Universal goods vs. state provision

Public schools systems should be a priority. Above giving any special treatment or credit to private school systems.

Because, like we all said, every child deserves access to quality education and low-cost.

 

Actually all children deserve an education free of all discrimination. I don't think that's a privilege in a free society, I think it's a right. It's a societal mandate. It's one I am willing to pay taxes to ensure.

 

Same. Opting out of this system is opting out on the social contract to help each other, in my view.

 

i see what you're saying ~

When businesses became more accountable to their investors than to their customers and workers,

things really did begin to slide downhill.

Like, all of a sudden, Ethics became more theoretical than something to be practiced in "real life."

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Do y'all have any earthly idea of how a school's budget is spent?

You act like it all goes for teachers, school buildings and books,

but there are WAY more things every school (private and public) have to plan their monies for, and some, like the Breakfast Program, are (and should be, imho) federally funded. Same with bussing.

And THAT's where you sort of fail...

You want everything "fair," but you want it to be fair-ER for some.

You've sat and watched, as our fabulous educational system has sunk down to it's lowest common denominator,

and all you can think to do is state that you support this (broken-down) system, and want to throw more money at it???

What is wrong with this picture?

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Try reading the The Age of American Unreason by S. Jacoby, here are some comments from some reviews.

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US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD(3).
But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so dumb, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.
One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
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A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time(6).

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This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln’s career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment it is a recipe for confusion.
Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly rage against the “liberal elites” destroying America.
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The other thing that sets America apart from Europe, Ms. Jacoby argues, is this country’s insistence on local control of schools, which means that “children in the poorest areas of the country would have the worst school facilities and teachers with the worst training” and that “the content of education in the most backward areas of the country would be determined by backward people.”
“In Europe,” she writes, “the subject matter of science and history lessons taught to children in all publicly supported schools has always been determined by highly educated employees of central education ministries. In America the image of an educated elite laying down national guidelines for schools was and is a bête noire for those who consider local control of education a right almost as sacred as any of the rights enumerated in the Constitution.”
The ignorance resulting from the absence of national education standards, combined with the resurgent anti-intellectualism now abroad in the land, Ms. Jacoby concludes in this useful if less than electrifying volume, is dangerous for any country, but especially dangerous for a democracy. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

 

To me the way that a society educates reflections that society.

If you treat education as just another product in a free market, where the goal is profit. The lessons you’re teaching is consumerism and greed.

Along with the belief that whatever you learn has as equal validity as anything else because it’s ‘yours’ since you bought it fair and square, even if what you learn is false and only there because it was what ‘sold’ best.

For example a Christian fundamentalist sends their children to a ‘good’ Christian school to be taught by ‘good’ Christian teachers or home teaches using ‘good’ Christian educational material (a big market I believe in the US).

And what you end up with is only 26% of the population accepting that evolution takes place by means of natural selection

 

When looking at why education is handled locally in the States, you have to consider that the US a republic made up of fifty states and several territores under our constitution the powers not granted the federal government in the constitution remain with the states:

That's not to say we don't also have some broad federal guidelines governing curriculum and standards for graduation that come bundled with federal funds received by the states for the purpose of education. I attended public schools in at least six states. The curriculum at that time appeared pretty standard throughout.

I do agree the recent popularity of home schooling has lead to a relaxation of graduation requirements and standards for curriculum.

 

I actually know a couple home schooled people, and right now I'm in college with a highly intelligent home schooled junior. Homeschooling has nothing to do with "dumb America".

People just don't critically think. They don't debate in classes, they just memorize for tests. In college I even had an Ecology/Evolution midterm with one of the questions being "Did Charles Darwin read _______'s journal on a ship?".

Who the fuck cares if he read it on a ship, on a blimp, or on land? It's all about the theories and concepts. But nobody else in the class noticed the test full of dumb questions like this, and somehow these tests ultimately determine our futures.....

 

I have a couple young cousins that opted for home schooling in High School. The work they turned in for credits was a joke. The only reason they know their state capital is because they go shopping down there.

 

Thing is, you still have to be in a financial position to homeschool your children.

