education taken for granted essay

Why education is often taken for granted

‘The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows’ Sydney J. Harris

For many of us the acceptable route to a sufficient level of education is through the attainment of academic qualifications, such as diplomas and degrees, but, that is not the norm for all of us, either by choice or by circumstance. Unfortunately over 1 billion of the world’s population is illiterate due to a lack of access to educational services or just simply being unable to afford school fees. Education is something that is often taken for granted. Many of us are fortunate enough to be raised in societies where going to school is second nature with libraries scattered around and teachers and facilities that can cater to our learning requirements. However, there are those of us in the world who don’t have unwavering access to educational content and have to make do with what they can. In some developing countries schools are over-flowing with children eager to learn but there just aren’t enough resources to ensure that they are efficiently provided for.

There are many of us whose skillset aligns more with the creative and others who are more into STEM as well as those who are lucky enough to champion both. Aside from the academic, school is a social experience, where we fall down on our faces, both literally and figuratively, learn about people and triumph when faced with adversity. A lot of the time we look back at the lessons that we learned more so than the contents of those that we attended. Once we’ve finished school we want to be able to say ‘I may not have liked it all of the time, but ultimately, I grew from the experience’ and then transfer this knowledge into our future endeavours, whether it be personal or professional.

In many countries parents have to pay school fees for their children, in numerous instances their actual income is significantly lower than someone on minimum wage.  There is a common misconception that the educational bodies in the developing world are subpar so people from such countries are under-qualified. Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate are women . It is often the case that they are predestined careers that do not go beyond the household, therefore little weight is placed on their academic competence. 

There are so many things to learn about that go beyond STEM subjects. Geography, history, sociology, there is an abundance of things to learn just by merely leaving your homes and stepping out of your comfort zone. There are various social entrepreneurs who endeavour to educate others through unconventional means. Such social entrepreneurial ventures include Bravehearts Expeditions , which is an outdoor education centre for Lake Volta. Braveheart Expeditions attempts to take people out of their comfort zones by pushing them into experiences that go outside of the norm, like survival training.

There never comes a point in life when we have learnt enough. Education goes beyond the academic, it is reinforced by our family, peers and communities. It shouldn’t be recognised as a burden that is time consuming and ultimately redundant. It goes past the institution and as much as it is cliched, knowledge is power, and that power is transferable. There are so many potentially phenomenal world leaders, politicians, teachers, doctors, Nobel Peace prize winners and social entrepreneurs whose talents and abilities go amiss and unrecognised by both themselves and the world because they never had access to a proper education. In an ideal world we could tap the heels of our ruby slippers and education would become accessible to us all but until someone creates an algorithm or an app for that we’re going to have to rely on our own power.

‘Education is not preparation for life, it’s life itself’  John Dewey

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Why education is the key to development

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Børge Brende

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Education is a human right. And, like other human rights, it cannot be taken for granted. Across the world,  59 million children and 65 million adolescents are out of school . More than 120 million children do not complete primary education.

Behind these figures there are children and youth being denied not only a right, but opportunities: a fair chance to get a decent job, to escape poverty, to support their families, and to develop their communities. This year, decision-makers will set the priorities for global development for the next 15 years. They should make sure to place education high on the list.

The deadline for the Millennium Development Goals is fast approaching. We have a responsibility to make sure we fulfill the promise we made at the beginning of the millennium: to ensure that boys and girls everywhere complete a full course of primary schooling.

The challenge is daunting. Many of those who remain out of school are the hardest to reach, as they live in countries that are held back by conflict, disaster, and epidemics. And the last push is unlikely to be accompanied by the double-digit economic growth in some developing economies that makes it easier to expand opportunities.

Nevertheless, we can succeed. Over the last 15 years, governments and their partners have shown that political will and concerted efforts can deliver tremendous results – including halving the number of children and adolescents who are out of school. Moreover, most countries are closing in on gender parity at the primary level. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to finish what we started.

But we must not stop with primary education. In today’s knowledge-driven economies, access to quality education and the chances for development are two sides of the same coin. That is why we must also set targets for secondary education, while improving quality and learning outcomes at all levels. That is what the  Sustainable Development Goal  on education, which world leaders will adopt this year, aims to do.

Addressing the fact that an estimated 250 million children worldwide are not learning the basic skills they need to enter the labor market is more than a moral obligation. It amounts to an investment in sustainable growth and prosperity. For both countries and individuals, there is a direct and indisputable link between access to quality education and economic and social development.

Likewise, ensuring that girls are not kept at home when they reach puberty, but are allowed to complete education on the same footing as their male counterparts, is not just altruism; it is sound economics. Communities and countries that succeed in achieving gender parity in education will reap substantial benefits relating to health, equality, and job creation.

All countries, regardless of their national wealth, stand to gain from more and better education. According to a recent  OECD report , providing every child with access to education and the skills needed to participate fully in society would boost GDP by an average 28% per year in lower-income countries and 16% per year in high-income countries for the next 80 years.

Today’s students need “twenty-first-century skills,” like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and digital literacy. Learners of all ages need to become familiar with new technologies and cope with rapidly changing workplaces.

According to the International Labour Organization, an additional 280 million jobs will be needed by 2019. It is vital for policymakers to ensure that the right frameworks and incentives are established so that those jobs can be created and filled. Robust education systems – underpinned by qualified, professionally trained, motivated, and well-supported teachers – will be the cornerstone of this effort.

Governments should work with parent and teacher associations, as well as the private sector and civil-society organizations, to find the best and most constructive ways to improve the quality of education. Innovation has to be harnessed, and new partnerships must be forged.

Of course, this will cost money. According to UNESCO, in order to meet our basic education targets by 2030, we must close an external annual financing gap of about $22 billion. But we have the resources necessary to deliver. What is lacking is the political will to make the needed investments.

This is the challenge that inspired Norway to  invite world leaders  to Oslo for a  Summit on Education for Development ,  where we can develop strategies for mobilizing political support for increasing financing for education. For the first time in history, we are in the unique position to provide education opportunities for all, if only we pull together. We cannot miss this critical opportunity.

To be sure, the responsibility for providing citizens with a quality education rests, first and foremost, with national governments. Aid cannot replace domestic-resource mobilization. But donor countries also have an important role to play, especially in supporting least-developed countries. We must reverse the recent downward trend in development assistance for education, and leverage our assistance to attract investments from various other sources. For our part, we are in the process of doubling Norway’s financial contribution to education for development in the period 2013-2017.

Together, we need to intensify efforts to bring the poorest and hardest to reach children into the education system. Education is a right for everyone. It is a right for girls, just as it is for boys. It is a right for disabled children, just as it is for everyone else. It is a right for the 37 million out-of-school children and youth in countries affected by crises and conflicts. Education is a right regardless of where you are born and where you grow up. It is time to ensure that the right is upheld.

This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate . Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda  subscribe to our weekly newsletter .

Author: Erna Solberg is Prime Minister of Norway. Børge Brende is Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Image: Students attend a class at the Oxford International College in Changzhou. REUTERS/Aly Song. 

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The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively..

Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus due to its inclusion of “cuss words” and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple. Named individuals have advanced explicit policies with clear goals and outcomes, and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies. That is already beginning to happen in many places, and I hope those successes will continue until every banned book is restored.

If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?

