Re: Paolo

Your comment: “In today’s bureaucratized, nanny-state system, you get no choice. You get one size fits all, public school indoctrination. Conservatives, when they are in power, love this. They get to emphasize their particular point of view. Liberals, when they are in power, do the same.”

A good thought, but this just doesn’t pan out in the real world.  Not everyone lives in a community large enough to offer the many options you assert and the children have no choice at all.

Additionally, “public school” means it is paid for by “public dollars” and is required to maintain a certain level of education and open to all.  This does NOT mean that there are not differences.  For instance, a school(I’m speaking of public schools here) in New York may be NOTHING LIKE a school in Alabama.  This is important and needs to be recognized.  This holds true even in the same city.  An inner city school may be nothing like a school in suburbia.  To claim there is some overall “indocrination” isn’t necessarily so, however…. on the flip side, it also CAN be so.

Let me see now——if I live to next November I’ll be pretty old!  And since I can remember, I guess since I was maybe 10, whenever there was a funding package about to be offered, there was always talk about improving the schools.  You would think by now we’d have the best schools possible.  Methinks it’s an everlasting ploy for da money.

My first wife was a teacher in a very large city before the “Union.”  And she had some pretty good horror stories about the administrative abuse of the rank and file teachers.  And so along came the union——you usually get the union you deserve!  Now we have the abuse of the unions against the school administration——you gotta love the irony!  Today the union is firmly entrenched and they’ll be no give-backs or freebies as they say.  Today teaching in that very large city is a plum——good pay, good hours, good vacation, and job security bar none——and a retirement package you could die for!  My first wife never remarried, but her tenure as a teacher not only provided the resources for a condo in that large city, but a vacation condo in a nice southern city among other advantages——it’s a salary and pension system that keeps on giving.  I had a laugh when the current Secretary of Education said he wanted to extend the school year——I got news for him the cities and towns couldn’t afford it——you think the teachers are going to work more hours for nuttin’!….and I use the word “work” very lightly!!!!!

Hi Tokinlib,

Well, as I said, I didn’t expect to get much positive feedback from a liberal website such as Truthdig. Let me take your arguments one at a time.

Spina Bifida: (or you can substitute Down Syndrome, or Tay Sachs, or conjoined twins—you name it). In a free society, nothing would prevent Tokinlib from contributing to charitable institutions that treat such conditions. The fact that a libertarian does not advocate GOVERNMENT charity does not mean the libertarian is against charity as such. In a free society, Tokinlib can decide where best to put charitable dollars. In our current system, the government sucks up about 40 percent of all available capital. Despite this, Americans still give tremendous amounts to charity.

What you advocate is a system in which the government has the lion’s share of allegedly charitable activities. Since the government has a virtual monopoly on such services, it need not be bothered too much by concerns about quality; after all, the government gets its money through force of taxation or through the fraud of creating fiat money.

“Humans evolved as cooperative creatures.” Goodness, Tokinlib, can’t you see the contradiction in your statement? You do not call for cooperation: you call for force. Hey, libertarians are all for cooperation, but “cooperation” ends where force begins. I congratulate and encourage all who want to cooperatively support charitable foundations, or for-profit companies that do good works. I am one hundred percent against government “cooperation” which comes in the form of a gun held to your head if you choose not to contribute to the government’s charities.

We are now able to communicate instantaneously with every citizen wherever they may be on the whole planet. Alas, what we don’t have is an education system that can prepare these citizens to understand all the information and choices available.
For example, my bank is very accessible. With a simple password and security question, I can communicate 24 hours a day, transfer funds, check balances, obtain credit, and get help from a vast library of information. When I need the reassuring guidance of a real human being, I can speak to a customer service rep. immediately. I might add that after using this system for eight years now, I have not lost a dime to fraud.
You would think that educators could design a system as simple and accessible as my bank, but colleges are only online during banker’s hours. (9-3 M-F pun intended,) require a PhD in computer science, suspension of all logic, and the patience of a saint to maneuver through the admissions system, while taking months to access previously completed coursework. (Tradition forbids they might enroll someone in a class for which they don’t have the proper pedigree!)
The cost of the average college degree in science or law or medicine is over $80k, which is more than most of our citizens can afford for even one child. I would hope that any economic recovery plan would include measures to correct this logjam.

Paolo, I never knew of a ‘libertarian’ who had a kid with spinal bifida, for example, and who didn’t therefore wish to avail her/himself of all the cares and services for her/his kid that he/she could get, but which, were here/his libertarian philosophy actually to have been enacted, wouldn’t be available, even if it was from the state.

Humans evolved (yes we did) as cooperative creatures. It was the only way we can survive. If you wanna go live and die off the grid, be my guest. But don’t get sick around me awhile disparaging the community of tax-paid services to which you owe your life.

Dihey, you are absolutely right.  Did you know that every year tens of millions of children learn to speak Chinese without going to school!  Fact.

However, it took me decades to unlearn the delusive presuppositions I was taught at the U of Chicago.

A libertarian view—

Of course, I don’t expect many voices of approval on this rather liberal website, but I have found that liberals tend to be more open to libertarian ideas than conservatives, so here goes.

As Ernest Hancock says, the answer is freedom. Now, what’s your question?

In a free society, anyone who thinks they have the “answer” to improving education, is free to pursue their dream. If you think cooperative education is the way, then set up a school and see if you can attract circumspect parents who want only what is best for their children.

If you advocate Waldorf education, the same applies.

If you advocate Catholic Schools, then (in a free society) you are free to support them.

If you advocate home schooling, then you can home school in whatever manner you deem proper.

In other words, in a free society, there is a limitless range of educational alternatives. Freedom and a free society presume that the overwhelming majority of parents want what is best for their children. It also presumes that what is best for family A may not be best for family B.

