The Cato Institute will host a book forum on Wednesday, January 28, 2004, at 12:00 noon for Heartland President Joseph L. Bast and Board Chairman Herbert J. Walberg.
Bast and Walberg will discuss their recently book, Education and Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America’s Schools, published in November 2003 by the Hoover Institution Press.
John Fund, who serves on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, will comment on the book as a speaker at the forum.
In spite of steady progress for the school choice movement over the past 20 years, relatively few children today are educated outside of the government monopoly school system. Why hasn’t school choice been implemented on a wider scale?
According to Bast and Walberg, the reason is that people don’t understand capitalism. Because people lack a basic understanding of how capitalism works, they are unwilling to trust it as a means to educate children. Education will move from a government-operated enterprise to a privatized one only if people understand how and why markets can be trusted to do a better job than government of educating our children.
The book forum is open to the public, and Cato welcomes everyone to participate in this discussion of the virtues of capitalism and methods for countering the myths about markets and education.
The forum will take place at the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001. Cato book forums and receptions are free of charge. To register for this event, complete the online registration form at http://www.cato.org/events/calendar.html or call Krystal Brand at 202/789-5229, fax her at 202/371-0841, or e-mail to [email protected]. You can also watch the forum live online by following the link on Cato’s Web site.
Diane Carol Bast is a former member of The Heartland Institute’s board of directors.
