In the Green Room: Prof. James Tooley on Education Reform for the World’s Poor and the US

Posted October 15th, 2009 at 12.46pm in Education.

“Be bold,” says James Tooley when you want education reform. He’d know. For the last decade the Newcastle University Professor has been traveling throughout the world’s poorest regions studying systems of education. What he’s discovered may be surprising.

In the poorest countries on earth, parents are choosing private schools because they don’t want to acquiesce to the mediocrity of public schools…Our research has shown that these schools are outperforming the government schools at a fraction of the cost.

The founder of the Beautiful Tree Foundation, a group dedicated to researching and developing high quality, low cost education to the poor, James Tooley has discovered some strange truths about the nature of fee-based education that has far-reaching implications for other issues.

A lot of these poor people tell us they don’t want free education. They want to pay fees. Why do they to pay fees? Because that means the schools are accountable to them and that means they are, in some ways, empowered and in charge.

A more succinct answer as to why the freedom to choose enables great things in education in any society would be hard to come by.

Author: Gerrit Lansing
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3 Comments

October 15, 2009 Freedom of Speech TX writes:

Since, the left-wingers want to hold up our decrepit, uncaring, expensive, selfish health care system to the vastly superior government-run healthcare systems (pick any country but here) - then,

This article explains why our public school systems are inferior to private schools both within and outside the U.S.

I wonder if these other poor countries have a Teacher’s Union? Just a thought on cost.

October 15, 2009 Leon, Durango, CO writes:

These people know nothing about education. We used to make students look up misunderstood words to eliminate confusion. That’s common sense but you can’t find it in Education “Reform”. It never was reform in the common parlance, it means reform in the Newspeak tradition, meaning education as socialist conditioning. So the kids are all Green these days, so Green in fact they will trade their future for little froggies, Bambi and slime worms, but nothing for humanity. It isn’t education, it is socialization.

The perfect example of modern “education” is how Obama got elected. We all got behind teaching the kids (and college students) ‘critical thinking’ but in fact they could not see behind all that baloney Obama offered in the campaign. “Change” and “Hope” but with no substance behind it. Our kids were taught how to swallow propaganda whole and they called it critical thinking.

October 16, 2009 Dr. Pauline Dixon writes:

Just for the second comment, yes the state sector in developing countries does have strong teacher unions, but in the private sector no one belongs to a union, hence the inflated price of government teacher pay. Otherwise in the private sector (where typically the salaries are much lower) the wages are set at market rate.

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