Reddit mentions of The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People are Educating Themselves

1. Bad decisions are NOT diluted. They are magnified. It's not one person making one bad decision diluted to everyone else. It's that same one person who then makes bad decisions for everyone altogether. Has Bush been prosecuted for the Iraq War?
   
   
2. "Providing free public education for children in poverty is a key part of giving those kids opportunity to succeed." What's the mechanism, what are the results, what are the opportunity costs? This is just pro-state propaganda that ignores the means and gushes about promised fluffy ends.
   
   
3. You're using current stats about current dropouts under current laws. 12-year-olds are not allowed to work, period. In those six years, what skills do students actually learn that they could not learn on their own without cost to taxpayers?
   
   
4. "Then again I could have been honing my latte making skills at Starbucks." Well, how about you having both a job and education, without cost to taxpayers? That's what a job would do. A barista makes about $20,000 a year. Given that a 12-year-old could make coffee for six hours a day and learn how to make websites on the side, that's then at zero cost to taxpayers AND the kid has money leftover AND is learning something else.
   
   
5. The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People are Educating Themselves: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1939709121/
   
   

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[The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People are Educating Themselves ][1]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1939709121

> Everyone from Bono to the United Nations is looking for a miracle to bring schooling within reach of the poorest children on Earth. James Tooley found one hiding in plain sight. While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad's Old City. Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parentfunded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education. Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces readers to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.

Just because the government doesn't 'guarantee' education for everyone (as though it can actually guarantee anything; Governments that promise to provide universal education fail all the time) doesn't mean that education will be unavailable to anyone. You can have education available to everyone even without public funding.

You are spouting meaningless socialist drivel.

Capitalism isn't terribly effective? Effective at what? I suppose that would depend on what your end goals are, but since the advent of free markets the world has seen an exponential increase in standards of living, health, education, and technology wherever it is adopted, not to mention that countries which peacefully trade with each other are less likely to go war. Capitalism has done more to help the poverty of mankind than anything else in history. But call it ineffective if you wish.

You cannot "destroy capitalism" without destroying freedom. A free market at its very core is simply two individuals agreeing on an exchange of goods or services in a way that benefits them both. If you "destroy capitalism," you must either prevent people from having the freedom of association and ability to trade without violence or coercion, or you have eliminate the property that permits trade - which is impossible.

Having workers own "the means of production" is an antiquated, hollow phrase that has no meaning. I can go to any online stock company and buy the means of production in any company on the planet that I wish, thus becoming a worker who owns the means of production. That phrase was coined by Marx in the middle of the industrial revolution, when he misread the movement to factory production as the future of mankind.

What if I can only get a job at the mills, but I want to be an owner of Google? Or I own the mill and it and goes out of business through no fault of mine? Should all workers in the mill own the means of production but be prevented from owning the means of production of anything else?

That phrase also misunderstands what property is. There are other forms of wealth besides "means of production" that he harped on about. Even animals understand the need for a nest or a den that is theirs. Property and wealth are the natural outgrowth of human work:

>The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.

• George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1921
  
  If everyone has "according to his needs" but must work "according to his ability," you remove incentive to work and people simply do not produce, because most people work for their "wants" not their needs - and the only one who can define what those are is the individual. Wealth is stored labor (work) of those who perform it, which they can then trade with others for the labor those other people perform. In a market, the ONLY way to get money is by offering services or goods to other people that they voluntarily give you their own stored labor for - you MUST serve others to gain wealth.
  
  The only way to destroy capitalism is to destroy freedom by enslaving everyone.
  
  Since this article was about education, you might be interested to know that even the poorest people on the planet can educate their children through the freedom of association, because parents everywhere want their children to be educated. No "bourgeousie" involved.
  
  Give people freedom and they prosper. Try and make people prosper and you destroy freedom and destroy prosperity.
  
  People like you scare me.
  
  Edit: clarity