Gee -- whoever could have thought that putting the crucial task of providing a quality education to a nation's youth in to the hands of private equity firms might just be one of the stupidest fucking ideas ever?
(Reuters) - When one of the biggest private education firms in Sweden went bankrupt earlier this year, it left 11,000 students in the lurch and made Stockholm rethink its pioneering market reform of the state schools system.
School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.
"I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.
In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.
Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden's secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.
Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.
Ahead of elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, accused of putting profits first with practices like letting students decide when they have learned enough and keeping no record of their grades.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/us-sweden-schools-insight-idUSBRE9B905620131210?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews
Shocking The Gadfly says! Private equity firms are being accused of putting profits ahead of actually educating the children? Say it isn't so!! Shocking indeed. Even more so considering the country's politicians seem to just be discovering, after all of this time, the knowledge that private equity firms are in the business of generating profits to begin with.
Apparently the Swedes bought in to the the fabulously tall tales sold to them by American profiteers that their nation's public education system could use a bit of old fashioned, American-style deregulation and privatization. The fact that it is turning out to be a miserable fucking failure should be a cautionary tale to other democracies who are contemplating the smoke and mirrors bullshit being peddled by the free-market fairies and their minions.
Honestly - The Gadfly doesn't get it. If history has shown any one thing to be unambiguously clear, it's that when the de-regulation fairies wave their reverse-Midas touch wand over a previously regulated industry and privatize it, the typical outcome is shittier, more costly service to the consumers and increased profits for the investor class. Why people can't see the inherent transparency in that tried and true formula is beyond the grasp of The Gadfly's dirty hippie old mind.
Ultimately - it's just one more story of how free-market capitalism, when left to it's own unfettered devices, is it's and it's worshiper's own worst enemy.
----TFG
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