The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications , from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade— except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone. Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass “pivot to online” finally graduates. I doubt that the pandemic closures were the decisive factor in themselves, however. Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards , teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

We can’t go back in time and do the pandemic differently at this point, nor is there any realistic path to putting the smartphone genie back in the bottle. (Though I will note that we as a society do at least attempt to keep other addictive products out of the hands of children.) But I have to think that we can, at the very least, stop actively preventing young people from developing the ability to follow extended narratives and arguments in the classroom. Regardless of their profession or ultimate educational level, they will need those skills. The world is a complicated place. People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as a humanities professor does. I think they’re missing out, but they’re adults and they can choose how to spend their time. What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose—for no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people.

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The Role of Government in Education

From Milton Friedman (1962/1982), Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press); earlier version (1955) in Robert A. Solo (Ed.), Economics and the Public Interest , pp. 123-144 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

The general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable. The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward collectivism offers an opportunity to re-examine the existing activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of the activities that are and those that are not justified. This paper attempts such a re-examination for education.

Education is today largely paid for and almost entirely administered by governmental bodies or non-profit institutions. This situation has developed gradually and is now taken so much for granted that little explicit attention is any longer directed to the reasons for the special treatment of education even in countries that are predominantly free enterprise in organization and philosophy. The result has been an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility.

The role assigned to government in any particular field depends, of course, on the principles accepted for the organization of society in general. In what follows, I shall assume a society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange economy, government’s primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free. Beyond this, there are only three major grounds on which government intervention is to be justified. One is “natural monopoly” or similar market imperfection which makes effective competition (and therefore thoroughly voluntary exchange) impossible. A second is the existence of substantial “neighborhood effects,” i.e., the action of one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible to make them compensate him — circumstances that again make voluntary exchange impossible. The third derives from an ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the difficulty of achieving it by voluntary exchange, namely, paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals. The belief in freedom is for “responsible” units, among whom we include neither children nor insane people. In general, this problem is avoided by regarding the family as the basic unit and therefore parents as responsible for their children; in considerable measure, however, such a procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. The problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to which no satisfactory answer can be given.

In applying these general principles to education, we shall find it helpful to deal separately with (1) general education for citizenship, and (2) specialized vocational education, although it may be difficult to draw a sharp line between them in practice. The grounds for government intervention are widely different in these two areas and justify very different types of action.

General Education for Citizenship

A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both. In consequence, the gain from the education of a child accrues not only to the child or to his parents but to other members of the society; the education of my child contributes to other people’s welfare by promoting a stable and democratic society. Yet it is not feasible to identify the particular individuals (or families) benefited or the money value of the benefit and so to charge for the services rendered. There is therefore a significant “neighborhood effect.”

What kind of governmental action is justified by this particular neighborhood effect? The most obvious is to require that each child receive a minimum amount of education of a specified kind. Such a requirement could be imposed upon the parents without further government action, just as owners of buildings, and frequently of automobiles, are required to adhere to specified standards to protect the safety of others. There is, however, a difference between the two cases. In the latter, individuals who cannot pay the costs of meeting the required standards can generally divest themselves of the property in question by selling it to others who can, so the requirement can readily be enforced without government subsidy — though even here, if the cost of making the property safe exceeds its market value, and the owner is without resources, the government may be driven to paying for the demolition of a dangerous building or the disposal of an abandoned automobile. The separation of a child from a parent who cannot pay for the minimum required education is clearly inconsistent with our reliance on the family as the basic social unit and our belief in the freedom of the individual.

Yet, even so, if the financial burden imposed by such an educational requirement could readily be met by the great bulk of the families in a community, it might be both feasible and desirable to require the parents to meet the cost directly.

Extreme cases could be handled by special provisions in much the same way as is done now for housing and automobiles. An even closer analogy is provided by present arrangements for children who are mistreated by their parents. The advantage of imposing the costs on the parents is that it would tend to equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size. 1

Differences among families in resources and in number of children — both a reason for and a result of the different policy that has been followed — plus the imposition of a standard of education involving very sizable costs have, however, made such a policy hardly feasible. Instead, government has assumed the financial costs of providing the education. In doing so, it has paid not only for the minimum amount of education required of all but also for additional education at higher levels available to youngsters but not required of them — as for example in State and municipal colleges and universities. Both steps can be justified by the “neighborhood effect” discussed above — the payment of the costs as the only feasible means of enforcing the required minimum; and the financing of additional education, on the grounds that other people benefit from the education of those of greater ability and interest since this is a way of providing better social and political leadership.

Government subsidy of only certain kinds of education can be justified on these grounds. To anticipate, they do not justify subsidizing purely vocational education which increases the economic productivity of the student but does not train him for either citizenship or leadership. It is clearly extremely difficult to draw a sharp line between these two types of education. Most general education adds to the economic value of the student — indeed it is only in modern times and in a few countries that literacy has ceased to have a marketable value. And much vocational education broadens the student’s outlook. Yet it is equally clear that the distinction is a meaningful one. For example, subsidizing the training of veterinarians, beauticians, dentists, and a host of other specialized skills — as is widely done in the United States in governmentally supported educational institutions — cannot be justified on the same grounds as subsidizing elementary education or, at a higher level, liberal education. Whether it can be justified on quite different grounds is a question that will be discussed later in this paper.

The qualitative argument from the “neighborhood effect” does not, of course, determine the specific kids of education that should be subsidized or by how much they should be subsidized. The social gain from education is presumably greatest for the very lowest levels of education, where there is the nearest approach to unanimity about the content of the education, and declines continuously as the level of education rises. But even this statement cannot be taken completely for granted — many governments subsidized universities long before they subsidized lower education. What forms of education have the greatest social advantage and how much of the community’s limited resources should be spent on them are questions to be decided by the judgment of the community expressed through its accepted political channels. The role of an economist is not to decide these questions for the community but rather to clarify the issues to be judged by the community in making a choice, in particular, whether the choice is one that it is appropriate or necessary to make on a communal rather than individual basis.

We have seen that both the imposition of a minimum required level of education and the financing of education by the state can be justified by the “neighborhood effects” of education. It is more difficult to justify in these terms a third step that has generally been taken, namely, the actual administration of educational institutions by the government, the “nationalization,” as it were, of the bulk of the “education industry.” The desirability of such nationalization has seldom been faced explicitly because governments have in the main financed education by paying directly the costs of running educational institutions, so that this step has seemed required by the decision to subsidize education. Yet the two steps could readily be separated. Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on “approved” educational services.

Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an “approved” institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards. An excellent example of a program of this sort is the United States educational program for veterans after World War II. Each veteran who qualified was given a maximum sum per year that could be spent at any institution of his choice, provided it met certain minimum standards. A more limited example is the provision in Britain whereby local authorities pay the fees of some students attending nonstate schools (the so-called “public schools”). Another is the arrangement in France whereby the state pays part of the costs for students attending non-state schools.

One argument from the “neighborhood effect” for nationalizing education is that it might otherwise be impossible to provide the common core of values deemed requisite for social stability. The imposition of minimum standards on privately conducted schools, as suggested above, might not be enough to achieve this result. The issue can be illustrated concretely in terms of schools run by religious groups. Schools run by different religious groups will, it can be argued, instill sets of values that are inconsistent with one another and with those instilled in other schools; in this way they convert education into a divisive rather than a unifying force.

Carried to its extreme, this argument would call not only for governmentally administered schools, but also for compulsory attendance at such schools. Existing arrangements in the United States and most other Western countries are a halfway house. Governmentally administered schools are available but not required. However, the link between the financing of education and its administration places other schools at a disadvantage: they get the benefit of little or none of the governmental funds spent on education — a situation that has been the source of much political dispute, particularly, of course, in France. The elimination of this disadvantage might, it is feared, greatly strengthen the parochial schools and so render the problem of achieving a common core of values even more difficult.

