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The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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Boston Marathon Explosion - Today's Topics: Public Schools
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khalid
Unelected Mod
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http://politicker.com/2013/04/bloomb...ave-to-change/
So Bloomberg thinks the rational response to this bombing is to change our interpretation of the Constitution? Talk about a complete fucking asshat wannabe jackboots.
So Bloomberg thinks the rational response to this bombing is to change our interpretation of the Constitution? Talk about a complete fucking asshat wannabe jackboots.
Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Correspondent / Stock Pals CEO
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I don't want to be one of those people who gets on their high horse and starts lecturing the lower class on how to spend their money, but I was dirt poor before and if you can't spare $350 a month to give your kid a fighting chance at the future, then you're not really serious about this education thing. Parents have to do more than just making a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and paying taxes. But all they are really willing to commit to is bitching, blaming the schools, blaming the teachers while they raise shitheads at home and then palm them off to the school, expecting them to turn their little De'Shawn or Aidan into a Rhodes scholar.
Haast
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Are you suggesting private school tuition is around $350/month?
I went to a mediocre private school for elementary (K-3) because we lived in an area with lousy schools. Just went and checked tuition for it. Currently, it would cost nearly $17,000 PER YEAR for grades K-4. HOLY SHIT. Then it jumps to $20,000 for grades 5-8. Mind = blown. I'm guessing rates have gone up.
Keep in mind, this was no fancy place. In fact, it was far more diverse than the suburban public schools I went to after we moved.
EDIT: In fairness, I just looked up some of the fancier private schools in the same city and the price is similar. I guess my old school has gotten a big head. It was small and quaint at the time; maybe it was cheaper too.
hodj
Vox Populi Jihadi
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This is probably one of the most nonsensical things I've read on the internet in quite a long time.
We should restrict the rights of people to provide for their children when government/the system has failed them because it denies others the right to provide for their children? I'm pretty sure you've just thrown a dart at a target, but the target was 180 degrees out of phase with where your dart actually landed. The reason that children are not being provided a roughly equivalent education is not because some parents can afford to send their children to private schools, rather, this situation is as it is because the government has failed to address the public educational system's deficiencies. You would solve a failure on the part of our government to address education properly by...restricting the rights of others to avoid having to engage in a failed system. This is not a cure, it is a delusional fantasy based in the false premise that by using my income to pay for my children to receive a better education than public schools provide, I am somehow restricting someone else's access to quality education.
Here's what I want from you.
I want you to justify this statement
You need to provide us real, hard research that shows that because Jim Bob spends the money to send his kids to a private school, Joe Bob's kids are being denied access to the same quality education. This evidence does not exist because this is not the case. What is denying poor kids access to equal quality education is a shit public education system, run by a bureaucracy totally embedded with its special interests and totally insulated from reproach, and no alternatives in the vein of being able to transfer children from failing schools to successful ones, be they public or private, without the financial capabilities of the parents.
You cannot solve a failed system by forcing people to engage in it and telling them they don't have a "right" to seek alternatives, which, in a free society, yes, in fact, they do. Impact on others has no relevance, does not exist in this situation, and is utterly nonsensical to be talking about in this debate.
Yes, actually, it is. And there are definitely gold stars for doing better than others. You would remove all that. That would leave you with mediocrity. Try appling for Medical School and telling us there is no gold stars or rewards for educational achievement, or that there should not be. That's ridiculous. You don't want doctors who couldn't swing a 2.0 GPA in high school and college for a reason.
To reassert: You cannot fix the problem of the public school system being a failure by telling people how wrong and bad and immoral they are for using their incomes to pay for their children to receive a better education. By your logic, if my kids go to public school, but I choose to pay for a tutor in after class hours, that would be immoral, wrong, or something that should not be my right in "America" because that would undermine the equality of education for all. Its ridiculous. You aren't even considering the real ramifications of what you are saying.
This. Saying competition is bad for education is like saying water is bad for fish. Rhetorical analogy I know but I don't care. Its ridiculous. The Asian system, Chinese, South Korean, Japanese, all of them are built on heavy competition based on testing results at various stages in your education, and they produce very good students, have two great economies, parents literally spend large portions of their incomes on educating and tutoring their children to ensure that they can keep up and being the competitors on the national tests.
Its a big fucking difference. Night and day. And it does work. And it is the proper way to do things. You see 12 year old Indian and Chinese kids in US universities. How many 12 year old Americans do you see in Chinese universities? Not many. For a reason. We're lazy as fuck with education and any argument that we should go one size fits all, and even lazier, is not going to solve any problems whatsoever. It will only exacerbate them.
Phazael
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@Araysar
Again, you are not wrong, but the economy changed starting in the 60s, with both parents generally having to work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. While I agree that parents need to take time and responsibility for their kids, the reality of it is that the amount of free parental time has diminished a lot over the last few decades. And again, the culture of self worship and entitlement has made everyone, parents especially, feel like the systems owes them instead of putting in the effort to achieve. But if you think every lower middle class family has the capacity to throw the extra cash out there to get their kid (or kids) into a private school in the current environment in every part of this country, you are not being realistic. And even if they did, the kind of discrimination and peer pressure little Bubba Jr will face when he is clearly the poor kid at a school jam packed with privileged upper class kids means he is still not having the same level of education those kids are.
