Why don’t we try to make things cheaper?

The Australian reports today that from 2014 every childcare centre must employ a qualified teacher. I thought the evidence was that it is debatable that teaching degrees even make much difference to the quality of teaching in schools, why do we need them in childcare centres?

Earlier this year I visited a charter school in Colorado. They have banned the unions from their school and they employ teacher’s who have no formal qualifications at all. Some are retired university professors, the shop teacher is a retired carpenter. They seem to be having excellent results and student positions must be allocated by lottery every year because they are oversubscribed.

Why cant we let parents decide what sort of expertise they want in their childcare centres? Why do they need a Minister in Canberra to doubleguess their parenting decisions?

This is a small example but still it makes the costs of mums re-entering more expensive. At some point we need to get over our fetish of imposing higher prices because bureaucrats apparently know better than people.