Therefore, providing impoverished communities with educational opportunities often takes a backseat to building roads. In this context, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest e-learning facilitates educational opportunities. After all, technology is expensive. Surprisingly, investing in e-learning may be a more cost-effective approach to dealing with the global education problem.
While there may be high initial costs in installing e-learning technologies in certain remote regions, these technologies would cut out other expenses of traditional schools. For example, using laptop computers would eliminate the need to supply students with textbooks, notebooks and even pens and pencils.
Any student knows that physical textbooks can come with hefty price tags. Giving students in poor communities the ability to access thousands of these books digitally would significantly reduce the economic burden of schooling. Another way that e-learning facilitates educational opportunities around the world is by making education more accessible.
Providing impoverished students with laptops and access to online educational materials would allow them to receive an education from home. This would reduce the costs of education for students by eliminating the travel expenses of attending a physical school. While the benefits of e-learning are appealing, they also provide some unique challenges for developing countries. One of the most evident difficulties is reaching areas that have little or no internet access.
This makes establishing effective e-learning programs in these areas nearly impossible. In a private market economy, the individual would get this return as his personal income, yet if the investment were subsidized, he would have borne none of the costs. In consequence, if subsidies were given to all who wished to get the training, and could meet minimum quality standards, there would tend to be overinvestment in human beings, for individuals would have an incentive to get the training so long as it yielded any extra return over private costs, even if the return were insufficient to repay the capital invested, let alone yield any interest on it.
To avoid such overinvestment, government would have to restrict the subsidies. This seems an entirely arbitrary, if not perverse, redistribution of income. The desideratum is not to redistribute income but to make capital available for investment in human beings on terms comparable to those on which it is available for physical investment.
Individuals should bear the costs of investment in themselves and receive the rewards, and they should not be prevented by market imperfections from making the investment when they are willing to bear the costs. One way to do this is to have government engage in equity investment in human beings of the kind described above.
A governmental body could offer to finance or help finance the training of any individual who could meet minimum quality standards by making available not more than a limited sum per year for not more than a specified number of years, provided it was spent on securing training at a recognized institution.
This payment could easily be combined with payment of income tax and so involve a minimum of additional administrative expense.
In this way the individuals who received the training would in effect bear the whole cost. The amount invested could then be left to be determined by individual choice.
Provided this was the only way in which government financed vocational or professional training, and provided the calculated earnings reflected all relevant returns and costs, the free choice of individuals would tend to produce the optimum amount of investment. The second proviso is unfortunately not likely to be fully satisfied. In practice, therefore, investment under the plan would still be somewhat too small and would not be distributed in the optimum manner.
To illustrate the point at issue, suppose that a particular skill acquired by education can be used in two different ways; for example, medical skill in research or in private practice. Suppose that, if money earnings were the same, individuals would generally prefer research. The non-pecuniary advantages of research would then tend to be offset by higher money earnings in private practice. These higher earnings would be included in the sum to which the fraction x was applied whereas the monetary equivalent of the non-pecuniary advantages of research would not be.
In consequence, the earnings differential would have to be higher under the plan than if individuals could finance themselves, since it is the net monetary differential, not the gross, that individuals would balance against the non-pecuniary advantages of research in deciding how to use their skill.
This result would be produced by a larger than optimum fraction of individuals going into research necessitating a higher value of x to make the scheme self-financing than if the value of the non-pecuniary advantages could be included in calculated earnings.
The inappropriate use of human capital financed under the plan would in this way lead to a less than optimum incentive to invest and so to a less than optimum amount of investment. Estimation of the values of x and y clearly offers considerable difficulties, especially in the early years of operation of the plan, and the danger would always be present that they would become political footballs. Information on existing earnings in various occupations is relevant but would hardly permit anything more than a rough approximation to the values that would render the project self-financing.
