> yet we don't pay as much attention to it as we should (see the planned 25% budget cuts on education in the UK, and elsewhere).
Counter-opinion: Good! Public education is all about obedience and stifles creativity, teaches children that they should follow orders rather than set their own objectives, passes off clearly incorrect propaganda as history, and neglects important life skills like personal finance and goal-setting in favor of learning archaic and useless facts. A main function of public education is the role of baby-sitting and instilling obedience and loyalty to the current government. Cutting this system returns the responsibility of educating children to the people who care the most and have the least conflicting interests with the children - their parents.
You could be proven right, but I don't think we should be alienating the education system, anyway. Education, regardless of it being public or private, exists for a reason, and that reason wasn't always babysitting and patronizing. Lack of many values fundamental to our educational systems in favour of modern capitalistic societies has brought us here today. A parent today rarely has the luxury of spending as much time as they'd like with their children. Our cultures rarely gives us any (meaningful) amount of time to spend with our children or loved ones; in fact they want as much out of it as possible. Spending money to rethink and redesign education, update the teaching materials[1], set transparent procedures for staffing schools etc. will not only lead to more creative students, but also responsible and enthusiastic teachers.
[1] I apologize in advance for paraphrasing. "Propaganda is passing as history" would be true if the winner didn't always write the history books. The important factor here is critical thinking: if a kid is given the chance to develop it instead of being spoon-fed whatever is passing off as fact, then (s)he could tell subjective from objective, and could relate to "the other side" when dealing with historic facts.
> Spending money to rethink and redesign education, update the teaching materials[1], set transparent procedures for staffing schools etc. will not only lead to more creative students, but also responsible and enthusiastic teachers.
The problem is, public education chokes out private education the same way that public roads often choke out railroads and water transport. It's hard to compete with free, but it's possible by offering better quality. But it's near impossible to compete with already-been-forced-to-pay-for-it; it means any parent who wants to privately educate their kids needs to pay twice - first through property and income taxes, and second through private tuition.
I know more about the American system than the UK one, and I'll tell you - I'm pretty sure if the U.S. announced today that they were going to scrap the entire public education system at the end of 2010 with no transition at all, there'd be a better system in place by 2011. It's that bad.
The most frequent counter-argument I hear is that the poor couldn't afford it, but the poor are the ones getting the worst out of the current cookie-cutter-centralized-managed system. There's been lots of experimental design in charter schools and custom tailored programs that work, but it's impossible to make ground in a politicized arena. I say scrap it all and let the citizens come up with something better - it made sense to have central education for a while after the Industrial Revolution got underway, but the system is outdated now. I'd be comfortable seeing government spending on education close to 0%: give tax credits for education spending and let parents and private organizations sort it out. They'll come up with something better. They'd be very hard pressed to do any worse than it currently is.
Counter-opinion: Good! Public education is all about obedience and stifles creativity, teaches children that they should follow orders rather than set their own objectives, passes off clearly incorrect propaganda as history, and neglects important life skills like personal finance and goal-setting in favor of learning archaic and useless facts. A main function of public education is the role of baby-sitting and instilling obedience and loyalty to the current government. Cutting this system returns the responsibility of educating children to the people who care the most and have the least conflicting interests with the children - their parents.