Education Unchained

What it takes to Restore Schools and Learning

By (author) Erik Lidstrom

Not available to order

Publication date:

26 October 2015

Length of book:

190 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475822434

Are we going about education the wrong way? The somewhat shocking demonstration of this book is that "we" simply cannot reform "our" schools "together". We don't actually even know what schools or education really are. Education can only be improved the same way we improve and invent things in other walks of life, through unbridled, unchained trial and error.

Assembling a wealth of economic, psychological and historical evidence, Erik Lidström paints a coherent and deceptively simple picture of how we went wrong, of why we went wrong and what we can do about it. The disconcerting conclusion is that education must be set free, it must be returned to parents and to pupils. Government should have no, or hardly any role in the financing of education, in the setting of curricula or diploma, or in the supervision of schools and education.

At the same time, the book is filled with optimism. By doing things very differently, we can very quickly and almost painlessly restore education and learning to a level previously unheard of.

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1- Introduction
Chapter 2- The knowledge problem
Markets and why we trade
Hunter-gatherers in the Great Society
The rules of the Great Society
The division of labor and the division of knowledge
The roles of competition
Quality is not one thing
Why we cannot think ourselves towards better things
We can become experts on teaching but not on education reform
Why school vouchers do not work
The process of improvements is different in a free system
Democratic decision-making is a particularly inappropriate method for improving schools
Chapter 3: The threats to improved education
Reforming “our” schools is impossible
Why we seek social conformity
The ever-present threat of paternalism
The species of the paternalists–the Anointed
How parents decide
Why parents and children will not find bad schools
School as a tribal ritual
Our urge to rationally plan prevents learning
It is not self-evident what education is
All-private schools are actually very affordable
Chapter 4: School, work and growing up
Norberg’s assistants
How we grow up
Play and school
Chapter 5: The ethics of state education
Government compulsion, government conformity
Using children as tools
Treating children as cattle
What is left for the state to do?
Maybe the government should verify that all become educated
Maybe the government should financially assist the education sector
Chapter 6: The rise of the government school system
Sweden
Britain
The Third World today
New York State
The five-stage rocket of compulsory education
The flow of information stops
The hard and magnificent 19th century government school system
Chapter 7: The art, science, and nonsense of education
The art of education
The science of education
Folk “science”
Practice makes perfect
The delusions of education reformers and pedagogues
Why education reforms almost always make things worse
Chapter 8: Der Untergang–the downfall of the government school system
Overview of the decisions in Sweden
The social misdistribution of education
Against meritocracy and the high status of theoretical studies
Improving social skills
Abraham Lincoln’s dog’s tail
Empirical trials for the 9-year unity school
How education reform broke the back of the school system
All hell breaks lose
Chapter 9: The downward, self-reinforcing spiral of death
The fall in quality for academic studies
The fall in quality for those who studied at the realskola but not at high school
The fall in quality for those who did not go to the theoretical realskola
Why don’t we return to the old system?
America, Britain and the spiral of death of government systems
Comments on the Finnish school system
Chapter 10: The kind of education we never had
Universities in a free system
Chapter 11: The negative externalities of government education
Positive externalities from education
Idle minds–government school as a source of crime and angry music
State schools as a destroyer of exceptional talent
State schools as a source of irresponsibility and immaturity
State schools as a source on unequal opportunity
State school as a source of social disintegration
On the unfairness having parents of different wealth
Chapter 12: Replanting the Beautiful Tree
Civil disobedience
Promoting freedom and democracy
Helping Third World countries
Appendix 1 - Estimates of the fall of quality in Sweden
The fall in quality of the teachers
Chaos in the classroom
Measures of outcomes and some possible contributing causes
The early economic outcome
Appendix 2 - The Parable of the Citizen Vehicle
References

Those seeking to improve public schools in the US often struggle to define how they wish to make schools ‘better.’ Lidström espouses a belief that government spending has led to a decline in schools and as that funding has increased, quality has declined. He presents his ideas in 12 sections: an introduction; ‘The Knowledge Problem’; ‘The Threats to Improved Education’; ‘School, Work, and Growing Up’; ‘The Ethics of State Education’; ‘The Rise of the Government School System’; a critique of pedagogy; how he alleges government schools fail; the downward spiral in quality over time; the benefits of a market system; ‘The Negative Externalities of Government Education’; and a plan to reinvigorate schools. Though the author considers only one perspective, it is well-reasoned and passionately argued. Best for those well-versed in the issues public education in the US faces, such as upper-level undergraduates or graduate students in a seminar setting. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.