This argument has considerable force. But it is by no means clear either that it is valid or that the denationalizing of education would have the effects suggested. On grounds of principle, it conflicts with the preservation of freedom itself; indeed, this conflict was a major factor retarding the development of state education in England. How draw a line between providing for the common social values required for a stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that it is easier to mention than to define.

In terms of effects, the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents. Given, as at present, that parents can send their children to government schools without special payment, very few can or will send them to other schools unless they too are subsidized.

Parochial schools are at a disadvantage in not getting any of the public funds devoted to education; but they have the compensating advantage of being funded by institutions that are willing to subsidize them and can raise funds to do so, whereas there are few other sources of subsidies for schools.

Let the subsidy be made available to parents regardless where they send their children — provided only that it be to schools that satisfy specified minimum standards — and a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand. Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible. In general, they can now take this step only by simultaneously changing their place of residence.

For the rest, they can express their views only through cumbrous political channels. Perhaps a somewhat greater degree of freedom to choose schools could be made available also in a governmentally administered system, but it is hard to see how it could be carried very far in view of the obligation to provide every child with a place. Here, as in other fields, competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than either nationalized enterprises or enterprises run to serve other purposes. The final result may therefore well be less rather than more parochial education.

Another special case of the argument that governmentally conducted schools are necessary to keep education a unifying force is that private schools would tend to exacerbate class distinctions. Given greater freedom about where to send their children, parents of a kind would flock together and so prevent a healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds. Again, whether or not this argument is valid in principle, it is not at all clear that the stated results would follow. Under present arrangements, particular schools tend to be peopled by children with similar backgrounds thanks to the stratification of residential areas. In addition, parents are not now prevented from sending their children to private schools. Only a highly limited class can or does do so, parochial schools aside, in the process producing further stratification. The widening of the range of choice under a private system would operate to reduce both kinds of stratification.

Another argument for nationalizing education is “natural monopoly.” In small communities and rural areas, the number of children may be too small to justify more than one school of reasonable size, so that competition cannot be relied on to protect the interests of parents and children. As in other cases of natural monopoly, the alternatives are unrestricted private monopoly, state-controlled private monopoly, and public operation — a choice among evils. This argument is clearly valid and significant, although its force has been greatly weakened in recent decades by improvements in transportation and increasing concentration of the population in urban communities.

The arrangement that perhaps comes closest to being justified by these considerations — at least for primary and secondary education — is a mixed one under which governments would continue to administer some schools but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school. This arrangement would meet the valid features of the “natural monopoly” argument, while at the same time it would permit competition to develop where it could. It would meet the just complaints of parents that if they send their children to private nonsubsidized schools they are required to pay twice for education — once in the form of general taxes and once directly — and in this way stimulate the development and improvement of such schools. The interjection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also, to introduce flexibility into school systems. Not least of its benefits would be to make the salaries of school teachers responsive to market forces. It would thereby give governmental educational authorities an independent standard against which to judge salary scales and promote a more rapid adjustment to changes in conditions of demand or supply. 2

Why is it that our educational system has not developed along these lines? A full answer would require a much more detailed knowledge of educational history than I possess, and the most I can do is to offer a conjecture. For one thing, the “natural monopoly” argument was much stronger at an earlier date. But I suspect that a much more important factor was the combination of the general disrepute of cash grants to individuals (“handouts”) with the absence of an efficient administrative machinery to handle the distribution of vouchers and to check their use. The development of such machinery is a phenomenon of modern times that has come to full flower only with the enormous extension of personal taxation and of social security programs. In its absence, the administration of schools was regarded as the only possible way to finance education. Of course, as some of the examples cited above suggest, some features of the proposed arrangements are present in existing educational systems. And there has been strong and I believe increasing pressure for arrangements of this general kind in most Western countries, which is perhaps to be explained by the modern developments in governmental administrative machinery that facilitate such arrangements.

Many detailed administrative problems would arise in changing over from the present to the proposed system and in administering the proposed system. But these seem neither insoluble nor unique. As in the denationalization of other activities, existing premises and equipment could be sold to private enterprises that wanted to enter the field, so there would be no waste of capital in the transition. The fact that governmental units, at least in some areas, were going to continue to administer schools would permit a gradual and easy transition. The localized administration of education in the United States and some other countries would similarly facilitate the transition, since it would encourage experimentation on a small scale and with alternative methods of handling both these and other problems.

Difficulties would doubtless arise in determining eligibility for grants from a particular governmental unit, but this is identical with the existing problem of determining which unit is obligated to provide educational facilities for a particular child. Differences in size of grants would make one area more attractive than another just as differences in the quality of education now have the same effect.

The only additional complication is a possibly greater opportunity for abuse because of the greater freedom to decide where to educate children. Supposed difficulty of administration is a standard defense of the status quo against any proposed changes; in this particular case, it is an even weaker defense than usual because existing arrangements must master not only the major problems raised by the proposed arrangements but also the additional problems raised by the administration of the schools as a governmental function.

The preceding discussion is concerned mostly with primary and secondary education. For higher education, the case for nationalization on grounds either of neighborhood effects or of natural monopoly is even weaker than for primary and secondary education. For the lowest levels of education, there is considerable agreement, approximating unanimity, on the appropriate content of an educational program for citizens of a democracy — the three R’s cover most of the ground. At successively higher levels of education, there is less and less agreement. Surely, well below the level of the American college, one can expect insufficient agreement to justify imposing the views of a majority, much less a plurality, on all. The lack of agreement may, indeed, extend so far as to cast doubts on the appropriateness of even subsidizing education at this level; it surely goes far enough to undermine any case for nationalization on the grounds of providing a common core of values. Similarly, there can hardly be any question of “natural monopoly” at this level, in view of the distances that individuals can and do go to attend institutions of higher learning.

Governmental institutions in fact play a smaller role in the United States in higher education than at lower levels. Yet they grew greatly in importance until at least the 1920’s and now account for more than half the students attending colleges and universities. 3 One of the main reasons for their growth was their relative cheapness: most State and municipal colleges and universities charge much lower tuition fees than private universities can afford to. Private universities have in consequence had serious financial problems, and have quite properly complained of “unfair” competition. They have wanted to maintain their independence from government, yet at the same time have felt driven by financial pressure to seek government aid.

The preceding analysis suggests the lines along which a satisfactory solution can be found. Public expenditure on higher education can be justified as a means of training youngsters for citizenship and for community leadership — though I hasten to add that the large fraction of current expenditure that goes for strictly vocational training cannot be justified in this way or, indeed, as we shall see, in any other. Restricting the subsidy to education obtained at a state-administered institution cannot be justified on these grounds, or on any other that I can derive from the basic principles outlined at the outset. Any subsidy should be granted to individuals to be spent at institutions of their own choosing, provided only that the education is of a kind that it is desired to subsidize. Any government schools that are retained should charge fees covering the cost of educating students and so compete on an equal level with non-government-supported schools. The retention of state schools themselves would, however, have to be justified on grounds other than those we have so far considered. 4 The resulting system would follow in its broad outlines the arrangements adopted in the United States after World War II for financing the education of veterans, except that the funds would presumably come from the States rather than the Federal government.

The adoption of such arrangements would make for more effective competition among various types of schools and for a more efficient utilization of their resources. It would eliminate the pressure for direct government assistance to private colleges and universities and thus preserve their full independence and diversity at the same time that it enabled them to grow relatively to State institutions. It might also have the ancillary advantage of causing a closer scrutiny of the purposes for which subsidies are granted. The subsidization of institutions rather than of people has led to an indiscriminate subsidization of whatever activities it is appropriate for such institutions to undertake, rather than of the activities it is appropriate for the state to subsidize. Even cursory examination suggests that while the two classes of activities overlap, they are far from identical.

