Education

The subject of over-subscribed schools came up in conversation, followed swiftly by what makes a good school. I'm not going to spell out my entire thought process here, but just conclude what education would be like in an RBE.

At the moment good educators and good leaders of educators have an incentive to apply their skills in a comparatively small context. That incentive is of course money. In a sane world, the best educators and educational materials would be deployed as widely as possible so that the maximum number of people could benefit from them. Ted Talks and the Khan academy are two institutions that subscribe to his philosophy and act upon it, but there are many others.

If good education is channeled through a certain institution in a certain place, by certain people at a certain time, of course the availability is limited and - behold - competition for access to that education arises. In schools, admissions criteria are applied. In the state sector, the crow-flies distance from home to school is often used, causing people to try to live near the 'good' schools.

One element of a school that makes it good is its ethos. This is an abstract concept, and there should be no difficulty in school A  having the same ethos as school B. Another characteristic is leadership. To improve education generally in this attribute the leadership needs to be scaleable.

... to be continued (maybe)

Prison works?

Check out the work of James Gilligan. I watched a few minutes of his videos on line, and was struck by the point that several studies have shown that education is the most effective antidote to re-offending yet discovered. There wasn't a modest difference - somethinh like 2% after 30 years (by those educated to Bachelor's level or above) compared to 60% after 3 years.

And education can be delivered cheaply, using on line videos, or DVDs, or even conveivably interactive teaching over the internet. In an RBE, of course, education wouldn't be withheld from people so that educators can make money out if it. All educational material would be open source.