Do you reckon there’s not quite enough Us vs. Them going on in modern day America ? :dubious:
Don’t putting all the (whoever) in separate-but-equal schools create more Us versus Them?
Nope. Intermingling might initially creates friction and conflicts, sure, but over the X years you’ll be seeing the Other every day at school, and often being forced to work/play together, you get used to it. In my experience, and generally speaking, people who remain sheltered within insular communities until young adulthood or even later, then get thrust into the “real” world tend to become giant jagoffs who have no idea how to deal with people outside of their communities in non-obnoxious ways.
The less you know the Other “for real” (as opposed to “I seen 'em on TeeVee”, “I read about them”, “My mum warned me about them”), the more he scares and confuses you. Just look at the still quite virulent racism that exists in the deep South, despite the fact that black people are few and far between down there. Or simply how Americans who have never even met a Muslim in their entire lives will spew the vilest, most nonsensical crap about them, and believe every word of it. Or the 'burb Middle Class vs. Inner City Poor, a climate which goes a long way towards furthering the Repub/Dem echo chambers, “Republicans are all evil vs. Democrats are all unAmerican” crap we see on this board every goddamn day because for the most part none of y’all want to communicate *with *each other, but *about *each other among other members of the tribe.
Compartmentalization and ghettoization creates Us vs. Them, not intermingling.
Now, intermingling doesn’t automagically eliminate tribalism of course. The Monkey is strong in our species. But you have a much, much higher chance of figuring out that the Other is kinda mostly just like you if you, y’know, *meet *him. And the sooner the better, because minds calcify as they grow older. Just look at Starving Artist 
If anyone was interested, there is a school for black boys that gets public funding in Chicago. They boast a 100 per cent grad rate and 100 per cent college acceptance rate but have dismal testing scores.
I have a friend who teaches at Harvey Milk High School, and I remember there was a lot of skepticism around the idea of a school for gay kids when it was founded. There probably still is. The impression I get from her is that a lot of the students aren’t gay, they’re have even less common gender identities and orientations. Acceptance of gay kids has improved, but I can imagine kids who are intersex or undecided would have an even harder time.
Is it possible that children in separate but equal educational settings in public school might be able to gain a more positive opinion of their culture, contributing to their self esteem and success in the larger society? For example, a Mexican American child being taught about the fight at the Alamo, as it is taught from a U.S. perspective makes the child see their own people as the enemy.
Or teaching how the doctrine of Manifest Destiny contributed to the loss of land from Mexico to the U.S. might be a good thing for children to learn at a younger age, because it might help explain to a
youngster why mom and dad are
Sorry I pushed the submit instead of preview button
Continued-----treated a certain way at the border, even though they were all born in L.A., it seems blind to deny that us and them is going to go away when only one side is taught in school and the other side is learned from Grandmothers stories.
Maybe to some extent, and in some places. Where I live, school funding is based on attendance numbers. The fewer attending, the less money.
Universally, if the parents who have the ability to take their kids out of the system do so, they make the schools worse because it means the only ones at the public school are those whose parents don’t care, or can’t afford to go to public school. Plus, private schools can reject kids with behavior or developmental problems, but public schools cannot. That means that the public schools will “decline” just because the ones who leave will be the ones who would have excelled even in the public school.
So implement a voucher program so that the poor and disadvantaged can get out of the failing system. To me, there is no bigger indictment of the public schools than the fact that some working class people, who already pay taxes, scrape and save to send their kids to private school.
Let’s say that the government took money out of your paycheck and with that money provided you with a car for transportation. If you, given free transportation, turned it down and saved extra out of your own pay to buy a different car, what would that say about the quality of the car the government provided you?
… that it didn’t come with a Jesus bumper sticker? Certainly many parents who put their students in private schooling do so specifically because they’re parochial.
Sure. So chalk up another reason for private schools. The government can’t (at least because the Warren Court said so) provide to the market schools that allow religious instruction, a feature that many consumers would like to have.
Put aside the church/state or the religion is for church/school for learning argument. If many consumers want a car with built in satellite radio, then they will naturally go to auto makers who have satellite radio in the cars. We can argue all day that satellite radio is stupid, that people who listen to satellite radio are stupid, and that we don’t need satellite radio in cars, but the fact remains that any auto maker (including the government if it was in the business) that failed to provide satellite radio was failing in its purpose to satisfy the market.
That’s what they have done with religious instruction in schools. Since they can’t/won’t do it, then they need to step aside and let private businesses run schools that offer features that parents want.
There must be some misunderstanding here. No such law has been passed here in Sweden. Actually the last few years we have exerienced a boom in the establishment of new private schools. This has been possible because of a new system where private schools receive government subsidies based on the number of students.
There has been some debate about the quality of these new schools though. Some are run by companies that seem more interested in making money than providing a decent education.
Religious organisations are free to start their own schools, but they must follow the same curriculum as all other schools and all religious activities has to be voluntary and extracurricular. This has proven difficult to control, and there have been reports of discrimination of students who are not “devout” enough. There was also a case where a christian school was caught teaching creationism.
Yes, I was misinformed. The law restricts home schooling. Rabbi Somebody was upset he was not allowed to withhold his children from all schools.