Do Away with Pulbic schools (indoctrination centers)

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Doug.38PR

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Do Away With Public Schools
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Here's a good question for you: Why have public schools at all?

OK, cue the marching music. We need public schools because blah blah blah and yada yada yada. We could say blah is common culture and yada is the government's interest in promoting the general welfare. Or that children are the future. And a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Because we can't leave any child behind.

The problem with all these bromides is that they leave out the simple fact that one of the surest ways to leave a kid "behind" is to hand him over to the government. Americans want universal education, just as they want universally safe food. But nobody believes that the government should run nearly all of the restaurants, farms and supermarkets. Why should it run the vast majority of the schools - particularly when it gets terrible results?

Consider Washington, home of the nation's most devoted government-lovers and, ironically, the city with arguably the worst public schools in the country. Out of the 100 largest school districts, according to the Washington Post, D.C. ranks third in spending for each pupil ($12,979) but last in spending on instruction. Fifty-six cents out of every dollar go to administrators who, it's no secret, do a miserable job administrating, even though D.C. schools have been in a state of "reform" for nearly 40 years.

In a blistering series, the Post has documented how badly the bureaucrats have run public education. More than half of the District of Columbia's teenage kids spend their days in "persistently dangerous" schools, with an average of nine violent incidents a day in a system with 135 schools. "Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days ... for the problems to be fixed," according to the Post. But hey, at least the kids are getting a lousy education. A mere 19 schools managed to get "proficient" scores or better for a majority of students on the district's Comprehensive Assessment Test.

A standard response to such criticisms is to say we don't spend enough on public education. But if money were the solution, wouldn't the district, which spends nearly $13,000 on every kid, rank near the top? If you think more money will fix the schools, make your checks out to "cash" and send them to me.

Private, parochial and charter schools get better results. Parents know this. Applications for vouchers in the district dwarf the available supply, and home schooling has exploded.

As for schools teaching kids about the common culture and all that, as a conservative I couldn't agree more. But is there evidence that public schools are better at it? The results of the 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress history and civics exams showed that two-thirds of U.S. high school seniors couldn't identify the significance of a photo of a theater with a sign reading "Colored Entrance." And keep in mind, political correctness pretty much guarantees that Jim Crow and the civil rights movement are included in syllabi. Imagine how few kids can intelligently discuss Manifest Destiny or free silver.

Right now, there's a renewed debate about providing "universal" health insurance. For some liberals, this simply means replicating the public school model for health care. (Stop laughing.) But for others, this means mandating that everyone have health insurance - just as we mandate that all drivers have car insurance - and then throwing tax dollars at poorer folks to make sure no one falls through the cracks.

There's a consensus in America that every child should get an education, but as David Gelernter noted recently in the Weekly Standard, there's no such consensus that public schools need to do the educating.

Really, what would be so terrible about government mandating that every kid has to go to school, and providing subsidies and oversight when necessary, but then getting out of the way?

Milton Friedman noted long ago that the government is bad at providing services - that's why he wanted public schools to be called "government schools" - but that it's good at writing checks. So why not cut checks to people so they can send their kids to school?

What about the good public schools? Well, the reason good public schools are good has nothing to do with government's special expertise and everything to do with the fact that parents care enough to ensure their kids get a good education. That wouldn't change if the government got out of the school business. What would change is that fewer kids would get left behind.





Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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http://www.townhall.com/columnists/...oldberg&dt=06/13/2007&page=full&comments=true

+1. Public schools are a joke. Sewer holes for gangs, garbage and nothing more than government indoctrination centers for social engineering and government conformity. (all at your expense)

Private, Home and Charity schools are the answer.
 
Don't do away with them, just put them back into the hands of the states. Vouchers will increase competition and improve schools but in iehter case the DOE has not business existing. That being said there are a few things public schools are good for, namely making sure kids don't confuse science with myth and ensuring that even the poorest kids have access to education.
 
The only hope of pulling the masses of the third world out of the fundamentalist religious zealotry sweeping the globe is through education. At the same time though we should toss our system out entirely so we can go back to kids learning that man rode on the back of a T-Rex while enforcing GOd's law over the lesser heathen races... We can also toss out all the requirements of learning math, and proper communication skills...

Great idea....:rolleyes:
 
^
Why not let local communites and parents decide for themselves what is important to teach their children. The children do not belong to the a collective or a government of any kind. PERIOD. Why do you feel you have to make sure that someone elses children (besides your own) do not get educated with what their parents think is important (regardless of whether you think it is important or right or not). Frankly, I would trust a caveman riding a T-Rex teaching my children more than I would public schools.

