Actually, Lib, far too much of your tax money goes to what could be accurately described as war profiteering.
Without getting into too much detail on what I do in the Air Force… I work on computers. These computers weigh five tons, cost seven million dollars apiece, and have approximately the processing power of an 8-bit Nintendo. They do the job, and they do it well. But there is no reason a video card capable of displaying three colors should cost as much as a new Bentley.
Yet, I’ve heard no libertarians calling for the privatization of the military. So why the sweet merciful fuck should we eliminate public schools? Public schooling seems to be working for the entire rest of the industrialized world, so maybe, just maybe we could salvage ours. Granted, the prick from Alabama mentioned in the OP isn’t helping, but that’s not even a speedbump.
Also, paying taxes is not slavery. Just wanted to point that out.
You are usually a little fairer than that. Alabama was also the center of the removal of Roy Moore from his position as State Supreme Court Judge and the removal of the Ten Commandments from the Court property. And as others have pointed out, the vote against “repealing segregation” is not as cut and dried as it first appeared to be. Not only was the wording confusing, but changing the Constitution may result in higher taxes. The law has not been enforced in many years and keeping it would not change that. Finally, near the end of the original count, the vote difference was 2,500 out of 1.4 million votes cast. These circumstances don’t leave much with which to draw conclusions about Alabama.
It would be just as easy to conclude that since George Bush was elected the President of the United States, Americans are a bunch of religious rightists.
Regarding the OP: Those who work in opposition to the religious right’s attempt to control the public school system do so a little more quietly and through legal channels. They may not get the media attention that the weirdos get, but then they are not as colorful as the ignorant.
Most of you recognize this, but generalize and stereotype anyway. How does that make you better than any other bigot?
Moore was removed because he refused a federal court order to remove them. The AG, Pryor, who began the removal proceedings stated that he disagreed strongly with the court’s decision, but that it must still be obeyed.
It’s nice to see that Alabama has agreed that rule of law is a good thing now and accepted the primacy of federal courts, though. Baby steps, I suppose.
The wording was confusing?
Seems pretty easy to me. The amendment removes those portions of the Constitution calling for segregation in schools and will guarantee a right to an education. Oh yeah, the right to an education was removed from the Constitution to try and circumvent Brown.
Heavens to Betsy, we might have to actually fund public education in our state! Can’t have that in Alabama. We don’t tolerate no book-larnin’ in these heah pahts.
And there’s no evidence, outside of a fear campaign started by Moore, that it would result in higher taxes.
The law hasn’t been enforced because they can’t enforce them due to federal constraints.
And yes, they do leave enough to draw conclusions about 50% of the voting populace of Alabama - that they’d rather keep language calling for segregation in their Constitution than deal with the small risk that they’d have to fund public education adequately.
Um, no. The appropriate analogy would be 50% of the populace of the United States voting to insert (or keep) symbolic language directly calling for the suppression of non-Christians.
Indeed, it is unfortunate that the 50% of the Alabama populace that is intelligent, tolerant and progressive don’t get airtime. Maybe you would hear more about them if they weren’t dwarfed by the other 50%.
I agree with you about the whole “broad brush” thing.
But doesn’t the “Rep.” in front of his name mean “Representative”? Like, he was chosen by a portion of Alabamans to represent them?
As mentioned elsewhere, not all Americans are evangelical pro-war pro-death penalty anti-gay anti-abortion ineloquent buttboys for the Religious Right and megacorporations, but a majority elected Bush as leader. When I lived in New England I most certainly didn’t notice everybody being incredibly liberal, but Ted Kennedy has been elected every election for the past generation, and not all W. Virginians are exactly folks you’d associate with Rockefeller values and interests.
It has a lot to do with who else is running, what the issues of the time are, etc… I know for a fact Allen didn’t get elected on the censorship ticket, and if you’ll check out the comments and postings on Alabama based blogs and in the U of AL newspaper in Allen’s own district, you’ll find that he has more than a few detractors in his own area.
My family has lived in Alabama since long before it was a state; one branch lived there before there were white people. In my own family there are right-wing wackos and zealous leftists with most being in the middle and that’s true of the state itself. I am literally becoming more offended by blanket statements about southerners than I am over blanket statements about gays.
It would help if you restated it. I assume you mean this one?
