Jobst

On 9/3/2017 11:06 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Sun, 03 Sep 2017 13:32:48 -0500, AMuzi wrote:
Without an educated populace the gatekeepers are powerless and wishing
for an educated population is a fool's dream. And here we are.

Yep. And unfortunately there is a large percentage of the American
population who have opted to be stupid and proud of it.

I have said this before and will say it again. I have for decades
thought that a class in logic ought to be required in every high school.
In a participatory form of government- like, you know, democracy, a
basic level of non-idiocy is required for success.

Unfortunately someone decided that "education creates liberals," and
thus far too many politicians have decided to oppose competent public
education (at least here, don't know about other parts of the country).

ISTM the "education creates liberals" effort is concentrating on
denigrating university professors and college education. There's a
gaggle of right-wing columnists who dig deep to find admittedly silly
things occurring in some schools and leap to statements that academia is
totally worthless.

I think the tactic with K-12 has been entirely different. Corporations
have focused on bad results from inner-city schools and gamed the system
to promote, then run, for-profit charter schools. Then they've gotten
rich by siphoning off the tax dollars.

In Ohio, at least, these for-profit charter schools were promising to
provide far better educations. But they've consistently delivered no
better and often far worse results. After years of educational failure,
many were closed down by the state, but later re-formed with most of the
same administrators under a new name, as a "new" school that rakes in
yet more taxpayer money.

As a bonus, for years they were exempt from many of the standards that
public schools must meet. Oh, and they pay teachers far less while
paying administrators far more.

Here I'll sound like a conservative: schools need to have standards and
accountability for behavior and educational performance, parents (or
someone in the home) need to be actively involved in their children's
scholastic life.

I'll agree, although bad family background makes it damned hard to get
kids to behave and perform. Society seems to look at kids with absent
fathers, layabout mothers, ramshackle homes and gang-banger role models,
and blame the teachers for not turning those kids into hard-working
geniuses.

And we need to recognize that not everyone wants to or
is able to attend college successfully, which seems to be the current
goal of Americam education policy; there should be multiple educational
tracks available to help students acquire the skills they need to be
successful.

I absolutely agree.


--
- Frank Krygowski