Vocational or Professional Education

As noted above, vocational or professional education has no neighborhood effects of the kind attributed above to general education. It is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of nonhuman capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being. If it does so, the individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher return for his services than he would otherwise be able to command. 5 This difference is the economic incentive to acquire the specialized training, just as the extra return that can be obtained with an extra machine is the economic incentive to invest capital in the machine. In both cases, extra returns must be balanced against the costs of acquiring them. For vocational education, the major costs are the income foregone during the period of training, interest lost by postponing the beginning of the earning period, and special expenses of acquiring the training such as tuition fees and expenditures on books and equipment. For physical capital, the major costs are the expenses of constructing the capital equipment and the interest during construction.

In both cases, an individual presumably regards the investment as desirable if the extra returns, as he views them, exceed the extra costs, as he views them. 6 In both cases, if the individual undertakes the investment and if the state neither subsidizes the investment nor taxes the return, the individual (or his parent, sponsor, or benefactor) in general bears all the extra cost and receives all the extra returns: there are no obvious unborne costs or unappropriable returns that tend to make private incentives diverge systematically from those that are socially appropriate. If capital were as readily available for investment in human beings as for investment in physical assets, whether through the market or through direct investment by the individuals concerned or their parents or benefactors, the rate of return on capital would tend to be roughly equal in the two fields: if it were higher on non-human capital, parents would have an incentive to buy such capital for their children instead of investing a corresponding sum in vocational training, and conversely. In fact, however, there is considerable empirical evidence that the rate of return on investment in training is very much higher than the rate of return on investment in physical capital.

According to estimates that Simon Kuznets and I have made elsewhere, professionally trained workers in the United States would have had to earn during the 1930s at most 70 percent more than other workers to cover the extra costs of their training, including interest at roughly the market rate on non-human capital. In fact, they earned on the average between two and three times as much. 7

Some part of this difference may well be attributable to greater natural ability on the part of those who entered the professions: it may be that they would have earned more than the average non-professional worker if they had not gone into the professions. Kuznets and I concluded, however, that such differences in ability could not explain anything like the whole of the extra return of the professional workers. 8 Apparently, there was sizable underinvestment in human beings. The postwar period has doubtless brought changes in the relative earnings in different occupations.

It seems extremely doubtful, however, that they have been sufficiently great to reverse this conclusion. It is not certain at what level this underinvestment sets in. It clearly applies to professions requiring a long period of training, such as medicine, law, dentistry, and the like and probably to all occupations requiring a college training. At one time, it almost certainly extended to many occupations requiring much less training but probably no longer does, although the opposite has sometimes been maintained. 9

This underinvestment in human capital presumably reflects an imperfection in the capital market: investment in human beings cannot be financed on the same terms or with the same ease as investment in physical capital. It is easy to see why there would be such a difference. If a fixed money loan is made to finance investment in physical capital, the lender can get some security for his loan in the form of a mortgage or residual claim to the physical asset itself, and he can count on realizing at least part of his investment in case of necessity by selling the physical asset. If he makes a comparable loan to increase the earning power of a human being, he clearly cannot get any comparable security; in a non-slave state, the individual embodying the investment cannot be bought and sold. But even if he could, the security would not be comparable. The productivity of the physical capital does not — or at least generally does not — depend on the co-operativeness of the original borrower. The productivity of the human capital quite obviously does — which is, of course, why, all ethical considerations aside, slavery is economically inefficient. A loan to finance the training of an individual who has no security to offer other than his future earnings is therefore a much less attractive proposition than a loan to finance, say, the erection of a building: the security is less, and the cost of subsequent collection of interest and principal is very much greater.

A further complication is introduced by the inappropriateness of fixed money loans to finance investment in training. Such an investment necessarily involves much risk. The average expected return may be high, but there is wide variation about the average. Death or physical incapacity is one obvious source of variation but is probably much less important than differences in ability, energy, and good fortune. The result is that if fixed money loans were made, and were secured only by expected future earnings, a considerable fraction would never be repaid. In order to make such loans attractive to lenders, the nominal interest rate charged on all loans would have to be sufficiently high to compensate for the capital losses on the defaulted loans. The high nominal interest rate would both conflict with usury laws and make the loans unattractive to borrowers, especially to borrowers who have or expect to have other assets on which they cannot currently borrow but which they might have to realize or dispose of to pay the interest and principal of the loan. 10 The device adopted to meet the corresponding problem for other risky investments is equity investment plus limited liability on the part of shareholders. The counterpart for education would be to “buy” a share in an individual’s earning prospects: to advance him the funds needed to finance his training on condition that he agree to pay the lender a specified fraction of his future earnings. In this way, a lender would get back more than his initial investment from relatively successful individuals, which would compensate for the failure to recoup his original investment from the unsuccessful.

There seems no legal obstacle to private contracts of this kind, even though they are economically equivalent to the purchase of a share in an individual’s earning capacity and thus to partial slavery. One reason why such contracts have not become common, despite their potential profitability to both lenders and borrowers, is presumably the high costs of administering them, given the freedom of individuals to move from one place to another, the need for getting accurate income statements, and the long period over which the contracts would run. These costs would presumably be particularly high for investment on a small scale with a resultant wide geographical spread of the individuals financed in this way. Such costs may well be the primary reason why this type of investment has never developed under private auspices. But I have never been able to persuade myself that a major role has not also been played by the cumulative effect of such factors as the novelty of the idea, the reluctance to think of investment in human beings as strictly comparable to investment in physical assets, the resultant likelihood of irrational public condemnation of such contracts, even if voluntarily entered into, and legal and conventional limitation on the kind of investments that may be made by the financial intermediaries that would be best suited to engage in such investments, namely, life insurance companies. The potential gains, particularly to early entrants, are so great that it would be worth incurring extremely heavy administrative costs. 11

But whatever the reason, there is clearly here an imperfection of the market that has led to underinvestment in human capital and that justifies government intervention on grounds both of “natural monopoly,” insofar as the obstacle to the development of such investment has been administrative costs, and of improving the operation of the market, insofar as it has been simply market frictions and rigidities.

What form should government intervention take? One obvious form, and the only form that it has so far taken, is outright government subsidy of vocational or professional education financed out of general revenues. Yet this form seems clearly inappropriate. Investment should be carried to the point at which the extra return repays the investment and yields the market rate of interest on it. If the investment is in a human being, the extra return takes the form of a higher payment for the individual’s services than he could otherwise command. In a private market economy, the individual would get this return as his personal income, yet if the investment were subsidized, he would have borne none of the costs. In consequence, if subsidies were given to all who wished to get the training, and could meet minimum quality standards, there would tend to be overinvestment in human beings, for individuals would have an incentive to get the training so long as it yielded any extra return over private costs, even if the return were insufficient to repay the capital invested, let alone yield any interest on it. To avoid such overinvestment, government would have to restrict the subsidies. Even apart from the difficulty of calculating the “correct” amount of investment, this would involve rationing in some essentially arbitrary way the limited amount of investment among more claimants than could be financed, and would mean that those fortunate enough to get their training subsidized would receive all the returns from the investment whereas the costs would be borne by the taxpayers in general. This seems an entirely arbitrary, if not perverse, redistribution of income.

The desideratum is not to redistribute income but to make capital available for investment in human beings on terms comparable to those on which it is available for physical investment. Individuals should bear the costs of investment in themselves and receive the rewards, and they should not be prevented by market imperfections from making the investment when they are willing to bear the costs. One way to do this is to have government engage in equity investment in human beings of the kind described above.

