Ook onderwijsproblemen buiten Nederland boeien mij zeer. Op de Worldservice (648 AM) hoorde ik vanochtend een programma over de voor- en nadelen van overvloedige regelgeving. Ook het onderwijs werd hierin genoemd.
Philip K. Howard, schrijver van het boek Common Sense, over “confused thinking in regulation”:
“One of the worst areas of regulation is the public school system in the US, which has become highly bureaucratized. Where teachers have to fill out forms to do everything. We did a survey of all the legal requirements required to do certain things in schools in New York. Over seventy legal considerations to discipline a child. You’re not sending a child to jail; you’re sending him home! And it’s very hard for teachers to maintain their authority for order in the classroom if the students know that the teacher is going to have to spend an hour, or more, in legal process just to get it going.”
“What bureaucracy has to do with teaching children franky escapes me. So that’s an example where just the idea of rules, that we need rules for everything, has infected a profoundly sort of personal and human service which is teaching, you know: running a school.”
“[These are rules that have come out of] risk aversion and fear of lawsuits, and the due process revolution in the 1960s and 70s, where people didn’t understand that there was a cost associated with letting people go to legal hearings.”
Bron: BBC Worldservice (www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice) World Business Review (za 16 september, 7.30) even voorbij de helft van de uitzending.