34/100: Students As Consumers
Paul Krugman makes a point in his NY Times op-ed piece - The Patients are not Consumers . Criticizing the Republican stance on Health care, where they resist state provision and starting to claw back in Medicare in the name of 'consumer choice', Krugman asserts: Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made. Yet making such decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge. Furthermore, those decisions often must be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping. It is possible to extend the argument to education and examine whether the new mantra of 'students as consumers' hold true. Education, after all, is a complex decision - and shapes the students lives. A lot of specialized knowledge, and in the case of education, an active participation, is needed from t...