One thing I will say is that access to information on the internet does close the gap much better than pillaging a library did in my day, but the kid has to be motivated to absorb knowledge and engage in critical thinking, which starts at home and ends at the school. Of course a lot of people have no business being parents in the first place, but that's a discussion best had in the Abortion thread....
Again, you are not wrong, but the economy changed starting in the 60s, with both parents generally having to work, especially at the lower end of the spectrum. While I agree that parents need to take time and responsibility for their kids, the reality of it is that the amount of free parental time has diminished a lot over the last few decades. And again, the culture of self worship and entitlement has made everyone, parents especially, feel like the systems owes them instead of putting in the effort to achieve. But if you think every lower middle class family has the capacity to throw the extra cash out there to get their kid (or kids) into a private school in the current environment in every part of this country, you are not being realistic. And even if they did, the kind of discrimination and peer pressure little Bubba Jr will face when he is clearly the poor kid at a school jam packed with privileged upper class kids means he is still not having the same level of education those kids are.
One thing I will say is that access to information on the internet does close the gap much better than pillaging a library did in my day, but the kid has to be motivated to absorb knowledge and engage in critical thinking, which starts at home and ends at the school. Of course a lot of people have no business being parents in the first place, but that's a discussion best had in the Abortion thread....
Noodleface
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Completely agreed with you up to here. Competition is great and all ... but there certainly can be too much of it. We all hear the horror stories of eastern education systems, 12 hour days for the kids, suicides due to bad test scores, rampant cheating etc. There is a happy medium, but I don't think going full Japan is the way to be.
You don't see Americans in overseas Universities because overseas Universities largely suck, and Americans don't want to move to China or India if they can help it. And you see just as many American 12 year olds in American Universities as foreigners (approximately zero). American Universities are still one of our main points of pride, one thing that America is actually definitely better at than the rest of the world. Maybe not as gloriously as they used to be, but still the best.
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Taking the pubes down to bare skin looks stupid on guys that are hairy. If I shaved my pubes I would have a weird bald spot surrounded by my stomach and leg hair. No fucking way I'm going to shave everything. Not having to shave your entire body is the primary upside to being a straight male.
hodj
Vox Populi Jihadi
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I don't disagree with the point you're making, but the US already has a pretty high suicide rate. As with all things, it can be taken too far, you have parents here who will attack kids soccer coaches for bad plays or whatever so its certainly not outside the realm of possibility, but I think the majority would handle it well. They do in Japan and China and South Korea. We shouldn't hold back the majority of our society because people who probably need to be addressed through proper psychological counseling might hurt themselves if the pressure's too high. In my opinion. The solution to that is to effectively treat the mentally ill.
The structure of Asian educational systems is difficult, but 12 hours of learning a day really isn't that big a deal when you're a kid. When you're a child literally all you do all day long is learn. Its pretty much your job. And it doesn't stop when you leave class in the afternoon, but I agree, twelve hours of hard studying is probably too much. That's why the system would have to be geared towards application. Teaching children through application and explanation works so much better than just straight studying. I really can't stand the way math and chemistry and other sciences are taught to people, though I understand why they are taught the way they are. Still, I think there's a better way, and that involves appealing to children's natural instincts to want to learn how things work, through exploration and application of techniques and principles key to grasping complex concepts. It would be more intensive but I think it would work a lot better.
As an aside, there's two twelve year old, identical twin Indian (dot not feather) kids at my university doing some sort of biology degrees. They even took a lab final with everyone else at the end of last semester. Its more common than you think (but still rare) to find kids in these institutions who are prodigies on some level.
US universities are the best, but Ivy League =/= the rest of the universities in the country. The average US university is better than the average Chinese one, but Shanghai university is probably better than most of the average US universities, and not as good as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc.
The structure of Asian educational systems is difficult, but 12 hours of learning a day really isn't that big a deal when you're a kid. When you're a child literally all you do all day long is learn. Its pretty much your job. And it doesn't stop when you leave class in the afternoon, but I agree, twelve hours of hard studying is probably too much. That's why the system would have to be geared towards application. Teaching children through application and explanation works so much better than just straight studying. I really can't stand the way math and chemistry and other sciences are taught to people, though I understand why they are taught the way they are. Still, I think there's a better way, and that involves appealing to children's natural instincts to want to learn how things work, through exploration and application of techniques and principles key to grasping complex concepts. It would be more intensive but I think it would work a lot better.
As an aside, there's two twelve year old, identical twin Indian (dot not feather) kids at my university doing some sort of biology degrees. They even took a lab final with everyone else at the end of last semester. Its more common than you think (but still rare) to find kids in these institutions who are prodigies on some level.
US universities are the best, but Ivy League =/= the rest of the universities in the country. The average US university is better than the average Chinese one, but Shanghai university is probably better than most of the average US universities, and not as good as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, etc.
Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Correspondent / Stock Pals CEO
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You wouldnt even pay that kind of tuition in Chicago for one of the top tier Jesuit high schools (St. Ignatius), let alone elementary schools, let alone schools of other religious orders (Jesuits schools are the most expensive). 20K is Cranbrook or Andover type of school. I'm talking a basic private school where kids at least come from semi decent families and arent just dumped there by their parents who need a babysitter from 8-4.
As i said earlier, the tuition for the elementary school I went to in early 1990s is ~$3510 right now in 2013. And this isn't in the boonies, this is in a decent middle class area of Chicago, just a few miles northwest of downtown.
Loser Araysar
Chief Russia Correspondent / Stock Pals CEO
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Mist
Eeyore Enthusiast
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Kids in the US have less school days but actually have more instruction hours per year than most other countries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...2dqO_blog.html
Some popular book mentioned the schooling gap. Was it Outliers? Mentioned American schools are based on our old farming society schedule of corn/wheat that was easy and had long summer breaks, whereas Asian schools were based around rice growing schedule that was endless work and no break. I think there's some data showing that poor kids suffer massively during the summer because their parents don't keep them learning, whereas wealthier families keep their kids learning through the summer and suffer much less of a performance drop after the summer.
Seems like going to year-round school, even keeping the total yearly hours in school the same, would automatically make our schools better. Summer break is stupid as hell anyway. No kid actually uses that time for anything beneficial, unless they're wealthy and their parents travel extensively. Korean schools have about a 4-6 week break in summer and 6ish week break in winter.
Seems like going to year-round school, even keeping the total yearly hours in school the same, would automatically make our schools better. Summer break is stupid as hell anyway. No kid actually uses that time for anything beneficial, unless they're wealthy and their parents travel extensively. Korean schools have about a 4-6 week break in summer and 6ish week break in winter.
Ignatius
#thePewPewLife
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I went to a Jesuit high school. I learned everything I should have but what made it different is they taught us not to be fucking assholes.
Teachers there didn't coddle us. We wore ties every day, and I remember the vice principal (who was scary as fuck, was in Vietnam, pretty sure he had a Brock Samson-style knife strapped to his leg) walking down the hall and grabbing my loosened tie then giving me what they called Penance Hall. We didn't have detention, they put us to work taking care of the school.
We also were taught to think for ourselves. If we were sure of an answer, we had to be able to defend it and explain our thought process. There was very little regurgitation except in fields that required it (ie math).
We talked about religion; theology was a class. But it wasn't "God is good, love, jesus mary!", it was more about critical thinking, and framing religion in the sense of helping your fellow man. Seniors were required to go do community service every Wednesday, usually at poor public schools or helping children with special needs, in addition to our normal community service requirements. We had mass every Friday that was mandatory, but really it was a chance for the Jesuits who worked at the school to talk to us. The school's motto was "Men for Others".
You can't do that in a public school. I think that is the real difference between (most) private and public schools. Talking with friends that went the public school route, more of them hated their schools and basically were taught to memorize and spit out what they had read.
I graduated in '07 for what it's worth. Wasn't that long ago.
Teachers there didn't coddle us. We wore ties every day, and I remember the vice principal (who was scary as fuck, was in Vietnam, pretty sure he had a Brock Samson-style knife strapped to his leg) walking down the hall and grabbing my loosened tie then giving me what they called Penance Hall. We didn't have detention, they put us to work taking care of the school.
We also were taught to think for ourselves. If we were sure of an answer, we had to be able to defend it and explain our thought process. There was very little regurgitation except in fields that required it (ie math).
We talked about religion; theology was a class. But it wasn't "God is good, love, jesus mary!", it was more about critical thinking, and framing religion in the sense of helping your fellow man. Seniors were required to go do community service every Wednesday, usually at poor public schools or helping children with special needs, in addition to our normal community service requirements. We had mass every Friday that was mandatory, but really it was a chance for the Jesuits who worked at the school to talk to us. The school's motto was "Men for Others".
You can't do that in a public school. I think that is the real difference between (most) private and public schools. Talking with friends that went the public school route, more of them hated their schools and basically were taught to memorize and spit out what they had read.
I graduated in '07 for what it's worth. Wasn't that long ago.
hodj
Vox Populi Jihadi
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Yet they underperform virtually every major competitor nation in pretty much every area.
The alternative is the kids being off for two weeks every 6 weeks, and I don't know if you're a parent or not, but as a parent I can tell you that that would basically make my life impossible. Who will care for my kids while I"m in school during the fall/spring? That two weeks off every two months bullshit and all year round schooling would basically mean my wife and I have to drop out of school ourselves just to ensure someone is there to watch the kids during that time. Our entire society is built around school schedules in a way, its fucking crazy but that would disrupt basically the entire structure of most families in the nation, and cost the poorest people bucketloads in dollars just to make sure the kids are being cared for during that time period.
Noodleface
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Can we just talk about ball shaving now.. thread literally turned into some faggot discussion