If that's the case, then how do so many parents succeed in homeschooling? Though I agree with your take on why schools were designed the way they are, I'm talking mostly about the overall problem that somehow lefties consistently think that throwing money at a problem produces good solutions. It doesn't. Parents caring about their kids' outcomes in schools do.
If we're spending more per student, and NOT getting better results, then something OTHER than more spending must be the solution.
Conceal-carry gun owners have better records than the POLICE. 99%+ of the gun owners in the country NEVER commit a crime. And WE'RE called the crazy ones.
It works rather well in Louisiana and Georgia, which have scholarship programs (TOPS and HOPE, respectively), which pay tuition for anyone qualified...and getting qualified means beating the average.
Except that home-school kids don't spend half the time in the classroom and get highly more phenomenal results. Understand the math lesson in ten minutes? Move on. Grasp the conjugation? Grab the history.
Butts in seats doing what amounts to more non-productive busy-work doesn't do anything for kids but aid more in ADD cases.
Skimming through the articles, I saw LITTLE mention of just about the only thing that really works in education - parental involvement. We Americans are FAR too convinced that throwing money at education is bound to fix the problem, when we spend more than any other country per student and don't get half as good results.
It's not about wealth, equality, social justice, or any of that. It's about parents who care enough to push their kids to do well in school.
When I think about it, this kind of stuff almost makes me glad - it means they're not trying to "do something" about something important that may as well just be left alone.
The problem with the TVA is that it is far too costly, and is questionable if its costs outweigh its benefits.
The New Deal's problem is that it adopted the philosophy of throwing money at problems and hoping something stuck, even if plenty of others didn't work out. We won't really know if the New Deal really worked because of the WWII issues at hand, which did so much more than the busy-work the New Deal provided. The large scale investment for technology and industry was due to the war, not something that the New Deal was working out. You cannot assume that simply because something coincided with the New Deal AND WWII that the New Deal and Keynesian economics both were massive successes - the context of WWII completely throws it out the window as to whether or not it worked, because of the massive sacrifice and work ethic of the nation at the time.
We'll probably see in the modern context if it really works or not, and if the supply-siders will have to bail everyone out again like we did during Reagan's term and bailing out the failures of LBJ's Great Society, Nixonian price controls, and Carter's ineptitude.
All those weren't the results of the New Deal, which had some colossal failures that are still dragging along today (like the TVA, which NEVER turned a profit, from what I understand). WWII produced a massively technically educated workforce, as well as the GI Bill. Soldiers came home with technical know-how and the ability to do a lot of modern jobs that drug us out of a primarily agrarian economy.
It wasn't the New Deal, it was actually primarily technology and education (which you were right about). The only other thing that I think may have helped was the CCC Camps, which physically prepared many young men to fight in a war (a problem we had going into WWI.)
It's an odd toss-up, and the one mistake many people make in homeschooling - the social isolation. However, there are good reasons to keep them out as well - so many of the kids in schools are also socially stunted with crazy, short-term priorities and morals and values that are absolutely worthless. Self-control is frowned upon.
I've heard of some other curious instances, like elementary kids being homeschooled for a few years and then placed into schools, where they nearly immediately assume leadership roles in their classroom and don't have the self-esteem issues from being picked on so much.
There's also something to be said from learning social skills from adults rather than other immature kids.
I'm planning on homeschooling, btw, if I cannot afford a good private school.
I actually agree on this point. I oppose universal healthcare (it just gives the government more power, and I don't think that we see the free market really working in healthcare now - the consumer isn't in the loop; it also doesn't promote preventative care so much - no incentives).
If we can get something like universal electronic record keeping implemented where it is secure and convenient, THEN we can talk about whether or not we really need universal healthcare with one of the major obstacles - technology - removed. We will get rid of one of the common complaints - record-keeping - that universal/single-payer proponents throw out that doesn't have to find its solution in socialized medicine.
From the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon...as a warning...
The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin!
BE PREPARED!
If there's a real cause for concern, it's within the prison system in the US. Many are short on chaplains, and they're being filled with muslim chaplains with better funding. It's one aspect of how Christians are failing domestically with the Great Commission.
If something like this were implemented, trucking companies who happen to be based in Oregon would suddenly find themselves elsewhere, with their trucks registered as being owned in other states. The state would lose a chunk of commercial revenue off of this, AND have to deal with higher prices to ship stuff into the state.
"we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty"
Is this the Onion or something? The above statement is a joke, right? Maybe part of the reason print media is taking such a downturn is both the internet AND the inability of many of the "top-flight journalists" to do anything that remotely resembles objective reporting. The internet is too accessible, cheap, and more or less admits its bias. Journalists - particularly those at the top - seem to believe that their training and expertise and degrees somehow give them license to disguise their personal beliefs and views as objective reporting.