A governmental body could offer to finance or help finance the training of any individual who could meet minimum quality standards by making available not more than a limited sum per year for not more than a specified number of years, provided it was spent on securing training at a recognized institution. The individual would agree in return to pay to the government in each future year x percent of his earnings in excess of y dollars for each $1,000 that he gets in this way. This payment could easily be combined with payment of income tax and so involve a minimum of additional administrative expense. The base sum, $y, should be set equal to estimated average — or perhaps modal — earnings without the specialized training; the fraction of earnings paid, x , should be calculated so as to make the whole project self-financing. In this way the individuals who received the training would in effect bear the whole cost. The amount invested could then be left to be determined by individual choice. Provided this was the only way in which government financed vocational or professional training, and provided the calculated earnings reflected all relevant returns and costs, the free choice of individuals would tend to produce the optimum amount of investment. The second proviso is unfortunately not likely to be fully satisfied. In practice, therefore, investment under the plan would still be somewhat too small and would not be distributed in the optimum manner. To illustrate the point at issue, suppose that a particular skill acquired by education can be used in two different ways; for example, medical skill in research or in private practice. Suppose that, if money earnings were the same, individuals would generally prefer research. The non-pecuniary advantages of research would then tend to be offset by higher money earnings in private practice. These higher earnings would be included in the sum to which the fraction x was applied whereas the monetary equivalent of the non-pecuniary advantages of research would not be. In consequence, the earnings differential would have to be higher under the plan than if individuals could finance themselves, since it is the net monetary differential, not the gross, that individuals would balance against the non-pecuniary advantages of research in deciding how to use their skill. This result would be produced by a larger than optimum fraction of individuals going into research necessitating a higher value of x to make the scheme self-financing than if the value of the non-pecuniary advantages could be included in calculated earnings. The inappropriate use of human capital financed under the plan would in this way lead to a less than optimum incentive to invest and so to a less than optimum amount of investment. 12

Estimation of the values of x and y clearly offers considerable difficulties, especially in the early years of operation of the plan, and the danger would always be present that they would become political footballs. Information on existing earnings in various occupations is relevant but would hardly permit anything more than a rough approximation to the values that would render the project self-financing. In addition, the values should in principle vary from individual to individual in accordance with any differences in expected earning capacity that can be predicted in advance — the problem is similar to that of varying life insurance premia among groups that have different life expectancy. For such reasons as these it would be preferable if similar arrangements could be developed on a private basis by financial institutions in search of outlets for investing their funds, non-profit institutions such as private foundations, or individual universities and colleges.

Insofar as administrative expense is the obstacle to the development of such arrangements on a private basis, the appropriate unit of government to make funds available is the Federal government in the United States rather than smaller units. Any one State would have the same costs as an insurance company, say, in keeping track of the people whom it had financed. These would be minimized for the Federal government. Even so, they would not be completely eliminated. An individual who migrated to another country, for example, might still be legally or morally obligated to pay the agreed-on share of his earnings, yet it might be difficult and expensive to enforce the obligation. Highly successful people might therefore have an incentive to migrate. A similar problem arises, of course, also under the income tax, and to a very much greater extent. This and other administrative problems of conducting the scheme on a Federal level, while doubtless troublesome in detail, do not seem serious. The really serious problem is the political one already mentioned: how to prevent the scheme from becoming a political football and in the process being converted from a self-financing project to a means of subsidizing vocational education.

But if the danger is real, so is the opportunity. Existing imperfections in the capital market tend to restrict the more expensive vocational and professional training to individuals whose parents or benefactors can finance the training required. They make such individuals a “non-competing” group sheltered from competition by the unavailability of the necessary capital to many individuals, among whom must be large numbers with equal ability. The result is to perpetuate inequalities in wealth and status. The development of arrangements such as those outlined above would make capital more widely available and would thereby do much to make equality of opportunity a reality, to “diminish inequalities of income and wealth, and to promote the full use of our human resources. And it would do so not, like the outright redistribution of income, by impeding competition, destroying incentive, and dealing with symptoms, but by strengthening competition, making incentives effective, and eliminating the causes of inequality.

This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced. Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools.

The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer — a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely accepted, the provision of general education directly by governmental bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education. To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds of educational services.

The alternative arrangements whose broad outlines are sketched in this paper distinguish sharply between the financing of education and the operation of educational institutions, and between education for citizenship or leadership and for greater economic productivity. Throughout, they center attention on the person rather than the institution. Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, nonprofit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units.

For vocational education, the government, this time however the central government, might likewise deal directly with the individual seeking such education. If it did so, it would make funds available to him to finance his education, not as a subsidy but as “equity” capital. In return, he would obligate himself to pay the state a specified fraction of his earnings above some minimum, the fraction and minimum being determined to make the program self-financing. Such a program would eliminate existing imperfections in the capital market and so widen the opportunity of individuals to make productive investments in themselves while at the same time assuring that the costs are borne by those who benefit most directly rather than by the population at large.

An alternative, and a highly desirable one if it is feasible, is to stimulate private arrangements directed toward the same end. The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children. They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.

Note: I am indebted to P. T. Bauer, A. R. Prest, and H. G. Johnson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

1. It is by no means so fantastic as may at first appear that such a step would noticeably affect the size of families. For example. one explanation of the lower birth rate among higher than among lower socio-economic groups may well be that children are relatively more expensive to the former, thanks in considerable measure to the higher standards of education they maintain and the costs of which they bear.

2. Essentially this proposal — public financing but private operation of education has recently been suggested in several southern states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation. This fact came to my attention after this paper was essentially in its present form. My initial reaction — and I venture to predict, that of most readers — was that this possible use of the proposal was a count against it, that it was a particularly striking case of the possible defect — the exacerbating of class distinctions — referred to in the second paragraph preceding the one to which this note is attached.

Further thought has led me to reverse my initial reaction. Principles can be tested most clearly by extreme cases. Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes. I deplore segregation and racial prejudice; pursuant to the principles set forth at the outset of the paper, it is clearly an appropriate function of the state to prevent the use of violence and physical coercion by one group on another; equally clearly, it is not an appropriate function of the state to try to force individuals to act in accordance with my — or anyone else’s views, whether about racial prejudice or the party to vote for, so long as the action of anyone individual affects mostly himself. These are the grounds on which I oppose the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commissions; and they lead me equally to oppose forced nonsegregation. However, the same grounds also lead me to oppose forced segregation. Yet, so long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser.

The fact that I must make this choice is a reflection of the basic weakness of a publicly operated school system. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma. They make unnecessary either choice. Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to. The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place. So long as the school system is publicly operated, only drastic change is possible; one must go from one extreme to the other; it is a great virtue of the private arrangement that it permits a gradual transition.

An example that comes to mind as illustrating the preceding argument is summer camps for children. Is there any objection to the simultaneous existence of some camps that are wholly Jewish, some wholly non-Jewish, and some mixed? One can — though many who would react quite differently to negro-white segregation — would not explore the existence of attitudes that lead to the three types; one can seek to propagate views that would tend to the growth of the mixed school at the expense of the extremes; but is it an appropriate function of the state to prohibit the unmixed camps?

The establishment of private schools does not of itself guarantee the desirable freedom of choice on the part of parents. The public funds could be made available subject to the condition that parents use them solely in segregated schools; and it may be that some such condition is contained in the proposals now under consideration by southern states. Similarly, the public funds could be made available for use solely in nonsegregated schools. The proposed plan is not therefore inconsistent with either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation. The point is that it makes available a third alternative.

