Comments on: A Sneak Peek Inside A Public School Classroom

By: The Lady Logician

The Lady Logician — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:29:52 +0000

Dave - a lot of that you can blame on the Clintons. They gutted the regular Army to the point where they HAD to rely on the National Guard to do the regular armys job. Having said that I am well aware that Recruiters have lied to hit their quota….to put it bluntly most sales reps do! Then again a lot of regular people lie as well…..it is (sadly) human nature.

However, if you enlist during peace time you had BEST be prepared to go to war….that IS your job. If you can’t do the job, then don’t sign up for it!

By: dave

dave — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 04:14:49 +0000

Jan, I followed the dustup over ROTC in SF schools and fully agree with you. Besides the benefits you mention, it was also a source of revenue, wasn’t it? I agree with all our concerns about govt oversight of schools, but this is an example of how publicly elected local school boards attract posturing power narcissists whose education management is just as stupid as the govt’s. BTW, on the Volunteer Army: when I considered Natl Guard I was told what many if not most of the Natl Guard members heard: that the Natl Guard is a peacetime force–yes, we might respond to a riot or crime wave now and then, but we would also rescue victims of natural disaster and such. The guys who signed up–at least a lot of them–didn’t expect to go to Iraq, and they never dreamed they would go a second or third time. Yes, they could go to war at any time, but with no war in sight before 9/11, they didn’t give it much thought. As Matt Damon and many others have suggested, if we did have a draft, there would be no war, because the warmongers’ kids would be taken. One of my best friends left the Youth Authority and went into the Air Force in peace time. He never finished high school but became a supervising flight mechanic– 110K a year and completely turned him around.

By: Jan

Jan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:49:09 +0000

That’s also why we’ve been fighting so hard in San Francisco to keep ROTC in the high schools after the School Board had voted to remove it. It provides a wonderful source for leadership training and grounding in discipline, self-reliance, teamwork, etc. ROTC in high schools is supported here by students, parents, teachers and school administrators…just NOT the school board members. Sound familiar? What is notable as well is that the makeup of the ROTC classes is primarily Asian students, with a smaller number of African-American and Hispanic students. Asian parents, noted for a cultural understanding of the importance of discipline and education, support ROTC enthusiastically…by the way, their children rank highest in our schools here in San Francisco.

By: The Lady Logician

The Lady Logician — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:20:12 +0000

Dave - the problem is those high tech skills that are taught in the military are taught for one thing and one thing only! There is a reason that the training they get there is like no other….there is no other organization that has the job that the military has.

I don’t relish the idea that my son could one day be sent to war, but this is a VOLUNTEER ARMY - not a drafted army. The young men and women who sign up (as my husband did) do so in full knowledge that they could go to war at ANY TIME.

By: dave

dave — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 02:45:42 +0000

Thank you for clarifying, Jan and thanks again Savage. Only other thing to add right now is wish we were at peace, so that some of these wayward kids could be steered into the military and get discipline, mechanical and high tech skills training like no other source provides. But right now they are just fodder, of course have no desire to enlist, or if they do they return with PTSD or missing parts instead of life preparation. Mission not accomplished.

By: Jan

Jan — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:35:00 +0000

Dave: First, to clarify (and to remove YOUR words from my mouth), you assumed I was implying we need to replace anti-Christian/anti-family values indoctrination with Christian and family values ones instead. Not so at all! I want schools to refrain from ANY values/religious indoctrination (that is the family’s responsibility) and return to educating children on the 3R’s and other legitimate skills needed to help them as productive adults in the world.

Savage and Dave: You’ve both brought some stimulating ideas to the discussion. Another thought is that we need to get rid of the idea of ALL children needing to prepare for college. Apprentice and technical training programs are having marvelous success rates in CA for at-risk kids failing in school. The immediate gratification of succeeding at something instills in them that needed impetus to try other tasks and persevere.

By: The Savage

The Savage — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:36:57 +0000

@dave,

Some people say… privatization would be a disaster. We have 60-80% illiteracy rates in many of our large cities. We have similar dropout rates… I’d say what we have now is a disaster.

