The news is just horrible! Education is taking it in the…….ear. Students are graduating as idiots, teachers are being attacked on all sides, and the money is drying up, both nationally and locally.
Recently I read a report of a town in Oklahoma where 16% of the seniors could NOT name the first president of the US……another report when asking a honor student to name the 49th and 50th state….and the answer was Hawaii and Puerto Rico…..and in ALL states the budgets for schools is stretched thin, to the point of one state looking at the possibility of a 4 day school week……
Speaking before an audience of business executives at the US Chamber of Commerce on Monday, Obama hailed the decision to fire the entire teaching and support staff at Central Falls High after they rejected demands to work extra hours without pay.
He defended such measures as critical to implementing the national strategy of Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deal with 5,000 of the nation’s “lowest performing” schools, overwhelmingly located in the most impoverished areas of the country. In order to qualify for federal funding, school districts have the option of closing a school outright, handing it over to a charter school or school management company, imposing a longer school day and other attacks on teachers, or firing the staff and rehiring only half back.
This anti-education agenda is being expanded by Obama. His administration is dedicated to carrying through the long sought program of the Republican right to gut the public schools and make decent education a privilege of the wealthy, rather than a right of all.
In order to pay for the Wall Street bailout, the administration is presiding over massive cuts in public school systems across the country, along with reductions in other vitally needed social services.
It is precisely the egalitarian aspect of public education that has long been the target of the most right-wing political forces, including free market economist Milton Friedman, who denounced the public schools as a “socialist enterprise” run by the teachers’ unions. Their repeated efforts to introduce a class-based education system, however, were rebuffed time and again by the population, which Friedman denounced for its “collectivist outlook.”
Education, one of the so-called “give a ways”, is one that the country cannot afford to destroy or underfund….the country needs an educated population….business needs it, science needs it and most of all POLITICS definitely needs it.
In theory, I do agree with the principles behind Milton Friedman’s thinking, simply because I don’t believe that the alternatives work any better, or even a tenth as good as a PROPERLY SET UP free market, bad as that sometimes is.
However, that’s the trouble with these “pundits and experts”, you give them a voice and they think they can apply their beliefs to EVERYTHING, which is utter bullshit. These days, even scientists have discovered that their theories – even something as straightforward and obvious as Newton’s Laws of Gravity don’t ALWAYS apply – as in the very small (quantum physics) and the very large (black holes etc.)
Education is the key to all success and all progress of any nation – the snag with that, if you’re someone like M.F., is that there are likely to be a few bright people who, with better education, will probably realise you’re just a loud mouth jerk who’s full of it! Tough choice I guess…
The problem is that a properly set free market has not existed in a very long time, with the except of the illegal drug trade……and they also make a position harder to understand than it really is….the is another problem…..scholars seldom talk to the people only each other…..that is why I do what I do….the more people understand the better they can evaluate…..
I agree – sort of… just because a properly set up free market hasn’t existed for a long time, doen’t mean it can’t.
However, the main point was, as you pointed out – these ‘scholars’ only talk amongst themselves and are so arrogant that they don’t realise that, without talking (and NOT talking DOWN) to rest of the world, there’s no bloody point at all to what they do!
Oh I agree….the true free market is a thing of beauty…too bad it is so hard to accomplish….
That was part of the problem with socialism…..scholars would not show the people how they would benefit…..instead there was an ideological war waged and it became a joke…
Exactly…
Those ideological warfare is being replayed by the Right with Repubs, Libertarians and Tea Baggers……will it also become a joke, if it is not already?
It’s all a joke, it always has been – it’s just not a funny joke 🙁
How sad, huh?