Stupid in America w/John Stossel [Archive] - Beastie Boys Message Board

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Qdrop

01-16-2006, 03:35 PM

Anyone else catch this on Friday night (20/20)?

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1491217

very interesting stuff....

whether you think it's hyperbole or not....our nation IS far behind much of the world in education- as it pertains to level of skill at each grade level.
why is this?
and why don't most kids (particularly in US public school systems) care?

i was talking to my girl about this (she's a 5th/6th grade teacher) during the show and after...
and i just cannot relate to the students she teaches. They have no fear of failure...because they're are no consequences for failing. Jenny cannot fail her students if they do not do homework, or if they fail to participate with projects....she's not allowed to. the NYS public school system mandates that you cannot hold a student back a grade more than once....you MUST pass them on the next grade after that. where's the logic in that?
many of her students are all too aware of these loopholes in the system, and use them to the fullest. the ones that were already held back boast openly to Jenny that "whatever, you can't fail me....i already got held back last year..." and they proceed to act like idiots all fuckin year.

i think that's one of the real issues with these public schools- no fear of failure....

when i was in grade school, i went to a private catholic school. EVERYONE excelled, or tried their damndest....even the punks. because the fear of failure was engrained in us. the teachers were empowered to fail us if we deserved it....and if we failed more than one year....the school kicked us out.
i came from a school were getting good grades was "cool"...where those kids that failed or did poorly were mocked, and feared for their scholarly lives.

why are public schools so backwards?
I mean, everyone has seen those Jay Leno bits where he interviews people on the street about basic US history and other basic knowledge....and they flub it terribly....
I used to think it was just editing....but jesus...these people are all around us...
why are americans so content to be stupid?

Qdrop

01-16-2006, 03:36 PM

also: how do you feel about the school voucher system? forcing schools to compete for students based on performance and course offerings?

it's basically "free market" of school systems...competition/survivial of the fittest.

i'm all for it....

Ace42X

01-16-2006, 03:38 PM

PM an admin, get them to merge the threads across the sub-forums.

minijosh

01-16-2006, 05:37 PM

I do know that the failure of the students could and would be brought to some court in some state somewhere. The parents would be taking the teacher to court because the teacher gave the student an F on a paper and has now caused the child to think for themselves and cried to the parents about the abuse the teacher puts into their brain. Oh the pain, all the new spelling words, on the math problems, how dare that person make my child think!!! I, for one, want to know how my children are doing in school and will allow the teachers to teach their own way. There are good teachers and bad teachers but there are also good and bad students. Will the court system punish the teacher for the emotional distress caused by the failing grade? Will the US never hold another child back a grade because they will be afraid to be sued by the parents?

Oh and the Jay Leno is always done at universities around the USA so those people should know something. I'll put money on it but if each one of you guys took a immigrations test on getting into the USA, you'd fail.

EN[i]GMA

01-16-2006, 05:52 PM

Anyone else catch this on Friday night (20/20)?

NO but I kind of wanted to see it.

I like Stossel.

whether you think it's hyperbole or not....our nation IS far behind much of the world in education- as it pertains to level of skill at each grade level.
why is this?
and why don't most kids (particularly in US public school systems) care?

Yep.

We're fuckign stupid over here.

Seriously, most of the kids in my school are abso-fucking-lutely retarded.

I have stories out the ass of how dumb the kids are.

i was talking to my girl about this (she's a 5th/6th grade teacher) during the show and after...
and i just cannot relate to the students she teaches. They have no fear of failure...because they're are no consequences for failing. Jenny cannot fail her students if they do not do homework, or if they fail to participate with projects....she's not allowed to. the NYS public school system mandates that you cannot hold a student back a grade more than once....you MUST pass them on the next grade after that. where's the logic in that?
many of her students are all too aware of these loopholes in the system, and use them to the fullest. the ones that were already held back boast openly to Jenny that "whatever, you can't fail me....i already got held back last year..." and they proceed to act like idiots all fuckin year.

My school isn't quite that bad, luckily.

But I certainly see what you mean.

i think that's one of the real issues with these public schools- no fear of failure....

And no incentive to succeed, and I mean to really succeed, not just get good grades, but to actually learn.

when i was in grade school, i went to a private catholic school. EVERYONE excelled, or tried their damndest....even the punks. because the fear of failure was engrained in us. the teachers were empowered to fail us if we deserved it....and if we failed more than one year....the school kicked us out.
i came from a school were getting good grades was "cool"...where those kids that failed or did poorly were mocked, and feared for their scholarly lives.

Eh, I don't put too much stock into my grades.

I usually average about a 90-94 and have a 3.2ish GPA.

I really don't feel like wasting my time getting any better.

why are public schools so backwards?
I mean, everyone has seen those Jay Leno bits where he interviews people on the street about basic US history and other basic knowledge....and they flub it terribly....
I used to think it was just editing....but jesus...these people are all around us...
why are americans so content to be stupid?

I don't know why people are so stupid.

Everyone at my school (Aside from a few people, mostly my friends) is fucking retarded.

I mean, just absolutely moronic.

I can't comprehend being as stupid as they are.

I couldn't live with it.

I would kill myself, assuming I could figure out to use a gun.

EN[i]GMA

01-16-2006, 05:53 PM

yeahwho

01-16-2006, 06:41 PM

GMA']
I don't know why people are so stupid.

Everyone at my school (Aside from a few people, mostly my friends) is fucking retarded.

I mean, just absolutely moronic.

I can't comprehend being as stupid as they are.

I couldn't live with it.

I would kill myself, assuming I could figure out to use a gun.

Sure, but they have nice outfits and all the props the mall can keep stocked.

D_Raay

01-16-2006, 11:09 PM

Sure, but they have nice outfits and all the props the mall can keep stocked.
Heh, that's a whole other can of worms now isn't it?

I like the cut of your gib...

EN[i]GMA

01-17-2006, 02:35 PM

Sure, but they have nice outfits and all the props the mall can keep stocked.

Indeed they do.

Though perhaps I'm not one to talk for today I wore one of my 'preppier' shirts akin to what most of them wear.

yeahwho

01-17-2006, 04:10 PM

Never underestimate the power of superficial. You can make $$$ from it.

Schmeltz

01-17-2006, 04:14 PM

They have no fear of failure...because they're are no consequences for failing

That's a much more complex issue than the simple failings of the school system. Where are the parents of these children? I don't know what my public school would have done to me if I'd failed a year, but I can tell you my parents would have torn a strip off me. I was raised to work hard and get good grades as an end unto itself. Obviously these kids are being taught different values at home, making teachers' jobs immensely more difficult. The fear of failure involves more than just schooling; it's a value that needs to be inculcated in children at an early age.

forcing schools to compete for students based on performance and course offerings?

it's basically "free market" of school systems...competition/survivial of the fittest.

Uh huh. And what happens when the fittest schools are at capacity and can't take students anymore? I guess those kids lose the competition. Forcing schools to compete like that would be done at the expense of the kids they're supposed to be teaching. The youth of your nation - and every other nation - deserve a guaranteed high quality education, not the chance to maybe get one if everything happens to work out alright. Letting schools fight one another isn't a realistic solution. Providing for all schools is.

As for why your countrymen are content to be stupid... well, I was going to think about it, but instead I'm going to watch The Swan on FOX.

Schmeltz

01-17-2006, 04:20 PM

I also feel somewhat compelled to point out that a deficiency in knowledge of American history doesn't necessarily indicate a deficiency in knowledge or intelligence. I can't name very many Canadian cabinet ministers from any point in time, but I could name quite a few Japanese cabinet ministers from the 1920s and 30s. Maybe I should apply for Japanese citizenship.

Qdrop

01-18-2006, 07:39 AM

That's a much more complex issue than the simple failings of the school system. Where are the parents of these children? I don't know what my public school would have done to me if I'd failed a year, but I can tell you my parents would have torn a strip off me. I was raised to work hard and get good grades as an end unto itself. Obviously these kids are being taught different values at home, making teachers' jobs immensely more difficult. The fear of failure involves more than just schooling; it's a value that needs to be inculcated in children at an early age. oh definately...and that's part of the lack of fear of failure.
Jenny's biggest obstacle as teacher is getting the parents to care....which seems particularly difficult in the city school district she teaches in. Education is not considered a priority in that culture.

Uh huh. And what happens when the fittest schools are at capacity and can't take students anymore?
like any free market....the successful schools will me mimicked. those that are losing enrollment will look to the succeeding schools with high enrollement, see what they are offering and mimicking thier process. Or perhaps offering differant niche courses, etc.

Here's a parallel for you, bare with me.
In the US, cable companies are allowed to bundle thier channel packages however they see fit....if you want your MTV, you always have to pay for Home and Garden channel, Golf TV, Cspan, and about 60 other channels- whether you want them or not. many of these channels have terribley low viewership...people just don't want to watch them....but they survive because they are bundled together.
so far, this analogy isn't very apt....but now it flips....

legislation is now being proposed (and hopefully passed) where the cable companies can no longer bundle thier channels. they must offer each one individually....the customer can choose which channels they want, and which they don't...and only pay for those.
so what will happen? the channels which are popular and governing viewership will be just fine....while the silly, low viewship channels will likely go under...unless they change thier format to either mimick or compete with the successful channels....they can't just expect to survive in a "welfare state" like when they were bundled.
people only pay for what they want....and cannot be forced to deal with what they don't.
survival of the fittest rears it's head again.

Schmeltz

01-18-2006, 12:03 PM

sam i am

01-18-2006, 01:10 PM

Schmeltz, et al....

Why do you think we all hold "education" in such high esteem?

I agree with the overall sentiment that education is valuable in and of itself, but not everyone is willing, capable, or able to afford themselves of education.

This goes back to an old thread where I proposed the abolition of public education so that parents are FORCED to pay for their children to learn.

