Education is not schooling

Short excerpts cannot do justice to Jay Griffiths' Wild: An Elemental Journey, but this is a blog about policymaking, rather than a book review. Here (page 140) she is writing about the Inuit in Canada :

School is not a synonym for education. Your might, if you're lucky, get a bit of an education at school, but for Inuit children, the land was their education. White lawmakers forced Inuit children to go to school, insisting that their parents settle in communities.... One result is that people are dependent on store-bought food, and if they have no cash they go hungry. ... a stark physical example of the effects of not knowing the land. But the psychological effects are everywhere. Without knowledge, you cannot be out on the land. without survival skills, you can barely set foot beyond the perimeter of the community. Young people are effectively imprisoned by this ignorance into the small and claustrophobic communities where they go stir-crazy.

The policymaking mentality hasn't changed much: government isn't content merely to raise and allocate funds for the (laudable) goal of educating children. It has a single, astonishingly limited vision as to what the form and substance of that education shall take. Naturally it's biased in favour of its own educational experience: the sort that leads to careers in lawmaking. It's the same in other fields: government views crime as something to be tackled by the police and justice system. Health is something for a Ministry of Health to deal with. Mental health is about more psychiatrists, counselling and drugs. The policies are all neat and compartmentalised, just like the bureaucracies and the state of mind that generates them. The real world, though, is too messy - wild - for that. Effective policies need to stimulate people's imagination; to cope with society's as different from our own as the Inuit; and to deal with rapidly changing knowledge and circumstances. Broad goals are stable over time: the most effective ways of achieving them are not.

Social Policy Bonds would allow governments to do what they are good at: articulating society's goals and raising the revenue to achieve them. But the actual achievement of these goals would be far more efficiently done by the market. Currently the markets' formidable incentives serve the private goals of shareholders and business operators. A Social Policy Bond regime, in contrast, would channel the market's efficiencies into the service of public goals.