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February 12, 2004
Why public schools are so important
In testimony before Congress yesterday, Alan Greenspan said it beautifully:
We have to find ways to create a cirriculum which enables us to compete with a significant part of the rest of the world. And a lot of the rest of the world to which I am referring is the so called developing world. And I don't know enough about the specifics of cirricula and how one would improve that, but I do know what the effect is, and I do know that it is obviously possible because they are doing it everywhere else in the world, and we're not. And if we want to maintain an economy and a society which has been at the cutting edge of technology, the highest real incomes of any major country, we have to enhance the capability of the skills of people coming out of our schools. You can not have a highly complex capital structure without skilled people to - essentially - staff it. I think immigration is obviously one thing that is helping in part, it is filling in a lot of the slots where skills are required, but we shouldn't be needing to do that. We should be doing it with our own students and enhancing their capabilities in a manner which would enable our increasingly complex capital stock to function and maintain these very long term improvements in productivity which even though I expect them to slow down from the recent pace. Nonetheless, even at half of where they've recently been it's a major advance over what we experienced in the period of say the 1970s and 1980s.
Posted by Mike at February 12, 2004 06:00 PM
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