3. See George J. Stigler. Employment and Compensation in Education, (National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Paper 1111, 1950). p. 1111.

4. The subsidizing of basic research for example. I have interpreted education narrowly so as to exclude considerations of this type which would open up an unduly wide field.

5. The increased return may be only partly in a monetary form; it may also consist of non-pecuniary advantages attached to the occupation for which the vocational training fits the individual. Similarly, the occupation may have nonpecuniary disadvantages, which would have to be reckoned among the costs of the investment.

6. For a more detailed and precise statement of the considerations entering into the choice of an occupation, see Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets, Income from Independent Professional Practice, (National Bureau of Economic Research, N.Y., 1945). pp. 81-94, 118-37.

7. Ibid., pp. 68-69. 84. 148-51.

8. Ibid., pp. 88-94.

9. Education and Economic Well-Being in American Democracy , (Educational Policies Commission, National Education Association of United States and American Association of School Administrators, 1940).

10. Despite these obstacles to fixed money loans, I am told that they have been a very common means of financing university education in Sweden, where they have apparently been available at moderate rates of interest. Presumably a proximate explanation is a smaller dispersion of income among university graduates than in the United States. But this is no ultimate explanation and may not be the only or major reason for the difference in practice. Further study of Swedish and similar experience is highly desirable to test whether the reasons given above are adequate to explain the absence in the United States and other countries of a highly developed market in loans to finance vocational education, or whether there may not be other obstacles that could be removed more easily.

11. It is amusing to speculate on how the business could be done and on some ancillary methods of profiting from it. The initial entrants would be able to choose the very best investments, by imposing very high quality standards on the individuals they were willing to finance. If they did so, they could increase the profitability of their investment by getting public recognition of the superior quality of the individuals they financed: the legend, “Training financed by XYZ Insurance Company” could be made into an assurance of quality (like “Approved by Good Housekeeping”) that would attract custom. All sorts of other common services might be rendered by the XYZ company to “its” physicians, lawyers, dentists, and so on.

12. The point in question is familiar in connection with the disincentive effects of income taxation. An example that perhaps makes this clearer than the example in the text is to suppose that the individual can earn $5, say, by some extra work and would just be willing to do so if he could keep the whole $5 — that is, he values the non-pecuniary costs of the extra worth at just under $5. If x is say 0.10, he only keeps $4.50 and this will not be enough to induce him to do the extra work. It should be noted that a plan involving fixed money loans to individuals might be less seriously affected by differences among various uses of skills in non-pecuniary returns and costs than the plan for equity investment under consideration. It would not however be unaffected by them; such differences would tend to produce different frequencies of default depending on the use made of the skill and so unduly favor uses yielding relatively high non-pecuniary returns or involving relatively low non-pecuniary costs. I am indebted to Harry G. Johnson and Paul W. Cook, Jr., for suggesting the inclusion of this qualification. For a fuller discussion of the role of non-pecuniary advantages and disadvantages in determining earnings in different pursuits. See Friedman and Kuznets, loc. cit.

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Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators pp 185–202 Cite as

Challenging the Taken-For-Granted: How Research Can Inform Doctoral Education Policy and Practice

• Lynn McAlpine 3 , 4 &
• Cheryl Amundsen 5  
• First Online: 01 January 2011

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Policies and practices within institutions are often built on taken-for-granted practices (without the benefit of evidence) or result from external calls for accountability (perhaps accepted without evidence to challenge such calls) that exacerbate the documented tensions and challenges reported by doctoral students and pre-tenure academics. We suggest there is a need for evidence-based perspectives to support the rethinking of certain doctoral policies and practices, and perhaps to challenge external drivers that are placing increasing demands on academics and we have been particularly attentive to this possible use of our research findings. In this chapter, we provide four examples of our efforts to use our research findings in this way. We hope they may stimulate reflection amongst those in academia, including administrators and more senior academics, about how such evidence might influence institutional change towards more research-informed practice and policy, and perhaps lead to challenges of external calls for particular forms of accountability.

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The studies have led to a series of presentations and publications, a list of which can be found at http://doc-work.mcgill.ca.

In Canada, and more generally in North America, full-time academics are often hired into “tenure-track” positions as assistant professors; these positions are secured 5–6 years later if the individual is deemed worthy of “tenured” status. However, the tenure system is coming into question and has been discontinued at some institutions in the United States.

Students sometimes approach professors to design an individual course involving just one student and the professor or perhaps two or three students and the professor. Usually this is done because the student has a special interest in a professor’s area of expertise or it could be that a desired course is not available at that time.

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McAlpine, L., Amundsen, C. (2011). Challenging the Taken-For-Granted: How Research Can Inform Doctoral Education Policy and Practice. In: McAlpine, L., Amundsen, C. (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0507-4_11

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• / Education - Is It Being Taken for...

Education - Is It Being Taken for Granted?

Essay by people   •  June 10, 2011  •  Essay  •  563 Words (3 Pages)  •  2,696 Views

Essay Preview: Education - Is It Being Taken for Granted?

Education can be seen much differently for different cultures; in Norman Rockwell's paintings "A Problem We All Live With" and "The Spirit of Education" this is shown quite vividly. In "A Problem We All Live With" a black child is shown walking to school surrounded by U.S. Marshals with offensive graffiti saying "nigger" on a wall behind them and a tomato smashed against it. "The Spirit of Education" painting shows a white child being sent off to school by his mother and being given all opportunities to succeed and become successful and taking those opportunities for granted. Both of Norman Rockwell's paintings are symbolic of how different races and cultures see education, for white people it is seen as a god given right that is readily available and is taken for granted and for black people education is seen as something that had to be earned and fought for to be where American education is now where it is available to all races, religions, and genders.

These paintings are similar in that they show how important education is seen in American society for children to be the focal point of a huge movement for equality. In "A Problem We All Live With" the guards are symbolic of how important education is that adults are willing to defend a child's right to education with their lives. Similarly, in "The Spirit of Education" the mother is symbolic of being behind her child and supporting him by giving him all tools necessary for his quest for knowledge.

However, these paintings also show how the quest for children's education is much different for different races. In "A Problem We All Live With" a child's education is shown as being something that must be fought for in order for one to earn the right to education, on the other hand in "The Spirit of Education" a child's education is shown as being a "god given" right that one has always had available and has never had to fight to have. The guards are symbolic of the struggle of black society to gain equality and having to fight for the rights that are promised in the constitution and are not being given to them by American society. The torch is symbolic of white American culture passing down the rights to education that has always been given to their children and is readily available to them.

