Thomas Sowell came out of retirement to write this
Posted by coaldigger 8 years, 6 months ago to Education
And well he should have. This is where it can start. This is where we can save the children, the cities and America itself.
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While we're very happy to have you in the Gulch and appreciate your wanting to fully engage, some things in the Gulch (e.g. voting, links in comments) are a privilege, not a right. To get you up to speed as quickly as possible, we've provided two options for earning these privileges.
This is not a proper constitutional function of the federal government.
And Internet content can also be controlled. Zuckerberg (Facebook) and YouTube as well exercise authority over content on their websites.
I believe bad education is a crime against all children and that the poor have the least chance of overcoming the evil that is perpetrated on them. I believe poor education is the disease that has crime, violence, hate and hopelessness as its symptoms and it is spreading and will lead to "don't go" zones and perpetual riots in our cities. This is a terrible waste of humanity.
Once a transition is completed I believe a hands-off is mostly possible but to start I believe that the federal, state and local governments need to pool the education budgets they have and cut education only checks for students (parents). Leave it up to the market to form educational institutions. There will be scams. There will be inadequate schools. There will be every kind of school you can imagine formed to collect these checks. In the end, people are not fools and will find what works best for them and all of society will be better off.
Oh, what happens to taxes? Why should people that can afford to pay get checks? I don't care about these issues. Those that can afford basic education can apply the check to better education. I only care that everyone gets to choose and the market has to compete every day to provide them with the best that they can afford. Would schools charge more because of the government subsidy? They can charge anything they want but in a competitive market, they will need to supply something that people are willing to pay for. Over time the fixed supplements will pay for less but more people will be in position to pay the overage. The volume of those that cannot pay should drop and stabilize. It would be interesting to determine the level that cannot be served by the market and if private charities would not be the answer at that point.
Are these schools "social"? Internet? Religious? Secular? Academic? Vocational? Yes, if you want it, select it. It is none of my business, nor the government's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerno...
I visited during this period and later. The improvement in customer service alone was astounding.
Make changes slowly and the bureaucrats will disrupt everything to hang on to power. (The recent irrational demonstrations against Trump's presidency are one example.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmfw...
I attended Detroit Public Schools in the 70s. In every school I attended, there was a teacher who was a paedophile. Everybody in the schools knew it; nobody did anything about it. If someone made a stink loud enough to rock the boat, the cops weren't called. The offending teacher was just moved to another school. The union protected them.
There were never enough books. We had to share them. The taxpayer money was also supposed to supply us kids with pencils, paper and equipment. Note the "supposed to" in there. At each level of administration, as federal money passed from Washington to the schools, everybody took their cut. There was nothing left by the time the school principals took their final cut. For example, in my high school biology class, 45 kids had to make do with 3 antiquated microscopes.
Since Detroit's population has dropped a lot I'm sure this no longer applies, but in the 70s, overcrowding was massive. The classes were intended to hold 25-30 kids each. Ours were 45+. The desks were crammed in so tight that you had to climb over the rows to get in or out.
I don't know if it was burnout or they just didn't give a damn, but teacher apathy was standard. We got bare-bones-minimum education. Just enough to pass the federally-mandated tests. Sometimes they spent the whole school year teaching us the literal tests. I don't know if the same tests were administered every year or they somehow fraudulently obtained copies, but they were exact matches. Some teachers didn't even show up for class. My high school history teacher used to blow in at the beginning of class, hand us quiz papers that were multiple choice, true or false and matching questions, then blow right back out. She never collected them again for grading.
Since funding depended solely on the number of students moving up from grade to grade and graduating, nobody got left back. I graduated with three people who couldn't read.
You didn't graduate from Detroit Public Schools, you survived them. It was jungle law. The object of your education was to obtain the necessary skills to avoid being beaten, shot, stabbed, or raped.
Since parent apathy was as prevalent as teacher apathy, I don't know if local parent-driven school systems will work in every community. But perhaps if it is no longer a federal juggernaut, things will change for the better.
All but the main door were chained shut because of students sneaking out and intruders sneaking in. God help us if there had ever been a serious fire.
Then the vermin. Ah, the vermin. Cockroaches and rats. The biggest rats I ever saw. One day, in my English lit class, a girl who was sitting next to a heating grate screamed her head off. Something big was moving across the grate. We thought it was a cat, until we saw the tail. Huge rat.
There were bats in the ventilator system. I can't help but wonder what we were breathing. I know bat caves are toxic to humans.
Your tax dollars at work, folks!
Bill Ayers tried that---Weather Underground.
Then he graduated with a PhD. in Elementary Education, and changed the whole landscape. He should have been imprisoned for sabotage of government building in DC.
The Federal Government has zero place in education according to the Constitution. The Department of Education should be closed down permanently and no Federal funds should be going to education in any way shape or form. Why? Because effective management of anything does not come at arm's length - and particularly in government.
States have the Constitutional authority to involve themselves in education, but if they get involved they should limit themselves to the funding - not the policy or standards.
Personally, I think that the best education is community driven and it starts with parents. Parents have to have a hand in examining the curriculum and then determining how they want their children to be educated - and then pay for it. That's the problem with the public education system we have - parents have little or no say in the matter from either a curriculum or an expense perspective.
I support giving parents lots of options - from internet-based learning (Khan Academy is excellent for hard sciences) to parochial schools to charter schools and home schooling. The only caution I would give is that part of an education is in the social graces that can only be taught in a group setting. I know many home schoolers who are technically very astute, but are socially not just awkward, but infantile. I don't think any true learning comes without practice, and many of the social skills require a LOT of practice.
A great big YES !!!! BT
You all know he is a former Marxist, don't you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S...
Supply clerk me did not go to Vietnam but bitter feelings expressed by fellow Marines (some having been there) only reinforced my opinion that servicemen and the young adults of America were all getting screwed.
Looking back, we WERE all getting screwed. I'm just no longer a socialist. Why? I concluded during the late 70s that those who sought socialism were only screwing themselves.
Incompetent Jimmy Carter (who I voted for before I voted for Reagan)) and genocidal maniac Pol Pot were influences. Reagan's speeches too.
Up until then like any libtard, I operated under the delusion that I was on a road to a to each according to their needs Candy Mountain.
Liberalism may be a mental disorder, to quote Michael Savage, but some of its sucked-in victims can and do find a way to heal themselves.
I must confess that I felt all puffed up with self-importance when I verbally announced that one of my selected courses would be "Phi-lo-so-phy 101." Like woooo lookie me, baby!
Oh, well, having lived through it, I hold the opinion that real maturity does not set in until age 30, the citizen termination age of Logan's Run but by then I was already a conservative..
Still, I was 30 when I came to that conclusion.
To give every citizen the information he needs tor the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence to functions confided to him by either; To know his rights, to exercise with order and justice those he retains, to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgement; And in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed.
Mr. Jefferson suggests that the schools focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry and on the "outlines of history" and geography in order to achieve these objectives.
Perhaps Mrs. Devos can re-start us toward these goals, by elimination of the Federal control of education and related bureaucracy./