Think back to those you know and how many of them deserved to be educated. How many of your chums are employing their vast reservoir of knowledge in their professions now?

Only when education has a cost that is directly borne by those who want it will the quality and involvement go up as you advocate.

EN[i]GMA

01-18-2006, 02:47 PM

You can't seriously be comparing cable television to the education of an entire generation of children. Nobody's going to suffer if the Home and Garden channel goes under, and we have neither a right nor a duty to provide access to Golf TV. But society will suffer if children are not given the education to which they have a right, and which we have a duty to provide to them.

They aren't getting it now.

The fact of the matter is that some schools are going to go under if forced to compete with other schools, and that isn't going to help their students one little bit, especially when so many of them are being raised not to value education in the first place.

The problem is, the lofty ideals of 'give everyone the best education possible' are, as enacted today, not really giving anyone that great of an education.

A properly designed system could be free of many of these flaws.

If you want an educated society, forcing educators to duke it out at the expense of students is simply not a viable solution.

They aren't duking it out at anyone's expense.

That's just ignorant.

Are US and Japanese car-makers 'duking it out at the consumer's expense'?

Or has the competition between the them created better cars, for lower prices?

Should we restict Japenese cars to 'end this competition'?

What effect do you think that would have?

That's nothing but a social Darwinist wet dream. There have got to be more pragmatic, less ideological solutions out there.

In other words, the solutions you espouse.

Essentially no less ideological ('All children have a right to education' is indeed ideology) and probably less practical.

I don't think we really need to disagree on this topic.

Qdrop

01-18-2006, 02:56 PM

Enigma pretty much answered this but...

You can't seriously be comparing cable television to the education of an entire generation of children. Nobody's going to suffer if the Home and Garden channel goes under, and we have neither a right nor a duty to provide access to Golf TV. But society will suffer if children are not given the education to which they have a right, and which we have a duty to provide to them. The fact of the matter is that some schools are going to go under if forced to compete with other schools, and that isn't going to help their students one little bit, especially when so many of them are being raised not to value education in the first place. the point being that the failing schools WON'T necessarily go under....they will be forced to alter thier tactics and what they offer...to mimic the successful schools...and IF they do go under...another school with new investors will spring up overnight, offering what the popular schools do..as so and so on.
free market schooling.
kids aren't gonna be left out on the street with no school...not when there's money to be made by private companies- to teach them and get them enrolled with thier fat voucher checks.

If you want an educated society, forcing educators to duke it out at the expense of students is simply not a viable solution. That's nothing but a social Darwinist wet dream. works pretty good for capitalist economies.
better than socialist ones, anyway...

There have got to be more pragmatic, less ideological solutions out there. easy to say, hard to back up.
if you are waiting for a "solution" that EVERYONE agrees on and thinks is "just dandy"...you're the one living in ideological land.
every "solutiuon" will have it's detractors.

Schmeltz

01-18-2006, 03:14 PM

not everyone is willing, capable, or able to afford themselves of education.

We're talking about elementary education here, sam. If you seriously don't see the benefit of schooling children, you're not worth anybody's time.

I proposed the abolition of public education so that parents are FORCED to pay for their children to learn.

And what about parents who can't or won't afford these costs? How do we deal with a large body of poorly educated people with little in the way of social or technical skills? Education is a public service for a reason. Why you would want to create a caste system in your own country is beyond me.

Only when education has a cost that is directly borne by those who want it will the quality and involvement go up as you advocate.

That's ridiculous. If the quality of public education has deteriorated it has nothing to do with monetary cost and everything to do with value - specifically, the value which people assign to it. All your "solution" will do is create a wider gulf between education and the people who need it most. Perhaps if we could go about demonstrating why it is worthwhile to get an education, instead of indoctrinating young people with superficial cultural values that don't serve their futures, the quality and involvement level of public education would improve.

Are US and Japanese car-makers 'duking it out at the consumer's expense'?

Again, a piss-poor analogy. Nobody has a right to a car. Nobody has a duty to provide consumers with car. But students are not consumers and education is not a marketable commodity. Children do have a right to be educated and society does have a duty to provide them with opportunities. If it wants to survive, anyway.

'All children have a right to education' is indeed ideology

Yeah, it is. So is "slavery should be abolished" and "women have the right to vote" and "I can practice any religion I please." These are not abstract ideals to guide business plans, they are the foundational cultural concepts of our civilization. Take a look at the countries that do not believe that all children have the right to an education, or the countries where education is restricted to those who can afford it. Would you like to live there?

I don't fucking think so.

and IF they do go under...another school with new investors will spring up overnight

Oh for Christ's sake. By that logic, why are we worrying about anything? Surely new federal funding for inner-city schools will just appear out of left field tomorrow, along with a host of youth social programs and qualified educators. After all, things always work themselves out when our best interests are at stake!

And at any rate, schools aren't supposed to be worrying about constructing new tactics to keep up with their counterparts, they're supposed to be worrying about educating children. You're reducing the provision of educational opportunity to a sink-or-swim business model that simply doesn't provide for the interests of the students, on whose shoulders the future maintenance of our society depends.

works pretty good for capitalist economies.

Yes. But not for the education of children. Which is what we're actually discussing.

Honestly, it's simply astonishing to read some of these comments. Perhaps the total lack of commitment to the provision of universally accessible public education, as demonstrated here, has more to do with the problem than you social Darwinists are willing to admit.

EN[i]GMA

01-18-2006, 03:51 PM

Again, a piss-poor analogy. Nobody has a right to a car.

They do if we say they do.

YOur 'right to an education' is an arbitrary ideological distinction.

If my ideology says 'people have a right to car', than I think they do.

Nobody has a duty to provide consumers with car.

Again, totally ideological and subjective.

But students are not consumers and education is not a marketable commodity.

Sure it is.

Students ARE consumers, trying to consume the best education possible.

IF children/parents aren't consumers, parents wouldn't shop around to find better schools, or pay for private schooling, or move to a better district.

Those are clear examples of market-based beheavior.

It's evident that people want a market, or at least the benefits of a market.

Children do have a right to be educated and society does have a duty to provide them with opportunities.

Which is precisely what a voucher system, if properly enacted, would do and which is precisely NOT what the current public education system is doing.

What's the contention?

Yeah, it is. So is "slavery should be abolished" and "women have the right to vote" and "I can practice any religion I please." These are not abstract ideals to guide business plans, they are the foundational cultural concepts of our civilization.

The Lord giveth and so the Lord taketh away.

We as a society can make anything a 'cultural concept' or make anything 'not a cultural concept'.

And I don't know why our discussion needs to be so abstract; I thought you advocated pragmatism?

Take a look at the countries that do not believe that all children have the right to an education,

Such as?

or the countries where education is restricted to those who can afford it. Would you like to live there?

Such as?

I think you're being obtuse about this. There's more to providing a service (And education is service; forget the lofty ideals. To most kids school is job training.) that simply stating your objective.

Sometimes, real solutions have to be created for real problems. You can't simply say "Kids have a right to blah blah blah" and use it as some kind of club.

Kids AS OF NOW have a 'right to education' and you see what it's worth.

I would give serious consideration to a voucher-based approach.

It would easily combine the benefits of a market (Namely choice) with the benefits of the government (Namely unlimited funding).

How anyone can say that government enforced, mandatory, compulsory, dictated schooling, espescially inadequate schooling, is somehow a fullfillment of Enlightenment principals is beyond me.

What's so fucking free about a beauracrat telling me where to to school? Where's the nobility in being forced to send your child to a pitiful school because some twat drew it up that way on a map?

What's so ingratiating about you CHOOSING which school your child goes to?

IT would probably be cheaper, probably be better, assuredly be 'more free', certainly be more sensical and would likely solve much of the current problem.

Schmeltz

01-18-2006, 04:47 PM

Holy fuckin shit! I just typed out a nice long reply only to get some fucking error message when I submitted it. God fucking dammit is that ever annoying.

YOur 'right to an education' is an arbitrary ideological distinction.

No, it is a fundamental human right, and this is because education works for people. The human experience shows that people thrive on education: they live longer and better lives when educated even at a fairly basic level. Infant mortality in third world countries decreases exponentially with each year of education imparted to new mothers, to give you one example. The countries in the world with the best education systems are without exception those with the highest standards of living and the lowest rates of crime. When people can't get educated where they live, they go to immense lengths to obtain education elsewhere (that is, if they are aware of the opportunities education opens up for them).

Conversely, any moron with a hand and a foot can drive a car. The fact that you can so ludicrously claim that the distinction between the two is arbitrary and subjective tells me that you either haven't thought this through, or you really do have little to no respect for education as a vital part of human life, which is monumentally ignorant.

IF children/parents aren't consumers, parents wouldn't shop around to find better schools, or pay for private schooling, or move to a better district.

In the first place, people in your country apparently aren't doing that, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Second - what about parents who don't have these options? How is your solution, which necessarily restricts access to education, going to provide them with more choices?

We as a society can make anything a 'cultural concept' or make anything 'not a cultural concept'.

Yes indeed, but if you don't make universally accessible quality education a vital cultural concept now, then you're going to have to make general ignorance and all its attendant disastrous social and economic consequences vital cultural concepts in the future. Again, Western culture shows that education works for people. When you give people basic human rights, like a right to education, they create stable and productive societies. Make no mistake - even if this sounds abstract to you, it couldn't possibly be more pragmatic.

Such as?

Use your head. You don't need your fucking hand held.

What's so ingratiating about you CHOOSING which school your child goes to?

Why, nothing. But forcing schools to compete for students, instead of supplying schools to meet the needs of students, is not going to help anybody choose which school their child goes to. The solution to the problems facing the education of children is not to limit the playing field with a tooth and nail business plan, it is to provide children with a values system that teaches respect for learning and opportunities to exploit it to their own advantage. Qdrop thinks people are content with being stupid, and I think he's probably right. So they need to be shown that not being stupid is better. We won't accomplish that by letting schools kill each other off in the hopes that the market will supply a demand that seemingly doesn't exist.

