Deepening Information Age: In the US, Public Education is being Undermined by the Internet

The internet seems on path to unravel 20th century welfare state institutions partly through the public education model.

Professor Gary North explains,

Parents are pulling their children out of the government schools. This is happening across the USA.

In city after city, enrollment is declining. This is not a recent development. It has been going on for a half a decade. It has taken place in half of the nation’s largest districts.

The trend looks irreversible.

As the Web offers better programs free of charge, the public schools cannot compete. The inner city schools are catastrophic. They are getting worse. As whites ans Asians flee the cities, the inner-city schools get worse.

The tax base shrinks. The teachers union demands more pay and smaller classes. The city governments are trapped. Solution: cut programs, fire teachers, and enlarge classes back to (horror!) 1959?s 33 students.

Nobody is supposed to talk about this. It is time to talk about it. Public education will not recover. The longer the decline takes place, the more parents will conclude that there is only one solution: pull their kids out.

At some point, voters will not pass any more bond issues. They will not consent to higher property taxes. They will let the public schools sink.

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Democratization (and the de-politicization) of education will become a global phenomenon as educational platform will mostly migrate to the internet.

One example:

Coursera a free internet educational platform that offers high quality courses from the top universities recently announced that 12 universities — including three international institutions — will be joining them particularly, the Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania in offering Coursera classes (Coursera Blog)

On Coursera, you will now be able to access world-class courses from:

• California Institute of Technology
• Duke University
• École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• Georgia Institute of Technology
• Johns Hopkins University
• Princeton University
• Rice University
• Stanford University
• University of California, San Francisco
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Michigan
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Toronto
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington

For traditional schools, it would be adapt or perish.

The salad days of the education bubble in the US or even in the Philippines have been numbered.