It’s amazing how requiring an investment improves outcomes.
This is true not only in education but everywhere. See housing...
“what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly...”
Free stuff is not valued by most human beings.
The conundrum is Thomas Jefferson [among others] argued for free education. Thomas Paine seems to have differed [his quote above.]
IMHO we can do both - provide education at taxpayer expense AND have it valued. If schools could just kick people out and/or refuse admission to undesirables it could work. But... who chooses the undesirables and makes admission decisions...
condundrum indeed
Indeed.
Anytime you hand your money to a bureaucracy to administer your interests, you fund failure.
1) I don't recall Jefferson using the word “free” with regard to education. Perhaps you have links. But...If he did he was wrong and Paine was right.
2) When our Founding Fathers stressed education and having an educated citizenry, they likely had their **own** educations in mind. That would include:
homeschooling
private tutoring as needed
dame schools in the homes of neighbors
one room schools organized by parents
Sunday schools
apprenticeships
home-based academies that prepared the brightest for admission into college as **young** teens.
Likely our Founding Fathers would be **appalled** that we warehouse our nation's youth in prison-like settings that are socialist funded, establish the godless religion of Secular Humanism, and are collectivist managed by voting mob controlled school boards.
I would think that if Jefferson argued for “free” education then I would expect that there would be one or two quotations of his stating exactly that.
Personally, using Google, I was not able to find any statements ( quotes) of Jefferson stating this. They might exist. I haven't found them. You haven't either or they would have been posted by now.
Regardless.....Jefferson and the rest would be horrified to see our modern, socialist, collectivist managed, GODLESS, prison-like, and compulsory government schools.