A Harvard trained economist is in a close race for president of Chile. Here is a paper of his on why it is a missallocation of resources if you let anything other than a child’s level of ability at preschool determine the amount of schooling they gets. He claims that this type of education reform could double the value of an education system.
Here is another paper where he shows “that the impact effect on the balance of payment from monetary disequilibrium depends upon the elasticities of substitution in production and consumption between non-traded and traded goods and the sharing of non-traded goods in consumer’s expenditure”. I’ll take his word for it, especially since the only part in english is the abstract.
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Sunday ~ January 17th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
RickRussellTX
Although preschool is an awfully early time to be making the decision, I lament the fact that students whose skills are less compatible with university academics have few choices in the US.
Educational systems like Germany, where there are real choices for students that are poorly adapted to academic work, seem to me to be fundamentally “fairer” to students as well as economically more sensible. Sieves are applied at each major milestone in the educational system to sort out the students by aptitude.
Many mechanical skills — take welding as an example — exploit mental abilities that are simply never tested nor developed in school. The ability to visualize the way machines function in space and time (without being particularly concerned about the mathematics of their operation, except in the basic sense of “what load can this part sustain?”) is a genuine talent of great use in the field, yet we do nothing to encourage it.
So, all the best machinists, welders and mechanics that get flown all over the world to work on trains, oil platforms, chemical plants and tunnel diggers are from Holland and Germany, because they’ve encouraged young people to develop those talents.
Likewise, some people are fundamentally better at people skills — nurturing, communicating, organizing — yet our school environments give students few opportunities to develop those skills. A young person interested in becoming a nurse will end up taking a lot of nonhuman biology and math and chemistry that is completely irrelevant to the job of being a nurse, instead of actually learning nursing. So it takes an exceptionally long time to become a nurse and then you’ve got a nurse shortage.
Part of the problem, I think, is that primary and secondary schools are ruled by university academics — people who pass down guidance on what students need to know, but who don’t actually work in the fields that students will eventually work in. If I’m in the hospital, I want somebody with a degree in the comfort and care of the human body and mind, not somebody who wasted time on Calculus 102 and BIO 313: The Metabolic Processes of Fish.
Monday ~ January 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am
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[...] ~ January 18th, 2010 in Uncategorized | by Adam Ozimek 1. I found it notable than an economist was running for president of Chile, but the article the New York Times has up [...]