Ace42X

01-18-2006, 05:42 PM

own3d.

EN[i]GMA

01-18-2006, 08:27 PM

Holy fuckin shit! I just typed out a nice long reply only to get some fucking error message when I submitted it. God fucking dammit is that ever annoying.

It just happend to me.

Apparently the backspace key also functions as a 'delete your entire fucking post' key.

No, it is a fundamental human right,

'Right to an education' means (To me) that you have the right to learn. It does not mean that society has the obligation to pay for that education.

Not to say I don't support publically funded education, I do, I just don't think its part of any 'right'. I just think its a good idea.

Just as the right to life means what it says and it doesn't mean you have the right to force me to help you with your life.

You can't merely say 'people have a right to x' and then expect society to fund that.

You can't have a right that takes a right away from someone else; that's non-sensical and abuses the term.

There's a difference between positive and negative rights, namely, the latter is valid and the former is not.

Your 'right to an education' gets in the way of my 'right to spend my money on what I want' possibly including education.

Now, from a consequentialist perspective, you indeed have a point: Education benefits society as a whole.

For this reason, I think it is a good idea. I've recently became much more of a consequentialist and have dropped a good portion of that libertarian ideology I just expressed to you, but I still associate with it somewhat.

I'm for publically funded education, but I don't think its a fundamental human right or it deserves an aura of reverence.

and this is because education works for people.

The human experience shows that people thrive on education: they live longer and better lives when educated even at a fairly basic level. Infant mortality in third world countries decreases exponentially with each year of education imparted to new mothers, to give you one example. The countries in the world with the best education systems are without exception those with the highest standards of living and the lowest rates of crime. When people can't get educated where they live, they go to immense lengths to obtain education elsewhere (that is, if they are aware of the opportunities education opens up for them).

I'm not disagreeing with you on this.

I think you have me portayed incorrectly.

Conversely, any moron with a hand and a foot can drive a car. The fact that you can so ludicrously claim that the distinction between the two is arbitrary and subjective tells me that you either haven't thought this through, or you really do have little to no respect for education as a vital part of human life, which is monumentally ignorant.

No, it's a difference in ideology, namely collectivist vs. libertarian.

I may be more prone to eschew consequentialism (Though in case I don't think I need to) in order to defend a particular moral(ish) argument.

In the first place, people in your country apparently aren't doing that, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Well, the wealthy are.

Vouchers would allow the poor to.

As it stands, and as it would stand if the situation were continued, the rich would always get the best education.

Second - what about parents who don't have these options How is your solution, which necessarily restricts access to education, going to provide them with more choices?

How are vouchers going to provide choices? Do you understand the system?

Yes indeed, but if you don't make universally accessible quality education a vital cultural concept now, then you're going to have to make general ignorance and all its attendant disastrous social and economic consequences vital cultural concepts in the future.

What makes you think I don't support 'universally accessible education'.

Again, I have to call into question your understanding of vouchers.

Again, Western culture shows that education works for people. When you give people basic human rights, like a right to education, they create stable and productive societies. Make no mistake - even if this sounds abstract to you, it couldn't possibly be more pragmatic.

Yet again, there's no dichotomy here.

I'm not proposing abolishing 'public' education; tax-payer money will still be used, albeit in a more effective manner.

Again, I make note of the fact that, to a letter, your ideas about 'right to an education' are being enacted in this country and they are failing. Horrendously.

Just a few hours ago I read an article by Christopher Hitchens on the state of history education in America. It's depressing.

Use your head. You don't need your fucking hand held.

I don't think you asked a valid question in the first place, so I was looking for an example of what you meant.

Whether a country 'has a right to education' is not necessarily an important factor.

Saddam's Iraq had a good education system. High literacy rates at least.

But I would hardly want to live there.

Why, nothing. But forcing schools to compete for students, instead of supplying schools to meet the needs of students,

False dichotomy.

Vouchers would supply the schools with money.

Plus, the current system of using property taxes as a primary fund is horrendously unfair.

is not going to help anybody choose which school their child goes to.

Really?

Why won't it?

The solution to the problems facing the education of children is not to limit the playing field with a tooth and nail business plan, it is to provide children with a values system that teaches respect for learning and opportunities to exploit it to their own advantage.

You are quite prone to creating false dichotomies and using pointlessly tendentious terminology.

"I think government schools are a tyrannical monopoly designed only to ingratiate students to Big Brother and foster obsequience towards state power"

See how absurd this can become?

Qdrop thinks people are content with being stupid, and I think he's probably right. So they need to be shown that not being stupid is better.

But of course they're probably too stupid to understand.

We won't accomplish that by letting schools kill each other off in the hopes that the market will supply a demand that seemingly doesn't exist.

Interesting.

I fail to see how the market system will make anything worse.

If the parents and kids don't care now and won't care then, what difference does it really make?

valvano

01-18-2006, 08:46 PM

you all go it all wrong....
public education needs more more, more money, more money...
and those administrating the public schools need less and less accountability.....

at least that's what the education unions say
:rolleyes:

seriously, does anybody on this board have school age children? my oldest daughter is in 3rd grade, public schools, and it takes active participation by BOTH parents....of course, it doesnt help when mom is too busy sitting at home waiting on the next govt check to show up to get involved, or dad is who knows where...(if the kid is lucky enough to even live with their parents)...

Ace42X

01-18-2006, 08:55 PM

my oldest daughter is in 3rd grade

Is she as stupid as you are?

valvano

01-18-2006, 09:23 PM

Is she as stupid as you are?

she's smart enough to know you spend too much time on the internet to find somebody willing to fuck you, which is about your only chance of reproducing....

:D

EN[i]GMA

01-18-2006, 09:35 PM

she's smart enough to know you spend too much time on the internet to find somebody willing to fuck you, which is about your only chance of reproducing....

:D

I would say fucking is probably anyone's only chance of reproducing unless there is a new masturbation technique I'm not yet aware of.

Presumably it's QUITE effective.

Ironically, Gang of Four's hilarious song I Love a Man in Uniform was playing while I was typing that.

I think this song applies to both the 'topic at hand' and to Valvano in general:

Time with my girl I spent it well
I had to be strong for my woman
(You must be joking, O man you must be joking)
She needed to be protected

The good life was so elusive
Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my self-respect
So I got into camouflage

The girls they love to see you shoot

I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform

To have ambitions was my ambition
But I had nothing to show for my dreams
Time with my girl I spent it well
(You must be joking, O man you must be joking)

The good life was so elusive
Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my confidence
So I got into camouflage

The girls they love to see you shoot

I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform

I need an order
(Shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(Shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(Shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(Shoot, shoot)

To have ambition
Was my ambition
Time with my girl I spent it well
(You must be joking, O man you must be joking)

The girls they love to see you shoot
The girls they love to see you shoot

I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
(They love to see you shoot)
I love a man in a uniform

The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(They love to see you shoot)

The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(They love a... they love a... they love a...)
(They love to see you shoot)

The girls they love to see you shoot
(Bang bang you're dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(They love a... they love a... they love a... bang bang)
(They love to see you shoot)

The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(They love a... they love a... they love a... bang bang)
(They love to see you shoot)

The girls they love to see you shoot
(Bang bang you're dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(They love a... they love a... they love a... bang bang)
(They love to see you shoot)

The girls they love to see you shoot
(Bang bang you're dead)
(They love a... they love a... they love a...)
(I love a man in a uniform)

Ace42X

01-18-2006, 10:16 PM

she's smart enough to know you spend too much time on the internet to find somebody willing to fuck you, which is about your only chance of reproducing....

I take that to mean "she's as stupid as me and her ma."

D_Raay

01-18-2006, 11:33 PM

Unbelievable... For all that wordsmithery and self-fanciful ideology and disturbingly narrow-minded perception when it comes to the children of our country, I am at a loss to comprehend how you could possibly be SO wrong about any one thing E.

I mean what's ok to you? Should we just start branding our children fresh out of the womb with permanent Ford or Nike emblems in exhange for "better" education? Should we take all the under-privileged children and just start educating them with courses like "burger flipping" or maybe "advanced fellatio 101"?

Schmeltz is quite right by saying that it is our duty to educate. It should be our top priority.

Maybe if so much of our taxpayer money wasn't being casually spent on creating more lunatics who want to kill us we could actually catch up to Estonia (who has better educated children than we do).

Val, I am guessing you live in a neighborhood where the phrase "You holdin'" is quite prevalent?

vickista

01-19-2006, 01:38 AM

bush is a dickhead
:mad:

ms.peachy

01-19-2006, 04:10 AM

bush is a dickhead
:mad:
Erm... well, you're not exactly wrong, but that's hardly a particularly insightful or relevant contribution to this discussion. Uh, thanks for playing, though.

valvano

01-19-2006, 07:43 AM

Val, I am guessing you live in a neighborhood where the phrase "You holdin'" is quite prevalent?

not really, my wife is a public school teacher for a rougher area, i've been hearing her teacher stories for 14 years, on both the administration side and the student/parent side...

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 07:58 AM

Oh for Christ's sake. By that logic, why are we worrying about anything? Surely new federal funding for inner-city schools will just appear out of left field tomorrow, along with a host of youth social programs and qualified educators. After all, things always work themselves out when our best interests are at stake! no, NOT federal funding. private funding...investment by private business.
elementary/grade/highschools should be private enterprises like Universties.

THAT is the model "public schools" should follow: private college universities.

no more federal funding for schools...just federal vouchers. and private schools that the people choose from to gain an education.

