Comment by tn135 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tn135 | Hacker News Reader

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> How is this a US problem?

One word: Mobility.

I lived in a slum in India and went to a private school that catered to poor kids. Got scholarship and worked my way up to start living into a high-rise. The private school had a big role to play in it.

That is not possible for low income neighbourhoods for USA anymore. The mindless regulations make private schools expensive. It is not possible for a retired school teacher to run a class-room in a garage at night and call it a school. That teacher will end up in jail and sex offenders registry. The poor hispanic neighbourhoods of south San Jose will have to rely on the pathetic public schools and those schools will ensure their students flip burgers. Those kids will find it hard to move to Palo Alto.

Public schools not only distort the housing markets but they feed into that evil spiral of poverty. I would love to see department of education dismantled completely and money given to kids to chose their schools of choice and let entrepreneurs make money by catering to the needs of all kids.

India is/was a socialist state and I would expect social services to be spread more evenly than non-socialist countries. I also believe mobility is easier in developing nations and was better to some extent right after the Industrial Revolution and workers rights movements.

I am confused by your arguments. You're saying abolish public schools. Great idea then we could create pillar schools where only the elites attend like Yale and Harvard. Then the poor people will have to take out loans from the elite to attend good High Schools. Oh wait.

I'm a product of mobility. My father grew up in rural government housing in Georgia. Thankfully he went to GaTech and stayed in an environment with good public schools.

> India is/was a socialist state and I would expect social services to be spread more evenly than non-socialist countries. I also believe mobility is easier in developing nations and was better to some extent right after the Industrial Revolution and workers rights movements.

Saying "India is a socialist state" is, well, technically correct (it's in the Constitution) but a pretty misleading way to characterize the sort of social mobility in India that GP was talking about.

India is home to the longest-running continuously-serving democratically elected Communist government in the entire world. It's also home to what could be considered borderline anarcho-capitalist metropolises that are larger than many European countries.

As it turns out, the sort of mobility that GP is talking about is very rare in the states led by Communist and socialist parties, which have generally struggled economically[0]. It's most prevalent in the states (and cities) where the leftist governments never took hold, or where they were elected, but carried out very little of their vision in practice.

In any case, the scale of mobility and economic growth experienced in the economic hotspots of India (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore) has been made possible by the end of imperial colonialism, and the concurrent rise of a global economy. No developed country like the US will ever be able to experience that same level of rapid growth.

[0] There is one exception, though in that state, 33% of the state's GDP comes from foreign remittances (mostly from expatriates living in the Gulf), which is incredibly high, and higher than any other state. There is definitely an object-lesson in mobility to be learned there, but it's not the sort of mobility GP was referring to.

Compare you're localized (hotspot) mobility to what the West experienced at the end of the 1800s. China is a much better example and I dislike China.

You're saying I am technically correct about India being socialist.

The reason India has mobility is the same reason black markets or black economies exist in Communist countries. Where there is a lack of government or public services, black markets will form to fill the gap, capitalism. See USSR, Yugoslavia, and North Korea. Difference is India seems to allow it. There is another comment below about staring schools in a garage for poor people. From what I've seen India has these shadow schools.

> Let me remind you the California has a higher GDP than your entire county. My state Georgia has a 1/4 of your GDP with only ~10 million people.

No, my country had a GDP of $18.5 trillion in 2016. You must be thinking of India, which had a nominal GDP of $2.5 trillion.

Though of course, this entire digression has next to nothing to do with my previous comment, so I'm not sure why any of those numbers are relevant.

I thought you were the other poster.

I think you missed my line > I went to a private school that catered to poor kids.

I did not go to a public school. No one I knew went to a public school because they suck everywhere like in every socialist society. India is indeed a constitutionally socialist country.

> You're saying abolish public schools.

I do not see why government should run schools. People can run better schools than government. Government must also abolish most of the regulations that require schools to have playgrounds or toilets or some other things that are not the focus of education.

The school I went to ran in an abandoned building and did not have electricity. That is how the costs were low and I could afford to go there. The teachers however were good.

> Thankfully he went to GaTech and stayed in an environment with good public schools.

That is a sad choice every American parent has to make today. I don't see why your father could not get a check of $X every month and let him send you to whatever school you wanted to go.

I am not sure I agree with you. I grew up pretty poor in India, and there were hardly ANY private schools that cater to the poor. Private schools were expensive and public schools in India are a joke. As a result almost all of the poor families I know dropped out of schools and never completed beyond middle school. I love public schooling in the US. It at least provides an opportunity for poor kids to complete schooling. An education system purely relying on private schooling will be a complete disaster like India's, where poor students simply giving up on education, creating generational poor.

> It at least provides an opportunity for poor kids to complete schooling.

It is other way round actually. What I can see is that in areas like Palo Alto where Asian parents figuratively hold Principal's feet to fire the good teachers get transferred there. The South of San Jose on other hand gets all the worse teachers where the poor parents don't have much time to wonder about the quality of teachers.

Those kids are perpetually into poverty because of the lousy education. Give them a check of $500 month for schooling and they will chose better schools.

> Private schools were expensive and public schools in India are a joke.

The quality of education in private schools is higher and the expensive part is related to that. However in terms of "cost to society" private schools are way cheaper than public schools.

To give you concrete numbers. Goa spends 40K per student per year but a private school that spends 8k per student per year delivers better result. Goa could afford to educate 5 kids with better education only if the money was given to the kid or the private school.

> An education system purely relying on private schooling will be a complete disaster like India's, where poor students simply giving up on education, creating generational poor.

It conflicts with what you are saying. Private schools have better retention and better outcomes. Public schools are where students drop out. Don't you think if we have more students going to public schools more students will give up on education ?

I think you misinterpreted what I was saying a little bit. If you have only private schools that are not affordable to a significant portion of the population, then you will have an uneducated population. A well funded, and well run public education system actually works pretty well.

> A well funded, and well run public education system actually works pretty well.

Not it does not. Public schools by definition will be run by government which will always be incompetent and provide worse education. A typical public school in India spends 5x the money to achieve lower learning outcomes that private schools.

> If you have only private schools that are not affordable to a significant portion of the population,

Unless government creates regulations that prevents people from starting schools for poor people there will be more and better private schools for poor people as they are now.

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