Education in most of the developing world is shocking. Half of children in South Asia and a third of those in Africa who complete four years of schooling cannot read properly. Most governments have promised to provide universal primary education and to promote secondary education. But even when public schools exist, they often fail. 
    The failure of state education, combined with the shift in emerging economies from farming to jobs that need at least a modicum (少量) of education, has caused a private-school boom. According to the World Bank, across the developing world a fifth of primary-school pupils are enrolled in private schools, twice as many as 20 years ago. So many private schools are unregistered that the real figure is likely to be much higher. 
    By and large, politicians and educationalists are unenthusiastic. Governments see education as the state's job. NGOs tend to be ideologically opposed to the private sector. The U. N. special rapporteur (报告人) on education, Kishore Singh, has said that "for-profit education should not be allowed in order to safeguard the noble cause of education". 
This attitude harms those whom educationalists claim to serve: children. The boom in private education is excellent news for them and their countries, for three reasons. 
    First, it is bringing in money--not just from parents, but also from investors, some in search of a profit. 
    Most private schools in the developing world are single operators that charge a few dollars a month, but chains are now emerging. 
Second, private schools are often better value for money than state ones. Measuring this is hard, since the children who go to private schools tend to be better off, and therefore likely to perform better. But a rigorous four-year study of 6,000 pupils in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India, suggested that private pupils performed better in English and Hindi than public-school pupils, and the private schools achieved these results at a third of the cost of the public schools. 
    Lastly, private schools are innovative. Since technology has great (though as yet mostly unrealized. potential in education, this could be important. Bridge gives teachers tablets linked to a central system that provides teaching materials and monitors their work. Such robo-teaching may not be ideal, but it is better than lessons without either materials or monitoring. 
    The private sector has problems. But the alternative is often a public school that is worse--or no school at all. The growth of private schools is a manifestation of the healthiest of instincts: parents' desire to do the best for their children. Governments should therefore be asking not how to discourage private education, but how to boost it. Ideally, they would subsidize (以津贴补助) private schools, preferably through a voucher (凭证) which parents could spend at the school of their choice and top up; they would regulate schools to ensure quality; they would run public exams to help parents make informed choices.