Believe it or not, there are people who don’t trust the public sector with things too you know. (ie. I could equally argue that you're assuming the public sector can be trusted with something as vital as education)A long time ago, back when state education wasn’t the ‘norm’, people didn’t want the state to take their kid away to school! These days, people cry out for the state to take their kids to be ‘educated’.Nebuchanezzar said:That assumes that you can trust the private sector with something as vital as education, that a private sector would be able to successfully implement a standardised curriculum in an entire state (although the government seems to have trouble between states) and that there'd be a point to such an act.
Saying that the private sector can’t be trusted but the public sector can is a bit rich imo. Look at the maintenance backlog in public schools, the HSC system (a system that clearly advantages richer students who can afford tuition), the redundancy of some of the courses (I recall learning some things more than once and unnecessarily), the content (debatable here, but we all have our own little opinions about what’s necessary and what isn’t, I’m just saying let people have more choice).
Point is, at least in a private sector, you have the right to refuse the service, whereas with the government, you have NO choice. Whether or not you get a poor quality education from the government, you PAY.
As for the ‘value’ of a standardised curriculum, I don’t see any great big need to have a unified curriculum. Let schools teach whatever they want, and parents decide what school to send their kid to. Let universities do their own entrance testing, no need for a big HSC/UAI system that tries (and fails) to rank >60000 students across different institutions/subjects/teachers into increments of .05
Private certification exists, let me give you the example of accounting, there are two big competing ones in Australia (CA and CPA). They’re both privately run, and in order to get accredited, universities have to have certain content in their subjects. So as far as ‘standardising curriculums’ is concerned, the mechanism is already in place to ensure that education meets a particular standard.
Ok if you’re talking about bureaucrats in particular, well my response is that this is as a result of the government’s existence, and is something that we’re just going to have to put up with because the government has no way of ascertaining the true value of goods/services. The only way to truly know the value of a good is to have people exchange for it.Nebuchanezzar said:Or that society thinks they need them more. I'd argue that a metalworker, or a coal miner is far more useful to society than a beureacrat, and yet...
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