Food is not generally as expensive as education because food is not as monopolized and cartelized as the education industry is. If it is becoming harder and harder to buy it is not due to scarcity, natural disaster, or technological regression. Throughout human history the capital base has been growing. The division of labor network has been growing and becoming more diversified. Human productivity, thanks to capital investment, which still goes on, despite government, is increasing. Look where the government is interfering in the market to get at the source of "mysterious" market problems where productivity seems to be falling, scarcity becoming worse and prices rising.

Yes, yes, when you can't attack the substance, attack the style. I offered you two links, one of which was an entire book. You've offered nothing back but your sweet little unsupported assertions, which you've called "generalized blather" when you've made the accusation of me. That's hypocrissy on stilts for you.

As for alternatives, I'm talking about anything voluntary that works for people. Who pays you now? Do you work directly for your clients or are you paid by the government "summer school"? If parents weren't already under the burden of the taxation and regulatory overhead they would be in a much better position to offer a competent teacher cold hard cash for his services. How does the plumber make a living? Are you trying to put forward the idea that most people in the world value having their children educated less than they do having their sinks unclogged? If that were even remotely true, who is so enthusiastic as to vote to have the State force them to pay for an education and mandate that their children utilize the service in the first place? I put it to you that much of what we call "education" could be arranged as apprenticeships and private initiatives in internship programs. If classroom instruction and "kindergarten" programs really do produce the results claimed for them, parents could patronize cheap, private alternatives or found their own. The "education professionals" have done their best to mysticize the process of education, just as Socrates claimed they would if pedagogy were ever "professionalized." It is in the professional interest to make what the professional does look mysterious and too difficult for the layman, and that is what generations of "educators" have accomplished. Unfortunately for them, the money has tended to gravitate toward the top of the cartel where the politically connected reside and only trickle down to the peons in the trenches, as it always does. The U.S. spends, on rough average, $10,000.00 per student, per year. That is insanity, beyond doubt. If I spent the cash spent, by the Dept. of Education's own admission on one student's education on both of my daughters, I could send each of them to a very exclusive and market-proven private acadamy, and that is provided that I neither desired nor had the ability to involve myself in their education at all. Multiply this ridiculous figure by the number of pupils in the average classroom, around 20 or so, and then by twelve years and ask yourself then if there is "enough" money to pay a reasonably competent teacher quite handsomely.