Welcome to Gaia! ::

That is such a good question!

I've always felt that education should be free. The more educated your children are, the more educated the future of the country will be.

Right now, as a college student, I'm seeing the unnecessary, rip-off expenses being put down on everyone. A paperback book on economics cost me $170 dollars... and that's just for ONE CLASS. If our education can't be "free", they should lower the expenses considerably, and make education almost free.

Sorry I agree with Queen here. You don't value what you don't have to put effort into.

I see the results of free public education all over Gaia. It may be free, but I am seeing a generation of kids-- American, British, and from other countries-- who can barely type a line of text correctly. I see epidemic levels of bad spelling, of sentnces that don't even make sense. There are times I've had to stare at a post for several minutes attempting to untangle the chatspeak and bad spelling enough to make some logical sense of it.

Even in my generation, there is something of a divide between public and private school education. I see the difference all the time, although it is not as extreme as it is in the current crop of teens.

And, I feel any attempt at free education MUST be accompanied by the guaranteed choice to privately OR home school the student. Different kids learn differently and some do not do well in school. I didn't do well at all in public school, I remember five long years of being bullied and not being challenged inside the classroom. Mom pulled me out of public school and plunked my in parochial school, which was the right call as I got what I really needed. I will probably be homeschooling my son-- well in a way I already am!!-- he is trying to learn to read, and he knows simple addition and subtraction.

France has free college, and they are, on average, a very intelligent country.