Comments on: Nullifying Brimelow’s Seminal Work On Unions?

By: derek

derek — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:36:06 +0000

Steve Sailer makes a better case for 'demography is destiny' in a different post. He breaks out recent American PISA scores by ethnic and racial group and then compares those scores to their cousins in their ancestral homelands. Whites for example outscore every Euro nation except Finland. Latinos outscore every Latin American nation. And Asians are only beaten by a small subset in China. Bottom line, US schools are doing a good job. It's the changing demographic mix that is affecting the overall US average.

By: Contemplationist

Contemplationist — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:30:29 +0000

Absolutely right! Thats how I feel about the issue. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive. As Cato’s extensive work has shown, yes the results of vouchers and other semi-free experiments in education are not dramatically better than the socialist schools, BUT THEY COST MUCH LESS! So efficiency and productivity are dramatically increased.

By: Nebojsa Malic

Nebojsa Malic — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:39:16 +0000

One can demonstrate (and many have), purely from first principles and without resorting to any empirical evidence (though there is plenty) that government education is a horrible idea. Srdja Trifkovic recently had a great piece in Chronicles about the quality (ha!) of American education, and his comparison to the classical European education that persisted even in Communism is particularly instructive.

I think it was John Taylor Gatto who said, rebelling against the GovEd racket a generation ago (paraphrasing): They don’t only teach children the wrong answers, they teach them to ask the wrong questions.

It isn’t about race, it’s about creating obedient subjects of the government.