Or, as Sledge Hammer said when asked, "Don't you read the newspapers?"
"No ma'am, I prefer to get my information from reliable sources, like rumor, and small children."
There have been almost a half-million jobs lost in the past year or so that more or less prove my point, and they pretty much run the gamut among all industry. Every week we are hearing about layoffs. How does that not prove essentially against what you're talking about?
Accountants != auto workers. White-collar non-government employees are rarely unionized, and we are seeing a TON of job-cutting lately that more or less stretches across all spectrums. You're almost treating the iron law as an absolute, instead of a general practice in some sectors. If that were the case, we wouldn't be losing so many jobs right now (which, even if we get over about 10%, isn't necessarily a catastrophe).
What about Doctors of Osteopathy? Full MD training, but doesn't have the constraints of what is essentially reaction-based medicine (fixing what is wrong) instead of preventative (keeping your body from what is going wrong).
I'm not talking IRS, I'm talking private sector, particularly those huge departments at big businesses. THOSE accountants would be in for an interesting time job-hunting if we went to a more simplified system and they didn't have much to do because the company would need fewer tax experts in-house and just people to more or less keep the books straight.
I understand that, but you won't need as many accountants (or, at least, man-hours) for the general populace outside of regular bookkeeping. A simplified, streamlined process means less work.
I'm not the biggest "flat tax" proponent, mostly supporting it just to enact some sort of simplification to the tax system....but issues like the IRS audit logs points yet again to the bloated American tax system - imagine what we could do with the economy when we don't have to add all the salaries of accountants and tax people, which add little to no value to a product (if not negative) through a simplification of the tax process. It's one of those self-propogating systems - the more laws we have on taxation, the more that companies have to spend to try and get around them.
Chicago. Detroit. DC. Poorer cities with high crime rates. New York is a relatively wealthy city - you're distancing the historical root of crime - poverty - and blaming it on inanimate objects and better police protection, which New York can afford. You want to restrict the freedom of the law-abiding needlessly, even within cities.
Conceal-carry states are relatively poorer than their neighbors and have relatively lower crime rates than states with more restrictive gun rights. You don't pay attention to what works and what doesn't in gun control. You ignore the matter that gun owners - particularly those with conceal-carry permits - don't commit crimes and want to punish them for something they aren't doing.
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If that's the case, then how do so many parents succeed in homeschooling? Though I agree with your take on why schools were designed the way they are, I'm talking mostly about the overall problem that somehow lefties consistently think that throwing money at a problem produces good solutions. It doesn't. Parents caring about their kids' outcomes in schools do.
If we're spending more per student, and NOT getting better results, then something OTHER than more spending must be the solution.
Here's the "crazier" aspect.
Conceal-carry gun owners have better records than the POLICE. 99%+ of the gun owners in the country NEVER commit a crime. And WE'RE called the crazy ones.
It works rather well in Louisiana and Georgia, which have scholarship programs (TOPS and HOPE, respectively), which pay tuition for anyone qualified...and getting qualified means beating the average.
Except that home-school kids don't spend half the time in the classroom and get highly more phenomenal results. Understand the math lesson in ten minutes? Move on. Grasp the conjugation? Grab the history.
Butts in seats doing what amounts to more non-productive busy-work doesn't do anything for kids but aid more in ADD cases.
Skimming through the articles, I saw LITTLE mention of just about the only thing that really works in education - parental involvement. We Americans are FAR too convinced that throwing money at education is bound to fix the problem, when we spend more than any other country per student and don't get half as good results.
It's not about wealth, equality, social justice, or any of that. It's about parents who care enough to push their kids to do well in school.
No, we don't like Ayers because he tried to BOMB GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. Also, he's a communist.
When I think about it, this kind of stuff almost makes me glad - it means they're not trying to "do something" about something important that may as well just be left alone.
The problem with the TVA is that it is far too costly, and is questionable if its costs outweigh its benefits.
The New Deal's problem is that it adopted the philosophy of throwing money at problems and hoping something stuck, even if plenty of others didn't work out. We won't really know if the New Deal really worked because of the WWII issues at hand, which did so much more than the busy-work the New Deal provided. The large scale investment for technology and industry was due to the war, not something that the New Deal was working out. You cannot assume that simply because something coincided with the New Deal AND WWII that the New Deal and Keynesian economics both were massive successes - the context of WWII completely throws it out the window as to whether or not it worked, because of the massive sacrifice and work ethic of the nation at the time.
We'll probably see in the modern context if it really works or not, and if the supply-siders will have to bail everyone out again like we did during Reagan's term and bailing out the failures of LBJ's Great Society, Nixonian price controls, and Carter's ineptitude.
All those weren't the results of the New Deal, which had some colossal failures that are still dragging along today (like the TVA, which NEVER turned a profit, from what I understand). WWII produced a massively technically educated workforce, as well as the GI Bill. Soldiers came home with technical know-how and the ability to do a lot of modern jobs that drug us out of a primarily agrarian economy.
