The Irrationality of the Market “Reform” of Education
By Paul Horton.
A couple of years ago I had the privilege of listening to the late Nobel Economics laureate Gary Becker speak at my school. Professor Becker won the Nobel Prize for his book Human Capital that argued that the marketplace provides consumers with “rational choices” that rational people will follow to become successful. In this way of thinking, markets rationalize “human capital” to enable smart economic actors to achieve more efficient outcomes.
Not surprisingly, Becker argued that the market would have corrected itself and that we would all be better off without the Keynesian stimulus of President Obama’s Recovery Act.
I really tuned in when Becker began to talk about the privatization of schools. He said that he “loved teaching and that a great teacher should be willing to teach sixty students in a class. If students thought that they could learn more from a given teacher, they should be able to choose that teacher and that teacher should be paid more.”
He went on to say that things should work the same way with schools; that all students should be able to choose their schools and that a public monopoly on schools and schooling prevented them from doing so. He supported starting as many charter schools as possible to end the public school monopoly and to introduce The Irrationality of the Market “Reform” of Education - Living in Dialogue:
