Education

Presented at the Mises Institute on June 17, 2003.

A common view promoted by advocates of "free" or public education is that a private system would lead many children to forego an education. Literacy rates would decline, and America would slide down a slippery slope toward low economic growth and stagnation. Barry Simpson looks at the history and finds that the opposite is true.

Laurence Vance offers a critique of John Merrifield's school voucher proposal. If the public school system were abolished, or even rendered irrelevant, what would be the point in collecting tax money from all citizens and redistributing it to those who have school-age children? How is this any different from a Great Society redistribution scheme? In short, Merrifield's "competition" and "choice" could, in practice, amount to vast wealth redistribution and another layer of educational central planning: not choice but market-based socialism.

If Peter Brimelow is to succeed in showing, as his subtitle states, that teacher unions — he has in mind principally the National Education Association — are destroying American education, he faces a preliminary task.

The chance to sit down with them during a real school day and supervise the process of learning in a homeschool setting was a rare treat, and something I would wish on every homeschool dad, who often feels that professional responsibilities shut him out of the schooling process, writes Jeff Tucker.

Ludwig von Mises was a great economist and teacher, writes William Peterson, but there is one more thing for which to credit Mises: a role model for each of us--whoever you are--for his standing up to the power elite of mainstream politics and economics, for valor in the face of all manner of fire, for never giving up. And to do so with verve and wit.

Graduate students at elite universities that have long proclaimed "solidarity" with organized labor are now actively attempting (and sometimes succeeding) in organizing unions of their own. And they are doing it in the face of opposition from labor-supporting faculty members and administrators. But while it might be tempting to pour some more sauce on the gander, there is another side to this story.

To help explain the complex analytics behind the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, an analogy seems to help. Suppose that, in his 8:00 a.m. class, a student was assigned a paper which is due tomorrow. Of course, he has not yet started working on it. In order to finish the paper on time, he decides to pull an "all-nighter."

Economics explains how society works. In place of clear reasoning in English, however, mainstream economics tends to use equations and calculus with dubious assumptions that made what they are doing seem to not have much relevance to the real world. Mainstream economists also seem to spend much of their time trying to find exceptions to the clear teachings of economics.

Because of their minority status, most budding Austrian economists must endure graduate training in the mainstream orthodoxy before earning their Ph.D.s. A recent graduate of New York University highlights the major differences between Austrian economics and the neoclassical, New Keynesian paradigm: method, choice, money, institutions, time, and the business cycle.