A provincial province?

Yesterday, the education conference wrapped up, and in the afternoon my husband and I took a very educational cruise along the Fort Lauderdale canal and intracoastal waterway system, learning all about the homes and yachts of the rich and famous, like Cher and Steven Spielberg and so forth. Today, we head into the Everglades. For today’s blog, I thought I would tell you what I have learned about school systems around the world.

The bottom line is that most countries have some kind of school voucher program, with the government fully or partially funding non-government schools. Thailand, for example, has a universal voucher system. In Ireland, all of the elementary schools are privately operated, with the government fully funding them. Chile, Brazil, Australia, almost every European country - all encourage the private delivery of schooling. Even Finland has a small voucher program. This information is being compiled by the World Bank, and it will be released shortly.

We all tend to accept the way things are done locally as the norm and assume this is how it is done everywhere else too. I expect that most parents in Ontario assume that our set-up, with fully-funded Catholic and secular schools but no support for non-government schools, is the way most countries do education. Not so! We are the exception, not the rule.

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