Are we going about education the wrong way? The somewhat shocking demonstration of this book is that "we" simply cannot reform "our" schools "together". We don't actually even know what schools or education really are. Education can only be improved the same way we improve and invent things in other walks of life, through unbridled, unchained trial and error. Assembling a wealth of economic, psychological and historical evidence, Erik Lidstr m paints a coherent and deceptively simple picture of how we went wrong, of why we went wrong and what we can do about it. The disconcerting conclusion is that education must be set free, it must be returned to parents and to pupils. Government should have no, or hardly any role in the financing of education, in the setting of curricula or diploma, or in the supervision of schools and education. At the same time, the book is filled with optimism. By doing things very differently, we can very quickly and almost painlessly restore education and learning to a level previously unheard of.

The second expanded edition completes the analysis by extending it to research and higher education, in and of themselves, how they are affected by the crisis in primary and secondary education, and how they would also be restored and set on a path of improvement through a similar return to independence from government.