What are you, an actual libertarian or something? Your logic will not be accepted here. From my perspective though, if we don't provide an education, our country will desend further into chaos. As it is, young adults have no idea how many rights have already been lost. To deny education is to invite fascism.
It's about teaching the children... to be good little pinhead protesters!
- Thread starter Dixie - In Memoriam
- Start date
What are you, an actual libertarian or something? Your logic will not be accepted here. From my perspective though, if we don't provide an education, our country will desend further into chaos. As it is, young adults have no idea how many rights have already been lost. To deny education is to invite fascism.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
You need to re-read the thread. The authority is at the State level, in accordance with the constitutions of all 50 states.
apple0154
MEOW
Hey! Don't go bad-mouthing my meds.
As for imaginary unwanted babies do us all a favor and read some history. Maybe start with orphanages and continue through foster homes and temporary placement of children. Do a thorough research and read testimonials from the children, now adults, who lived through it.
From waiting for a family to adopt them to being shifted from home to home they grew up realizing no one gave a damn about them. Then there was the physical and emotional abuse that was so common.
As Ice Dancer mentioned, as a society, we seem to take less responsibility for children. We value them less.
Do you think we're going to value them more when there is a surplus? Do you think the people who abort, those who do not want a child, are going to adopt a child or properly look after a child if they're compelled to deliver one?
Where is your logic and common sense? Fewer people are choosing to have children because they don't want children.
Times have changed. In the past rural families would foster a child because it was free farm labor plus the government would give them a few $$$. Also, one or both parents stayed home, on the farm. It was a bonus to have an extra child.
Today, it's the opposite. The foster family receives little benefit. There is no work for the child to do plus neither parent stays home. Fostering has gone from being a benefit to a liability and we all know how self-centered people are today.
Do you know nothing of history? You talk about stopping abortion without thinking anything through. Even in the "best" of times, times when an extra kid was an asset, there were still un-adopted children who lived out a large portion of their lives in an institution. What do you think would happen if we added another million children, every year!
Good grief, Bravo. Think, man. Think!
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Where are the "fixes"?
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
I went to public school and I scored over 1100 on my SAT (as a junior in HS) and over 40 on my MCAT (as a junior at State U). I probably could have done better on both if I had waited till I was a senior. What did you score?
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
No no... he was silly long before anyone was debating.
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
I'm not a product of the compulsory government day care system, yet I am able to discern the difference between second person possessive adjectives and the contraction of "you are".
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
I guess you never heard of Satan? The Bible actually portrays Satan as being more powerful than God, because of temptation. It is much easier for Satan to recruit mindless nitwits like yourself, because he can dishonestly tempt you with all kinds of decadence. God can only tempt you with eternal salvation, which is a bum deal for an idiot who doesn't believe in the afterlife, it's much more appealing to get your 'rewards' now, which is what Satan promises.
Soundin' an awful lot like a Christian there, mr. spiritualist.
Speaking of Satan, did anyone see "Devil's Advocate" with Al Pacino? Just saw it again the other night - kind of a cool take on what the religion suggests is Satan's raison d'etre...
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
You can't ever fix a turd. Word to the wise!
Your kids, if they attend public school, are NOT getting a good education. Whether a kid is "impressed" by a school, is not an indicator of a "good education." Sorry, I just see no correlation between the two. 20 years ago, I would have agreed with you, we could fix the system, now I think the system is too FUBAR to fix. We need to pour kerosene on it and torch the hell out of it, then start over with a completely NEW system!
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
I don't really give a fuck what I sound like to you, I am merely trying to explain something to Apple's ignorant ass, which he had apparently never heard of. If you learned something too, good for you, but I am not preaching or trying to advocate Christianity in any way. If you would like to think that is what I am doing, and if you want to think of me as a "Christian" it doesn't bother me, I am not religiously bigoted intolerant like you, so things like that don't really get under my skin.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
"If there is an indictment of the public school system, it is the fear exhibited by its defenders. They worry that if people are given a chance to leave with vouchers or tuition tax credits, public schools will be abandoned like ghost towns in the Old West. And that may not be such a bad thing.
When an institution no longer serves people well, they react negatively either by complaining or exiting."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4172
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Dude, get a grip. My son just graduated high school with 39 AP credits, got one answer wrong on the SAT math test, and currently has a 3.9GPA at one of the top rated engineering schools in the country. That's not an indication that the system needs to be completely re-vamped.
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Did your son learn to chant the hymn to the One like these sheeple did?
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
No.
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Couldn't afford a quality education for your child? I suppose it's natural to make excuses for the failed unionized education monopoly, if only to assuage your own guilt.
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
Did they give him gold stars, koolaid and cookies too? I bet you were proud! And I bet thousands of proud parents feel exactly the same as you about their kid. My daughter also graduated top of her class, but I am intelligent enough to realize, if she had to compete with a Japanese student who also graduated top of his class in Japan, she would probably pale in comparison. We've established a very low bar for "excellence" in education, so it's no great feat that your son or my daughter were at the top of their class, and it doesn't mean they got the best education money could buy, or that they are necessarily "smart!" We think they are, because we are parents, and because the "school" has given them accolades, and we look at the GPAs and gold stars, and it seems impressive to us, as proud parents.. but what does it mean, really?
