Well, I must confess that pretty much of the following has been written well in advance and kept in my archive unpublished. However my view has not changed in such a way that invalidates their contents. So here you go…
What is the difference between education and going to school? Let’s hear from Frank Lloyd Wright…
Education has been unrealistic.
Education has not seen the nature of the thing we needed as a people.
Education has not provided enlightenment. It’s provided conditioning
By way of books, by way of what has been, by way of the past,
By the habituation of the human species to date.
And it hasn’t taken the views of the men who are capable of looking beyond
and seeing what the nature of the thing was.
What is the nature of this thing we’re in.
Now that’s the grace(?) of seeing in, not seeing at.
And all education today is a seeing at.
In education, there is more to mere literacy (i.e. reading, writing and counting). It includes within its contents the way of life, beliefs and spirituality. It could be as practical as how to maintain one’s cleanliness; or as abstract as adopting cleanliness as a way of life, as exhibited by Shinto. Through education, one obtains the tools – skills – and the ability to yield control over them. The lack of the latter probably explains why there are people who are very smart but nevertheless commit themselves to white collar crimes. But it could be as subtle as one’s being blinded by “logic and reasoning”, instead of realizing that it is a tool that one can choose to heed or disregard.
The scope of education is wide indeed. To make things complicated, different people have different beliefs and capabilities. My religious practice may be different from yours; I may be bad at drawing which is your forte. The possible combination of these qualities is almost limitless.
How to educate people under these circumstances? Centralization is the norm today, but it is evident that there are problems due to its one-size-fits-all nature. Besides, telling people what God to pray (or whether to pray at all), as in some “official policies”, or what language to speak, are hardly conducive to peaceful coexistence of different kinds of people. Pacifists are likely to be concerned with nationalist teachings that exist in virtually all “national syllabi” that puts undue emphasis on “pride”.
This is the non-economic problem of centralized education that I’d like to bring out. I don’t have to cover the more comprehensive and economic side of the problem, since Milton Friedman has poured his talent over decades into analyzing the problem, and this article summarizes his points. My specific points on his article is available here. There are many ways of committing education to the forefront of national priority, while still leaving freedom for parents to decide and participate in the education of their children. Here’s what I’ve thought up a couple of years ago:
The Ministry of Education will be substantially dissolved. Its existence is substantiated only be several new programs that will be instituted, as described below.
Separation of Government and Educational Institutions
The Constitution is to expressly prohibit the Government, at any level, to operate educational institutions and to promote non-objectively verifiable subjects such as moral-civic education, and history. The Government is liable to dissolution upon such a breach.
In preparation for the dissolution of the Ministry, government-operated schools and other educational institutions will be corporatized. The ownership of the institutions will be transferred from the Government to the Boards of Trustees of the respective institutions. Along with the dissolution of Central Bank and the Sovereign Wealth Fund, some of the proceeds will be distributed to these institutions as endowments.
Council of Education
A national council pertaining to basic education will be set up and named “Council of Education”. The Council will deal with basic education, i.e. education that a person undertakes to achieve functional literacy, and includes first undergraduate degree.
Any registered society or company with a substantial business in education, or interested person, is welcome to join the Council, although not compulsory. The Council itself operates as an incorporated, non-profit organization, with the state and federal Governments providing some financial support, but otherwise is financed by the civil society.
One of the most important agenda of the Council is to coordinate national educational effort. These include inter-alia organizing regular dialogues and special workshops towards such an effort, setting of standards and examinations, reaching out to such interested parties as parents and foreign educational institutions, and coordinating the country’s educational project with international organizations.
The Council will also undertake the collection of statistics, both to support its effort and to the benefit of the public; …
Education Voucher
Financially, the largest program administered by the new Ministry of Education is the Education Voucher (EV) program, which represents well over 90% of its planned expenditure.
An EV entitles the holder to spend on education in various ways. The most common way is to use EV to pay for tuition; shortfall would have to be borne by the holder (or his guardians), and unrealized value of EV can be carried forward by placing the EV into Edusave Account. Other permissible expenditures include, but not limited to, purchase of books (subject to certain limits), paying tuition of foreign educational institutions (ditto), and attending enrichment courses.
A table of apportioning entitlement is drawn up for the purpose of distributing EVs. The entitlement is apportioned to a pre-determined rate, typically expected expenditure of a primary school student. The apportionment schedule is as follows:
Let the Standard Rate be $2,500. Hence, a 13-year-old student will receive 100% of entitlement, or $2,500 per year; a 19-year-old student will receive 75% of full entitlement, or $1,875 per year; and a 35-year-old worker will receive 10% of full entitlement, or $250 per year; and so forth.
Using the population structure from 2001 to 2008, the expenditure on EV would be as follows (amounts in $ millions):
The expenditures are comparable to what the Ministry of Education has actually spent over the years. However, the Ministry did not cover adult learners in its budget, nor senior citizens. A comparatively large bureaucracy is needed to administer the existing system, adding considerable overhead to total expenditure.
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