In addition, the values should in principle vary from individual to individual in accordance with any differences in expected earning capacity that can be predicted in advance — the problem is similar to that of varying life insurance premia among groups that have different life expectancy.
For such reasons as these it would be preferable if similar arrangements could be developed on a private basis by financial institutions in search of outlets for investing their funds, non-profit institutions such as private foundations, or individual universities and colleges.
Insofar as administrative expense is the obstacle to the development of such arrangements on a private basis, the appropriate unit of government to make funds available is the Federal government in the United States rather than smaller units. Any one State would have the same costs as an insurance company, say, in keeping track of the people whom it had financed.
These would be minimized for the Federal government. Even so, they would not be completely eliminated. An individual who migrated to another country, for example, might still be legally or morally obligated to pay the agreed-on share of his earnings, yet it might be difficult and expensive to enforce the obligation.
Highly successful people might therefore have an incentive to migrate. A similar problem arises, of course, also under the income tax, and to a very much greater extent. This and other administrative problems of conducting the scheme on a Federal level, while doubtless troublesome in detail, do not seem serious. The really serious problem is the political one already mentioned: how to prevent the scheme from becoming a political football and in the process being converted from a self-financing project to a means of subsidizing vocational education.
But if the danger is real, so is the opportunity. Existing imperfections in the capital market tend to restrict the more expensive vocational and professional training to individuals whose parents or benefactors can finance the training required.
The result is to perpetuate inequalities in wealth and status. And it would do so not, like the outright redistribution of income, by impeding competition, destroying incentive, and dealing with symptoms, but by strengthening competition, making incentives effective, and eliminating the causes of inequality.
This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced. Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship, but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society.
Government has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low price at governmentally operated schools.
The lack of balance in governmental activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer — a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity as well.
Because the financing of general education by government is widely accepted, the provision of general education directly by governmental bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education.
To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds of educational services. The alternative arrangements whose broad outlines are sketched in this paper distinguish sharply between the financing of education and the operation of educational institutions, and between education for citizenship or leadership and for greater economic productivity.
Throughout, they center attention on the person rather than the institution. Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit.
Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, nonprofit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units. For vocational education, the government, this time however the central government, might likewise deal directly with the individual seeking such education. In return, he would obligate himself to pay the state a specified fraction of his earnings above some minimum, the fraction and minimum being determined to make the program self-financing.
Such a program would eliminate existing imperfections in the capital market and so widen the opportunity of individuals to make productive investments in themselves while at the same time assuring that the costs are borne by those who benefit most directly rather than by the population at large. An alternative, and a highly desirable one if it is feasible, is to stimulate private arrangements directed toward the same end. The result of these measures would be a sizable reduction in the direct activities of government, yet a great widening in the educational opportunities open to our children.
They would bring a healthy increase in the variety of educational institutions available and in competition among them. Private initiative and enterprise would quicken the pace of progress in this area as it has in so many others. Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.
Note: I am indebted to P. Bauer, A. Prest, and H. Johnson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. It is by no means so fantastic as may at first appear that such a step would noticeably affect the size of families.
For example. Essentially this proposal — public financing but private operation of education has recently been suggested in several southern states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation. This fact came to my attention after this paper was essentially in its present form. My initial reaction — and I venture to predict, that of most readers — was that this possible use of the proposal was a count against it, that it was a particularly striking case of the possible defect — the exacerbating of class distinctions — referred to in the second paragraph preceding the one to which this note is attached.
Further thought has led me to reverse my initial reaction. Principles can be tested most clearly by extreme cases. Willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one agrees is hardly evidence of devotion to the principle of free speech; the relevant test is willingness to permit free speech to people with whom one thoroughly disagrees. Similarly, the relevant test of the belief in individual freedom is the willingness to oppose state intervention even when it is designed to prevent individual activity of a kind one thoroughly dislikes.
These are the grounds on which I oppose the proposed Fair Employment Practices Commissions; and they lead me equally to oppose forced nonsegregation. However, the same grounds also lead me to oppose forced segregation.
