Tell ya what, get married, have kids, and when they reach school age, come back and pitch your fit.
Ummm......No.
"Surely he knows that DCP, The Nehor, Lamanite, and other key apologists..." -Scratch clarifying my status in apologetics "I admit it; I'm a petty, petty man." -Some Schmo
Now Nehor, you know you're saving yourself for me...you're going to be my second husband, remember?
I never looked at the private school system from Moniker's point-of-view, but she does make a lot of valid points.
The city that I spent most of my school years in was for a long time filled with teachers who did not know how to handle the rediculously rambunctious kids that I went to school with. I had a math teacher who literally sat on her desk each day and let the kids go wild, saying that she was going to get paid regardless, and she didn't care. First grade teacher threw desks around (I hid in the closet) and cried about her dead dog. Second grade teacher took a big black marker and scribbled all over a letter I was writing to a pen pal, in which I said I was shy. Ok...do you know me better than I do?
For years our only high school in this city wasn't even accredited. We were the ghetto of the Northern Virginia school districts. It's far different now, but it was a long road, believe me.
I actually enjoyed the two years I was in Catholic school...outside of my teacher who didn't like anyone who wasn't white. It was hard being a black Jew (who had heard of that? they assumed I was Baptist), but I found my education very interesting. But I was definitely not in my socioeconomic background, and Moniker is right, there were no special education/special needs children there at all. However, the curriculum was very broad for 5th and 6th graders. Was definitely a shock when I got back to public school.
I would imagine that if you had a special needs child, if you could find a private school to enroll them in, you'd be paying out the butthole.
I'm a fan of head start, because many of these kids in my area have young mothers who don't give a rat's buttcheek, and left to languish with their crackhead parents, they probably would be worse off come time to actually hit full day school...
Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances. -Ghandi
bcspace wrote:And while you're at it, stop legitimizing homosexual behavior, planned parenthood, and socialism in the schools too please. Even better, abolish the public school system altogether.
Indeed. And while were at it, let's stop the environmental hysteria, Kinseyan based sex ed, condom and birth control distribution, death education, the covert sneaking of New Age philosophy into teaching materials, and amateur psychotherapy that passes in many modern schools for "counseling".
Oh, and let's stop controlling and inducing compliance in public school children with powerful psychoactive drugs (we could return to standards and discipline in lieu of Ritalin).
And let's abolish the public school system to ice the cake.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
Unlike Nehor I actually have a child in high school right now. She's just finished her freshman year and in a few weeks will start her sophomore year. The public high school she goes to is one of the top high schools in the state academically. I was very actively involved with her schooling and following what assignments she was working on and whatnot, and I was absolutely astounded just how hard and how rigorous her classes were. She probably did more homework and projects in her freshman year alone than I did in three or four years of high school. She would come to me and discuss her tests, her projects, etc. so I knew a great deal about what was going on.
I find it hard to imagine she would have gotten a finer education anywhere else. She might have gotten a finer education somewhere else if we had perfect knowledge of all schools, perfect freedom to choose her school, and unlimited funds to pay for it, but the law of diminishing returns definitely would apply - I think the education she's receiving at her public high school is fantastic.
The utopian vision of people who clamor for the public schools to be shut down so every kid can go to Philips Academy, or Eton, or whatever, is just retarded. Private schools are not some ultimate answer to a question public schools just can't even grasp. Private schools are just other schools, run by other people, who are a lot freer to do what they please.
Personally I think there are too many private schools around, especially those founded and run by members of particular religions, for the "benefit" of the children of their own members. Think orthodox jewish schools, or fundamentalist Christian schools. Imagine schools where they really do use "Of Pandas and People" as a textbook.
For heaven's sake, before Warren Jeffs abolished the FLDS-run school in Colorado City and required all the FLDS parents to home school (ie: keep in ignorance) their children, they actually had a textbook on plural marriage. One of the audio recordings of Jeffs teaching plural marriage to young girls that's on Youtube is actually from a classroom where he's teaching them, and giving them assignments to read particular chapters from the plural marriage textbook. That's their idea of a private school. No thanks.
I had a decent public high school growing up in Massachusetts, and my daughter's got a fantastic public high school here in Arizona. Are their crappy public schools out there? Yeah, I'm sure. These schools should be improved.
The whole "abolish public schools, they were only ever created to keep poor kids ignorant so they couldn't challenge the establishment" meme is one I regard as on a par with other stupid conspiracy theories, like "the CIA created crack cocaine to keep the black race poor and subservient" and "we need to move to Montana with guns and years of food and ammo because the New World Order is coming to rule the world and destroy Christianity".
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen
Nehor is, for all intents and purposes, correct. The government schools have become a dumping ground for the bottom of the barrel of the academic landscape. One tends to go into education when one's intellectual abilities will not allow him to go anywhere else (which explains why most private schools won't touch certified teachers when hiring academic staff).
