BrianGarst.com

This is the sort of thing you can’t make up, but given the perverse incentives of government monopoly education, it ought not be too surprising:

Even if [Khan Academy] is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it’s not clear that the schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics—but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

Shouldn’t the goal of teachers be to educate students? Shouldn’t student advancement be seen as a good thing? Obviously, it should. But the sad reality is that the goal of government monopoly schools is not education, it’s subsistence. Their objective is to keep the government money coming and the teachers employed, and once all that is accomplished, they might then bother themselves to teach the children a thing or two.

Markets, unlike government monopolies, align the interests of the educators with the children. If schools had to compete for students, and their dollars, then they wouldn’t be able to get away with bemoaning the fact that some children are becoming too advanced, they would cheer it.

(Hat-tip: Andrew Coulson on Cato@Liberty)