But I think your right on one point Redworm, I would not wnat my children to confuse the myth of Darwinism with real science http://www.amazon.com/Politically-I...724745?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182531635&sr=1-10
But if anyone wants to teach such things to their children...well that's their own business.
 
man did not ride on t-rex :rolleyes:



he rode on triceratops! :D

.


myth of darwinism...LOL. down with gravity, teach intelligent falling!
 
+1. Public schools are a joke. Sewer holes for gangs, garbage and nothing more than government indoctrination centers for social engineering and government conformity. (all at your expense)

Give it a break with the silly inflammatory rhetoric Doug its so tiresome.

But hey, maybe thats what they teach in schools today...how to sloganeer with twisted facts and half generalizations

WilditisnttheschoolsitstheteachersunionsAlaska
 
The schools need to teach real scientific theory. That is different than mythology (Bible, Koran, Torah). You may not like Darwinism but it still stands and there is not one bit of true evidence against it. If you want to dispove Darwinism then simply point out ONE bilogical feature that could not have possibly evolved from a prior feature. Darwinsim is not random chance as the religous opponents state. There is hysteria, religious zealotry and self delusion going against it but those are not rational arguments.

We need schools to teach real subjects to give kids a chance. Parents are free to fill their kids with whatever mush and garbage they want later but those kids need to at least be exposed to the basics of scientific rational though if they are going to have any hope of freeing themselves from culturally passed ignorance.
 
Why not let local communites and parents decide for themselves what is important to teach their children.

They can teach whatever they want but we need schools with true scientific curriculum to at least expose students to rational thought in the hopes that they can decide agaisnt the religous fundamentalism of their parents. Without the school it is a gaurnetee of one generation of stupid fundamentalist children after another.
 
Let me assuage the hurt feelings out there. Parents should be allowed to teach whatever religous mumbo jumbo they want. That is their right. As a society we need to see to it children are at least given exposure to rational thought.

Let the kids be taught scientific thought in school and if you want tell them to disregard it. At least the kid gets exposed though and there is some hope for independent scientific thought.
 
As a society we need to see to it children are at least given exposure to rational thought.

What is considered rational thought to one person may not be to another.;)

The current public school policies are not working...........................
 
+1

"Stupid in America" by John Stossell covers similar topic: how U.S. students are as intelligent as European counterparts until around 4th grade and thereafter, get stupider and stupider, longer they stay in public school.

Surprisingly, in Europe, they have the equivalent of vouchers where money tracks students, whether they attend public or private schools.

There was a study done several years ago where students were randomly chosen via lottery from inner Washington, D.C. ghetto (mostly poor single parent families) and allowed to attend private schools (non-public schools).

Students did better (learned more) and parents participated more in their children's education because they now had the power of choice in choosing best schools for their children instead of being tied by where they lived.

Incidentally, depending on locale, expenditure on per student basis cost 33% to 50% more for public school compared to private school. One reason is that private schools have much lower ratio of non-teaching staff to teachers compared to public school.

At university level, many engineering students drop out of engineering program because of poor math education in U.S. public school.

The new book "Freedomnomics" by Lott (same guy who wrote the gun books) covers some of this.

--John
 
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I don't have the answer, but...

The gov't program has the wrong 'motto', it should instead be: 'no child left standing that still has a brain'!
2clip1
 
Why not let local communites and parents decide for themselves what is important to teach their children. The children do not belong to the a collective or a government of any kind.

Because parents frequently are idiots, and local communities often not much better.

Not to mention - have you heard of a school board?

All your childs are ours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D

PS - Did anyone else notice that public is misspelled in the title of the thread? Ooops!!!!!!!!
 
Hope I didn't mis-spell too many...

Public schooling, when coupled with good parenting, can be quite educational and a positive basis for most children. All it takes is... some good parenting skills, some time and energy devoted to the children and an occasional honest to goodness conversation with the teachers of your children.

But that's hard work and it takes away from the parent's time to... do other, more important things... I guess. It's hard and probably incorrect to generalize ALL kids or ALL school systems as being this or that. Like life, kids and parents get out of it what they put into it.

One can lay blame on the government, the unions, the administrators or school boards, student peer pressure, too much TV (or whatever you want to call sensory overload) and the lack of inspired parenting; or one can give credit to all of the same. So much depends on the parents passing on the value of learning, and not just while in a scholastic setting, but in the every moment, day to day.