And at any rate, schools aren't supposed to be worrying about constructing new tactics to keep up with their counterparts, they're supposed to be worrying about educating children. the latter will take care of the former. again, think of this as universities competing against each other for your college tuition.

You're reducing the provision of educational opportunity to a sink-or-swim business model that simply doesn't provide for the interests of the students, on whose shoulders the future maintenance of our society depends. hmm...works great for higher education...

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 08:00 AM

Why, nothing. But forcing schools to compete for students, instead of supplying schools to meet the needs of students, is not going to help anybody choose which school their child goes to. brutha, you crazy.

The solution to the problems facing the education of children is not to limit the playing field with a tooth and nail business plan, it is to provide children with a values system that teaches respect for learning and opportunities to exploit it to their own advantage. Qdrop thinks people are content with being stupid, and I think he's probably right. So they need to be shown that not being stupid is better. We won't accomplish that by letting schools kill each other off in the hopes that the market will supply a demand that seemingly doesn't exist. but that is not the place of schools to do so....that is the place of parents and communities.

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 08:03 AM

Maybe if so much of our taxpayer money wasn't being casually spent on creating more lunatics who want to kill us we could actually catch up to Estonia (who has better educated children than we do).

it's NOT a question of "more money", D.
throwing money at it won't fix the problem. DON'T fall for the "we're just underfunded" claim.
it's WELL beyond that....
it's the system....the structure of the system that is failing, and the culture of apathy that it has created. as well as the environment that fosters that apathy.

ms.peachy

01-19-2006, 08:14 AM

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 09:38 AM

Q, I understand your argument for vouchers, and I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, but I do have concerns that actually, this wouldn't in fact benefit pupils. My fear is that hte indicators of a "successful" school will be those that produce kids who score well on standardised test scores, and that what that means is that kids will be kept to an increasingly rigid curriculum and move essentially from one phase of testing into another. (This is currently what is happening to an extent in Britain.) I think that that puts an unfair amount of stress on young children to measure up to a fairly objective standard, one with little regard for whether the child is actually learning or just regurgitating in many cases. Also, I'm concerned that many subjects we already see being cut will be further reduced - things like art, music, drama etc will be regarded (are already being regarded) as superfluous and not worthy of investment, and my opinion is that this actually contributes to the overall 'dumbing down' in the long run, by creating an educational model that fails to produce culturally rounded individuals.

but it's Federal guidlines and structures that are causing the problems in many cases, or adding to them.
let's face it...the gov't and city administrators are FUCKIN CLUELESS about pragamatic teaching, and logistics or procedures. it's nothing but ideologicall theories, slogans, and red tape. hard to get results that way.
EVERY day, Jenny comes home with aggravating stories about idiot state-mandated guidlines and orders she has to carry out, instead of teaching HER way....
she actually wrote a published article about this America's Choice curriculum that she feels is hampering the schools, not helping them (and i illustrated the article for her...)

i think that privatizing schools would actually ENHANCE curriculums like music, art, dance, etc....
privatizing would allow for more specializing of schools..with more true choice.
case in point: one of THE most popular schools in the city of Rochester is the School of the Arts, downtown. City families get on waiting lists and go through extensive interviews and admissions to get in, to avoid the terrible to average city schools. why not give the people more of what they want? more "School of the Arts" type schools? why not go with the flow, rather than telling the masses "NO! you can't go to private schools....we are going to "somehow fix" these public schools, and you're gonna LIKE it! no vouchers for you!"

Schmeltz

01-19-2006, 11:13 AM

It does not mean that society has the obligation to pay for that education.

If society wants to survive, it has an obligation to pay for the education of its children. You might not like it, and you might think it infringes on some right of your own (which is a ridiculous idea anyway), but that's just the way it's gotta be. I guess it's something of a moot point since you said anyway that there is value in educating children. But I will say again that the cost of not providing children with education and opportunity is far, far greater than the cost of supplying them with these things. That's why your car analogy didn't work: it would indeed be ridiculous to say that everybody has a right to a car and then expect society to fund that right. People don't need cars. But they do need to be educated. Meeting that need is more important than considerations of market ideology or efficiency.

How are vouchers going to provide choices? Do you understand the system?

As I understand it, a voucher enables a set of parents to pay for the education of their children at the school of their choice. The problem (well, one of them) as I see it is that the higher-end schools simply can't accomodate everybody, while lower-end schools will wither and die without direct federal funding because parents won't want to send their children there. This has the unavoidable effect of limiting choice (and therefore the educational opportunities open to children) simply because the playing field gets smaller.

Besides, as demand for registration in these schools goes up, so will tuitions, according to the laws of the market. So vouchers will have to rise in value to meet the cost, assuming they were high enough to meet it in the first place (as I understand it, they rarely are). So it doesn't seem to me that vouchers will necessarily be any more effective at getting money to educational institutions.

If the parents and kids don't care now and won't care then, what difference does it really make?

It's hardly good practice to formulate public policy based purely on heavily politicized ideology simply because things are already tough and might not get worse. I think the Soviets tried that and it didn't work out very well for them.

THAT is the model "public schools" should follow: private college universities.

But not everybody gets to go to a private college university. Access is restricted to a small portion of the population - those able to pay for it. The whole underlying idea of public education is that it is universally accessible to everybody. Higher education is very different - not everybody is suited for it, wants it, or needs it, and hence it's much more open to a supply and demand, market-based system like what you advocate.

You could say that universities supply a demand, while elementary schools supply a need. The former is much more easily defined as a marketable commodity than the latter, especially when we're talking about something like education. Now, if every parent was supplied through vouchers with the equal ability to pay for education of equally high quality across the board, I would certainly see the merit of the system you propose. But that's just as utopian and fantastic as any idea I've ever heard or espoused.

sam i am

01-19-2006, 11:38 AM

This has been an enlightening discussion to peruse thus far.

OK, the way I see it is as follows : a blended system along the lines of what Q & E are espousing on one side and what Schmeltz and D are espousing on the other.

We can all probably agree that the current configuration is not a workable long-term solution.

For a bit of history : how do you, Schmeltz, D, and Ace, think children were educated prior to "public" education?

The truth is that the vast majority of Americans (or any other nationality you can name) were NOT educated. They worked on farms or in menial labor that did not require skill sets that are currently the most marketable worldwide (i.e. computer skills, writing literacy, etc).

Instead, jobs were agrarian in rural areas (you needed to know how to foal a colt, for instance, but the ability to operate a telegraph or a computer were non-existent or far in the future) and menial in urban areas (factory workers needed to know how to do piecework or assembly line, but did not need to know calculus or accounting, for example).

Parents, at that time, were solely responsible for educating their children. Sometimes, communities would band together and hire a teacher to come in and give a more "formal" education (see "Little House on the Prairie" for a prime example of this).

Girls, mostly, did not learn how to read and write, unless they were from wealthier families. Boys, especially in more urban settings, would get some form of education, but graduation rates from "high schools" did not become a job prerequisite until far into the 20th century.

Now, for a bit of perspective, inventions did germinate, industry advanced, civilization increased worldwide, and most of the daily items we take for granted were created under this old system of "education."

Only in the past 60 years or so, in the US, has education become "universal," with literacy and specialized knowledge gaining currency as marketable commodities once a person moved past "childhood."

OK, now Schmeltz is absolutely correct in stating that education is fundamental and beneficial, but Enigma is also correct in stating that it is not a RIGHT. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (or equality, in France) are the only RIGHTS that are directly laid out in the Constitution of the United States of America. Free speech, bearing arms, etc., were only added as Amendments to the original document, but they are not in the same class as those first three that are specifically enunciated.

I think some of the controversy that we come across with this subject, as with many others on these boards, is the gulf between what is perceived as "rights" or "fundamentals" in Europe or Canada and what we perceive here in the US.

Free thinking and "do-it-yourselfness" are much more ingrained in American culture and psyche than in other places worldwide.

Yet, despite the inequites and indignities that are the American educational system, the US continues to be the world leader in innovation, technology, and commerce.

So......

We must be doing something right.

The bottom line is that the system, as currently configured, is not the ideal, nor does it work for everyone, but it can certainly be improved through ideas like vouchers that do not purport to assume that everyone is entitled to equal OUTCOMES, only equal OPPORTUNITIES.

Ali

01-19-2006, 11:42 AM

It's a plot to make you all too stupid to find a job so you have to join the army. :p

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 11:57 AM

As I understand it, a voucher enables a set of parents to pay for the education of their children at the school of their choice. The problem (well, one of them) as I see it is that the higher-end schools simply can't accomodate everybody, while lower-end schools will wither and die without direct federal funding because parents won't want to send their children there. good.

This has the unavoidable effect of limiting choice (and therefore the educational opportunities open to children) simply because the playing field gets smaller. again, you are failing to see the effect of a market system in the private sector. when shit schools close down, other private entities will open up to fill the gap. there's money to be made.
the successfull schools will be emulated by other new schools (or revised ones)....competition will keep tuition in check as well.
this is all free market 101. please tell, specifically what you don't understand about this, or why you don't feel a privatized school system will work in this manner as any other private sector business.

Besides, as demand for registration in these schools goes up, so will tuitions, according to the laws of the market. but competition between other new or revised schools keeps prices level. Tuition costs will be a selling point just like quality. also, just like any other free market entity...you can have price regulation, and anti-trust rulings...things of that nature.

