VoiceofReason

Yes which gives the an inherent reason to provide a good service or a good product.



Yes they do else the customer will take their business elsewhere. How easy my job would be if I didn't have to offer the customer a better product at a competitive price providing them with value. But in order to make a profit that is exactly what I have to do.

Well you just can't claim otherwise.

The ultimate goal is to create a profit, it's the means we are talking about. You don't do that by not offering a good product at a good price, that's what government does.

In the vast majority of them unless they have a monopoly.

I don't know what business you work in but that is the exact opposite of everyone I have ever been involved with.

Wrong, every thing about capitalism demands it.

There are a limited number of schools because the goverment is involved and tries to keep it's monopoly on it.

What if the people who were seeking it had the money in their pocket and were shopping the schools?

ThresholdOutlet

Reform it.
We should reform the education system. It’s pretty bad when one can learn more from the channels owned by Disney than from a federally funded school. Some of the smartest people I have ever met dropped out of high school. Why? Let’s see; English is taught to English-speaking people. They say, “Don’t write like that. That’s not how it’s done.” When in reality, yeah, we contract our words. Science is taught to many who don’t even know how to form a simple argument. Lastly, mathematics is taught without regard for usability or history. You’d think the history of mathematics would be pretty important to math.
I didn’t include history because that is just used for nationalization. Why do you think they start with American history in America? If you said patriotism, you’d be wrong.
It is my opinion schools should be government run, but the curriculum should be designed by professionals in their fields – those who are working on the cutting edge. Too much is conserved from the old ways of teaching. This would fix the problem, in my opinion. I don’t see any way the private sector could fix it.

__________________
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."

VoiceofReason

Until you get the teachers unions out of it and get some competition into it you're beating a dead horse. In my state the most represented profession in our state legislature is Education. So the wolves are watching the hen house.

Ahhh those are professionals in the field that work for the government and have guarantied jobs and retirements (that are far better than anything in the private sector) and control the statehouse. As long as they have that lock the citizens are at their mercy.

Then why does the private sector do such a better job. I actually had to take one of my children to Sylvan Learning Center to learn math because the public schools failed at it, tried to label her learning disabled and put in a slow class labling her LD when she wasn't.

Fong

Dude don't do this.

I wrote one piece that needs to be taken as a whole, you can't read one sentence and reply to each sentence as an individual statement. The entire piece is about a single aspect. All you have done is taken what I have said out of context, ignored the next line and replied to each part seperately.

Show me what part of Capitalism demands improvement or change?

There is nothing inherent in Capitalism that demands anything of the sort.

The ONLY thing Capitalism demands is profit. That is it. Nothing else.

Fong

When it comes to education, people will not have much choice, they will be limited by what they can afford in a Capitalist system.

Now if all you can afford is the bottom rung of education, then where is the incentive to improve that service?

The people using the service can't afford anything better. So any improvement you make, will be unrewarded in terms of profit, because you can't increase prices, because if the people using your service could afford something better...they would be using something better.

Now if you can't increase profit by improving the service the ONLY way to increase profit is by increasing capacity, while not increasing staffing levels.

If you have 1000 students, and instead you cram in 1500, then you will earn more profit.

That is what capitalism will do. Since all it wants to do is create more profit. It will not improve the service, in fact, it will likely make the service worse by trying to wring out every last cent it can.

Fong

Have you trained to be a teacher at all?

I have, I am a qualified teacher in the UK, our Teaching 'system' is much like America's, in fact most of the stuff we were taught came from American professors, like Bloom and others.

The problem is, these people are twats....errmm americanism...idiots.

They have no idea what children are like in the real world. During our training we spent more time learning some psuedo language that only other teachers know, so that it looks like we all know something other people don't.

All we know is a dictionary that isn't taught outside teaching establishments.

No the LAST people who should be running the Curricullum are leading teachers in their field, who are basically those who can bullshit the most.

Shiva_TD

Actually competition drives improvement and change in a capitalistic enterprise of any kind.

As that applies to education a private university cannot compete based upon cost with a public institution that is subsidized by the taxpayers therefore they have to offer a better education or some other benefit that would enduce people to pay more to attend their school.

On the flip side a public university can pretty much tell the student to take what they get because they are offering subsidized education and they have no competition in their price range. Public institutions do not have competition therefore they have no motivation for improvement.

AzTeK

VoiceOfReason: The main point Fong is making is correct, the one and only goal of capitalism is to increase profit. There is no point in denying that. That, in order to increase profit, most of the times companies will end up having to improove their products/service is pretty much just a nuisance the companeis have to deal with in order to achieve their goal.

Also, you keep arguing the fact that a government organisation has the exact same goals you are trying to propose capitalism has. It is in the best interest of the government in every possible meaning of it to provide as high a quality service (in this case education) at as low a possible cost - in other words, the exact same thing the free market does. The difference? Capitalism syphons money away from the people and stuffs the wallets of a few with it, while the government rather uses it to "overstaff" its facilities. I seriously don't see how one is better than the other, eventhough "regular" citizens having a job is surely superior to a few rich people having a (relatively to their fortune) small amount of money more.

That's totally wrong. That would be the case if you had a scenario where there was a single university in the entire country. As this is not the case, there is very strong competition between state universities, which can not only be noticed by massive marketing that's done in schools in order to attract people but also by the fact that universities with a better reputation end up getting more students. Specially in Europe where the demographic developement is leaning towards ever less young people, competition is getting tougher and tougher everyday for schools and universities, and in Austria 99% of them are state-run and owned.

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ThresholdOutlet

No.

What subject do you teach, if I may ask?

Lol.

Yes, jargon. That's what I mean by old worn-out ways. It used to insure a teacher a job, but does not seem to have a purpose nowadays.

What I meant by "professionals in the fields" is professionals in the area the student wants to enter. General education is useless. With so much information available, there is no need to educate people in so many areas. I think we should specialize.

__________________
"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."

VoiceofReason

Where have I. My point is the best way to do that is not as Fong asserts, give a cheap product and a high price and not do what your customers want, but exactly the opposite.

Actually it is what drives companies, when they lose site of that they usually go bankrupt.

No it is not, it is in the best interest of a government organization to not be efficient at all so that they can lobby for more money next budget cycle.

Capitalism creates wealth and puts money into the pockets of people. Governments only take money from one person, usually the productive one, and gives to someone else, usually the nonproductive one, it is the entity that siphons money.