Prentice – Denmark’s example

There is one argument that has surprised when people have talked about child care and it comes a bit out of left-field to someone who’s imprinted on North American realities and that’s the example of Denmark.  Denmark doesn’t really have child care regulation and yet they have very high quality child care.  And to a North American who’s used to fighting for better regulations, who’s seen regulations really as a way to try to promote a set of minimums, the idea that Denmark could have really high quality without regulation was quite startling to me at the beginning.  And spending a bit of time on the research made it clear why this works.  If you have very highly trained staff and you give them resources that they need, their training and their talent and their ingenuity will produce really high quality programming without the regulation.  Maybe the same way that you could trust, for example, that highly trained healthcare practitioners will practice good quality healthcare, you don’t have to have minimal rules for doctors and nurses.  But in a market system where we’re so used to a race to the bottom and everything being done as cheaply as possible, it’s a bit surprising that regulations look differently where resources are more distributed.  That was a surprise for me about Denmark.