“Development experts,” as Tooley calls them, have long believed that if citizens of developing countries are to be educated, their governments, helped by heaps of money from rich nations, must invest in free and universal public schooling. If the resultant public education is lousy—as it is in India, for instance—then it must simply be reformed through more money and more regulation. Meanwhile, the poor must be patient.
But the poor have run short of patience, Tooley found, and so they have rejected the development experts’ failed syllogism and created one of their own: You open a school, and we’ll pay you to teach our children. If they don’t learn, we’ll stop paying. Therefore, you will ensure that our children receive a solid education.
Americans have done something similar by homeschooling, but Americans have difficulty opening underground schools like these because of the culture of regulation that would shut them down. Like American home-schools, however, these underground schools post results far above their public establishments. They also share something else in common with home-schools: they have critics who will say and do anything to try to discount them.
The Beautiful Tree is a refreshing aberration in the stolid ranks of development literature. Tooley writes engagingly and obviously finds the story he tells exciting. His enthusiasm is contagious. One cannot help but think that Tooley has provided the rudimentary outline of how education can be brought to many more millions of the world’s poorest.
Government schools were Jefferson's greatest failure, not because he didn't get it right, but because educating the youth (rather, indoctrinating them) is too enticing for tyrants to ignore, and all the safeguards that Jefferson established were bulldozed.
"We are now trusting to those who are against us in position and principle, to fashion to their own form the minds and affections of our youth... This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once, will be beyond remedy."- Thomas Jefferson to James Breckinridge, 1821
The Beautiful Tree is definitely on my wish list.
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