Yet, so long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. The fact that I must make this choice is a reflection of the basic weakness of a publicly operated school system. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma. They make unnecessary either choice. Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.
Parents can choose which to send their children to. The appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the nonmixed, and a gradual transition will take place. So long as the school system is publicly operated, only drastic change is possible; one must go from one extreme to the other; it is a great virtue of the private arrangement that it permits a gradual transition.
An example that comes to mind as illustrating the preceding argument is summer camps for children. Is there any objection to the simultaneous existence of some camps that are wholly Jewish, some wholly non-Jewish, and some mixed? One can — though many who would react quite differently to negro-white segregation — would not explore the existence of attitudes that lead to the three types; one can seek to propagate views that would tend to the growth of the mixed school at the expense of the extremes; but is it an appropriate function of the state to prohibit the unmixed camps?
The establishment of private schools does not of itself guarantee the desirable freedom of choice on the part of parents. The public funds could be made available subject to the condition that parents use them solely in segregated schools; and it may be that some such condition is contained in the proposals now under consideration by southern states.
Similarly, the public funds could be made available for use solely in nonsegregated schools. The proposed plan is not therefore inconsistent with either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation.
The point is that it makes available a third alternative. See George J. The subsidizing of basic research for example. This involves action in two areas: i making preschool education compulsory and free for all children aged and implementing additional measures to achieve full participation of Roma and other vulnerable children in preschool education for at least 3 years before enrolling primary education; and ii expanding the scope, coverage, and quality of public child care service provision for children aged , with priority focus on vulnerable children and their parents.
Second, better equity and quality of basic education may be achieved by following two different - but not necessarily mutually exclusive - paths. One option might be for Bulgaria to implement a well-funded program for extensive support for low-performing schools and schools in disadvantaged regions, providing all the inputs and resources needed to bring these schools equal with high-performing schools.
This would require targeted actions to improve curriculum and ensure that low-performing schools benefit from the most effective teachers in Bulgaria. However, in the context of Bulgaria, high-performing schools produce exceptional results because they are also able to select the best students.
To address this issue, a second reform path may require a structural change in the education system whereby the ability-based tracking of students into profiled, general, and vocational tracks is postponed to later grades. Such a reform would reduce school stratification resulting from the concentration of students with similar socio-economic status and will narrow the performance gap between schools.
Peer learning among students would intensify as greater diversity in skills and abilities among students is achieved and more effective teaching and learning strategies could be employed to improving learning outcomes.
Third, to improve the quality and effectiveness of teaching, changes in policy are needed. A large proportion of current teachers will retire in the next decade. The vacancies that open as a result of their retirement call for the development and implementation of a comprehensive teacher policy that covers new entrants into the profession.
According to World Bank research on teachers in Bulgaria , such a policy may include incentives to attract the best students into pedagogy programs in universities; raising the standards and the quality of the pedagogy university programs, the pre-service and in-service teacher training and qualification programs; adopting a new remuneration framework for teachers that is capable of attracting and retaining the best and most talented teachers and providing additional incentives for effective teachers working in hard-to-staff schools.
Finally, in terms of the school curriculum, Bulgarian schools would benefit from greater autonomy on curriculum and teaching methods and a stronger focus on teaching kids how to become good learners - rather than memorizing facts or exposing the students to occupational training too early.
Bulgaria may benefit from the experience of a high performing country like Poland, where reforms led to unprecedented gains in the performance of Polish students on the PISA test.
According to Professor Zbigniew Marciniak, former Polish Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of National Education - who visited Bulgaria in October and shared his experience while meeting with key stakeholders in Bulgaria - success in Poland was driven by bold education reforms made in big, hard-to-reverse steps that resulted in significant improvements among low achieving students. You have clicked on a link to a page that is not part of the beta version of the new worldbank.
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