Sweden's "Free Schools" Incentivize Innovation, Better Prepare Kids for Future

When the economy recovers, graduates will breath a sign of relief, but will they have skills good enough to find work? Reihan Salam, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, writes in Forbes that the offshoring of many services — including education — may leave a generation with the wrong skills for a domestic market that has offshored so much to countries with cheaper labor.

Salam suggests that this alone is reason enough to transform the education system in the U.S. to focus more on so called 'soft skills' like creativity, problem solving, and team-work, rather than more mechanical tasks that can be done on a calculator, or rote memorization, from afar.

He cites Sweden as an example of a country that's revolutionizing its schools. Anyone — parents, non profits, or for-profits — can set up schools that have more freedom and less standardization. So called "free schools" can experiment, and compete for students, with the profit motive of attracting students having the effect of incentivizing successful innovation. We don't necessarily need to go down the privatization route, and can keep them non-profit — but is working for a profit such a bad thing?

Photo Credit: Solarthermienator