The Road to Hell..

I agree with Obama, while programs can make small differences or big differences for a few exceptional kids, in general nothing is going to work if the parents and the child dont stress and value education. A lot has already been tried. The schoold district that my kids go to is over 50% black, yet there is still a significant testing gap despite years and years of focused effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on consultants. Black kids that do well academically are made fun of by other black kids for acting white. So basically I think significant change will only come when the parents in these poor performing school districts decide that the education of their child is a top priority. Throw all the money at it you want but it aint going to work. Just look at DC's $14,000 per pupil spending.

As an example, my father was a terrible parent. He was mean and abusive, and he never knew where I was or what I was doing. The one thing he did do was demand good grades in school. I knew that if I didnt come home with straight A's, I was in trouble. While I dont recommend this method of parenting, it did work in terms of my education. It shows you what high expectations can do.

 

Hey, Lyle, I'm going to start taking these little quips against Rice personallly.

I must say that I have never met a stupid person that went to MIT. Where did you find this person? MIT is a true meritocracy.

 

Wow, Ohio does not allow a classroom with more than 26 children; and I think 26 is too high for elementary school classrooms. We still have some bad schools though.

 

I grew up in 25-40 kid classrooms. ALLA time... couldnt build schools fast enough between WPAFB expansion and Appalachians in Gen'rul Motors plants.

We had good teechurs tho... some of them, but probably not most, from wives of base employees and military personnel. The BEST were stereotypical old maid teachers.

Compassionate but didnt take much stick. Though in Jr High we began to smirk about who lived with whom.

BEST teacher I ever had, though, was a Colonel's wife. In Sr English, broken semesters.. first semester Grammar, second Composition... she regraded my grammar score from C to B after noting I actually could write a coherent sentence.
Your view may vary.

 

Better have Don point out which 'That' he is referring to. I'd think we were talking about 'classrooom size' v quality of education.

Can I add that, in the eighties, the school district I live in had the near-largest student/room ratio the lowest per-pupil expenditure and always ranked highest or second highest in the county for student grade point and college admission.

 

I'm being facetious. It's not to suggest people who go to MIT or Rice are stupid at all. They are all of course smart people. However, even the smartest of people can be really, really unintelligent about all kinds of things.

A case in point is Noam Chomsky at MIT. He's brilliant and ridiculously successful in his area of expertise, but he'a also incredibly unintelligent when it comes to other things. For example the man publically supported the Khmer Rouge while they were killing a million or so people. Brilliant!!!

Bottom line... everyone is a dummy at something. At some point, we're all stupid; even brilliant math majors at Rice and MIT.

 

I have my theory on this and Mo has pretty much alluded to it. It's no secret but it's not something that most parents want to hear. And as the DC article indicates, you can improve the stats but you have to throw a boatload of $$ into education and you'll only get a minimal result b/c this issue isn't addressed. But that is only one aspect of the problem.

The other is the quality of education. I'm willing to bet Don got a better public school education than I got, and I got a better one than the kids today (on average). On that one, I don't have the answer. I think pc nonsense is part of the problem, but teacher pay is clearly another, as are student-to-teacher ratios. I'm sure there's more nuance that I'm not familiar with.

But even then, you can find examples of districts with larger ratios, lesser paid teachers, less funding, etc that outperform those with better "metrics" ratings.

As for "stupid" people in colleges, from my experience, discipline plays a larger role in whether you're successful in school than intellect with few exceptions.

 

It's also hard to tell George W. Bush went to an upscale primary school and then Yale.

 

Mo! I was trying to be a bit tongue in cheek here. I guess I failed.

But that is essentially the argument in pettys original powerline link. Its point is that the future leaders of society are already performing community service, and thus encouraging(though it says forcing) the masses so to speak to perform community service is a essentially useless exercise or even a dangerous one. Well theres something to that it completely eliminates the possibility that by encouraging and exposing the now non service inclined youth you are improving them, opening doors in their mind.

As for part 2 the corruption of America's youth; again I was trying to be a little tongue in cheek here! I know no one here said that, but Petty did of course state that he felt America's youth had in fact receded from 40-50 years ago.

"And, by the way, Franek... my opinion is that the typical college Sophomore is actually DUMBER and less informed than the B graded HS Senior of 40-50 years ago. Only my opinion, of course."


I've heard this line of thinking to many times before and I know you have to Mo. Its the kid's these days routine;

"The music they listen to, the movies they watch, the thongs they wear, the language they use, their all selfish, lazy, never punched a time clock, always on the phone, no respect for their elders, no respect for themselves."

Anyway you pick the topic you know the view point. Pettyfog's post made him sound like a decidedly grumpy old git I thought, so I was putting those words in his mouth. Ok yeah?


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And I must chime in, everyone does in fact have the opportunity to go to college in this country. You can make it work if you have the desire. The community college route worked just fine for me. Its was more expensive than it should have been but I was able to cover the costs with my four nights a week job and now have transfered to a respectable four year university, starting in September. Granted there are many out there with far worse obstacles than I, but the tools are in place. They can make it work if its the path they want to go down.

 

OH COME ON :shock: Talk about being taken out of context. I was railing agianst full-time mom's who don't do the job properly, not reducing the world of parenting to simply baking cookies. Ugh.

 

First of all, I thought that you were being quite funny, and not railing, so we remember it differently. You did only talk about what food you provide for your children in terms of stay-at-home moms and their parenting (we could look the thread up to see if I'm wrong). I meant to, but didnt, respond by pointing out that cooking meals is only one part of parenting. That was my whole beef with Hillary's "baking cookies" comment to begin with.

BTW, where did you decide to go to school?

 

I was trying to do both and I must say I don't think HRC was trying to reduce motherhood to baking cookies either.

I was lucky enough accepted to a few places including the University of Minnesota close to home but I decided to take the leap and go west.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Victoria
http://www.uvic.ca/

 

Things like ESL, the whole ritalin debacle, slowing the pace of classes to the slowest student, etc. Unfortunately I can't provide specific examples of curriculum adjustments b/c I don't have kids in the system. I base that on things I've read and from friends with kids.

 

Okay I'll give it a go . . . . ...

ESL - we're too PC to say you live in the US, learn English. The French and the French Canadians do this, why dont we.

Ritalin - some is legit, but some of it is we're too PC to say, "teach your child some self control rather than telling him how perfect he is all the time". Schools have their hands tied when it comes to discipline and some parents cant be bothered to help thier kids behave or they think it's too negative.

Slowing the pace of classes to the slowest students - PC dictates that we're all valuable which, while true, morphs into no one can fail or do better than someone else so they teach at the slowest students' level (I would blame NCLB for this too).

 

You poking me with your Fog stick? (that was for Don, not Mo) :wink:

 

Okay, so you weren't calling me any more stupid than anyone else.

Yeah, and I agree, some of the smartest people academically have the least amount of common sense.

I knew ol' Noam taught at MIT; did he go there as a student as well? He teaches linguistics and how this qualifies him as a leading voice in politics and history has always baffled me, but I guess it is more legitimate than Jane Fonda or Susan Sarandon (sp?)