Education Unchained: What it Takes to Restore Schools and Learning Hardcover – December 26, 2024

Are we going about education the wrong way? The somewhat shocking demonstration of this book is that "we" simply cannot reform “our” schools “together”. We don't actually even know what schools or education really are. Education can only be improved the same way we improve and invent things in other walks of life, through unbridled, unchained trial and error.Assembling a wealth of economic, psychological, and historical evidence, Erik Lidström paints a coherent picture, treating education from the ground up, of how we went wrong, why we went wrong, and what we can do about it. The disconcerting conclusion is that education must be set free; it must be returned to parents and pupils.Freedom is the necessary condition for restoring and then improving education. Freedom from government regulation, oversight, provisioning, financing, determination of curricula and teaching methods, and recognition of diplomas.ReviewsThrow away all those books on how to fix the education system. As Erik Lidström shows in this thought-provoking book, full of insights, the only way to fix education is not to fix it. Education is too important to be left to the "education experts", and should be a matter for the real experts – schools, teachers and parents. - Johan Norberg, author of Open: The Story of Human ProgressErik Lidström has provided us with a heretical, but brilliant exposé of modern education. There is wide agreement that the modern, bureaucratic school system does not work well and is subject to a never-ending cyclical spate of reforms that often make matters worse. By combining economics and evolutionary theory with an intriguing account of the educational system and outcomes before and after government-organized schooling, Lidström makes a cogent and thoughtful argument for a ground-up, market-based approach to education. No doubt, the thesis will irritate and offend many educators, but this is all the more reason to read the book and seriously reflect on Lidström's proposals. - David C. Geary, PhD, curators' professor, Thomas Jefferson Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri[T]here are surprisingly few fresh ideas on how to improve education and learning. The book by Dr. Erik Lidström brings plenty. They are both radical and proven. Radical, because he is quoting Hayek, Sowell, Weinberg and calls for a free market solution to learning. And proven, because such systems worked in the past. The book is a must read for parents, teachers and policymakers in general. And it provides some just-in-time food for thought related to Mr. Corbyn’s ideas of ‘cradle to grave’ National Education Service. - Professor Žiga Turk, former Slovenian Minister of Education ― Medium Read more