EducationNews.org

by Briggs Armstrong
A high-school calculus teacher scored a victory for capitalism and dealt socialized education quite a blow this year. A recent article in USA Today reported that Tom Farber had devised a brilliant, free-market way of funding the tests that he felt were necessary for his students.

Jerry Kirkpatrick
Teachers are peddlers of knowledge and ideas.
Well, that's what they would be in a free market in education and that's how they should think of themselves in today's government-run and government-controlled system.
In a free market in education, teachers would be sales reps for their schools. Some might even be owner-entrepreneurs who hang out their shingles and then must recruit — i.e., sell and service — their paying customers by meeting the customers' needs and wants.

Ben O'Neill
University campuses receive a great deal of attention due to the political and cultural indoctrination and activism that some academics try to pass off as education.[1] However, government education bureaucrats are eager to ensure that their prescribed views are etched on the slate of the human mind at a much earlier age. For this reason, the most shameless political and cultural activism is often directed, under the guise of environmental and social education, at young children attending government primary schools.

By Jeffrey A. Tucker
It's civic baseball season again, that time of the year when we are reminded that everything we believe about how society works is wrong, at least in this area if not in all areas.

Jim Fedako
I recently finished reading A Paper Life, the autobiography of the movie star Tatum O’Neal. I know, in a time of the ever-growing Leviathan, such a diversion is pure Hollywood puffery. However, tidbits of insight can be found in such a book, as seemingly inconsequential stories shed light on the fallacies of government.

Albert Jay Nock's classic lectures on education:
The Great Tradition will go on because the forces of nature are on its side; it has on its side an invincible ally, the self-preserving instinct of humanity. Men may forsake it, but they will come back to it because they must; their collective existence cannot permanently go on without it.

By Dan McLaughlin
Top professional athletes regularly sign multi-million dollar contracts, with signing bonuses and lucrative product promotion deals.

Additional Commentaries and Reports

By Robert P. Murphy
In response to mounting controversy over the student loan industry, the House recently passed the Student Loan Sunshine Act by a large margin (414 to 3). The Act would require lenders to disclose any financial relationships they have with educational institutions, and it would prohibit certain questionable activities, such as lenders giving "gifts" to the employees in a school's financial aid office.

Jim Fedako
All for the want of a dog. "What's a dog?" I inquired. The middle-aged Jamaican smiled, "The dog is that little part down there." He knelt, pointing to the rear wheel of his broken bicycle leaning against the stuccoed cement block wall that outlined his neatly kept yard. He rose, looked me in the eye, and inquired, "Can you bring me a new one back when you return from the States?"