There is another wonderful essay about the free market by economics professor Sandy Ikeda over at the Foundation for Economic Education. ?And it provides some wonderful reminders to educators of all stripes (including Randi Weingarten and, from her speech yesterday at the AFT convention, those ?on high?) to be careful when trying to mess with the beauty of free association.? As Ikeda writes:
There is no better explanation of the how vast, impersonal cooperation works than Leonard Read's classic essay, ?I, Pencil,? in which he elegantly shows that no single person can know all that goes into the making of something as apparently simple as a pencil. That's because a pencil is the tip of an enormous production iceberg, only one of whose roots stretches back, for example, to the iron mines that provide a single input for just one of the tools that goes into manufacturing the saw that cuts the wood from which a portion of the pencil shaft is made. The real wonder in this, however, is that no single person has to know. Tens of thousands, probably tens of millions, of people who will never meet nevertheless work together to make a single pencil.
As was so apparent, to me, in reading Michael Winerip's story the other day about one child's charter schooling experience, success or failure is the result of many different interactions. And, if the pencil story is meaningful at any level, it is here: ?the freer the choice in each schooling decision, the better the education. ?(Read the comments to my post; some people don't agree.? )
Checker and Mike get at this with their ?speech for a GOP [presidential] candidate?:? ?The federal government has been trying to do too much in education.?? No kidding.
So, if we can appreciate the ?miracle? of thousands of free associations that go into making a simple pencil, let's consider how great an education system we could have if it were made up of equally free associations. ?I, laptop!
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