In today’s bureaucratized, nanny-state system, you get no choice. You get one size fits all, public school indoctrination. Conservatives, when they are in power, love this. They get to emphasize their particular point of view. Liberals, when they are in power, do the same.

Again, the solution is freedom. I don’t expect a lot of agreement on this site, but I am willing to bet more agree with me than let on.

Oh no you don’t, not another “the public schools are horrible” “public schools are failing” (make that, according to NCLB test scores) article.

No way.

Public schools in this country are A LOT better off than articles like this make clear, they are very regulated, have supervisory boards and are accredited (all their teachers are certified, for one). They provide stable, union jobs to million of people (a big reason public education is under attack). They send millions of kids to college and the stats of college success, are in THEIR grads favor.

Heres my advice: send your kid to your local school (no matter how many white kids go there). Your kid will learn two of the most important lessons in life: Tolerance and Color-blindness, and you will be happily surprised.

You will also become a public education ADVOCATE.

Remember, the Right would very much like to see the whole thing dismantled, so we really need public education advocates in this country.

We sure could use more journalist advocates as well!!

We are the problem!  We have listened to the “experts” and no longer discipline our children!  We don’t want the “teachers” to discipline them, because they are not the child’s parent!  We allow our children to sit in front of the “boob tube” tuning out, because we as parents are too busy to tune into them!  We parents have abdicated our responsibility to our schools, and have bought into the fallacy that our failing schools do not need to be held to excellent standards - especially in minority communities!

Where did this shift in our attitudes arrive!?  When we as a people, as a community started to not just listen, but believe those “politicians” that drivel about “individualism” and “bad government” b.s. even as they are having their pockets lined and overturning legislation that empowers corporation over the community, and the individual!!!  It is time to stop listening to the deception, and start following the money that these people receive!!!

the sad truth is that they abandoned any semblence of strictness, authority or structure in the classroom. Relegating these values to the trash heap of history, the progressive made every attempt to reinvent childhood as one of “positive reinforcement,” abandoning concepts like respect for adults, formalilty and civility in interaction, and respectful speech.  They completely rejected the concept of “obedience” as cruel and obsolete.

Teach kids to be obedient, they’ll mebbe grow up to be obedient.

and little else.

The world never was changed by ‘obedient’ people.

Discipline is great tool for compelling submission.

For “learning to think for yourself?” Not so much.

Children are stifled by the very people paid to nurture their creativity. You get marked down for showing signs of individuality. Homework is purposely DESIGNED to be confusing and time-consuming. Parents become embarrassing “strangers” who don’t fit into the assimilation process taking place.

Worst of all - discipline becomes more important than actually learning, and the teachers become enforcers. I’m afraid if there is a rebirth of education, many of these problems will remain.

Anybody who says “USer Schools Do Not Work” does not understand the purpose of Murkin schools.

Education is not it.

Murkin schools are vast, expensive sorting machines which provide, retroactively, the evidences—test scores, grades, deportment reports—which rationalize and justif the decisions made about children, based on the socio-economic status of their parents, prior to their ever attending a day of school.

Schools exist mainly to ensure that as far as possible, no child escapes the socio-economic niches into which they were born.

One statistic exemplifies to me the “paradox” of school: When comparing between-student scores on standardized tests, one variable accounts for more than 60 percent of ALL variance.

That variable is (guesses?): the socio-economic status of the parents.

there is one and only one way to assure that ALL students perform to standards” on tests: eliminate poverty. The standards to which students are held are still primarily the standards of bourgeois literacy and numeracy. Want kids to perform to standards? Make ‘em all bourgeoisie…

The public education system is doing just what it was designed to do that is produce good workers for business If you are a free thinker and don’t regurgitate verbatim what they implant in you. They consider you disruptive and weed you out or use Ritalin to make you into a zombie

When our public system is designed to, or at least has migrated to over the years, teach everyone at the same level it is almost doomed to fail from the outset. In addition, we ignore thought provoking and mental agility excercises like music and language during early years even though that is exactly when we are best equipped to learn them. Students who are adept in language and music are, on average, better students later in life, and the correlation to math is irrefutable.

Many kids, talented kids, get lost in the system because of another “general” failure, and that is too many students vs too few teachers. I find this most offensive at the college level. If you look at it from a pure business perspective, having one professor teach a class of 400 is one hell of a profit margin for the school. Having put three kids through college this bothers me…really bothers me.

If billions are going to be invested (instead of thrown at) in education I hope some of this will be addressed in some way.

“Is our children learning?”

There are many theories on how to educate our children, but as long as administration are allowed to fail without consequences and teachers can draw a fine golden retirement package at a Young age nothing is going to succeed.
One change I would like to see is a teacher moving along the ladder with his/her class from 1st grade to 8th grade. Safeguards would have to be put in place if parents feel there are biases. Shoving children along to make the school look good must end. Disrupting children must be addressed.
Ending this merry-go-round must be stopped.
Great article Paul Cummins.

When I was in Chicago 1963-66 the President of the University of Chicago, an educator himself, succinctly characterized the basic stupidity of our educational system as follows:

During the first five years of their lives most children accomplish astonishing feats almost on their own and with but little help from grownups.

The learn to talk, to walk, to eat without using their fingers,and to go to the potty themselves.

When they enter kindergarten it is decided that they are actually morons who cannot learn anything without teacher placing a funnel in their mouths through which teacher pours her/his prejudiced knowledge and thereby kills the child’s self-starting abilities.

The reason why I recall this is that any attempt to “improve” the educational system which continues this arrogant idiocy will be doomed to dismal failure, no matter what experts dream up. They have failed so often that it is a folly to believe them any longer.