Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free

> Perhaps "for profit" is just never going to work in education?

Well, government-run certainly isn't working, at least in the US. Charter schools (like Kipp) seem to be doing a lot better.

Uh huh yes. The sum wealth of humans today is vastly larger than that of humans 100, 500, 1000, 5000, and 10000 years ago. Vastly.

> Denying private citizens the ability to have great wealth basically gives the Government a large scale monopoly on far out projects.

Not necessarily. People can still organize, collect wealth and build a large scale project themselves. Or the bureaucrats running companies can organize and together finance big projects. There are many other possibilities.

> allow the private citizen to decide how to deploy the fruits of their work

Assuming these really are their fruits, which is pretty disputable in case of very wealthy people.

> it's always easier to play with other people's money

I agree, and this is actually the reason why one person owning a billion may be more willing to invest to crazy projects than a thousand people owning million each.

Modern education in the West is mostly pomp and circumstance. Facts are extremely non-discriminatory; people can't help but learn things and absorb the information that's around them. A key to successful education is putting people in environments and circumstances where the information is so well-integrated that it's difficult NOT to absorb it. That basically means giving people something interesting and valuable to do, telling them to do it, and being there to show them how. The magic really kicks in once they begin to show each other.

We're focusing on the wrong things. You don't need a $50 million facility and $5 million of payroll per school to teach people stuff, and you don't have to pay everyone's medical bills. You need to have the learners do something of actual utility and value to both themselves and their immediate community so that they are properly engaged, and then you have to be there to communicate the information they need to fill the gap from "no idea" to "some idea", and the rest happens automatically. Virtually anyone who has written a program has followed this process.

It's best if the teacher is directly invested in the learners, like a parent or other close family member. They'll care much more about the individual child's success. I plan to home school my kids once they hit 3rd grade or so (I think those first few years of school are important for developing the social baseline).

If we actually care about educational quality, we need to get down to basics. As long as the dialogue on education is dominated by pension funds and zoning, it's a losing proposition.

>How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries?

* Provide more competition for labor from the public sector by employing more people in the public sector (i.e. the opposite of austerity).

* Raise the minimum wage significantly.

>What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?

"isn't worth it" = "can't employ that person and make a profit"

Corporate profits are at all time highs and labor's share of income is at an all time low. Ergo there is a massive amount of slack at the low end.

Every corporation that employs a lot of people will scream until they're blue in the face that they will fire half of their workforce if you raise the minimum wage by so much as a cent, but when it actually goes up, they don't do anything of the sort.

Raising the minimum wage to $20 or $25 / hr would be one of the most direct ways to transfer money from 0.01% to the pockets of the people who do all the actual work in this country. It would not only drag salaries up it would drag the cost of property down.

You just have to deprogram all of the people who erroneously believe that it will cause mass unemployment, massive inflation, or who think that it's somehow unfair to people earning $minimum wage + $x (who would all get a pay raise too).