> Also, the capitalists that originally funding and benefited from the public model also send their own kids to schools with different models.
Re: “different models”—the main difference with private schools is that private schools are permitted to eject students for whatever reason they want. They can solve classroom management problems by removing problematic students from the school entirely. It would be morally wrong to let public schools do the same thing.
IMO this is difference is the only difference worth talking about between public and private schools. Other factors exist but this difference is just too big and swamps the others. Public schools which are permitted to be more selective show much better outcomes, such as Stuyvesant. Wikipedia has a dedicated page listing Stuyvesant alumni, including several Nobel prize winners, the Fields medal, musicians, actors, and politicians. It’s part of the NYC public school system.
> Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people.
I don’t think I can evaluate this statement—I don’t know what you actually mean by that. Surely you don’t mean it in a literal sense, but I don’t have any kind of landmark for what kind of figurative sense you mean here.
> This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.
I don’t think you’ve made a compelling argument here, or even touched on some kind of framework for evaluating the problem. There are so many contributing factors for why public schools are often terrible—underpaid teachers, underfunded programs, standardized tests, constant meddling from politicians and administrators, etc. Some things about public schools you have to accept as part of the constraints, or you have to come up with some kind of radical, outside of the box thinking for how to get around them. For example, the idea that you send kids, from morning to afternoon, to a local school where they sit in a room with 25 peers from their local neighborhood and receive instruction on some particular topic.
“Ditching it for something else entirely” is a suggestion that can be dismissed unless you can come up with some argument that “something else entirely” plausibly exists.
I think the sad truth is that we know how to improve public schools, but it takes a lot of slow work and political power. Coming up with new ideas doesn’t help us if we are already failing to implement ideas which we know work.
Re: “different models”—the main difference with private schools is that private schools are permitted to eject students for whatever reason they want. They can solve classroom management problems by removing problematic students from the school entirely. It would be morally wrong to let public schools do the same thing.
IMO this is difference is the only difference worth talking about between public and private schools. Other factors exist but this difference is just too big and swamps the others. Public schools which are permitted to be more selective show much better outcomes, such as Stuyvesant. Wikipedia has a dedicated page listing Stuyvesant alumni, including several Nobel prize winners, the Fields medal, musicians, actors, and politicians. It’s part of the NYC public school system.
> Whatever system (and culture) that is doing this on a large scale is not educating people.
I don’t think I can evaluate this statement—I don’t know what you actually mean by that. Surely you don’t mean it in a literal sense, but I don’t have any kind of landmark for what kind of figurative sense you mean here.
> This is so disasterous that ditching it for something else entirely or trying all kinds of local experiments makes a lot of sense.
I don’t think you’ve made a compelling argument here, or even touched on some kind of framework for evaluating the problem. There are so many contributing factors for why public schools are often terrible—underpaid teachers, underfunded programs, standardized tests, constant meddling from politicians and administrators, etc. Some things about public schools you have to accept as part of the constraints, or you have to come up with some kind of radical, outside of the box thinking for how to get around them. For example, the idea that you send kids, from morning to afternoon, to a local school where they sit in a room with 25 peers from their local neighborhood and receive instruction on some particular topic.
“Ditching it for something else entirely” is a suggestion that can be dismissed unless you can come up with some argument that “something else entirely” plausibly exists.
I think the sad truth is that we know how to improve public schools, but it takes a lot of slow work and political power. Coming up with new ideas doesn’t help us if we are already failing to implement ideas which we know work.