Every solution I hear about involves creating more of what we have.

I disagree with the “it won’t happen” refrain. It will happen… it is just a matter of how long we want to continue protecting the status quo. Eventually we’ll go bankrupt doing this. The dam will break when the poor communities realize the lie they’ve been sold and demand choices in education. Rich people will always have choices. It is poor and middle class people who want a quality education who get screwed by public education. The very people the ’system’ claims to protect.

I hope you stick around and keep reading…

Thanks for the intelligent debate.

By: dave

dave — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:49:00 +0000

Savage, I agree w/ everything you say. In the honest dialogue you call for, I’d add that we need to be able to use non-PC terms and ideas like African-American, illiterate, Latinos, immigrants, trash media, enforced work/training programs, and the more than half of children in this country born out of wedlock to immature and unconscious girls who haven’t a clue on raising them.

BTW like you, teaching is my fourth career–I learned a lot more about effective teaching out in the world than I ever did in Education Courses.

Taking government STANDARDS out of it would be good, but beware of people like Jan who implies she wants Christian and family values taught and doesn’t realize she is confusing education with the indoctrination she goes on to criticize. Some sort of objective control is needed or public schools will be replaced by private madrasahs–
it’s already happened in a number of cases.

In fact, most of what you propose is unrealistic–it won’t happen. So maybe you can think of answers we could actually have a realistic chance of employing. Thanks for your thoughts.

By: The Savage

The Savage — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:00:05 +0000

@Dave,
Great questions! So the problems are… we need a place to warehouse deliquents and union teachers are very expensive baby sitters/prison gaurds who we ask to spend their entire lives in horrible careers? Okay, that is a good start. We’ve identified what public schools are. A least a little of what public schools are. So we first need an open and honest public identification of what these schools have become, then we as a society need to change how we address this problem. There are likely a thousand answers to your question. Some of these kids need to go to work. Some need to stay in school. Some need vastly different educational techniques than we are currently deploying. The first thing we need to do is quit talking about how great public education is… it isn’t great… it isn’t the foundation of our free democratic society, it is a disgrace to our free society, because it sucks. The next thing we need to do is decide how to dismantle it. And finally what to replace it with.

It is an antiquated 19th century model built by a bunch of fascists and eugenicists who believe people could be manufactured like machines.

Another thing is… why does teaching need to be a career? Why does one need to do it for a lifetime? We’ve created obstacles to people moving in and out of teaching. We should make benefits personal, not collective, and portable. I’ve changed careers 4 times and I am only 39. I will likely change careers several more times. In my experience the best teachers are the new teachers and the worst teachers are the ones nearing retirement. It is a generalization, but it holds true in most of my experiences.

Do I have all the answers… no. But I do know that a government protected public school monopoly has created an educational nightmare. We need to allow innovative entrepreneurial change in education and the teachers union fights every and all efforts to introduce market forces. We need to decide what we will do with the kids who refuse to learn and disrupt the system. If every kid has a right to an education, then many are being cheated out of their right by their fellow ’students’ who torment them and disrupt their ability to learn. People don’t value what is free… they need to own their own education. We’ve been telling the lie that people can be force ‘educated.’ They can’t. They have to decide for themselves to become educated. And we need to say this in all public debate.

By: dave

dave — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:42:38 +0000

Savage, what would you do with the kids on the street? If we kept only kids who want to be in the public schools, you’d have a horde of delinquents bent on mischief and crime loose all day. You’d have more graffiti, more shootings, more teen-age pregnancies, and ultimately more poverty, slums and welfare mothers, breeding more of the same kind of kids. I agree govt is strangling the schools, but who if not the schools will baby-sit these thugs? On teacher’s unions: teachers need a reason to endure years of trying to teach in these classrooms. Take it from me it makes you exhausted, even ill to be around these failures. Unions provide cheap health care and other protections so that some teachers can endure a career of this horror. Most of the teachers I met in schools like these wouldn’t be there but for the money and benefits–you can’t pay enough to get people to waste their own lives on these losers.