But not everybody gets to go to a private college university. Access is restricted to a small portion of the population - those able to pay for it. The whole underlying idea of public education is that it is universally accessible to everybody. Higher education is very different - not everybody is suited for it, wants it, or needs it, and hence it's much more open to a supply and demand, market-based system like what you advocate. primary education need not be as expensive as higher education. i'm just advocating the business model.
unlike higher education, there will be a MUCH larger populace making use of primary education...thus, more private schools, higher enrollement, more competition (with self regulating prices) as well the possibility of price regulation by the gov't.
this isn't a stretch, man.
this system is happening outside your window...right now. and it's working pretty damn well. (of course Ace would say otherwise)

You could say that universities supply a demand, while elementary schools supply a need. sure, except the elementary schools aren't doing a very good job of supplying that need.
the fact of the matter is that the logicstics of running something as complex as an educational system, state by state...with thousands upon thousands of schools, with millions of students with separate needs and interests....is just too much for a gov't to run.
they can't do it.
governments are forced to dictate "one size fits all" curriculums...that don't work well.
gov't can't overcome educational issues effected by students homelife or culture...they are just too detached from the situation.
these are things that the people (the market, the society) need to determine and tackle themselves.
the gov't fits the bill, the people run the show.

D_Raay

01-19-2006, 01:49 PM

Yeah it's working in governments such as Chile, Sweden, The Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Poland and a few other countries, generally supported by political parties ranging from the Right to the Center-Left, and were sometimes introduced by the Center-Left itself (in the Netherlands). It should be stressed that not all voucher programs are alike, so that those introduced by the Left may differ in many ways from those of the Right. Since the context in which the plan is introduced affects outcomes, it can be hard to generalize from either successes or failures.

However, the policy has remained deeply unpopular in other countries. In the UK, The Conservative Party proposed such a policy during the 2005 general election. It was blamed by many for their subsequent defeat after being the subject of an negative Election broadcast (similar to an 'attack ad') by the winning Labour party.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), a U.S. teachers union and the largest labor union in the country, "(U.S.) Voters, for the last 30 years, have rejected vouchers every time they've been proposed". The NEA has a long-held interest in opposing school choice.

There are three major problems as I see it:

1.Segregation

Choice is just a subterfuge for segregation, like it was in the Old South.

2.Taking Public Funding Away from Public Schools

If a school is failing, the solution isn't to give 50 scholarships to 50 children and leave 500 behind, but to fix the problem, fix the whole school.
If the Titanic doesn't have enough lifeboats for everybody, then nobody should use one.

3.Church/State Separation

The Babe Ruth of arguments. Vouchers clearly violate the Constitution's separation of church and state. They run counter to our Founders who sought that taxpayers not fund religion.

valvano

01-19-2006, 01:53 PM

1.Segregation

Choice is just a subterfuge for segregation, like it was in the Old South.

The Babe Ruth of arguments. .

i know this has nothing to do with education, but weren't the yankees and the red sox among the last MLB teams to have black players?

yes, the red sox wer indeed the last MLB team to have a black player in 1959, more than a dozen years after robinson...and the yankees werent that much ahead of the bosox....

so don't paint the south as a land of segregation and ignore what was going on in the "progressive" north.... :rolleyes:

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 02:37 PM

again, you are failing to see the effect of a market system in the private sector.

Probably because it never works. Schools, like trains, are essential services - people can't do without them, and people do not have the option to "shop around." No amount of economic theory can change the simple logistics of it - people need a school that is in range of their house, irrespective of its qualities. Unless everyone gets shipped off across the country, on a local level a free-market system just won't occur.

It is exactly the same as when they privatised the trains here, we were all told that competition would lead to investment and improvement in quality, but because trains simply do not operate like that (You can't just choose not to take a particular train because you don't like it) we ended up with the worst of all worlds - with the private companies reducing quality without fear of going bust.

All that will happen if you give parents choice is that schools which teach intelligent design are going to be packed to the gills and receive a proportionally large amount of funding, whereas poor areas (unprofitable ones) are going to suffer from ghettoisation.

Children are not like coal, you can't just move them around schools weekly to keep on top of the best deal. The disruption of moving schools can be very stressful, and will remove the stability that developing children require. Uprooting your child every time a better school opens up will leave them with no friends and serious anxiety orders.

The companies involved will know this, they have whole departments dedicated to pushing the envelope. They will know precisely how shitty their school can get before people leave, and it is guaranteed to be several notches lower than "an adequate school."

And can you really see the anit-intellectual parents giving a rats ass anyway?

sam i am

01-19-2006, 02:50 PM

^^^^^^^^^^^^

This entire argument is specious.

Schools and trains are NOT necessities.

Air, water, food, shelter...yes.

Schools, trains, governments....not.

Let's at least be honest with our discussion and all agree that schools are an OPTION in society. Plenty of societies, throughout recorded history, have prospered and grown to serve their people WITHOUT formal education EVER being a part of the system.

valvano

01-19-2006, 03:03 PM

Probably because it never works. Schools, like trains, are essential services - people can't do without them, and people do not have the option to "shop around." No amount of economic theory can change the simple logistics of it - people need a school that is in range of their house, irrespective of its qualities. Unless everyone gets shipped off across the country, on a local level a free-market system just won't occur.

It is exactly the same as when they privatised the trains here, we were all told that competition would lead to investment and improvement in quality, but because trains simply do not operate like that (You can't just choose not to take a particular train because you don't like it) we ended up with the worst of all worlds - with the private companies reducing quality without fear of going bust.

how much in tax money has amtrak been funded since its inception in 1971 by nixon, and when was the last time it made a profit?

:confused:

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 03:07 PM

how much in tax money has amtrak been funded since its inception in 1971 by nixon, and when was the last time it made a profit?

What part of "It is exactly the same as when they privatised the trains here" means "it is exactly the same as Amtrak" ?

I know I should be more patient with you, what with you being a moron, but you are really trying.

However, while we are on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMTRAK#Federal_funding

More evidence to show that "an independent for-profit corporation" need not be efficient.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:08 PM

Unbelievable... For all that wordsmithery and self-fanciful ideology and disturbingly narrow-minded perception when it comes to the children of our country, I am at a loss to comprehend how you could possibly be SO wrong about any one thing E.[/quoted]

What exactly am I wrong about?

[quote]
I mean what's ok to you? Should we just start branding our children fresh out of the womb with permanent Ford or Nike emblems in exhange for "better" education?

What does that have to do with anything I've discussed?

My ENTIRE POINT was that these voucher systems need not be privately funded and indeed should be publically funded.

Should we take all the under-privileged children and just start educating them with courses like "burger flipping" or maybe "advanced fellatio 101"?

Maybe we should send them to 'advanced argument manipulation classes'. I'm sure you can vouch for their efficacy, forgive the pun.

Schmeltz is quite right by saying that it is our duty to educate. It should be our top priority.

What an outstanding declaration. Now lets try to actually apply this principal.

Maybe if so much of our taxpayer money wasn't being casually spent on creating more lunatics who want to kill us we could actually catch up to Estonia (who has better educated children than we do).

I don't think its really an issue of money, or at least not solely money.

Washington DCs students recieve the most funding per student but are generally regarded as some of the worst students in the country.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:13 PM

no, NOT federal funding. private funding...investment by private business.
elementary/grade/highschools should be private enterprises like Universties.

THAT is the model "public schools" should follow: private college universities.

no more federal funding for schools...just federal vouchers. and private schools that the people choose from to gain an education.

Wouldn't a voucher amount to funding?

the latter will take care of the former. again, think of this as universities competing against each other for your college tuition.

hmm...works great for higher education...

Exactly.

Simply take the university system and add in a failsafe for the poor (Vouchers) and system would be ideal.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:17 PM

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 03:23 PM

I'm with Peachy on this. It is inevitable that in an ostensibly competitive system, the onus will be on the school to achieve better test scores, confusing that with actually providing a decent education.

It is one of my biggest frustrations with education in the UK that it is geared around a never-ending cycle of meaningless tests and scores, which has little to no bearing on a candidate's aptitude in the field. The tests are closer to measuring your ability to take the tests, rather than being able to apply or retain knowledge.

In my opinion, the whole education system needs a serious overhaul. Its fundament and principles need to be re-examined, as well as its mechanisms.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:29 PM

If society wants to survive, it has an obligation to pay for the education of its children. You might not like it, and you might think it infringes on some right of your own (which is a ridiculous idea anyway), but that's just the way it's gotta be. I guess it's something of a moot point since you said anyway that there is value in educating children. But I will say again that the cost of not providing children with education and opportunity is far, far greater than the cost of supplying them with these things. That's why your car analogy didn't work: it would indeed be ridiculous to say that everybody has a right to a car and then expect society to fund that right. People don't need cars. But they do need to be educated. Meeting that need is more important than considerations of market ideology or efficiency.

We'll call it even.

I think we actually agree more than we disagree, practically if not ideologically.

As I understand it, a voucher enables a set of parents to pay for the education of their children at the school of their choice. The problem (well, one of them) as I y because the playing field gets smaller.see it is that the higher-end schools simply can't accomodate everybody, while lower-end schools will wither and die without direct federal funding because parents won't want to send their children there. This has the unavoidable effect of limiting choice (and therefore the educational opportunities open to children) simpl

But 'middle-end' schools will prop up to take their place.

I don't feel the need to go into an extremely complex example, but its really quite simple.

Lower-end schools, if they want money, will have to improve. They won't have a choice.

If they fail (Which is a good thing, not a bad one), a new school will take its place.

If one 'school' fails it will just close up shop and sell the school building...to another private schooling company.

A better one.

This school company will enforce its criteria and will become profitable.

There needn't by any actual downtime at the school; the transfer would be an easy one.

Schools wouldn't lie dormant, if that's your argument. It's not like the demand would go down; everyone wants an education and everyone would have funding.

'Lower-end' schools would mimic the practices of 'higher end' schools making education itself better in the process.

This is all very rudimentary.

Besides, as demand for registration in these schools goes up, so will tuitions, according to the laws of the market.

But there is no real scarcity power, that I see, in schooling.

A less-successful school can easily emulate a successful one meaning that 'successful' schools have no power to raise prices exorbitantly.

Now there will still be 'elite' schools, expensive schools, but overall, schooling will be cheap. Cheaper than it is now actually.

