People come to United States from all over the world to get a better education. Although this seems to demonstrate the success of the American education system, I believe that considering education as a marketable product for a long time has had a key role in the success of American schools.
Most capitalist values and systems emerged from the American society. America was the first country to create laws enabling privatization and commercialization of education. Education has become a highly lucrative industry with lots of monetary resources. More money has provided smaller classes, developmentally appropriate curriculum and specialized staff for the fortunate ones who could afford it.
I see lots of similarities in the development of America's health industry and the education industry. Today there are about 40 million Americans with no life insurance who cannot receive decent health care but simultaneously you can find world's most advanced health care in America. In this particular case competitive nature of capitalism is achieved by a rather cruel award and punishment mechanism.
Education is a public good and the whole society will prosper from better-educated people. Public goods should be provided equally to the public.
The fact that education is becoming a market may result in an inequality in education. A market, by definition, is interested in creating profit rather than the common good of the society. It seems to me that providing education to everyone equally in United States will get harder as the market gets more attractive for invertors who are seeking profit.
Still, I must admit that before I realized the positive effects of my school on my character, I was quite a nuisance for my teachers. I must have had a distinct taste in teachers. My favorite teacher in high school was a substitute teacher who stayed in school for one semester and was fired after a few months for corrupting us. Mr. Alper treated us like adults and tried to make us realize literature was something to enjoy rather than study and learn. He wasn't really a high school teacher and he didn't do things in the traditional way. I guess other teachers were not very happy about the fact that he could communicate with us on a much deeper and friendly level by simply ignoring the traditional education system. I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to be an anarchist. He just didn't know how to teach high school students and what he did worked perfectly well in that literature class. I know it worked because some of us actually read Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream that semester. Maybe he failed to make everyone memorize lines from Macbeth, but he made us all realize that "That Shakespeare guy wasn't so bad after all." I understood what he was doing when
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