This thread on education is becoming a bit off-topic, but I just have to throw in my two cents. Throwing money at a problem in and of itself isn't the answer to any problem. As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, that can attract lousy teachers who are in it for the money. Money is a reward in a competitive society, so really what you need is competition: good teachers get good pay, bad teachers get bad pay, or just fired. It works like that in the tech industry: that's why our salries are 70k to 80k, easily. The problem with introducing competition in education the same way we have competition in the tech industry is that education is (probably justifiably) considered a right, to be provided by the state, with equality for all. But how can you have equality provided by the state when the simple fact is that some communities are richer and collect more taxes? If you allowed competition, rich communities would attract all the good teaching talent, leaving poorer communities with poorer teachers. And since education is supposed to be the levelling field, the spiral of poverty would thusly deepen. So the result is teachers' unions insisting on tenure and other policies that are meant to keep education uniform throughout rich and poor communities alike, to prevent exactly the stratification that competition might bring. The flipside of that is, without competition (a key element of free-market capitalism) we have socialism, or communism, or something like that. And we all know how the high ideals of equality is undermined by "free-riders", human laziness, and selfishness. i.e., Communism doesn't work. This is an open topic: I don't have a solution, or even necessarily an opinion on this topic. If I had a solution, I'd be the Education Czar (or whatever they call it.) Flame, reply, debate: thought is a good thing. -- Colonel Forbin Incidentally, I believe the same argument applies to health care. It is achieving a status approaching a state-endowed right. Where will this leave doctors and the health care industry in the future?
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And then we'd know where they were. :)
Maybe this is all a big DARPA trick to get the "enemy" to give away their positions with EMPs...
This thread on education is becoming a bit off-topic, but I just have to throw in my two cents. Throwing money at a problem in and of itself isn't the answer to any problem. As someone earlier in the thread mentioned, that can attract lousy teachers who are in it for the money. Money is a reward in a competitive society, so really what you need is competition: good teachers get good pay, bad teachers get bad pay, or just fired. It works like that in the tech industry: that's why our salries are 70k to 80k, easily. The problem with introducing competition in education the same way we have competition in the tech industry is that education is (probably justifiably) considered a right, to be provided by the state, with equality for all. But how can you have equality provided by the state when the simple fact is that some communities are richer and collect more taxes? If you allowed competition, rich communities would attract all the good teaching talent, leaving poorer communities with poorer teachers. And since education is supposed to be the levelling field, the spiral of poverty would thusly deepen. So the result is teachers' unions insisting on tenure and other policies that are meant to keep education uniform throughout rich and poor communities alike, to prevent exactly the stratification that competition might bring. The flipside of that is, without competition (a key element of free-market capitalism) we have socialism, or communism, or something like that. And we all know how the high ideals of equality is undermined by "free-riders", human laziness, and selfishness. i.e., Communism doesn't work. This is an open topic: I don't have a solution, or even necessarily an opinion on this topic. If I had a solution, I'd be the Education Czar (or whatever they call it.) Flame, reply, debate: thought is a good thing. -- Colonel Forbin Incidentally, I believe the same argument applies to health care. It is achieving a status approaching a state-endowed right. Where will this leave doctors and the health care industry in the future?