In addition, the two children have very different attitudes shown in their facial expressions that show how school is seen by the different races. For the black child school is wanted and seen as something very valuable and that is an important factor in life. The white child's expression shows that education is seen by him as not important and more of a chore for the child; him being in a bad mood because he has to go to school shows how white American culture does not appreciate the opportunities available for one to become successful and have a better

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Personal Essay: My Privilege Of Education

Show More Privilege is something that is taken for granted by so many individuals. As humans, it is so much easier to focus on the negatives of our lives. As a white, middle-class, American citizen I have a large number of privileges. A privilege that I am going to focus on is my privilege to education. I believe that so many people take education for granted. Especially in the United States, it is commonly something that is just expected so it is tossed around lightly. Nelson Mandela once stated, "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Education is a privilege that so many before us have fought for yet we take it for granted. Growing up in a small town and then moving to Norman for college I have come to realize how important an education is. Since the age of five, I have attended school. I am from a very small town so I have always attended the same school. As an elementary student, I loved school! I loved the structure and knowing that every day I was going to learn something new. Attending school became a place and time that I got to see my friends every day and play. I also was obsessed with reading. Every chance I got, I was in the library to choose a new …show more content… I was involved and realized that the decisions I was making would affect me when it came time to choose a college and my career path. When I was applying to college is when I began realizing how privileged I truly am. First off I am an American citizen who has the right to attend school for free, twelve years of education for free. People had chosen to dedicate their lives to teaching and invest time into seeing me succeed. So as I sat there applying to college it hit me. For many Americans, college is not an option. College is expensive and many are difficult to get into. Thanks to my parents and everyone in my community I had the opportunity to apply to any college I wanted and potentially get

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What is privilege and how does it manifest itself? Privilege can be defined as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. Privilege has been manifesting itself throughout history. The most common type of privilege is given to us because of our gender, race, social class, age, sexual orientation, and disability. It can be hard for some people to come to terms that they were born with certain privilege that some people will never receive in their lifetime, while others may choose to ignore the realities of privilege.…

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Privilege is a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. I have a brother named Logan, who has Autism and is also diagnosed with Mild Mental Retardation. Growing up around him I realized that we are different. I do not mean in the aspect that we are different in gender but in our capabilities. We have different abilities which also leads to our different privileges in life.…

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Privilege is a right, advantage, favor, or immunity specially granted to a specific individual, group, or class, and withheld from certain or all others. White privilege is a form of social privileges that solely benefits white people and excludes people of color. For some apparent reason many people become blinded, ignorant, and oblivious when white privilege becomes the topic of conversation. “White Privilege is the other side of racism” (Rothenberg, 53). Although we live in a country where we are constantly told all men are created equal, there is an overt contradiction to the ideology simply because of conspicuous white privileges.…

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Americans Take Their Education for Granted

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Why You Should Never Take Your Education For Granted

Everyday I spend my time consumed in the world of education. As both a student and a teaching assistant, I have a unique perspective on this world. I make the same mistakes that other students make, like procrastinating or skimming over instructions that are crucial. Similarly, I make the same errors as others teachers make such as, being slightly unprepared, or forgetting to explain a confusing concept in multiple ways. However, the one mistake I try not to make, that most of the world of education in North America seems to be making these days, is taking this learning opportunity for granted.

Not only are there thousands of locations around the globe where education isn’t easily accessible, but there are people in North America who are still struggling to access education. Yet, so many of us who have this opportunity forget how much of a privilege this is. We start to focus on the stress of upcoming assignments, and the lengthening of to-do lists, while  we lose sight of the positive elements behind this experience.

Education opens doors to career opportunities, it flexes and strengthens our minds and introduces us to like-minded individuals. When you feel confident in who you are and your abilities to do a job, it’s because someone taught you the skills necessary to do that job. When you strike up a conversation with a friend or colleague and you note internally that they don’t understand the details of that topic, it’s because you do.

Everytime you learn a new concept, or engage with a new idea, you are creating a better version of yourself. This version of yourself will be incrementally more prepared for life than the version before. Education isn’t just a stepping stone to a job or money, it’s the process of growth you choose to partake in. This growth exists within and goes beyond the content of your courses. That content might teach you about a culture, society, a part of the body or a section of the government system you knew nothing about previously. This knowledge can carry you places you could never imagined. For example, a  Deakin degree in Leadership  won’t just simply up your credentials. It will help you boost your potential and with the acquired skills, help you step out of your comfort zone confidently.

However, the skills you learned while passing these courses will invariably help you throughout your lifetime. Time management, the ability to cope under pressure or when stressed, communication and teamwork skills, these aren’t attributes everyone simply is born with. Not only are they not innate, but we use them in quite literally everything we do. School helps you improve these skills, even when sometimes the process feels painful.

Maybe these notions aren’t new to you. However, our society somehow continues to foster the idea that going to school is something we just do. If you visit any third world country and stand outside of a school at the beginning of the day, you will see kids running to school with massive grins on their faces, excited and grateful to be there. In North America, I see empty desks because students didn’t feel like attending, I see uninterested expressions and students complaining to one another.

Do the world a favour, close your eyes and imagine your community, your friends and family or even yourself without your education. Where would you be? Who would you be? How many basic amenities would you have to go without simply because you didn’t have that education? So, the next time you struggle to wake up for your 11 a.m. class, remember this: the world doesn’t owe you an education, you owe the world because you have one.

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Dont take education for granted

Don’t take education for granted

Imagine. You’re asleep in your warm cosy bed, comfortably wrapped in your soft silky duvet cover and you’re dreaming about Christiano Ronaldo, until a loud piercing sound awakes you from your comfort. Its 6:30 in the morning and your alarm is blaring in your face forcing you to get ready for school. How many of us feel like this every single morning?  Every day we have to go through 7 long periods of lessons, annoying teachers that get on your nerves and endless amounts of homework. This is school, isn’t it? We all find that in our daily lives, school is a burden. But have any of us actually thought that school may not be a bad thing, that it may not be a burden?

You, me, all of us here, even Miss Mitchell have no choice. We’re all part of a system. A system we can’t get out of, a system we have to go through, but ironically it’s a system we all take for granted. What system am I talking about? I’m talking about the education system. Now, many of us here probably hate being part of this system. One of the main reasons for this is that it’s hard. We as students get loaded with tons of homework, set for short deadlines, but is this really hard work? You think that your science lessons are stressful, well put yourself in the shoes of Carla who has to wake up at 4 am just to get a few glasses of water, who sleeps on the cold floor, with nothing but a few rags as her shelter. Who whilst, we are at school, dosing off in our English lessons, is busy searching for food to escape death. Who yearns for an education but will never move one from selling rubbish on streets. That is hard work.

This is a preview of the whole essay

38 % of the world is privileged with the opportunity to receive education? Yes, that’s right only 38%!  In our vast world, who would have thought that only a small number of people have the chance to succeed? It’s not fair. You and me are part of this lucky 38%, but yet we wish we were the other 62!  Why? Why do we feel the need to hate school? The problem with us kids these days is that we are constantly thirsty for more and along the way forgetting what we have. None of us want to be here listening to these speeches, we would rather be at home sleeping, watching TV or on Facebook right? But by you coming to school, sitting in lessons even listening to these speeches can help you. Who knows where we would be in the future, without education.

Receiving an education itself sets stepping stones for us to walk on. Two thirds of all jobs require a higher education, or advanced training. Without a good primary education, you are less likely to keep up with your peers. Without a high school diploma, you're likely to earn a salary three times less than average, and without a college degree it's harder and harder to find a job that can help you support your family when you’re older. Now this might sound like a load of rubbish to you, but in time you’re going to regret it if you don’t take education seriously. Continuously bunking, disrupting classes, disrespecting teachers and not concentrating in lessons can contribute to you badly affecting your future.

All of us in this room aim to be something, be it a doctor, a dentist, a lawyer, a teacher, a business woman. We all want to achieve. But to reach these goals, we all need to put in our upmost effort and dedication. Just by coming to school is not enough, you need to make sure that the grades you get are deserved and earned. We are not going to get anywhere just by sitting in school. Hard work is needed and if we put in this hard work we can succeed. We, as today’s youth, are going to lead the way in the future and so in the words of Barack Obama “If we want to outcompete the world tomorrow, we must out-educate the world today”

So imagine again. You’re asleep in your warm cosy bed, comfortably wrapped in your soft silky duvet cover and you’re dreaming about Christiano Ronaldo, until a loud piercing sound awakes you from your comfort. Its 6:30 in the morning and your alarm is blaring in your face forcing you to get ready for school. Now how do you feel? Every day you are waking up to a crucial chapter of your life. A chapter which will lead you to experience the world in a whole new light, a chapter which will give you the chance to make your dreams reality and a chapter that will give you respect. Education gives us the prospect to grow up in a world with no limits to our dreams and I know for a fact that in every single one of you there is something special, and that special something is needed in our world. Whether you’re the next Bill Gates, Einstein or Barack Obama, what you know today is what you are tomorrow.

