Education Unchained: What It Takes to Restore Schools and Learning
Ebook
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Overview
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.
The second expanded edition completes the analysis by
extending it to research and higher education, in and of
themselves, how they are affected by the crisis in primary and
secondary education, and how they would also be restored and set on
a path of improvement through a similar return to independence from
government.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Knowledge Problem
Chapter 3: The Threats to Improved Education
Chapter 4: School, Work, and Growing Up
Chapter 5: The Ethics of State Education
Chapter 6: The Rise of the Government School
System
Chapter 7: The Art, Science, and Nonsense of
Education
Chapter 8: Der Untergang—The Downfall of the Government
School System
Chapter 9: The Downward, Self-reinforcing Spiral of
Death
Chapter 10: The Kind of Education We Never Had
Chapter 11: The Negative Externalities of Government
Education
Chapter 12: The Private Origins of Science and Higher
Education
Chapter 13: An educational, socio-economic motorway
pile-up
Chapter 14: Replanting the Beautiful Tree
Appendix A: Estimates of the Fall of Quality in
Sweden
Appendix B: The Parable of the Citizen Vehicle
References
Education remains among the highest ranked concerns of parents across the world, yet many believe, often rightly, that their children are receiving sub-optimal material and instruction. In this book, Erik Lidström shows why this need not be the case as well as ways forward for a thorough-going renewal of learning – one in which truth, evidence and the good matter.
Throw away all those books on how to fix the education system. As Erik Lindström shows in this thought-provoking book, full of insights, the only way to fix education is not to fix it. Education is too important to be left to the "education experts", and should be a matter for the real experts – schools, teachers and parents.
Erik Lidström has provided us with a heretical, but brilliant exposé of modern education. There is wide agreement that the modern, bureaucratic school system does not work well and is subject to a never-ending cyclical spate of reforms that often make matters worse. By combining economics and evolutionary theory with an intriguing account of the educational system and outcomes before and after government organized schooling, Lidström makes a cogent and thoughtful argument for a ground-up, market-based approach to education. No doubt, the thesis will irritate and offend many educators, but this is all the more reason to read the book and seriously reflect on Lidström’s proposals.
- Title: Education Unchained: What It Takes to Restore Schools and Learning
- Author: Erik Lidstrom
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781475858136, 1475858132
- Resource ID: LLS:9781475858136
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-19T10:15:40Z