251–260 of 816 posts
We are not, should not, and cannot all be the same.
I am bad at languages. Should I now demand that everybody please slow down so that I do not have to feel bad about myself? ... Nope.
Is there anyone out there who disagrees with this? I have not seen a single person (aside from the few people actually implementing these changes) that agrees with it.
I disagree. In general what you'll find is that most of these advanced classes are dominated by certain economic groups. Public funds are advancing people with more resources when all they actually need is to pass state college entrance exams. It's not that children from low income families can't do the math, it's that they're at a huge disadvantage when their parents are often working, can't hover over them to make…
I sometimes wonder if this is how the German system came about, where there's a hard split in high school / gymnasium between the academic track kids and the vocational track kids (and there absolutely is not any shame in taking the vocational route).
Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life. No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this. Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it. Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a…
This only works if you require all schools getting vouchers to accept all students. Otherwise you end up with all the special needs kids in the public schools that are required to take them and all the high performers in private schools. And even then you still have the problem of transportation. Only the more well off families have the time and means to get their kids to somewhere that isn't their closest home schoo…
Stuff like this is why I will remain a proponent for true vouchers for the rest of my life. No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this. Pull your kid. Find them a school that gives them the greatest opportunity to succeed and use the funds earmarked for their education to ensure they receive it. Currently, options are restricted to parents who can afford to move to a…
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Besides, the state can mandate a minimum curriculum which includes civic education to receive the voucher, with the state managing standardized end of years test for the mandatory curriculum.
The options to handle it well are there, society just needs the will.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> School board elections have very low turnout usually, and the people elected to them are disproportionately ideologues who treat engaged parents with contempt for being "privileged." Not only the School Board but the Teachers Unions and the United States Government are anti parents attending School Board meetings to support their children. Red or Blue, 6 or 600, it doesn’t matter when the USG decides to make parent…
I dunno--if you want to see America's mental illness problem on full, public display, just do a YouTube search for "school board meeting outrage". It's great when concerned, non-ideological, rational parents show up to have a voice in how the school is run, but the flip side of that coin is ugly, belligerent, and counter-productive.
As for ideology, I doubt it's possible to be non-ideological. I have children not because they are accidents or the abortions my wife didn't bother to have. Not even because we just didn't know any other way to go through life. We had children because children are a good thing unto themselves. So good that I hope they grow up to have their own and enjoy that experience. Schools are hostile to that and seem to be doing what they can to encourage sterility.
The first six months was very rough as they caught up from being so far behind, but they are being well positioned to the rest of their school careers compared to where they would have ended up academically in the public schools.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I'm OK paying taxes to get to live in a society with universally-available (mostly) fee-free primary and secondary education that aspires to some set of standards. I'm not OK paying taxes to help Bobby Baptist send his kids to Jesus Is Lord Day School. Or kick in to rich parents' budget for Phillips Exeter. If we must have vouchers, let people keep their own tax money that would have gone to schools and use tha…
It sounds like you're in a good spot where the taxes extracted from you go to support a value system that you are in favor of. Given that taxes aren't a choice, and given that value systems vary between people, can you envision a case where somebody with a different value system would be unhappy about where their taxes go?
[EDIT] To make this more substantive: I think there's a distinct difference between collectively funding a public system, and redistributing money to folks to go toward private entities—this goes beyond not liking the values or environments of some of the schools private-school-preferrers might spend their vouchers on. That's why I suggested that if we must do vouchers, it ought to be limited to what a given person paid in themselves, not other people's money—I think there's a fundamental difference between funding a public good available to all and giving people cash so they can get past a private paywall to access a similar good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No parent should be stuck without options when educational governance goes sideways like this. You say this, but what you actually mean is no wealthy parent should be stuck without options . The hoi polloi that can't afford the voucher plus mountain of money private school tuition will still be quite stuck without options, except that you've also created an explicit two-class system. I hear those do wonders for soc…
Bit of a weird position to take that you're in favour of schools doing indoctrination, just as long as it's away from the viewpoint you don't like. That's pretty authoritarian; seems to be on the rise these days.
No, it's not. Society only works when people believe in a shared fiction, and when they stop believing it, things go completely to shit.
I would absolutely oppose indoctrination into a bad shared fiction, just like a religious person would oppose indoctrination into a 'religion is the opiate of the masses and must be purged from society' shared fiction, or like a pro-democracy person would oppose indoctrination into 'the way forward is installing an autocracy that will seize power through force of arms' shared fiction, or like how most of us would probably have issues with pro-ISIS indoctrination.