So vouchers will have to rise in value to meet the cost, assuming they were high enough to meet it in the first place (as I understand it, they rarely are).

Private schooling isn't really that expensive, or at least wouldn't be if a real market existed.

5,000 a year sounds high to me, but considering that we already spend over 7k per pupil, a voucher of 5k would still be a bargain by comparison.

So it doesn't seem to me that vouchers will necessarily be any more effective at getting money to educational institutions.

Sure they will.

Effective at getting it GOOD institutions as well.

If your argument were true, the american university system would be horrible but as you know, its the envy of the world.

It's hardly good practice to formulate public policy based purely on heavily politicized ideology simply because things are already tough and might not get worse. I think the Soviets tried that and it didn't work out very well for them.

'Politicized ideology'. LIke yours. Like mine. Like the Soviets. Like nearly everyones.

But not everybody gets to go to a private college university.

They would if we had a voucher system which is exactly the point.

Access is restricted to a small portion of the population - those able to pay for it.

Which, if we had a voucher system, would not be true.

Not that we should have one, though.

The whole underlying idea of public education is that it is universally accessible to everybody. Higher education is very different - not everybody is suited for it, wants it, or needs it, and hence it's much more open to a supply and demand, market-based system like what you advocate.

So we don't hand out vouchers for colleges and we do for schools.

You could say that universities supply a demand, while elementary schools supply a need.

You could say that, but you'd be both wrong and economically ignorant.

There are no needs, only demands.

The former is much more easily defined as a marketable commodity than the latter, especially when we're talking about something like education.

Yeah it is, because a 'need' can be whatever you say it is, but a 'demand' is a very specific thing.

Now, if every parent was supplied through vouchers with the equal ability to pay for education of equally high quality across the board, I would certainly see the merit of the system you propose. But that's just as utopian and fantastic as any idea I've ever heard or espoused.

THere's something utopian about mailing everyone a voucher for $5,000, to be spent a private (Regulated) educational institution?

And yet again, for at least the third time, I point out that THE CURRENT SYSTEM (THE ONE YOU SUPPORT) IS FAILING SPLENDIDLY.

sam i am

01-19-2006, 03:35 PM

^^^^

Beautifully argued : coherent and spot-on.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:35 PM

Yeah it's working in governments such as Chile, Sweden, The Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Poland and a few other countries, generally supported by political parties ranging from the Right to the Center-Left, and were sometimes introduced by the Center-Left itself (in the Netherlands). It should be stressed that not all voucher programs are alike, so that those introduced by the Left may differ in many ways from those of the Right. Since the context in which the plan is introduced affects outcomes, it can be hard to generalize from either successes or failures.

Sounds good to me.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), a U.S. teachers union and the largest labor union in the country, "(U.S.) Voters, for the last 30 years, have rejected vouchers every time they've been proposed". The NEA has a long-held interest in opposing school choice.

Hahaha.

The NEA? No vested interest there, is there?

They're a leading reason for schools sucking now.

There are three major problems as I see it:

1.Segregation

Choice is just a subterfuge for segregation, like it was in the Old South.

Eh?

Do you realize how 'segregated' some schools are NOW?

Vouchers would do a lot to fix segregation, not make it any worse.

2.Taking Public Funding Away from Public Schools

If a school is failing, the solution isn't to give 50 scholarships to 50 children and leave 500 behind, but to fix the problem, fix the whole school.
If the Titanic doesn't have enough lifeboats for everybody, then nobody should use one.

Do you understand the system at all?

I really don't think so.

3.Church/State Separation

The Babe Ruth of arguments. Vouchers clearly violate the Constitution's separation of church and state. They run counter to our Founders who sought that taxpayers not fund religion.

PRivate schools need not be religious.

sam i am

01-19-2006, 03:38 PM

GMA']PRivate schools need not be religious.

Exactly.....although in practice many are, Edison schools and Montessori schools are private and non-religious.

I went to a non-religious private high school and it was well-funded, but could have benefitted from a voucher program that would have allowed parents to CHOOSE where to send their children.

What's up with all the typical libs on this thread being anti-choice when it comes to education decisions?

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 03:40 PM

GMA']
If they fail (Which is a good thing, not a bad one), a new school will take its place.

If one 'school' fails it will just close up shop and sell the school building...to another private schooling company.

A better one.

This school company will enforce its criteria and will become profitable.

All pie in the sky. Companies aren't in the business of investing in a failing market. "Yeah, they couldn't achieve profitability, that MUST mean that this is a great opportunity!"

Quite the opposite - a failing in a sector is viewed as a warning of risk, not an indicator of potential.

More likely is that a failing school will be stigmatised, and mo number of "under new management" banners will shift that. Also, in terms of resources, it is nonsensical to think that a change in ownership would also result in improvement. You'd end up with the new company employing the same staff from the same pool of people, with the same results.

PRivate schools need not be religious.

They would be, though. By making schools a populist choice, they will inevitably cater to populist demands. That means prayers in school, hail marys in detention, and teaching what people want taught, rather than what they SHOULD be taught.

Schmeltz

01-19-2006, 03:42 PM

Real quick, before I go to work. I simply cannot let this slide.

Now, for a bit of perspective, inventions did germinate, industry advanced, civilization increased worldwide, and most of the daily items we take for granted were created under this old system of "education."

Yeah, and for a bit of perspective child mortality, poverty, disease, racism, and hunger were also part of that wonderful old world. We don't want to go back there, man. And, for the record, most of the daily items we now take for granted are entirely products of the industrial revolution and the concurrent rise in an educated and affluent middle class. Not the backwards, reactionary agriculturalism you seem to look back on so nostalgically (even though you never lived through it).

Let's at least be honest with our discussion and all agree that schools are an OPTION in society.

This is mind-boggling. Education is the only thing that has allowed Western civilization to advance to the heights it has reached today. You send kids into the workforce with nothing more than basic reading and writing skills, and society will collapse in short order. The creation of a stable, harmonious, and productive society is fundamentally dependent on the quality of education given to that society. I refuse to agree that education is nothing but an option. It is the only way forward.

Jesus, with attitudes like these in your country it's no wonder people are content to be ignorant, and it doesn't take much to see why your schools are failing. Shit, why don't we just teach kids how to work a horse and buggy and send them back into the fields, Khmer Rouge style? What more do they need? Disgusting.

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 03:43 PM

According to the National Education Association (NEA), a U.S. teachers union and the largest labor union in the country, "(U.S.) Voters, for the last 30 years, have rejected vouchers every time they've been proposed". The NEA has a long-held interest in opposing school choice. i fuckin hate unions. i'm not sure if you saw the mentioned ABC special, but they really shined a nasty light on them....the union leaders came off looking like aloof, power hungry idiots.
i wish jenny didn't have to join, but she had little choice.

There are three major problems as I see it:

1.Segregation

Choice is just a subterfuge for segregation, like it was in the Old South. interesting. I mean, a private school cannot legally reject on basis of race....

it could happen in some areas....on purpose, or just by chance. i'm not sure what you can do about that.
you can't start imposing quotas or affirmative action....that just gets messy and ridiculous.

if you can prove that schools are rejecting applicants on basis of race, ect....take them to court.

if schools just naturally lean towards segragation (like black and white fraternities, going to where you feel comfortable)....that is their choice. i detest it, but people are free to group with who they choose.

2.Taking Public Funding Away from Public Schools

If a school is failing, the solution isn't to give 50 scholarships to 50 children and leave 500 behind, but to fix the problem, fix the whole school.

yeah, you people keep saying that..."using it like a club" as enigma said.
but unless you have actual examples of solutions, than just shut it.

you can't keep rejecting ideas, and countering with "yet to be determined" ideological solutions.

give me something concrete in return.

3.Church/State Separation

The Babe Ruth of arguments. Vouchers clearly violate the Constitution's separation of church and state. They run counter to our Founders who sought that taxpayers not fund religion. no no.
the money goes directly to the students and parents....NOT to any single school. the parents/kids decide which school they go to...religious or not. private school does not = religious school.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:47 PM

Probably because it never works.

No, the market system has never worked in any case, any where, ever.

Schools, like trains, are essential services - people can't do without them, and people do not have the option to "shop around."

Because trains are generally a monopoly. They have scarcity power.

And most Americans don't 'need' trains; most Americans don't use them. They're notoriusly unpopular over here.

No amount of economic theory can change the simple logistics of it - people need a school that is in range of their house, irrespective of its qualities. Unless everyone gets shipped off across the country, on a local level a free-market system just won't occur.

Public schools will buy 'busses' or arrange car pooling or make use of public transportation or smaller, more local schools will pop-up.

'School' as you know it would change.

It is exactly the same as when they privatised the trains here, we were all told that competition would lead to investment and improvement in quality, but because trains simply do not operate like that (You can't just choose not to take a particular train because you don't like it) we ended up with the worst of all worlds - with the private companies reducing quality without fear of going bust.

WHich is a specific result of the scarcity power of a train company; you can't really easily build a competing train, but schools don't suffer from this sort of scarcity.

Starting a school is actually quite easy, by comparison.

All that will happen if you give parents choice is that schools which teach intelligent design are going to be packed to the gills and receive a proportionally large amount of funding, whereas poor areas (unprofitable ones) are going to suffer from ghettoisation.

Seperation of church and state will prevent public money from going to overtly or covertly religious schools.

That's a basic provision of my system.

But this brings up another point about telling people what's good for them.

Children are not like coal, you can't just move them around schools weekly to keep on top of the best deal. The disruption of moving schools can be very stressful, and will remove the stability that developing children require. Uprooting your child every time a better school opens up will leave them with no friends and serious anxiety orders.

What an unrealistic market example.

Do grocery stores just 'prop up' and 'close down' at random? Or are there a few that are quite regular in their existence?

