Roger Partridge: Well-educated workforce key to prosperity

"For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist." Or so satirists of the economics profession claim. The truth is most economists agree on most of economics. And even though they disagree on some things, all economists agree that human capital is critical for productivity. A country's prosperity depends on the skills, knowledge, and experience of its workforce.

Sadly, the stock of human capital in New Zealand is in long term decline. Or at least it is if you measure it by the educational achievement of successive generations of school leavers.

A growing proportion of children leave school unable to read an instruction manual or do basic maths. Over the past 20 years, New Zealand's education system has slipped from being the envy of the world to barely mediocre.