It wasn't the New Deal, it was actually primarily technology and education (which you were right about). The only other thing that I think may have helped was the CCC Camps, which physically prepared many young men to fight in a war (a problem we had going into WWI.)
Yeah, whatever happened to that thing called "parenting?"
It's an odd toss-up, and the one mistake many people make in homeschooling - the social isolation. However, there are good reasons to keep them out as well - so many of the kids in schools are also socially stunted with crazy, short-term priorities and morals and values that are absolutely worthless. Self-control is frowned upon.
I've heard of some other curious instances, like elementary kids being homeschooled for a few years and then placed into schools, where they nearly immediately assume leadership roles in their classroom and don't have the self-esteem issues from being picked on so much.
There's also something to be said from learning social skills from adults rather than other immature kids.
I'm planning on homeschooling, btw, if I cannot afford a good private school.
It's a bit of an oversimplification, but I do believe that government jobs really don't count all that much in job creation statistics.
I actually agree on this point. I oppose universal healthcare (it just gives the government more power, and I don't think that we see the free market really working in healthcare now - the consumer isn't in the loop; it also doesn't promote preventative care so much - no incentives).
If we can get something like universal electronic record keeping implemented where it is secure and convenient, THEN we can talk about whether or not we really need universal healthcare with one of the major obstacles - technology - removed. We will get rid of one of the common complaints - record-keeping - that universal/single-payer proponents throw out that doesn't have to find its solution in socialized medicine.
From the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon...as a warning...
The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin! BE PREPARED!
If there's a real cause for concern, it's within the prison system in the US. Many are short on chaplains, and they're being filled with muslim chaplains with better funding. It's one aspect of how Christians are failing domestically with the Great Commission.
If something like this were implemented, trucking companies who happen to be based in Oregon would suddenly find themselves elsewhere, with their trucks registered as being owned in other states. The state would lose a chunk of commercial revenue off of this, AND have to deal with higher prices to ship stuff into the state.
"we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty"
Is this the Onion or something? The above statement is a joke, right? Maybe part of the reason print media is taking such a downturn is both the internet AND the inability of many of the "top-flight journalists" to do anything that remotely resembles objective reporting. The internet is too accessible, cheap, and more or less admits its bias. Journalists - particularly those at the top - seem to believe that their training and expertise and degrees somehow give them license to disguise their personal beliefs and views as objective reporting.
Or, as Sledge Hammer said when asked, "Don't you read the newspapers?"
"No ma'am, I prefer to get my information from reliable sources, like rumor, and small children."
Keep in mind that "cautiously favorable" simply means that "Windows 7 is not Vista."
There have been almost a half-million jobs lost in the past year or so that more or less prove my point, and they pretty much run the gamut among all industry. Every week we are hearing about layoffs. How does that not prove essentially against what you're talking about?
Accountants != auto workers. White-collar non-government employees are rarely unionized, and we are seeing a TON of job-cutting lately that more or less stretches across all spectrums. You're almost treating the iron law as an absolute, instead of a general practice in some sectors. If that were the case, we wouldn't be losing so many jobs right now (which, even if we get over about 10%, isn't necessarily a catastrophe).
What about Doctors of Osteopathy? Full MD training, but doesn't have the constraints of what is essentially reaction-based medicine (fixing what is wrong) instead of preventative (keeping your body from what is going wrong).
I'm not talking IRS, I'm talking private sector, particularly those huge departments at big businesses. THOSE accountants would be in for an interesting time job-hunting if we went to a more simplified system and they didn't have much to do because the company would need fewer tax experts in-house and just people to more or less keep the books straight.
I understand that, but you won't need as many accountants (or, at least, man-hours) for the general populace outside of regular bookkeeping. A simplified, streamlined process means less work.
I'm not the biggest "flat tax" proponent, mostly supporting it just to enact some sort of simplification to the tax system....but issues like the IRS audit logs points yet again to the bloated American tax system - imagine what we could do with the economy when we don't have to add all the salaries of accountants and tax people, which add little to no value to a product (if not negative) through a simplification of the tax process. It's one of those self-propogating systems - the more laws we have on taxation, the more that companies have to spend to try and get around them.
Chicago. Detroit. DC. Poorer cities with high crime rates. New York is a relatively wealthy city - you're distancing the historical root of crime - poverty - and blaming it on inanimate objects and better police protection, which New York can afford. You want to restrict the freedom of the law-abiding needlessly, even within cities.
Conceal-carry states are relatively poorer than their neighbors and have relatively lower crime rates than states with more restrictive gun rights. You don't pay attention to what works and what doesn't in gun control. You ignore the matter that gun owners - particularly those with conceal-carry permits - don't commit crimes and want to punish them for something they aren't doing.