Why would you 'uproot' your child? Wait until the year ends and then send him to a new one; coordinate with friends and family. Is that so hard a task?

Markets reach equilibrium rather quickly.

A standard of quality (Good) is soon set.

Most schools would not be fly-by-night organizations, but would instead be public, audited companies.

The companies involved will know this, they have whole departments dedicated to pushing the envelope.

Putting them at a real disadvantage with schools who don't employ this staff.

They will know precisely how shitty their school can get before people leave, and it is guaranteed to be several notches lower than "an adequate school."

Is your car 'less than adequete'? Your computer? Your books? Why then would schools be?

And can you really see the anit-intellectual parents giving a rats ass anyway?

Maybe not.

But if that's the case, there's really nothing at all that can be done to improve the children's lot.

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 03:48 PM

private school does not = religious school.

Given the massive number of backwards religious nuts in your country, I think it is optimistic to suggest that it would result in anything but a majority of religious edifices.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 03:53 PM

All pie in the sky. Companies aren't in the business of investing in a failing market.

What are you talking about?

That's precisely what the market is: turning 'failing markets' to into 'successful markets and making money in the process.

"Yeah, they couldn't achieve profitability, that MUST mean that this is a great opportunity!"

It is. If I knew how to run a profitable school, and an oppurtunity to purchase a new school came up, I would take it.

Simple investing.

Quite the opposite - a failing in a sector is viewed as a warning of risk, not an indicator of potential.

Are you saying the entire education market would be failing, or specific instances inside of it?

More likely is that a failing school will be stigmatised, and mo number of "under new management" banners will shift that.

So you don't shop at a grocery store, a Tesco say, because a shitty one existed in the locale before it?

Also, in terms of resources, it is nonsensical to think that a change in ownership would also result in improvement. You'd end up with the new company employing the same staff from the same pool of people, with the same results.

Not necessarily.

A new school would bring over new staff. And generally the problem isn't with teachers being incapable (IT's not that hard), it's them teaching the wrong things, or teaching in the wrong way.

Those can be corrected in a market system. Good luck in the current one.

They would be, though. By making schools a populist choice, they will inevitably cater to populist demands. That means prayers in school, hail marys in detention, and teaching what people want taught, rather than what they SHOULD be taught.

We simply exclude religious schools from funding. Simple.

Qdrop

01-19-2006, 03:55 PM

Given the massive number of backwards religious nuts in your country, I think it is optimistic to suggest that it would result in anything but a majority of religious edifices.

perhaps...

yet i went to a Catholic private school until highschool....got a wondeful education...and am one of the strongest Athiests i know....

ASsman

01-19-2006, 04:04 PM

And the thread comes to a grinding hault. Dumbass.

D_Raay

01-19-2006, 04:30 PM

We simply exclude religious schools from funding. Simple.Which would also violate the constitution.

Methinks the underlying problem here is religion. I will confess it is partially my reason for partaking in this subject. A voucher program would seem to be a way (like this intelligent design nonsense) for new nuts to circumvent longstanding guidelines that have already been decided. I understand the possible advantages of such a program, but the potential is to great for it to fail and the damage it would cause is really not worth it.

As for other avenues, I really can't say. Maybe we should discuss that and just call this whole debate a draw?

D_Raay

01-19-2006, 04:32 PM

Do you understand the system at all?

I really don't think so.
Perhaps you could enlighten me? Just what exactly was wrong with what I said?

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 04:37 PM

GMA']No, the market system has never worked in any case, any where, ever.

Fine, institute this voucher system, and them come back and tell me I was right after all 50 years down the line.

Because trains are generally a monopoly. They have scarcity power.

And you think a complicated, immobile, multi-faceted edifice like a school has less scarcity power than a couple of wheels on some rails?

And most Americans don't 'need' trains; most Americans don't use them. They're notoriusly unpopular over here.

Presumably why you guys consume so many more resources than Europeans. That said, it is understandable, given the expansive nature of the terrain. Here trains are an essential public service for commuters. However, I wager that if your trains stopped rolling, you'd soon know about it.

Public schools will buy 'busses' or arrange car pooling or make use of public transportation or smaller, more local schools will pop-up.

Again, that is logistically unsound. Lengthy commutes to school will only detract from learning. Children having to get up early and get home later due to lengthy journies will not help their concentration, and the students are the ones who'll be paying EXTRA for the school (on top of the vouchers, etc) in terms of lost man-hours. That will cause greater resentment in children, who feel their time is being consumed.

As for "smaller, more local schools" - surely you can see the shortcomings of this. Even assuming that it could be cost-effective to have a small (and thus under-funded and under-equipped, and probably under-staffed) school, thereby ruining the economy of scale, is a school on every street-corner a good thing? Because I can't help but think that it would make schools into fast-food restaurants.

'School' as you know it would change.

Ahhh, but what into? I'm all for a major redefinition of the educational process, and certainly decentralising it could work in its favour, but by making it so mercenary, it can't help but to fall foul of the inherant flaws in consumerism. Nike syndrome - you'll be paying $99 for 50 cent shoes. The brand, the diploma, not the quality. Because measuring a consistant level of quality across five billion corner-shop schools just isn't feasible.

you can't really easily build a competing train, but schools don't suffer from this sort of scarcity.

Starting a school is actually quite easy, by comparison.

Think long and hard about that, because that makes absolutely no sense at all to me and seems to be the most irrational thing imaginable.

Seperation of church and state will prevent public money from going to overtly or covertly religious schools.

That's a basic provision of my system.

But this brings up another point about telling people what's good for them.

How can you possibly ensure that without undermining the whole point of choice? It is ridiculous to think that people people not gravitate to a school which, for better or worse, meets the personal preferences.

What an unrealistic market example.

Do grocery stores just 'prop up' and 'close down' at random? Or are there a few that are quite regular in their existence?

Grocery stores can open and close within a year. A school does that and you have a lot of people with seriously disrupted educations and lives. You might not know this, but cauliflowers don't have to commute to a grocery store every day, nor does the quality of the store effect them that much.

Why would you 'uproot' your child? Wait until the year ends and then send him to a new one; coordinate with friends and family. Is that so hard a task?

"Wait until the year ends" - Yeah, who cares if the year's education is a right-off... Who cares if a kid has a different school for every year of his life... It's not like the actual education matters, just as long as the market processes are ongoing...

Markets reach equilibrium rather quickly.

A standard of quality (Good) is soon set.

Nonsense, absolute nonsense. Firstly, "equilibrium" doesn't mean good. Equilbrium is "bottomed out" just as often as it is "obliged to be good." Secondly, the standard of quality is "the bare minimum" - it is not in a company's best interest to put quality even 0.0000001 penny above the absolute minimum they need to achieve.

Thus, it is in the companies best interest for the standard to be uniformally bad (which means maximum profits for them) rather than uniformerly good which eats into their profit margins. It is naive to think that companies will operate against their best interests by embarking on a policy which can only ever result in their profit margins being curtailed.

Even accepting that the market doesn't stay in flux, all that means is that the system is stagnant, and there is no incentive for them to maintain standards. The stability of your model is basedo n the assumption that people DON'T choose to move.

Most schools would not be fly-by-night organizations, but would instead be public, audited companies.

Nice dream, but totally unrealistic expectation.

Putting them at a real disadvantage with schools who don't employ this staff.

Not schools, COMPANIES. And schools that don't employ the full range of corporate strategies will be the disadvantaged ones. Step one, marketing. Hey, it doesn't matter that our school teaches crap, we have better adverts! Step two, the coporate lawyers. Its in our students best interests to be locked in to a simple cost-effective test-orientated system. Step three, the profit margins - it doesn't matter if our school is full of geniuses or hill-billies. A genius requires the school to spend $50 on materials, a bumpkin can be educated for .50 cents. Thus a school full of morons learning nothing can be more profitable than 500 full schools with gifted students.

Congratulations, you've just given incentive for the dumbing down of students...

See, the idea that competition will foster a better quality of education just doesn't ring true. As Peachy points out, even in a non-privatised setting, competition just leads to dirty tricks to avoid admitting to the facts.

Is your car 'less than adequete'? Your computer? Your books? Why then would schools be?

No, they aren't, because I don't buy Nike, Dell, or Harry Potter. My food? I don't buy McDonalds. However, the success of these brands show that people DO and WILL buy them.

What you are doing now is arguing for the right of Americans to select inferior products (and thus schools). They may well have this right, but it will not combat "stupid America", the origin of the topic.

Maybe not.

But if that's the case, there's really nothing at all that can be done to improve the children's lot.

Tish and Fipsy. Give idiots a choice, and they will make stupid choices. If you only give them a good option, they have no option but to take it.

Children should be well educated inspite of their parents, not contingent on them.

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 04:39 PM

perhaps...

yet i went to a Catholic private school until highschool....got a wondeful education...and am one of the strongest Athiests i know....

But, I'd imagine that you'd not number yourself out of the "stupid America" camp soley because you went to a decent school.

Or is your school the overriding factor in being a non-stupid in your opinion? I'd imagine that if you plonked a hill-billy kid in that school on day one, he'd still be one of "stupid America" coming out of it, despite having the same education as you.

And, more importantly, at the present that school has to compete with nationalised alternatives on the public school's own turf. The inverse would be true undera voucher scheme.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 05:55 PM

Which would also violate the constitution.

No it wouldn't.

Using public money to promote religion is what violates the Constitution.

Saying a prayer before a football game was rule unconstitutional, to give you an example.

So will 'public money for private religious schools'.

Methinks the underlying problem here is religion. I will confess it is partially my reason for partaking in this subject. A voucher program would seem to be a way (like this intelligent design nonsense) for new nuts to circumvent longstanding guidelines that have already been decided. I understand the possible advantages of such a program, but the potential is to great for it to fail and the damage it would cause is really not worth it.