 

exactly how does america to expect to have healthcare and schools when they are busy fighting wars on behalf of the israelis??

if you let these people take your money it is no surprise that you are destitute in in much pain

next election you must vote

get obama out

keep the "republicans" out

if you do not get the religious fanatics that worship a foreign god and hold allegiance only to that god then you will be destitute and probably dead.

you must try and convince your fellow american to vote.

 

If, in the next elections,

we don't vote for O-Bozo, the incumbent and Dem party's next candidate,

nor for a Repub,

that leaves us with...

Oh. Yeah.

The tiny, little splinter parties.

It could work, but i doubt that it will.

imho, our best hope for the future is for Obama to be proven ineligible for office,

which would shock the entire country into a major re-think of exactly what the two parties are offering us.

That would be so catastrophic to the Dems, and Repubs, alike,

because we'd have to seriously consider exactly where this country is headed and how WE want to get there.

 

Thing is, in my experience, you can be dirt poor and homeschool your kids. Actually, the only requirement is that you have 4 more years of education than the kids you teach. The school supplies books for the year, and you don't have to spend money on your kid's school clothes (status).

 

In NY they should have enough money via taxes to run EVERY imaginable sort of school. Just one household alone (with no kids) pays around $1500 a year JUST in school taxes. (Add another $2500 annually for property taxes.) Multiply that by however many landowners there are and you would get a number which should see the schools parking lots paved with gold...

I worked for a guy in NY State before moving to WV who was 80 years old and never had any kids, but paid $1000 a year in school taxes. That was 33 years ago, the taxes for school are much higher now...

No way to opt out, no way to direct where your money goes. Simply highway robbery.

 

I guess I have to say it a third time, since so few people read my link.

Its not that complicated. If the state is spending $12,000 per child to educate them, then give each parent a $12,000 voucher so they can choose their own school. They could choose a cheaper one and get a refund or a more expensive one and pay a premium. In fact state schools could continue to operate, they would simply be one provider among many.

Similarly, if you don't want to manage your own retirement funds, then buy government bonds. Its pretty much the same thing as letting Social Security provide for your retirement, which contrary to popular belief is not guaranteed in any sense of the word.

Why are people afraid to have freedom? Why do people resent other people's freedom? Why do people think the best way to raise the bottom is to hold down the top?

 

People like being told what to do, they like having the option of having a choice, but people enjoy being told what to do because it frees them of responsibility

 

People aren't afraid of responsibility, they accepted it when social security was instituted. They bellied up to the bar in order to provide for the elderly, poor and infirm that couldn't provide for themselves at the time. That's true responsibility.

And that $12,000 for each student, you can bet if we allow public education to be privatized it will go the same way as California and Enron. That same $12,000 per student will end up in the coffers of a few who will cherry pick the elite students and run the cost of tuition up so high that no one else will be able to attend. It'll work as well as our health care industry.

 

Well said Gardener



Hipstatic

You still haven’t addressed the things I said earlier?

On education –

On investing for retirement

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And as I’ve pointed out before a more equitable society is a freer society because more people have the ability and resources to exercise there freedoms. If they want to seize more freedom they need to bring about a more equitable society.

And if people have more freedoms than others because they have an unfair and inequitable share of the resources the question is why are they knowingly stealing other peoples freedoms?

In what way hold down?

Where CEO’s that got 40 times the average worker in 1970 being held down? Do you think that they should be allowed to get 500 times the average worker as they did in 2000?

What about been given huge bonus even if they put the company (or the whole economy) in the toilet?

Is that ‘holding them down’?

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As I said this is just the same failed ideology that has caused the resent worldwide financial crisis.

 

Correct. They weren't worth addressing.

OK let me repeat for the fourth time. Nothing I am proposing would eliminate social security for the elderly. What it would do is give people the opportunity to choose whether to stay with the current plan, which offers very low returns, or to choose whether they want to do something else with the money, which would involve higher risk and potentially higher returns. I'm saying offer them the choice.

If you don't want the freedom to choose, fine, buy why are you so determined to deny other people that freedom? How does that make your life better?

Again, I posted the link to the Swedish example precisely for that reason. Why not read it?

Reminds me of the book "The Tyranny of Choice" which says that when people are given too much choice they get confused and end up less happy with whatever they choose.