I thought my original response would have been clear enough, but as it appears I was wrong, I will elaborate.
We spent trillions of dollars on education, and three quarters of Americans have a functional understanding of celestial mechanics. If we’d spent half that much, maybe only 50% would know that the Earth revolves around the sun. If we’d spent a tenth, maybe only 10% would know that. You’re saying we should spend zero money on public education. Now, math is not my strong suit, but that sounds to me like we’re going to end up with a situation in which 0% of students know that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
The subject brings up an interesting side issue: how much of the populace can be reasonably educated under any system? Is only 75% really that bad? How does it rate against other Western nations? Are we higher? Lower? If European schools are turning out more knowledgable students, how do they fund their schools? Do they use public education to greater effectiveness, or have they found some alternate, superior system? What is that system? Would it work here? And, most pertinent to this discussion, which nations have instituted a system of education that would be acceptable to someone who adheres to the Libertarian philosophy, and how succesful has that system been for them?
Finally, I’m still curious as to the difference between schooling and education. I suspect I understand the rhetorical point you were driving at, but I find semantical arguments far more interesting that policy arguments, and so I’d be interested to know precisely how you define those two terms, and how you perceive them to be seperate from each other. As I doubt that it’s germane to the topic, however, I won’t mind if you decline to answer.
Speaking from experience, it ain’t all that hard. And frankly, you’ve got quite a few in your so-called public school system who can barely manage to read this message board.
Actually, half of 75 is 37.5, but that’s neither here nor there. Your whole statistical sample and analysis is flawed from end to end. You have no idea whether private education is not accounting for the majority of the 75%, especially considering that 90% of privately schooled 8th graders are at or above basic achievement levels, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics. Fewer than 75% of publicly schooled 8th graders compare. Those in the lowest socio-economic quartile who are privately schooled are four times more likely than publicly schooled students in the same quartile to get college degrees. 20% of 12th graders who are privately schooled take AP placement tests for college, even though they account for only 7.5% of the total.
Education is like any other edification. It is something that you must desire before it can happen. Schooling is a set of motions and circumstances that might or might not result in education. Kids don’t learn unless they want to learn. Some of them are there just because they have to be. They go through the motions and that’s it. Others want to learn so much that they seek out knowledge for themselves, reading books from the library, teaching themselves math and computer programming, absorbing knowledge from any source they can find.
Schooling is something teachers do; education is something students do.
I’d really need more background about you to properly respond to this statement. According to my parents, I “taught myself” how to read when I was three. But I was able to do so because I was fortunate enough to be born into a family that placed a premium on literacy, and both of my parents made a point to read to me every day practically from the moment I popped out. Not everyone has parents as devoted as mine, and I would never use my own childhood experience to argue that everyone should be able to perform exactly as I did, beause not everyone was born into the same circumstances which allowed me to perform as I did.
Considering that I was pulling numbers directly out of my ass, that’s hardly surprising.
Seems unlikely, given the ratio of kids in private schools to kids in public schools. If you’ve got a cite to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
Meaningless in the context of this discussion.
Here’s the thing. What makes the kids in the private schools perform better than the kids in the public schools? The fact that mom and dad are shelling out the big bucks to buy Junior an education doesn’t, in and of itself, make the kid smarter or better educated. Instead of removing public education entirely, and cutting those 80% of public-schooled AP testing kids adrift, how about we examine teaching methods and administrative policy at the private institutions, and try to adapt them to the public institutions?
So, you do not think that a desire for education can be taught? I’ve got my own anecdotal evidence and a list of teachers the length of my arm that indicate otherwise.
Excellent! Because as we all know, impoverished inner-city youths have almost unlimited access to quality reading materials and learning aids, in their well-funded public libraries and at home on their DSL lines. Not to mention that it’s so much easier to teach yourself integral calculus than it is to have a qualified professional teach you. For free. In a service offered by the government.
No shit. Libertarians want to vastly shrink the military, thereby making sure it’s devoted solely to national defense. But I think it’s putting the cart before the horse to think that military defense will save us from tyranny when we don’t even acknowledge that our children have a right to literacy.
As for the OP, I’m scared yet also DAMN glad to be living in a blue state. And hell, even in my native RI we occasionally have batshit crazy legislators like that.
