Education Unchained: What It Takes to Restore Schools and Learning

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 and deceptively simple picture of how we went wrong, of 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 to pupils. Government should have no, or hardly any role in the financing of education, in the setting of curricula or diploma, or in the supervision of schools and education. At the same time, the book is filled with optimism. By doing things very differently, we can very quickly and almost painlessly restore education and learning to a level previously unheard of. The second expanded edition completes the analysis by extending it to research and higher education, in and of themselves, how they are affected by the crisis in primary and secondary education, and how they would also be restored and set on a path of improvement through a similar return to independence from government.

About the Author :
Erik Lidström holds an MSc and a PhD in physics from Uppsala University, as well as an MBA from the Open University. After research at the ESRF in Grenoble, he moved to the software industry in 2000. He has worked in Britain, France, Sweden and Morocco, lately with a primary interest in complex development processes and organizational issues.

Review :
Throw away all those books on how to fix the education system. As Erik Lindström 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, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of In Defence of Global Capitalism, author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, named by the Economist as one of the best books of 2016 Education remains among the highest ranked concerns of parents across the world, yet many believe, often rightly, that their children are receiving sub-optimal material and instruction. In this book, Erik Lidström shows why this need not be the case as well as ways forward for a thorough-going renewal of learning - one in which truth, evidence and the good matter.--Samuel Gregg, director of research, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty Erik 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