> For example, universal health care and education are public goods that generate more market wealth in higher productivity than they cost in taxes collected to pay for them, but markets intrinsically cannot produce universal education or health care by themselves.

I have quite a different point of view from you of how to go about getting to our goals, despite the fact that they overlap almost completely - we both believe in literacy, education, health, and general well being. I'll leave the universal healthcare thing alone, since it delves into an argument that has merits on both sides and I don't have any radically different arguments that people haven't heard, except that I think the artificially high licensing requirements for doctors and restrictions on supply via medical schools are driving up costs and that's a bad thing. But beyond that, you've probably heard all of my beliefs on universal healthcare elsewhere and I have nothing new to add, and will refrain from reposting them. Both sides have some merit.

But I have, I think, views that most people haven't heard or thought of about public education. I've been thinking on this lately since I read a submission here where a teacher of the year was complaining about what a mess the school system is and how it kills creativity and fosters obediance. (I searched for the post to link it, it was +120 or so and very well received, but I couldn't find it - if anyone has a link for people who missed it, it was a very good piece)

Me? It may seem somewhat radical at first, but I think top-down, streamlined public education is a mess, a disaster, and makes people less fit to be adults and citizens. It makes them reliant on following instructions and higher authority that provide clear and precise instructions and evaluate on clear and precise guidelines, and kills innovation and creativity. Like some other bright students, I'd often try to speak to my teacher and say - hey, I'm not really interested in this lesson, can I do this more difficult and more stimulating thing instead? Far more often than not, the teacher said no. In the real world, if you go to head of R&D or operations or logistics with credible specs that show you can make a lot more money for the company doing something better and ask to work on it on a trial basis, you'll get greenlighted. If not, you can throw your hat in at a startup or start a company yourself. That's real life. The educational system isn't for that though.

It grades from 0 to 100. But in real life, it's okay to be terrible at, say, "social studies" and score a 0 on it while scoring 1,000,000 in an applied science like engineering. If you're a failure of a historian and can't remember dates and places to save your life, but you can make a better engine, you're in line for quite a good life. But the potpourri-based education system, with its dabbing here and there on a curriculum set by other people - it'll have none of that. You'll get an "A" in math, an "A" in physics, and an "F" in social studies, and wind up with a 2.6 GPA and be in bad shape academically.

I dropped out of two high schools and one university, and I think it was the best thing in the world for me. But I love learning, and I love good education. I've self taught myself a number of things, and learned from smarter people. But never mind me, the education system stifles creativity and curiosity among high performers, but most land on their feet. What about the people who aren't succeeding?

And I'll tell you - I've met some people who failed out of school but were quite talented, and it's a function of how the school system is drawn up. There's lots of new cool things coming out of home schooling, and one of the biggest findings is that people really shouldn't be studying a subject based on how old they are; they should be studying based on where they're at in their development. It's okay if this particular 8 year old isn't interested in reading nonfiction but is already doing algebra, and this particular 8 year old is still a bit rudimentary in mathematics but is reading deeply into classical works. You meet the student where he or she is at and everyone develops at a bit of a different pace.

And this is why I'll go so far as to say that I think the school system is destructive to young minds. It's because it chokes out potential competition from different systems. When I was speaking on the phone to a friend of mine about how hard it is to build alternative schooling projects, he said, "Yeah, it's hard to compete with free." But you know what? It's not hard to compete with free. You just need to provide better features and support than the free option, and some people will choose it.

No, it's much worse than that. The school system isn't free. You're not competing with free. You're competing with, "You've already been forced to pay for this." Anyone who wants their kid to be educated differently has to pay for their kid's education twice - first through taxes, and second through tuition. This means that private education is largely for the wealthy, and low priced private education options can't compete. Poor people can't afford to turn down the already-paid-for-education. Knowing that poor people will be choosing the already-paid-for option, very few people are trying to make low cost options that would work well for the poor.

I got into university despite not finishing high school, I learned quite a bit in my law, technology, and business classes, but I didn't finish because I couldn't deal with how university math was taught. I was already working on important stuff in my life, actually using real math, and I couldn't get my mind around the piles of homework of mindless nonsense.

Statistics class killed me. I couldn't deal with it. But I'm now a lover of statistics, and you know how I learned? Baseball. Comparing on base percentage, slugging percentage, trying to figure out what the optimum mix and lineup balance is, looking for baseball skills undervalued by market, looking for weird park effects where a player strikes out a lot at their home park for god-knows-why and might do better at a park that for whatever reason has lower strikeouts. You can find all kinds of cool things out diving around in statistics. For the real baseball nut, you can look at what percentage of different pitches a player swings at, and his contact percentages on each pitch - really fun and interesting stuff.

But as far as I know, there's none or not many classes teaching math by using sports, which is something a lot of kids like and are stimulated by. I played poker with a guy who couldn't do school math at all, but had a loose grasp of poker odds and amazing knowledge about basketball. We used to debate whether Allen Iverson's low shooting percentage high volume scoring was good for his team or not.

A lot of kids could learn math that way. You see kids who can't handle memorizing names and dates, are bored, not stimulated - but they can quote all kinds of stats about their favorite sports players and debate whether the higher batting average/lower power player like Ichiro Suzuki is better, or the lower average/more power guy like Carlos Pena is better.

But the top down, government run school system chokes that out. And that's before we even start talking about topics like history, which might as well be called "Patriotic Indoctrination Courses". The wars that we spent the most time on in history class were The American Revolution, The War of 1812, The American Civil War, and World War II. And we can get the "we're the clear good guys" side of the story, nothing about supplying Stalin and what Stalin did to the captured Japanese prisoners in Manchuria after the war was basically already over. Nothing about the firebombing of Dresden, very little about the fire raids on Tokyo. Then we get a little bit of "well, we were sort of the bad guys in the Indian Wars and Vietnam", and then we get not much treatment at all of World War I (we're the neutral to slightly bad guys in that one - why were we even in the middle of a European colonial war?), the Spanish-American War (the Americans of the day were waaaaay the bad guys in that one), the Mexican American War (questionable - somewhat bad in that one), or all the little invasions and overthrows of little republics there and there.

And I see this everywhere. I'm in China right now - and at the risk of upsetting the internet censors here, they ain't get so much a fair view of recent history. But my girlfriend is Taiwanese and says Taiwanese history vis-a-vis the Kuomintang and corruption and recent history is totally unreliable and ridiculous too.

I think central education chokes out better options, stifles creativity, fosters obediance, and has no chance at providing anything like a fair view of history. I think it made sense during the Industrial Revolution, where centralizing education meant a base standard of literacy and mathematics ability among the population, and central education might make sense in a developing country. But I think once you hit a certain point of wealth, then private education and tutors can take over.

People talk about how private education doesn't serve the poor - but I think that ignores the historical record. People have shown as much or more willingness to volunteer to teach than to volunteer for almost any other cause in history. And options designed to meet the student where he is at, to meet him at a point of interest, to build a curriculum for him - those options aren't built for poorer people once already-been-paid-for education is offered. The wealthier do alright under public education by opting out of it except in the best districts, but I think the poor suffer quite a lot by centrally planned education not meeting them where they're really at. I think it's not good for anyone, not the poor, the middle class, or the wealthy, and I think if we can realize this and dismantle centralized education, we'll see huge gains in creativity, persistence, personal responsibility, and prosperity.