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Dont take education for granted

You’re peacefully sleeping in your cozy bed, snugly wrapped in your luxurious duvet cover and dreaming about Christiano Ronaldo. However, your blissful slumber is abruptly interrupted by a loud, jarring sound. It’s 6:30 in the morning, and your alarm is blaring in your face, compelling you to begrudgingly prepare for school. Do many of us experience this familiar scenario each morning? Each day, we encounter seven lengthy periods of lessons, bothersome teachers who irritate us, and an endless amount of homework. This is what school is, right? We all find that in our daily lives, school becomes a burden.

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Has it ever occurred to any of us that school may not be a detrimental or overpowering weight? Every single one of us, myself included, all individuals in attendance here today, and even Miss Mitchell, are required to engage. We are all integral components of an unavoidable system that we must endure. Ironically, however, it is a system that we frequently neglect or undervalue. Which system am I referring to? I am referring to the education system.

Many of us here probably dislike being part of this system because it is difficult. As students, we are assigned a lot of homework with short deadlines. But is this truly hard work? While we may find our science lessons stressful, we should consider Carla’s situation. Carla has to wake up at 4 am just to find some water, she sleeps on a cold floor with only a few rags as her shelter. While we are dosing off in our English lessons, Carla is busy searching for food to survive.

Who yearns for an education but will never move from selling garbage on the streets? That is hard work. Only 38% of the world has the privilege to receive an education. Yes, that’s correct, only 38%! In our vast world, it is surprising that only a small number of people have the opportunity to succeed. It is unfair. You and I are part of this fortunate 38%, yet we still wish we were in the other 62%. Why? Why do we feel the need to despise school? The issue with us youngsters today is that we are always thirsty for more and in the process, forgetting what we already have.

While we may not always be excited about going to school and listening to speeches, such as when we would rather be at home sleeping, watching TV, or on Facebook, it is important to acknowledge that attending school and actively participating in lessons, including these speeches, can actually have a positive impact. Education plays a crucial role in shaping our future trajectory by providing us with a solid foundation for personal growth and development. Additionally, it creates opportunities for advancement and success as two thirds of all jobs necessitate higher education or advanced training.

Having a strong primary education foundation is essential to stay competitive. Failing to obtain a high school diploma will likely result in earning below the average salary. Additionally, without a college degree, it becomes harder to secure stable employment that can provide for your family in the long run. While it may not seem significant at present, neglecting your education will lead to regret later on. Skipping classes, causing disruptions, disrespecting teachers, and lacking focus during lessons can have a significant impact on your future opportunities.

We all have aspirations in this room. Some want to become doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, or businesswomen. Our shared objective is to attain success. However, achieving these goals requires dedication and maximum effort. Merely attending school won’t be enough; we must earn our grades with true merit.

Success requires diligence, and simply going to school is not enough. The younger generation has a vital role in determining the future. As Barack Obama stated, “To surpass other nations in the future, we must excel in education today.” Now imagine this scene: you are peacefully asleep on your comfortable bed, covered with a soft duvet, dreaming about Christiano Ronaldo. Suddenly, a loud disturbance disrupts your tranquility and abruptly awakens you.

Every morning at 6:30, as your alarm blares in your face, you feel the compulsion to prepare for school. This daily ritual marks a significant chapter in your life. It offers a new perspective on the world, allows you to pursue your dreams, and earn respect. Education presents us with endless possibilities to achieve our aspirations and realize our dreams. I am of the belief that each individual possesses something unique, and this uniqueness holds immense value in society.

Your current knowledge is crucial for your future self, regardless of whether you become the next Bill Gates, Einstein, or Barack Obama.

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Human Activities

“A Sound of Thunder” by Bradbury and “Nethergrave” by Skurzynski, are both great and entertaining science fiction short stories. Both of these stories are about different types as technology such as time travel and computer games. The technology in both of these stories takes a pretty big toll on the main character's life even though the stories are totally different. In “ A Sound of Thunder,” Eckels, ends up having pretty big troubles because of a big mistake that he makes when he goes back in time using the company's new invention, the time machine. In “ Nethergrave,” the main character Jeremy, gets the offer to live in a virtual world on his computer in which he is a jaguar. He ends up taking the offer because he is promised to live happy and in peace, he chooses that life and gives up the chances of ever having a good and healthy relationship with his parents because he is being bullied in school. I think that they do think in similar ways because both of them are cowardly. Both stories have their bad and good parts like most stories, but they both are mainly about the effects of technology can have on everyone in today's world, though I am not sure if that was the authors were intended. In my opinion, I think that Bradbury’s story was more interesting and more entertaining than Skurzynski’s story. I liked the idea that making the smallest of things, and actions in the present can change the future in a huge way, good or bad. I wish that it would have ended a little different and was longer because it kind of leaves you hanging at a really intense and interesting point. In” A Sound of Thunder,” Eckels pays to use a company’s new experiment, a time machine, to go back to a time to hunt dinosaurs. While there he made a small blunder that provoked dire consequences.Eckels’ death, in the end, made me feel really bad for him because it was a pure ...

You just dont understand conversations between men Short Summary

Conversation

and womenIn the first chapter of her book, You Just Don’t Understand, Men and Women in Conversation, Deborah Tannen quotes, “...studies have shown that married couples that live together spend less than half an hour a week talking to each other...”. (24)This book is a wonderful tool for couples to use for help in

Dont Care High – Summary

Entertainment

Don't Care High - SummaryThe novel Dont Care High was written by Gordan Korman. This novel, as well as other novels he wrote were based partly on his experiences in high school, where he says, "the only way to get through high school alive was by laughing". This novel relates to teenagers about high school

Dont Text Your Life Away 

Distracted Driving

“When you’re distracted, who’s driving?” A great question, that we should ask ourselves everyday before we get behind a wheel and start texting and driving.” According to a AAA poll, 94 percent of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35% admitted to doing it anyway.” Something that we know is so

Education Is the Transmission of Civilization Education

Civilization

Education refers to the process of learning and acquiring information . Education can be divided into two main types :formal learning through an institution such as school and the other is self taught learning or what is often termed life experience . Generally education is important for learning basic life skills ,as well as learning

Online Education and Face to Face Education

Online Education

Online education is the latest and most common form of distant education in the today world because technology plays an inevitable role in our life whereas face to face education means students physically present in the classroom. Some studies show that online students slightly outperforming their traditional classroom counterparts, most indicate that there is little

Traditional Education vs Modern Education

Online Education Vs Traditional Education

The traditional didactics (in charge of the methods) using as analytical, synthetic, inductive and deductive 'didactic methods' which are the general logical methods, that is, the methods of all thinking, not teaching in particular. Because man thought like 'logos', like intelligence, reason, thought. The logical methods are those that we use in any daily, permanent activity, in

A Comparison between Comprehensive Sex Education and Abstinence Based Education

In many schools across America pre-teens and teens take Sex Education courses. There are some schools that have a comprehensive course while others opt for abstinence centered education. What is the difference between comprehensive sex education and abstinence based education? Is one better than the other? Although you are taught about abstinence in both courses, the

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