We tolerate bad schools because we don’t want to pay for better schools. Those who matter don’t care because they don’t send their children there and those who matter aren’t smart enough to care. The only basis of fact in this premise is that our schools everywhere do not receive the same funding and they don’t teach the same subjects and why wouldn’t they if they were really concerned with the results?
It is probably impossible to get rid of what some people regard as “bad schools” in the next 30 years. Too many people involved, too many ideologies and conflicts of interests.
But why can’t we create a National Recommended Reading List, about 10,000 books K-12, with explanations of why each book is in the list. My mother taught me to read before I started kindergarten, but she did not suggest any books after that and I had no idea what to try.
So how many kids would learn a lot on their own regardless of the schools with a little direction and encouragement?
How many smart kids with poor parents could blow away students at better schools with merely direction to good information. Face it, computer tablets today are better than the mainframes that major universities had in the 70s and 80s.
psik
Davida03801 wrote: “Because Democrats and Progressives have a vested interest to keep a large % of the population ignorant. Therefore they really don’t want to fix the schools.”
These days it seems to be the Republicans that are benefiting from stupidity. QED.
I don’t believe we have any equivalent. “Homeless” in Norway is defined as someone who does not own or pay for their own dwelling. They get somewhere to stay provided. So all families with kids will have an address and be covered by the same laws on education as everyone else.
The climate does not encourage sleeping rough. If someone does, they are normally transients from eastern Europe come to beg during the summer.
Sort of what I figured. We don’t have a law in the US to provide for teaching children to write whose hands have been chopped off as punishment for theft, for much the same reason.
This is an interesting idea, but I’m not sure how super-necessary it is. First, there are lots of recommended reading lists out there, both prestigious (Newbery and Caldecottwinners and nominees) and niche (10 books to help children understand mental illness). Second, if a kid is gonna get a book, they’re gonna need a library (or, I guess, a book store, but libraries are likelier), which means there’s a librarian there who can make recommendations.
Between all the reading lists out there, and librarians, I’m not sure a massive official reading list is necessary.