Surprisingly little has been written on school choice in the Netherlands, despite its long history – 100 years – of equal funding to public and private schools. A recent World Bank helps to remedy this neglect.
One of the key features of the Dutch education system is freedom of education
Some time ago I drafted a paper on education and presented it to a conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The full paper can now be downloaded from SSRN (Social Science Research Network). Here is an abstract:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises free elementary education and free choice of schools to children and their parents. International fora emphasise the first right while neglecting the second. This essay examines arguments for limiting school choice and finds each of them to be unconvincing. It then describes three school systems: India, with free choice, but only for those who can afford to pay; Sweden, with taxpayer-funded free choice for everyone; and Finland, which allows parents almost no choice at all in basic education.
Larry Willmore, “Basic Education as a Human Right Redux”, 26 July 2008.
I included ‘redux’ in the title because I revisit the theme of an earlier essay that was published in Economic Affairs (December 2004).
Two of these authors oppose state education, and