We can surely agree that cheap wide good education has to be one of the policies necessary for that, yet it's quite ignored even in some rich countries.
A big problem is that many educators and school boards treat education as indoctrination. i.e. "Teach people what to think"
The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.
A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.
There's near-universal agreement that education should be cheap and wide and good. The question is which policies best accomplish those goals. Should we add vocational high schools like Denmark has, where teachers can focus on practical skills since it's already been decided the students won't go to college? Should we add 60 more days to the school year and universal high school admission tests like they do in Japan?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be studied and answered. But instead, politicians just say “‘Murica is #1” and leave it at that. The platitudes need to stop. We need some policy wonk technocrats to take over government.
I don't think this is something we can blame on the politicians, though. People got grumpy enough about Common Core; imagine how much worse it would go over if a school district announced that it was going to transition towards rote learning.
I agree. There are many practices common to countries reporting high levels of happiness that Americans (And certainly other western nations) ignore seemingly on principle.
We would have to analyze the actual distribution of that spend. When this is done, we see wealthier places have higher spending per capita because public schools in the US are funded primarily by property taxes.
One of the thing Americans do differently is setting up systems for inequality from the get go. First past the post voting, but also using education to produce/select 'winners', rather than use it as a tool for equality. One could say this is a choice and there's no wrong way to make it, but to me it seems clear that it is the root cause for many of the issues in the US. I think superstar systems and mentality necessarily produces inequality and inequality necessarily produces problems.
The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.
A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.