As a child, dirt poor. We’re talking outhouse, wood stove, and water from a nearby spring here. Large extended family in a four-room shack, the whole nine yards. Conditions extreme enough that my detractors will think I’ve made it up. But lest you think I am complaining, I did not learn that I was poor until we moved to relatively better accomodations when my father found cabinetry work in the flatlands. There, I met kids who thought that an afternoon without television was an eternity in hell.
Pretty much the same thing here, except they didn’t so much read to me, as I would see them read and wonder what all the fuss was about. A couple of my aunts lived with us, and I used to copy the letters out of a book one of them had called Madame Bovary. I would then take my scribbles to her and ask her to read them. It seemed to delight her, and delighting her delighted me. But I fail to see what advantage our circumstances would have given either of us if we had not had the basic ganas — the desire to learn. The dumbest stump in my high school was the son of a local mill tycoon whose parents afforded him every opportunity and even a friggin’ nanny.
Gotta give you props for that. Seldom is a man willing to retract his own argument and admit to its fallacies.
Privately schooled kids consistently outshine publicly schooled kids in whopping contrast to the ratios. You can learn more here.
Gotta call bullshit on that one. Meaningless? If 90% of privately schooled students are basically competent (which means such things as the earth revolving around the sun), then it is evidence for my premise that the 75% figure you brought up might be skewed by them.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of private schooling. It includes home schooling, for one. And it isn’t all Eaton and Ivy. There are scholarships, just like in college. There are grants. There are parents who are willing to devote their lives and their resources to their kids.
With respect to making public schools into copies of private schools, that just ain’t gonna happen. And the reason is that public schools are structured to accomodate the lowest common denominator. If they required the levels of excellence that private schools require, then the riff-raff about which you’re so concerned would fall out and fail. But you won’t allow that because you think it’s somehow unfair to them, and so here we are — a public school system that is out of sight and out of mind of the public at large. Less than half the parents of assigned public school kids are “very satisfied” with the schools their kids attend. What happens when there’s an involuntary public dole is that people believe they have contributed enough (their taxes) and that the education of kids is someone else’s problem (the schools). You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You must establish rigorous expectations, or else you must prepare yourself for mediocrity.
Don’t misunderstand me. I do not mean to say that public school teachers are worthless, nor even the administrators and parents. I too had public school teachers whom I adored. It is the system itself that is sick — the system of “here’s the money, now get outta my hair”. Trying to fix that with more money is like trying to help an alcoholic by giving him more liquor.
Liberal, do you have another not quite so biased source, someplace that might be more even handed in reporting the facts of the U.S. Department of Education’s report. Is there a link to the report it’s self that I can then use to further my evil plans of world domination. Don’t get me wrong here. I like what you are saying, but i don’t want to be spoon fed by the Council for American Private Education.
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Privately schooled kids consistently outshine publicly schooled kids in whopping contrast to the ratios. You can learn more here.
As a teacher, I was delighted when Section 28 was repealed.
It came from the mindset of people who thought homosexuality was both created and taught by teachers. (Same as evolution being against God’s word, and that abstinence is the only way to deal with sex education.)
As for Liberal’s well-meaning ideas, I can offer my family experiences.
I teach in a Private School. We charge £16,000 ($31,000) per year per pupil. This buys you a 96% chance of University through class sizes of 20 or less, as well as:
an Olympic standard swimming pool
8 sports pitches (used by professional clubs)
a 220 seat theatre
a shooting range
a £2,000,000 ($3,900,000) library (paid for by parents)
600 school computers (for 1,000 pupils)
Recent School trips have visited Australia, South Africa, Fiji, New Zealand, Hawaii, Russia, Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain etc.
My sister teaches in a State School in a wealthy area. The State gives about £3,000 per pupil per year to UK Schools.)
They have class sizes of 30.
They visit France, Germany and Spain.
My father recently retired from teaching in a State School in a run-down area of London.
They have class sizes of 40. Over 30% of pupils have English as a second language. Over 40% of pupils have free School meals, because their families are on welfare.
Their annual school trip is to another part of London.
I don’t believe that asking parents to pay for their child’s education is going to help.
As shown above, wealthy parents already provide expensive extras to their chosen schools. If Government taxes are withdrawn, State Schools in dperived areas will not flourish.
Don’t get me wrong here. I like what you are saying, but i don’t want to be spoon fed by the Council for American Private Education.