The Age of Profound Ignorance

Perhaps you have read it before on this blog. Now “The Age of Profound Ignorance” is available to a wider readership on LiveMint.com. (If the previous link does not work, please use this one.)

Excerpt:

“Entrepreneurship creates immense wealth that permeates healthy economies. Entrepreneurship alone has the capacity to create innovations in education that no bureaucrat or centralized planning authority can ever hope to achieve. Yes, central control can control, but it cannot create.

“In an age where each of us is immensely ignorant relative to the sum total of human knowledge, the skills that the individual acquires over a lifetime of learning cannot be imparted by an educational system that was created for a different world. The resources for building that educational system are already there. All that society has to do is keep the state out of it so that private enterprise can do its job—which it invariably does. The role of the state is limited to light-handed regulation.

“Liberalization of the educational system from the political-bureaucratic nexus is absolutely necessary. Without economic freedom, we cannot expect the entrepreneurial innovation required to make the educational system in step with the dramatic changes that the future has in store. It would be profoundly ignorant to not liberalize education.