Or we can let someone else raise our kids and inspire/indoctrinate their beliefs. Social skills are important, as are setting goals and achieving them, let alone the skills needed to actually reason, think, organize and make valid decisions.

And some public schools... really are atrocious. By my standards. But whaddaIknow? My son scraped by on the skin of his teeth while my daughter was a straight A student. He only wanted to study art and hang out with the rowdy boyz, she wanted to learn everything. Same schools. Same teachers.

It may be that private schooling would have helped. At least the rowdy boyz might have been a better influence or a step up. Might... maybe. Or not.
 
Give it a break with the silly inflammatory rhetoric Doug its so tiresome.

But hey, maybe thats what they teach in schools today...how to sloganeer with twisted facts and half generalizations

WilditisnttheschoolsitstheteachersunionsAlaska

But Wildalaska, if we do away with public schools, then we can have a whole class of home-schooled morons for those of us who attended public schools to exploit. Sure, some home schooled kids get very good educations, but if home schooling was a must, then we would have current moron class (those folks we see being busted on shows like COPS) raising children to the same high standard they have attained (assuming they know anything about how to teach or teach effectively) and as such we can we can then lower the minimum wage for those who can't do the math. The end result will be a nice, HIGHLY stratified society.

Of course, Doug may be on to something, given that he is moving to Louisiana or is already there. In 2005-2006, LA jumped from being the 46th top state (out of 50) to 45th over the previous year. It was a subtle move in the right direction.
http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank05.htm
 
'man did not ride on t-rex' - well, if we let local communities have total control, some will teach they did that on Noah's Ark. Sorry - I'm bad. But the point is legit.

Also, talk to teachers - the community is part of the problem - the kids don't have real June and Ward Cleaver parents. Many come from single parents of questionable ability. With the well to do - have a kid get a bad grade or punished and the parents are all over the teachers.

Last, my parents couldn't have afforded a fancy private school. A state education through 12 and a state college system let a kid whose parents didn't graduate high school, whose mother grew up in an orphanage, etc. (wah-wah, but the truth) get a PhD, write in the best journals and contribute to the education of 1000s of folks. I teach rich kids and many of them don't contribute crap after they graduate.

A crucial part of the USA is educating all our kids well. You may object to some things - the right wing usual object on ideological nonsense. The real issue is quality of education, however.

I was talking to HS teacher from Dallas, she is pretty good and getting a $400 raise this year. So why don't the best go into teaching?
 
Having just come out of high-school recently, I figured it would be helpful to lend my point of view to this debate. I will preface this by saying that conditions are obviously different region to region. I speak only of my region, not for all of them.

I attended a private school, but had a lot of friends in public school (I rowed with them through high-school at a local club). What I can say is that, at least in my neck of the woods, the disparity in education did not come from whether or not you were in public or private school. In all honesty, I think the proportion of straight-A, 1600 (now it's 2400) SAT score kids was about the same. The only thing that I got out of my private school education that the public school kids didn't was better facilities and a few more extracurricular opportunities. I don't think it's as clear cut as "private" vs. "public." I think that, in places like the East Coast (and this may be incorrect, but it is just my experience in dealing with students from those regions) many urban public schools in the spotlight are failing, while the private schools are much more established with a long legacy of wealthy families who have continually upped the prestige of the school itself. The urban public sector lies locked in this downward spiral while the private sector keeps getting reinforced with the "Old World Blood," prices and exclusivity continue to climb, and you get more and more kids thinking that because they are in the public sector in this terrible system, they can't do well. At this point, the education debate becomes more financially driven on the student's side, and not on the educator's side.

(A quick aside - my college rowing coach detested those prep school kids; they were the people who came from St. whatever's boarding school and thought they were the best thing since sliced bread. He would just go on and on about how much he hated "the kids who were born with the silver spoon in their mouths and didn't even recognize it - you know, the Dupont's, the Rockefeller's, all those high up's....")

In other words, it might not be the actual teaching that contributes the most to success post-highschool but rather, the environment in which the kids grow up in, and the subsequent networking they can acquire. There are a great deal of kids at my university who got where they are not because of test scores or intelligence, but simply because they have money and connections. We (my friends and I) went through that whole process during recruiting for rowing at the Ivies. It was very common for us to talk about "such and such a person is dumb as a brick, but they're legacy recruits and their dad knows someone/they're loaded" etc, etc. It came to the point that a lot of us joked that after a certain cutoff, your academic resume was irrellevant and it became a function of what numbers were on your tax returns. Test scores and GPA and all of that were, for the most part, the same between private schools and public schools in my region. That's not to say that the public schools were exceptional or the private schools were terrible, but each produced a number of very intelligent people if you're evaluating them solely by their academic resume.

