Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools

In spite of steady progress for the school choice movement over the last 20 years, relatively few children today are educated outside the government monopoly school system. Why hasn’t school choice been implemented on a wider scale? According to the authors Herbert Walberg and Joe Bast, the reason is that people don’t understand capitalism. Because people lack a basic understanding of how capitalism works, they are fearful of trusting it to educate children. Education will move from a government‐​operated enterprise to a privatized one only if people understand how and why markets can be trusted to do a better job of educating our children than government does. Please join us for a discussion of the virtues of capitalism and the methods for countering the myths about markets and education.