Suppose we create an anarchic education system with minimum central control. Where the rights of parents and of children comes clearly and explicitly before the opinion of the state.
There may be many different types of schools, each based on its own specific methods, philosophy, religion, etc. Any group of parents can establish their own school to suit their own beliefs, and the state won't interfere. Such schools can even get funding and formal approval from the state if they want. Children may even be home-schooled with the approval of the state. The state won't tell the state-funded school how to teach anything, and it will have very basic requirements regarding the content - issues such as literacy, for example.
In direct contradiction to other posts in this blog, this anarchic education system will have almost no accountability mechanisms, very weak mechanisms for sharing data about schools and how they function, and very little oversight on what and how kids are being taught.
I won't tire the reader with more details of this fantasy... You get the point. It's a sort of nutty utopia that couldn't work in the real world. Except it does, in Denmark. And it seems to get reasonable results - on the 2006 PISA tests, Denmark was at about the OECD average.
It is not necessarily the "right" way to manage a national education system, but it is interesting to see that anarchy is a viable way - semi-anarchy, anyway. For more information, see The Case For School Choice: Denmark, or the chapter about Denmark in Yoshiyuki Nagata's book Alternative education.
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