Education

For what? is just as important a question as for whom?

US economist Richard Musgrave (1910–2007)

Mixed public & private goods:

Education as a merit good

Not all education is the same thing. We must ask, like Cicero, “cui bono” (who benefits)? — though in a very different context

“Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the "overt curriculum." But beneath it lay an invisible or "covert curriculum" that was far more basic. It consisted—and still does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.”
Alvin Toffler (1980) The Third Wave