Today, I have a few points from The Beautiful Tree. I haven’t finished this book, although it does represent the notion that government should do what it can do better than individual initiative. When someone finds out what that is, let me know.
Tooley, J. (2009). The Beautiful Tree. Washington, DC, Cato Institute.
The book talks about education in poor countries which have it all wrong, as do the international agencies which pour billions of dollars down the black hole of government incompetence. The assumption is that education leads to development when it is the other way round.
I didn’t write this book, although it confirms everything flowing from the incentives hypothesis. A few salient points and one of the best quotes I’ve read anywhere.
Tooley studied private education in several poor countries. The general points are: International agencies, both governmental and non-government give billions of dollars earmarked for “free and compulsory education”. –free and compulsory in the same sentence without explaining the contradiction. English is a slippery language. A large amount of the money goes to expensive central offices and central office salaries. The officials in these expensive offices say, a) There are no private schools in their country, and b) If there are, they serve the rich. Both of these statements are so wrong that, as usual in government bureaucratese, their opposites are true.
Many government schools are filled with teachers who, although highly paid, are absent, late, sleeping or not teaching. The central offices are filled with people who believe, because they are government experts, they are anointed with automatic divine wisdom. Any parent who chooses a private school is deluded. One official described them as “ignoramuses”, giving voice to a widely held belief. The government school officials, after being shown that private schools exist, insist the teaching is of very poor quality. They also state that the poor do not have private schools because they are unaffordable. Again the opposite, the teaching is of high quality and tuition is low.
The same officials believe that private schools are a cause of problems for the public system rather than a response to the problems of the public system.
In my opinion, this is the best quote in the book, from a parent in Kenya, “One father summed it all rather neatly as to why he still preferred private schooling for his daughter rather than what was provided free in the public school: ‘If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and vegetables, you have to pay for them.’” (p. 124).
Another good one, from India, “Were his teachers qualified? I asked. He began by telling me that he trained them himself; at the end of each term, they had workshops to increase the academic standard, and that was fine. Then he added: ‘We don’t cherish qualifications, we cherish your output. Can you perform? That is the important thing, not whether you have certificates.’” (p. 43).
When next I talk about the book, I’ll look at costs and results. It appears that the government schooling is much more expensive, but makes up for it by being less effective.
Cheers and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
