You’d expect education costs to be rising, though, as people are expected to have a higher level of education before entering the workforce than they were previously, and because career changes and reskilling are far more common than previously. It’s a bit like healthcare. You can be spending far more than you were when there was a younger population and fewer sophisticated and expensive treatments, and yet still not be spending enough.
There is no evidence that people have a higher overall level of education before entering the workforce over time.
Rather, people know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge. It is only if we define "education" as the degree of knowledge in the body of subjects we teach today that one can say people in the past had less of it. But that's only because we have discarded the many bodies of knowledge an educated person needed to have in the past.
For example, one can laugh and say that to earn a doctorate in mathematics during the renaissance you'd need to know algebra only to the level of solving a cubic equation. However you are missing all the archaic geometric ruler and compass constructions, evaluation of various infinite series, and deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German texts, mastery of rhetoric, music theory, and other topics that few learn today. So it is not true that a mathematician of the present could waltz in and get a Doctorate in Philosophy in medieval Paris. He would probably get quickly thrown out for failing to master the many various scholastic topics that were required of a PhD in that time period, and which no one learns today.
As another example, a new worker in 1800 might be expected to know how to deliver a calf, fix a fence, shod a horse, make homemade preserves, skin a rabbit, set a broken bone, paint a barn, as well as know Greek, geography, history, recite the speeches of Cicero, translate the Odes of Horace, navigate the seas by an astrolabe, stain a bookcase, identify the key flood valleys of Europe and know which animals could be hunted in which part of the year in various European forests, or know the biographies of German princes, etc. But you are correct, they wouldn't have MS Office skills or know how to create a webapp.
Once you move past "hunter-gatherer", you very quickly run into complex societies with their own historically developed bodies of knowledge that require lifetime learning, whether that means learning the seasons and details about planting crops and irrigating fields, dealing with pests, where to dig a well, how to tan leather, etc - or whether that means something else, it is still a vast body of knowledge that takes decades to master. The point is, wherever a society is technologically, it will choose different areas to train its workers, and omit other areas that are no longer needed. But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.
>Rather, people [nowadays] know a different set of skills and accumulate a different body of knowledge.
Yes, but this is increasingly knowledge that needs to be imparted through formal education (for a variety of reasons). Hence it costs more.
>But how many resources does a society need to train its workers? If that number keeps growing, then there is something wrong with the society.
I don't see the logic here. It's fine as long as you can afford it.
>as well as know Greek
Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time.
>Only a tiny minority of the working population could read Ancient Greek in Europe in 1800. In England, around 50% of the population were still entirely illiterate at that point in time.
Surely that can't be true? Here in Sweden literacy was made mandatory for adults in 1686. It was not permitted to get married without being able to read.
Surely England can't have been that far behind, as late as 1800ed?
The data you've cited is wrong though. It lists Sweden's literacy rate in 1800 at 21%.
People were interviewed by their local priests to see whether they could read and the results were noted down. From this we know that in the middle of the 1700eds the 70-90% of all people could read.
The law was also clear. You couldn't get married unless you could read. To be married you had to be confirmed, and to be confirmed you had to be able to read.
I don’t particularly care about the specific case of Sweden. Every source I can find for England or Europe in general shows low literacy rates in around 1800. Do you have any sources that disagree? (Note that the map I linked to shows a higher rate for Sweden, if that’s important to you, but still around 50% for England and many other European countries.)
I'm not for sure I agree, but that's a separate issue than de-concentrating wealth. What to do with tax funds, how to appropriately distribute them, etc. is another discussion. Just because those problems exist, we should allow more and more wealth to be concentrated?
It would be good to fix that before we start funneling even more money in that direction, yes. Or at least have a workable plan. If you have a leak in a pipe, you fix the leak before shunting even more into that pipe.
Because spending money on education doesn't equate to better outcomes. It creates more bureaucracy, bigger councils, etc.
Teacher pay is still abysmal, especially considering the fact they are expected to act as guardians and even security these days. And you'll never get better outcomes if you can't attract smart people to actually teach, no matter how much you pay the superintendent.
US public education should be called what it is, a government sponsored day care.
School budgets are set by your local school board(s). If you want to pay teachers more, vote for school board members that promise to do that exact thing.
School board elections are one of the best examples of a local election being able to enact meaningful, visible change in your community.
My partner is a teacher, and the money certainly does not reach educators or kids in need. It mostly gets stuck at the administrative level or is spent for expensive football teams. Hell, there is still a national debate about kids going into debt to pay for lunch
It has also been spending much more on education over the past decades[1]. With very little to show for it.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
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