I think the true disparity between "public" and "private" lies in the ability to cushion those who don't really care about school. In public school, if you don't care about doing well, fine - you aren't really encouraged to pick up your game and struggle through it all, etc, etc. In private school, you get an academic tutor, and they push you along and make you apply to college, you get help from individual teachers, whatever. Personally, I *hate* that. But, let me make a distinction - I hate that it is offered at private schools for kids that don't care, not for kids that need it. I think it is a great thing that it is offered for kids that need it and want to succeed, and that is where I think private schools truly surpass public schools. Private school, for me, was a breeding ground for two, unequally distributed groups of people - those who recognized that school was important and they needed to work and do well (the much, much smaller group), and those who really just didn't care about school and sort of meandered their way through classes because they could *afford* to. They had no concept of what necessity, poverty or more broadly, a state of discomfort, was simply because their parents could afford to pay the bills and they could leech off mommy and daddy. So they did, and they didn't really care about anything because they knew they would be taken care of, whether or not they got A's or D's. A lot of those classmates have since failed out of college or are attending community college, after squandering away tens of thousands of dollars of their parents money in education. It disgusts me, and I won't even talk to those people anymore. It's different, I think, in public school. A lot of those kids have a more realistic idea of what's in store for them if they don't work - whether or not they capitalize on that is a whole different story.

There are definite trade-offs though. One of the glaring issues that I've discussed at length with some of my former classmates is the differences in our abilities to write and do math in college as compared to our current peers. With the exception of the few math whiz's in my high school, the vast majority of us are much more uncomfortable with our math skills when compared to the kids who had public school math. Conversely, I am a far, far better writer than almost anyone I know at college, having tested out of the generally mandatory college writing classes and recieving very high grades in my subsequent rhetoric courses.

Again, this is only speaking for the school districts in my area, but I would hesitate to say that education is poorer simply because it is public, or better because it is private. The issue does not lie as much in the education you recieve as it does in the motivation of the student to do well. That is, of course, influenced by the teachers, but I also think it is influenced by the environment in which the student grows up and their ability or desire to change that environment, coupled with the potential effort required to do so. There is a growing issue with academic complacency and a lack of a desire to learn. I think that is greatly contributed to by a general ignorance of the economic and job-market conditions which are rapidly approaching. The majority of high schoolers and college kids these days don't really understand that the economic world we grew up and lived in, up to a few years ago, is going to turn upside down and you're going to need all the academic preparation you can to stay afloat. They think they can just coast through high-school and college and everything will be ok. We're seeing the first wave of what's on the horizon with the rapid outsourcing of human capital. It's not going to end there.

On a final note, I'll say that while I don't think home schooling is all that great, I don't think it's the education (or lack thereof) that's the most damaging to the individual. Humans are tremendously social creatures, and the prepubescent/adolescent/teenage years are pivotal in human psychological development and capacity to interact socially and integrate. Most of us have no problem with this because we are thrust into interactions of all different sorts in our junior-high/high school years. You severely cripple the social development by cutting yourself off from those interactions. The kids that I have known who have been homeschooled have been of average intelligence, but they are all socially eccentric and awkward. They simply lack the ability to communicate and interact as well as those who have been exposed to a "normal" teenage life.

Whew, that was a lot.
 
Redworm

Don't do away with them, just put them back into the hands of the states.
YES YES YES YES! That is exactly what we need to do. What works in one part of the country does not always work in another. The bureaucrats don't know this, but the people of the states will (hopefully) know this and be able to implement what is best for that locality.

The feds overstepped their authority decades ago and look at all the problems it has caused.
 
All I can offer in way of an opinion is after hearing my brother and sister's take on public, if my wife and I had kids, I would not send any of mine to a public school, never, not gonna happen.
 
Yes, by all means lets do away with one of the things that enabled America to develope an educated middle class. Let's make it where only the rich can learn to read and write. Then we can make all the poor people learn all they need to know from their churches. That way it will be alot easier to control them. :rolleyes::rolleyes::barf::barf:

And by all means, if you ever get a hangnail use this same line of reasoning and just cut off your whole leg. :rolleyes:
 
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