Many, if not most people teaching in the public schools today do not have degrees in any substantive subject such as history, the humanities, sociology etc. They have an education degree; that is, they have studied pedagogy, a discipline riven with fluff, trendy political correctness, and intellectual stuffing of no known value in teaching (as our national NAEP scores continue to indicate).
As Myron Lieberman pointed out years ago in his book Public Education: an Autopsy, the public schools are managed and maintained, not for the consumers of education, but for the providers; for the educracy, the teachers unions and their members. It is their school system (though publically funded, or perhaps, because of that) and it is run to fulfill their needs. Hence, our national test scores and the gross decline in educational standards over the last 40 years or so.
The public schools have become a vast playground for special interests (sometimes on the Right, but almost always on the Left) for the hearts and minds of impressionable children at taxpayer expense and involving the promulgation of ideologies and philosophies that many parents find repugnant, if not outrageous, and which have nothing to do with the primary task of public schools in a free democratic republic.
The public schools are, as a class, failing, and all previous attempts at reform have fallen under to boot of the teacher's unions, the Dept. of Educaiton, and other interested parties.
Moniker is partly right that private schools do not always turn out better students. The rub is, they turn them out statistically much more often (as does homeschooling) then do most public schools, which is reason enough to essentially abolish them. By "abolish" I do not mean a statutory destruction of the public school system. What I do mean is the complete and total end of the public school monopoly; that is, the de-unionization of all public school teachers, an end to tenure, across the board introduction of merit pay to attract the best and brightest into the field (not necessarily the certified), and the complete opening up (through a massive voucher program, educational savings accounts, or some other similar approach) of the public education system to the disciplines of the marketplace; to vigorous and dynamic competition in a free market in which both public and private schools would compete with each other for the presence of the student in the classroom. Of course, those public schools that could not delver a quality education (as most are not doing now) would disappear (and this is good). Those that could adapt and raise standards would remain, but only so long as they were able to compete with a burgeoning private market for educational services along the dimensions of quality and cost effectiveness.
In other words, a much better system would be to allow the the market (parents themselves) choose the best schools for their children as opposed to education system bureaucrats and the teacher's unions for whom the continuation of the system as presently constituted is in there interests.
Last edited by Guest on Fri Jun 20, 2008 10:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
The whole "abolish public schools, they were only ever created to keep poor kids ignorant so they couldn't challenge the establishment" meme is one I regard as on a par with other stupid conspiracy theories, like "the CIA created crack cocaine to keep the black race poor and subservient" and "we need to move to Montana with guns and years of food and ammo because the New World Order is coming to rule the world and destroy Christianity".
Judging by the entirety of Seth's post, from which this snippet is taken, he is so out of the loop on this issue as to make virtually anything he says here irrelevant.
There are some islands of excellence in the public schools, but present empirical data make quite clear they are relatively rare within a sea of mediocrity and failure. Further, Seth just cannot hide the fact that he is a secularist liberal who wants to keep the indoctrination machine of the public schools (per the OP of this thread) free from serious competition or alternatives. so that all the little Mormon, Evangelical, and Catholic children will turn out to be good little secular humanist liberals like himself who do not question the orthodoxies of the liberal faith. The road to serfdom (or "a better world", as the "progressives" would have it) is being paved in the public schools, and there is no conspiracy theory about it (nice dance Seth, but try something a little substantial, such as perhaps actually engaging the argument. There are plenty of real conspiracy theories to criticize here, all from the leftists on this board, but this isn't one of them). Others want no part of it, and have every right to want out of the Orwellian education matrix.
The cultural Left knows very well that the minds of the young are the key. When The Thing has absorbed all those around it, it has no more enemies: it has won.
One must also realize that, given the general standards prevailing within most public schools in America today, even the best, a High School diploma is, intellectually, worth little, in basic subject areas, compared to the knowledge base of even grade school children in the late nineteenth century. A child who is an "honor" student at the typical public school is probable doing 'C' level work by earlier academic public school standards.
Look at the national stats. This country is at the bottom of the industrialized Western world and even lags some non-western countries in a number of basic subjects, and has been for sometime. Seth's anecdote may be true, but hardly tells us anything about the state of American education as a whole, which bottomed out almost thirty years ago (as A Nation at Risk made clear).
Last edited by Guest on Fri Jun 20, 2008 8:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
H.L Mencken
Since our Mr. Kemp is probably not accustomed to much serious reading, he may be exempted from the above.
Last edited by Guest on Fri Jun 20, 2008 9:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
I don't expect the slightest substance from you at this point Kemp. Thanks for meeting my expectations.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us
- President Ezra Taft Benson
I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.