Lower education bubble

Glenn Reynolds, writing on the "lower education bubble," has some good lines:

So at the K-12 level, we've got an educational system that in many fundamental ways hasn't changed in 100 years – except, of course, by becoming much less rigorous – but that nonetheless has become vastly more expensive without producing significantly better results. . . .

When our public education system was created in the 19th century, its goal, quite explicitly, was to produce obedient and orderly factory workers to fill the new jobs being created by the industrial revolution. Those jobs are mostly gone, now, and the needs of the 21st century are not the needs of the 19th.