Weekly review (2024-03-17)
It was another busy week. The week felt longer than just 7 days because many different things were happening.
One notable thing I started this week was studying with people 20 years younger than me. I wanted to do this because recently I realized that I don’t usually interact with people 20 years younger than me, although I do the same with people 20 years older (even 30-40 years). I am sure that I have a lot to learn from the youth, so starting a study session with youngsters was one of my TODOs during this year.
It started as a small group of people. What we do is simple:
(1) we decide on a subject,
(2) everyone brings material to read/listen to/watch + discussion points, and then
(3) we get together physically and talk for 2 hours.
The members are in their early 20s, and the language is English (this is important because Japanese is a hierarchical language, and using it will automatically entail a barrier).
I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know whether these smart people would find it meaningful for them. I was glad to hear that they had fun and we agreed to have it every few months going forward.
This time, the topic was the future of democracy. We all know that it is at risk due to various factors - the rise of inequality, the increase of the “irrelevant class” who cannot participate in society fully and thus crave meaning (the foundation for populism), technology that is not supporting human agency but rather used by the small number of people, AI-powered social media and the other services which can generate more revenue by agitating the people, and so on. It is easy to analyze the structure (there are many suitable reading materials) but not the solution. We discussed various fun ideas.
By coincidence, another study session was rescheduled. It was a simpler one—we were supposed to read and discuss just one book: “The Beautiful Tooly” by James Tooley.
It was an eye-opening book. James Tooley in education is Stuart Rutherford in financial inclusion. Both are free from stereotypes. They go to the field and find and learn from the things that local people create on their own, without any intervention from the “experts” of international organizations.
What Tooley found was the penetration of affordable private schools. In some developing countries, 70% of the students go there. Even in these countries, public education is free, but the parents don’t send their kids there because (1) in public schools, teachers don’t fulfill accountability and often sabotage (don’t come to school, don’t teach, etc.), (2) the tuition for these private schools is affordable, 3-10% of the income of the low-income households.
Most of these private schools are unregistered and thus not supported by the government. The private schools still are sustainable as a business because (1) they hire local people from the village (in many public schools, teachers are from larger cities) at low wages, (2) they don’t spend much money on infrastructure, and (3) teachers are well incentivized (by the feedback from the parents + motivation to work for the local community). These private schools were like the school version of ROSCA. It’s a self-sustainable organization run by the local talent and resources.
Most education experts from international organizations didn’t accept the existence and success of these schools. That is also similar to the misunderstanding about these community-based financial services.
I was so impressed by the book that I did additional research on the author (he published another book, “Really Good Schools” recently). Interestingly, while assuming the vice chancellor job at a university, he started an affordable private school in the UK. Apparently, the school became subject to criticism from many experts, but the school is close to the breakeven. If it works in the UK, then it will likely work in many other developed nations as well.
I had many headaches during the week related to work, but it was a good week.