All Posts Tagged With: "education"
Super Bowl versus Education?
It appears that spending on government education in one year was 324 times the amount companies spent on Super Bowl advertising over 20 years.
7Feb2012 | Sandy Ikeda | 15 comments | ContinuedState-Mandated Thinking
Is this statement true? “If SpongeBob SquarePants is the mayor of Minneapolis, then Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.” It is. On the other hand, this is not: “If Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, then Spongebob Squarepants is the Mayor of Minneapolis.” Confused? Welcome to our government-school curricula. In the July/August 2011 issue of [...]
4Jan2012 | Peter McAllister | 6 comments | ContinuedUnemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedA Maverick’s Defense of Freedom
The Liberty Fund catalog is filled with excellent books on American history, economics, and philosophy. As a Public Choice economist I have benefited tremendously from its publication of the collected works of James Buchanan. While I already owned several of his books, the opportunity to purchase all his books and articles at once saved me [...]
26Oct2011 | Joshua C. Hall | 0 comments | ContinuedGrowing Government Ensures “National Greatness”?
There is widespread belief among politicians, public officials, and pundits that if government doesn’t give us the seeds, nothing will grow. A friend of mine served on our city’s legislative council for eight years. During that time he often heard—in defense of tax-funded business incentives—“If we don’t do something, nothing will happen.” The same belief [...]
21Sep2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 6 comments | ContinuedComing Soon: The Federal Department of Standardized Minds
The story of federal intervention in education is one of abject failure. Coming in large supply only since President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” Washington’s educational undertakings first resulted in billions of misspent dollars, then billions of misspent dollars coupled with increasingly rigid “accountability” rules. The result of both phases has been squandered funds and academic [...]
22Jun2011 | Neal McCluskey | 6 comments | ContinuedRichman on School Choice
The new book Freedom and School Choice in American Educationincludes a chapter by Freeman editor Sheldon Richman titled “‘Unbounded Liberty, and Even Caprice’: Why ‘School Choice’ Is Dangerous to Education.” The book, edited by Greg Forster and C. Bradley Thompson, is a compilation of papers presented at a 2008 conference sponsored by the Foundation for Educational Choice (formerly the Milton and Rose [...]
2Jun2011 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 3 comments | ContinuedFree the Children, Cut the Budget
Education is important – far too important to leave to politicians and bureaucrats.
4Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 29 comments | ContinuedGovernment and Conflict
Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]
22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | ContinuedWhat Education Needs
As an antidote to the blather masquerading on MSNBC as serious discussion of education, I prescribe the wisdom of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804).
1Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 18 comments | ContinuedMore Hand-Wringing over Education
MSNBC is devoting this week to the education crisis. Every ten years or so, the media, politicians, and intelligentsia remember how bad the government schools are. They then go into overdrive discussing what’s wrong and what to do about it. Funny thing is, they never look back to the last time they went through this [...]
30Sep2010 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedWeapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
An annoying bumper sticker I have seen on occasion reads, “If you think education is costly, try ignorance.” That trope is meant to break down resistance to the education establishment’s desire to shop-vac in as much taxpayer money as possible. The trickery is subtle—deceive people into equating schooling with education. What the education establishment does [...]
22Sep2010 | George C. Leef | 15 comments | ContinuedPublic Schools through the Public Choice Lens
Regarding the state of government (“public”) schooling in the United States today, two facts stand out. The first is that the average amount of money spent per pupil has dramatically increased during the past 35 years and is now one of the highest in the world, and the second is that student achievement, by both [...]
22Sep2010 | Michael Bors | 7 comments | ContinuedGovernment Failure: E.G. West on Education
This illuminating book was designed to commemorate the achievements and to spread the ideas of the late Edwin G. West. Professor West, who lived from 1922 to 2001, did pioneering work in the economics and history of education, and his studies have been critical in refuting the pretensions of government education. Those who wish to [...]
8Jul2010 | Antony Flew | 0 comments | ContinuedEducation Is the Effect, Not the Cause, of Affluence
Despite its abysmal record, the United Nations wears a mantle of legitimacy in the popular discourse. Almost every daily newspaper or nightly newscast reports some UN-sponsored agency’s activities regarding world hunger, climate change, disease, or some other problem. All too often the UN is on the wrong side of reality. Take its latest “solution” to [...]
7Jul2010 | Jude Blanchette | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey
Growing up in a fairly poor family in rural Manitoba, David Henderson would have seemed an unlikely candidate for the authorship of one of the most resounding libertarian books to come along in years. But an innate sense that there was something valuable in having the freedom to live one’s life according to one’s own [...]
30Jun2010 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued-
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