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Eugine_Nier comments on George Orwell's Prelude on Politics Is The Mind Killer - Less Wrong
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It's not quite an enforced government monopoly, although people choosing private school have to pay twice (pay for the public schools through their taxes and tuition for the private school). There are various attempts, e.g., school vouchers, charter schools, to fix this but the teachers' unions have been fighting them tooth and nail.
By capitalist I mean free market. By functional I mean provides effective services. Note: my claim is not that societies can't have both functional and non-capitalist elements, rather that for the most part the functional elements will be capitalist and the non-functional ones will be non-capitalist.
This doesn't surprise me given the filters you likely get your news through.
By "fixing" I mean making it so that students come out of the schools having actually learned basic math and English skills. A specific reform is making it possible to get rid of incompetent teachers.
What do you mean by free market, exactly?
When is effectiveness, and when can a service be qualified as effective?
Depending on your definitions of effective and free-market, the existence of Sweden, at the very least, might make you want to question that reasoning.
I don't select the media from which I get my news. While the press in general does operate a selection on what information they release to the public, I do not think favouring teachers' unions is one of their priorities.
Well, in the end the institutions are made of people, and applying game theory oversimplifies many factors. Such as public backlash: I cannot imagine teachers being stupid enough to risk the public backlash that opposing such a reform would cause (supposing that reform is exactly what it says on the tin, rather than making it possible to fire teachers for other, less avowable reasons. Unless teachers in the USA already had such a low social image that they would not care about degrading it further.
EDIT: You know, someone keeps down-voting both of us, and I don't know why.
Well, adjust you're priors appropriately.
Or rather they have such a high social image that the people who aren't paying much attention react the same way you just did.
By all accounts, teachers in the USA are the dregs of society: very badly paid, subjected to unreasonable demands of moral upstanding, and powerless in front of the students, the administration, and the parents.
How do you manage that? Does someone else select it for you?
Wait, you're on the internet, that can't be right.
I just read whatever information falls in my lap while browsing my favourite sites: Less Wrong and Tv Tropes. I don't get out much, Internet-wise. I don't go out of my way for sources that agree with me, nor do I actively refuse sources that don't. A selection bias still happens, because I only read news provided to me by tropers and rationalists.