Hi v, checked this first. Nice, lots of good points. First: compulsory education – yes, it is problematic, and it is grossly distorted by current education arrangements, globally. I would suggest that every child has a right to a full education introducing them to the world they live in, and providing basic literacy and maths, and the skills to find answers to anything they are curious about. After that, I suggest that everyone be free, from around puberty (11-14), to leave school and work if they want, with the proviso that they can return to education/training at any later age, and be fully supported by society at large to do so – win-win.
Second: I’m always wary about the ‘private ownership=good, public ownership=bad’ dichotomy when it comes to larger organisations. The problem is that these are both just labels for groups, cooperating for a given end/product. The issue isn’t ‘public/private’; the issue is the task, and the quality of the output. Some tasks require that the public interest comes first, regardless of ‘profitability’, and private ownership distorts this badly (think private prisons in the US – and indeed, big pharma – no interest in keeping people out of prison, or indeed, long term cures – it damages profit). My intuition here is that the problem is not that ‘private/public’ is particularly the issue – the issue is the size of nation states, and the grotesque centralisation of power. Education must be local, responsive to local control and choice, and ‘big govt – or big private industry/corp' are pure poison here – they have absolutely no justification for a say in it. I think this equally applies to pretty much every other public policy too. In short, three words: devolution, devolution, devolution. Do that and everything you write that you want here will inevitably follow. Db
RE: The reason why public education does not work