Public Education - Will it help us to a better future?
I love knowledge. I embrace learning. I seek enlightenment. Then why don’t I like school? There are many problems with public education; bureaucracy and underfunding are only a few of them. A good education is the basis of so much, from how people treat you to when you can retire. Education is foundation of our lives.
The busywork of school reminds me of an office, where people create papers that are passed from one person to another and finally end up in the recycle bin. The bureaucracy can be suffocating. A relevant example: a kid is only a minute late for class, but their teacher sends them to the attendance office. The kid has to wait in line for a half an hour to get a slip assigning them lunch detention, causing them to miss half the lesson. And because lunch detention is held in a classroom, students are not allowed to eat. When does punishment go from right to ridiculous?
Another factor which many students don’t think about is funding. Lack of funding breeds your falling-apart math book, your one-leg-is-too-short desk, and your thirty-five kids to a class. Lab activities in science depend on how many parents donated fifteen bucks to the science fund. And how can I learn about Shakespeare if some kid has drawn indecent pictures all over my copy of Macbeth? Underfunding education makes it almost pointless.
Education is the key to a successful life. A good education helps you get a good job, enables you to make informed decisions during elections, and allows you to understand world affairs. I love learning. I think the reason more of my friends don’t is because for them school has always been about wading through all the tedium towards that far distant shining place we call knowledge.
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Comments
I disagree that public schools are to blame for young liberalism.
Winston Churchill (a Brit- mind you) once famously said: "Show me a young Conservative, and I'll show you one without a heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you one without brains"
My interpretation of that is that young people are inherently socially liberal. Being born unbiased to race, culture, and pain we slowly develop our ways of thought, and while childhood can be rough for many, I would say that for most people, their youth is when they are least jaded. They aren't fiscally conservative because they have no money to lose, they don't need to protect their right to bare arms because they're not 18.
Young kids are liberal because they haven't seen the ways of the world and they still have hope, not because their teachers train them to be.
There needs to be funding for all children in public schools, for books and for special programs, both special needs and the gifted. I say we pull some of the money from pro sports. I used to work for Fox Sport Net, and I love athletics, but there is an incredible amount of money spent on salaries and incidentals. The young minds of todays youth are more important than Kenji Johjima's Hummer and his personal chauffeur... right?
You make some good points, and I do agree that growing up in general makes people conservative. However, if kids were exposed to the reality of taxes and hard work they might "grow up" faster. I personally went to private Catholic school for 9 years and I have never had one second of liberal thought.
As an anecdotal evidence, a teacher in San Francisco took her 1st grade class to her wedding as a field trip. She is a lesbian.
Is being a Lesbian a problem for you? I really don't see how being a lesbian is at all relavent.
Second, is it really a good thing to not consider both sides of an issue? You've never even considered the benefits of Liberialism? I speak as someone who is still making decisions and am undifined as far as left and right is concerned
If someone wants to be a lesbian its none of my business, but the issue of gay marriage is extremely controversial. Bringing first graders to a gay wedding is a blatant attempt to mold their minds to favor it. That is just plain wrong. Kids should be learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, not politics.
Second, I believe in small government and traditional values, which liberalism is entirely opposed to.
May I remind you that gay bashing and racism and sexism can be seen as traditional values. No I'm not painting you as any of those things, but I am interested to hear what you consider to be traditional values because everyone seems to have a different idea about that.
Secondly, I really don't understand the controversy in gay marriage, enlighten me, if you will, as to how gay marriage "ruins the sanctity of marriage?" Or "is a threat to the american family?" We live in a country where 50% of marriages are divorced, is marriage really all that sacred? I know it should be, but as you said above it's "none of your business" and I agree, it's nobody's business but her's. Why does government have the right to obstruct that? You said you believe in "Small goverment" but does that same small government have the right to define marriage for us?
Bashing people is not a traditional value, everyone should be treated with decency and respect. That being said, traditional values are basically Judeo-Christian values like the ones this nation was founded on.
Whether or not a person is gay is none of my business, but when that person goes in public and makes demands of government it IS my business. The government represents the people, and a sanction by government is basically sanction by the people. By stopping government sanctioned gay marriage, the government is not obstructing anyone from being lesbian, leading a lesbian life, or any of that stuff. It is only obstructing an attempt by lesbians to have government force every citizen to sanction their ideas and behavior.
I do believe that marriage is extremely important and that government absolutely needs to encourage it. When people have kids, it is hugely advantageous for those kids to have married parents. It just is, and statistics prove this. That is why government encourages marriage, it is not a violation of "small government" it is just an absolutely positively necessary part of government. On the other hand, and I know this will tick some people off, gay marriage does not serve an over arching need of society. It serves only the individuals that want it legal for their own purposes.
If gay people want the legal advantages of marriage, they have other avenues to achieve them in nearly every case.
My question is this: What is the reason not to allow gay marriage?
Dwyman is correct, public schools in Washington D.C. are the most expensive yet are also THE WORST in the nation (except maybe Chicago). It is not funding, its the fact that there is zero competition and every teacher is guaranteed their job no matter how bad hey are and how bad their students perform. If you want to make schools better, people need choices.
One solution would be school vouchers, which I am sure most people here will disagree with, but they will introduce the competition that otherwise will never exist. Public schools would be forced to get better, lest every student leaves for a private school.
I for sure agree, but the only missing peice of the puzzle is more government money for special needs kids. Sometimes that gets left out with disaterous results, otherwise I agree. My mother, (being a teacher) completly disagrees with me on all these points, but I think the problem comes mostly from a bad system, where in-effiecent spending meets a too powerful teachers unions.
Thats coming from me and I LOVE unions. But we have to remember that this is about the children.
Unions are a huge part of the problem, they are the reason why teachers have 100% job security. They also stone wall just about any reforms, including the voucher system. The fact is, they are an arm of the democrat party and they control what our kids are taught and how. They do not want to give up the power of molding and shaping young minds so that they grow up to be democrats. It is the reason why young people are overwhelmingly democrat.
I strongly disagree with that, most young people agree with their parent's views. The union system serves more to protect the jobs of incopetent teachers, and to keep teachers from being policed by their superiors. The biases of the school reflect the biases in the community, I have republican friends who used to live in Eastern Washington, over there, schools have a conservative bias. Teachers don't go to school and teach aginst their personal baises.
If your talking about the whole evolution/creationism thing, that argument is ridiculous. We are supposed to learn what is scientificly acurate. Kids can learn creationism from their parents, or their church. But america is about diversity, and teaching one religous idea doesn't reflect that. And as a parent, you may keep your child from learning evolution if you so choose. So there really isn't a problem.
Im not talking about science, I am talking about the basic social outlook that kids are taught. It is a fact that teachers unions, hell just about any union, give almost exclusively to democrats.
again, would disagree with that, parents are a much stronger influence in a child's life
I agree with you, except for you point about underfunding. If you pour more money onto the same system that isn't working, it doesn't help. Statistics support this, Kansas City schools recently got an almost doubled budget, they used it to get more computers, a huge indoor gym, Olympic sized swimming pool, they even payed to have taxis bring in high-level kids from far away to raise their averages. Their scores actually went slightly down. Let's get rid of the bureaucracy, then think about funding.