At all three levels, primary education, secondary schools, universities, America and Japan significantly outspend Europe, according to 2005 OECD figures. The United States funnels 2.6 percent of its GDP into its universities alone, compared with just 1.1 percent each for Germany, Italy and France. Last year even Turkey passed these three. In the most recent global ranking of top research institutions compiled by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, only nine European colleges made it into the top 50, the majority of them in the United Kingdom. Less than a quarter of Europe's working-age population has a university-level degree, compared with 38 percent in the United States and 36 in Japan.

In his 1999 book Market Education, the Unknown History, Andrew Coulson examined the history of education from the time of Plato and the Greek Golden Age right up to yesterday's news, ironically something no one else has ever done. He asked a simple question: "What has worked historically, and what has not worked?" And he came to the conclusion that the best approach is a network of private scholarships competing with one another, offering access to the entire spectrum of possible schools.

 He argued that this solution answers most of the objections raised by opponents to each of the other funding proposals, including direct public funding of public schools as currently practiced. He even develops a plan that will enable an orderly transition from our current system of publicly funded public schools and privately funded private schools to a free market system. This new system would finally enable  children to reach their educational potential, and best -educated citizens. In fact parents and the community in which they live will ultimately determine the proper mix, not a topdown bureaucracy imposed from the outside.

In France and Germany, bureaucrats in giant ministries micromanage curricula, budgets and personnel assignments. Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands have retained 19th-century school systems that divide up kids as early as the age of 10 into different-level schools, all but cementing their future careers. Lower tracks, such as Germany's Hauptschulen, offer only a rudimentary education. This relic of feudalism might have made sense for industrial societies that needed a small university-educated elite and masses of simple workers. Today, in a globalizing, flexible world, such fixed hierarchies are more out of date than ever.

The reality also in the USA is not much better either with many high schoolchildren hardly able to read, a reason why books with extra large print are a must on the book market place in the USA. This is because the  NEA and other national teachers' organizations, have endorsed tenure instead of performance as the main consideration for increased pay for example.

One of the  problems here is that American teacher training emphasizes courses about teaching instead of knowledge courses. With the strong endorsement of organizations like the NEA, the USA produces a corps of teachers who know how to teach, at least in principle, but who know very little about the subjects they teach. Does anyone benefit from a math teacher with excellent teaching credentials who knows essentially nothing about fractions or long division?

But where in the USA as a result more and more people end up sleeping on the street, Dropout rates average 10 percent at German Hauptschulen and a horrendous 60 percent at Italian universities. Many of these kids land straight in the lap of the welfare state. In Germany, the Federal Labor Office has 960,000 "customers" under 25 and spends ¤6 billion just on remedial programs that teach youngsters the most basic of skills, like simple math or how to use Microsoft Word. Despite 4.5 million registered unemployed, companies complain that they can't find skilled workers, not just engineers and specialists but plain-vanilla graduates with the social and learning skills to start simple on-the-job training.

Within the current educational framework, it seems far better to forge a local partnership among parents, teachers, and the governing boards. Even this, however, is a BandAid solution to a systemic problem. As with the proper balance between education and training, a market-based school system eliminates this problem as well. It seems unlikely that a national organization like for example the NEA in the US, could survive in a market-based school environment. When a teacher's livelihood depends on his or her ability, his or her acceptance by the parents, and the survival of his or her school, it is difficult to picture that teacher marching in a picket line.

The Best school system so far is Finland which devolved decision making from Helsinki bureaucrats to the schools themselves, setting only guidelines for what students should be able to do. Schools and teachers are monitored for quality, and constantly evolve in terms of curricula and methods. The old-fashioned sorting of kids into different-level schools has been abandoned. As a result  Finnish 15-year-olds not only score highest in a number of skills, but also show the least effect of class background on achievement, a key measure of meritocracy.

But in the end teaching a young person to think is more challenging than teaching that person to read. So a next step would be to entice top-level thinkers into the educational system as a career, by offering salaries that compete with corporate positions. But that far, not even Finland has thought yet.

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