Look at the overall numbers, look at how our kids are faring compared with the Japanese... realize that we are failing our children by adopting this passive attitude about the education system, which is not doing an adequate job of educating. The choice is to keep dumping our tax money into this liberally insane system, or adopt some new system, where we control the level and quality of education with our purse strings.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
I can't comment on the comparison with Japanese schools only to say that many come to the US to study engineering. And as I said before my son as a high GPA at one of the top rated engineering schools in the US.
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
"Milton Friedman, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976. This article appeared in the Washington Post on February 19, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author and the Washington Post.
Executive Summary
Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal,available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.
Introduction
Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically reconstructed. That need arises in the first instance from the defects of our current system. But it has been greatly reinforced by some of the consequences of the technological and political revolutions of the past few decades. Those revolutions promise a major increase in world output, but they also threaten advanced countries with serious social conflict arising from a widening gap between the incomes of the highly skilled (cognitive elite) and the unskilled.
A radical reconstruction of the educational system has the potential of staving off social conflict while at the same time strengthening the growth in living standards made possible by the new technology and the increasingly global market.In my view, such a radical reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. Such a reconstruction cannot come about overnight. It inevitably must be gradual.
The most feasible way to bring about a gradual yet substantial transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. I first proposed such a voucher system 40 years ago.
Many attempts have been made in the years since to adopt educational vouchers. With minor exceptions, no one has succeeded in getting a voucher system adopted, thanks primarily to the political power of the school establishment,more recently reinforced by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, together the strongest political lobbying body in the United States.
1. The Deterioration of Schooling
The quality of schooling is far worse today than it was in 1955. There is no respect in which inhabitants of a low-income neighborhood are so disadvantaged as in the kind of schooling they can get for their children. The reason is partly the deterioration of our central cities, partly the increased centralization of public schools--as evidenced by the decline in the number of school districts from 55,000 in 1955 to 15,000 in 1992. Along with centralization has come--as both cause and effect--the growing strength of teachers' unions. Whatever the reason, the fact of deterioration of elementary and secondary schools is not disputable.
The system over time has become more defective as it has become more centralized. Power has moved from the local community to the school district to the state, and to the federal government. About 90 percent of our kids now go to so-called public schools, which are really not public at all but simply private fiefs primarily of the administrators and the union officials.
We all know the dismal results: some relatively good government schools in high-income suburbs and communities;very poor government schools in our inner cities with high dropout rates, increasing violence, lower performance and demoralized students and teachers.
These changes in our educational system have clearly strengthened the need for basic reform. But they have also strengthened the obstacles to the kind of sweeping reform that could be produced by an effective voucher system. The teachers' unions are bitterly opposed to any reform that lessens their own power, and they have acquired enormous political and financial strength that they are prepared to devote to defeating any attempt to adopt a voucher system."
http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp023.pdf
Executive Summary
Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal,available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.
Introduction
Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically reconstructed. That need arises in the first instance from the defects of our current system. But it has been greatly reinforced by some of the consequences of the technological and political revolutions of the past few decades. Those revolutions promise a major increase in world output, but they also threaten advanced countries with serious social conflict arising from a widening gap between the incomes of the highly skilled (cognitive elite) and the unskilled.
A radical reconstruction of the educational system has the potential of staving off social conflict while at the same time strengthening the growth in living standards made possible by the new technology and the increasingly global market.In my view, such a radical reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. Such a reconstruction cannot come about overnight. It inevitably must be gradual.
The most feasible way to bring about a gradual yet substantial transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. I first proposed such a voucher system 40 years ago.
Many attempts have been made in the years since to adopt educational vouchers. With minor exceptions, no one has succeeded in getting a voucher system adopted, thanks primarily to the political power of the school establishment,more recently reinforced by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, together the strongest political lobbying body in the United States.
1. The Deterioration of Schooling
The quality of schooling is far worse today than it was in 1955. There is no respect in which inhabitants of a low-income neighborhood are so disadvantaged as in the kind of schooling they can get for their children. The reason is partly the deterioration of our central cities, partly the increased centralization of public schools--as evidenced by the decline in the number of school districts from 55,000 in 1955 to 15,000 in 1992. Along with centralization has come--as both cause and effect--the growing strength of teachers' unions. Whatever the reason, the fact of deterioration of elementary and secondary schools is not disputable.
The system over time has become more defective as it has become more centralized. Power has moved from the local community to the school district to the state, and to the federal government. About 90 percent of our kids now go to so-called public schools, which are really not public at all but simply private fiefs primarily of the administrators and the union officials.
We all know the dismal results: some relatively good government schools in high-income suburbs and communities;very poor government schools in our inner cities with high dropout rates, increasing violence, lower performance and demoralized students and teachers.
These changes in our educational system have clearly strengthened the need for basic reform. But they have also strengthened the obstacles to the kind of sweeping reform that could be produced by an effective voucher system. The teachers' unions are bitterly opposed to any reform that lessens their own power, and they have acquired enormous political and financial strength that they are prepared to devote to defeating any attempt to adopt a voucher system."
http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp023.pdf