School vouchers are not about education
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School vouchers are not more complex than the concept of money. They still generate debates as hot as the debate on the superiority of socialism over capitalism.
I will help clear up the debate with three simple observations:
- school vouchers are an economic tool. This is not a tool that is supposed to guarantee a recovery of an inefficient educational system. This is just a tool that rationalizes the financing of education. The entire process of recovery is up to the people, and will reflect all ills of the implementing society. If you have a stratified society, vouchers don't provide a cure. At best, they provide an equal boost to everyone
- educational experts are useless at assessing the voucher system. To pass judgements, they need to settle the optimization criteria. The point of vouchers is to reject universal criteria and let each student (with support of her family), make decisions that bring her closer to her own goals by her own standards. If you see reports that use test results and provide a judgement, you know the authors don't get the purpose of vouchers. You cannot measure the impact of a policy on an ecosystem with a zillion of goals and purposes
- nobody has implemented school vouchers correctly. There has been 25+ implementations of the voucher system. None of those was the right implementation. When politicians take good tools in their hands, they tweak them without understanding their own impact on making the tool impotent. All limits on freedom in the use of the vouchers, on schools, on the learning process, affect the efficiency of vouchers. Most of all, no country in the world dared to pass the entire control of the education system to the best control mechanisms available in the child's brain. We still live the legacy of human "rights" defined at the time of the "Lord of the flies" (i.e. dark ages before the arrival of modern neuroscience in where children have the "right to be coerced"(sic!)). Compare: Declaration of Educational Emancipation
On April 15, 2023, an educational conference in Polish parliament might make a dent in the wall of ignorance.