Lant Pritchett on Education in Poor Countries

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2013

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

Lant Pritchett of Harvard University and author of The Rebirth of Education talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book. Pritchett argues that increases in years of schooling for students in poor countries do not translate into gains in education, learning, or achievement. This tragic situation is due to corruption and poor incentives in the top-down educational systems around the world. School reforms that imitate successful systems fail to take into account the organic nature of successful school systems that cause various external attributes to be effective. The conversation concludes with a discussion of school systems in rich countries and possible lessons for reform that might apply there.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:07.8	of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,
0:14.4	comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.6	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006. Our email address is maladycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:31.9	Today is November 18, 2013, and my guest is Lant Pritchett of Harvard University. His latest
0:39.0	book is the Rebirth of Education, Schooling Ain't Learning. Lant, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:45.6	Thank you very much. Your book is about the state of learning around the world and how
0:50.5	students are treated around the world. I want to start with a distinction that runs through the
0:54.7	book between spider systems and starfish systems. What do you have in mind with those terms?
1:01.2	Well, it's terms I picked up from a couple of business consultants that I talked about the way
1:06.8	organizations work, but I've expanded it to the way systems work, and the basic distinction is
1:11.4	between a top-down organization where the metaphor of a spider is, all of the resources of the
1:17.8	spider web, however spread out they are, merely serve to transmit information to one spider,
1:24.2	who synthesizes that information and responds with the resources of the system. So if there's a
1:29.2	bug, the spider crawls out and gets it, but kind of all the web is merely an ancillary to
1:37.2	you know, the brains at the top. A starfish is a creature that actually has no brain. It has
1:44.2	it's nearly connected, but a starfish moves because the individual units of the starfish, the
1:50.4	little tannical sense something, and if they sense more food, they try and pull that way, and if the
1:54.5	other side isn't pulling as hard, the starfish moves. So it's really a metaphor of a decentralized
2:00.9	system where individual units responding to local conditions create the properties of the system.
2:07.0	And the beauty of a starfish is if you cut a starfish up into five bits, you get five starfish.
	...

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