As for other avenues, I really can't say. Maybe we should discuss that and just call this whole debate a draw?

I wouldn't support a voucher system that didn't safegaurd against this.

But I must note that the version of 'history' taught in American public schools probably does count as a religion.

At least, it's horribly stupid.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 05:57 PM

Perhaps you could enlighten me? Just what exactly was wrong with what I said?

You said: "2.Taking Public Funding Away from Public Schools

If a school is failing, the solution isn't to give 50 scholarships to 50 children and leave 500 behind, but to fix the problem, fix the whole school."

Vouchers don't have anything to do with 'giving scholarships to a few kids' and 'leaving the rest behind'.

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 06:10 PM

GMA']
But I must note that the version of 'history' taught in American public schools probably does count as a religion.

At least, it's horribly stupid.

And yet, can you see the flag-waving patriots choosing a school that doesn't include this? Could you see Valvano or Sam choosing a school that doesn't teach their children the jingoistic philosophies they endorse?

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 06:18 PM

Fine, institute this voucher system, and them come back and tell me I was right after all 50 years down the line.

Sounds like a plan. I'll work on that whole 'instituting a voucher' thing tommorow. Should wrap it up by the weekend.

Then we play the waiting game...

And you think a complicated, immobile, multi-faceted edifice like a school has less scarcity power than a couple of wheels on some rails?

No, not at all.

Steel plants are 'complicated, immobile and multi-faceted (They have at least 4 walls)'.

Steel mills also have very little scarcity power.

All it takes to build one is capital.

Schools are much cheaper and easier to build and, I would imagine, maintain (Because the prinicipal of my school is dipshit but the school is decent, by comparison).

THe market works in car factories, steel mills, stores and whatever else. It would work for schools as well.

There's no fundamental difference, from an economic perspective.

Comparing a school to a train system is absurd.

Presumably why you guys consume so many more resources than Europeans.

It's a factor.

That said, it is understandable, given the expansive nature of the terrain. Here trains are an essential public service for commuters. However, I wager that if your trains stopped rolling, you'd soon know about it.

They're certainly used for cargo, yes.

Again, that is logistically unsound. Lengthy commutes to school will only detract from learning.

It happens now.

I live in a rather rural area, and some students have a 30 minute or more commute to the highschool. Factor in a meandering bus route and there are children on the bus for over an hour.

Children having to get up early and get home later due to lengthy journies will not help their concentration, and the students are the ones who'll be paying EXTRA for the school (on top of the vouchers, etc) in terms of lost man-hours. That will cause greater resentment in children, who feel their time is being consumed.

It happens now, is the problem.

I see no specific reason why things would change, for the better or for the worse.

Again, think outside the box. Parents would be incined to have their children go to a school on or near their route to work, perhaps.

As for "smaller, more local schools" - surely you can see the shortcomings of this. Even assuming that it could be cost-effective to have a small (and thus under-funded and under-equipped, and probably under-staffed) school, thereby ruining the economy of scale, is a school on every street-corner a good thing? Because I can't help but think that it would make schools into fast-food restaurants.

I don't know.

One room schoolhouses were, by many accounts, better than current schools.

Ahhh, but what into? I'm all for a major redefinition of the educational process, and certainly decentralising it could work in its favour, but by making it so mercenary, it can't help but to fall foul of the inherant flaws in consumerism. Nike syndrome - you'll be paying $99 for 50 cent shoes. The brand, the diploma, not the quality. Because measuring a consistant level of quality across five billion corner-shop schools just isn't feasible.

Sure it is.

There are '5 billion' restaraunts and most of them maintain a similar level of quality because they purchase and serve generally similar products.

They confrom to norms and customer demands.

Think long and hard about that, because that makes absolutely no sense at all to me and seems to be the most irrational thing imaginable.

In comparison to starting up a train service, starting a school would be quite easy.

For a company in the business of creating and running schools, creating a school would be easy.

Yes, for me, it would be quite a challenge because I don't have the credentials, the capital or the initiative.

But if you had a list of available teachers, a suitable building, compotent administrators and some capital, it would indeed be quit easy.

How can you possibly ensure that without undermining the whole point of choice? It is ridiculous to think that people people not gravitate to a school which, for better or worse, meets the personal preferences.

Prevent public money from entering religious schools.

It really is that simple.

Grocery stores can open and close within a year. A school does that and you have a lot of people with seriously disrupted educations and lives.

What would cause a school to 'just collapse'?

You might not know this, but cauliflowers tdon't have to commute to a grocery store every day, nor does the quality of the store effect themhat much.

"Wait until the year ends" - Yeah, who cares if the year's education is a right-off... Who cares if a kid has a different school for every year of his life... It's not like the actual education matters, just as long as the market processes are ongoing...

Which might be a good good example if the current system were better, or you proposed some sort of solution.

Nonsense, absolute nonsense. Firstly, "equilibrium" doesn't mean good. Equilbrium is "bottomed out" just as often as it is "obliged to be good." Secondly, the standard of quality is "the bare minimum" - it is not in a company's best interest to put quality even 0.0000001 penny above the absolute minimum they need to achieve.

We're moving into area we're never going to agree on here.

I can feel it.

Thus, it is in the companies best interest for the standard to be uniformally bad (which means maximum profits for them) rather than uniformerly good which eats into their profit margins. It is naive to think that companies will operate against their best interests by embarking on a policy which can only ever result in their profit margins being curtailed.

No, its in the companies interest to make money, which means delivering a good product.

Even accepting that the market doesn't stay in flux, all that means is that the system is stagnant, and there is no incentive for them to maintain standards. The stability of your model is basedo n the assumption that people DON'T choose to move.

Not everyone will choose to move, no, but enough will to enact change.

10% of children leaving is a huge blow.

Nice dream, but totally unrealistic expectation.

Nice refutation.

Not schools, COMPANIES. And schools that don't employ the full range of corporate strategies will be the disadvantaged ones. Step one, marketing. Hey, it doesn't matter that our school teaches crap, we have better adverts! Step two, the coporate lawyers. Its in our students best interests to be locked in to a simple cost-effective test-orientated system. Step three, the profit margins - it doesn't matter if our school is full of geniuses or hill-billies. A genius requires the school to spend $50 on materials, a bumpkin can be educated for .50 cents. Thus a school full of morons learning nothing can be more profitable than 500 full schools with gifted students.

I can count at least 4 unfounded assertions in that paragraph.

Again, if we're going to get back into the acrimony about basic market precepts, you can count me out, because we likely won't achieve anything.

SO to respond in-kind to your unfounded assertions, I present my own: "No it won't."

Congratulations, you've just given incentive for the dumbing down of students...

And i'm sure consumers will be powerless to stop this!

If only they had some sort of way to transfer their funding!

See, the idea that competition will foster a better quality of education just doesn't ring true. As Peachy points out, even in a non-privatised setting, competition just leads to dirty tricks to avoid admitting to the facts.

Of course it does, you're just not going to accept it.

If you really think people would be content paying for failing schools, there's nothing I can say to change it and nothing anyone can do to fix the school problem.

No, they aren't, because I don't buy Nike, Dell, or Harry Potter. My food? I don't buy McDonalds. However, the success of these brands show that people DO and WILL buy them.

Good for them.

But please do impose yourself on them. It's not the least bit presumptious, condescending or pretentious.

What you are doing now is arguing for the right of Americans to select inferior products (and thus schools).

Well no, not really...

They may well have this right, but it will not combat "stupid America", the origin of the topic.

And we're back to sqaure one.

I'm interested in your proposal.

Tish and Fipsy.

I've not seen that before.

I'll need to employ it later.

Give idiots a choice, and they will make stupid choices. If you only give them a good option, they have no option but to take it.

Sounds like an argument for vouchers.

Children should be well educated inspite of their parents, not contingent on them.

Again, fantastic declaration, but what does it mean? What's it worth?

'Shoulds' are nothing.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 06:22 PM

And yet, can you see the flag-waving patriots choosing a school that doesn't include this? Could you see Valvano or Sam choosing a school that doesn't teach their children the jingoistic philosophies they endorse?

As of now, this is exactly what happens. Not exactly 'jingoistic' entirely, but half jingoistic sloganeering bullshit and half PC-touchy feely "I'm Ok you're OK" trash thrown together, blended and pissed on.

It's horrific.

What I would like to see is 'comparitive history', teach Zinn's History and a conservative one, say, A Patriot's History of the United States or something of the like and compare and contrast them.

I don't know why YOU trust the government or 'communities' to come up with better schooling than 'individuals'.

The answer is, they'll probably always be biased and probably always suck, to some degree, so at least let people CHOOSE how they want their schools to be run.

Again, the current system ain't working.

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 07:00 PM

GMA']
Steel plants are 'complicated, immobile and multi-faceted (They have at least 4 walls)'.

Steel mills also have very little scarcity power.

All it takes to build one is capital.

Schools are much cheaper and easier to build and, I would imagine, maintain (Because the prinicipal of my school is dipshit but the school is decent, by comparison).

Wrong all away across the line. Firstly, steel-mills are infinitly simpler constructs than schools. They require less diverse equipment, less vetting for the staff, and employ a single mechanism for making a single product. The raw materials go in, a simple production-line procedure is followed, the product comes out. The steel doesn't take drugs, or bully the other alloys, or bunk off. In a steel mill, the workers don't scoop out dollops and go "oh, this steel is a bit different to that steel, and needs special treatment." Steel doesn't have abusive parents or pay taxes, and isn't stupid or clever.

Secondly, steel mills do not have to cater directly to individual families. They ship in bulk to wholesalers and they get their materials in bulk. They don't sell individual ingots to people's doorsteps, nor do people just turn up with an individual hunk of ore and go "can you make this into some metal for me..."

A school has to be wholesaler and retailer - that is twice the work in itself.

Steel can be shipped around the world, and it won't complain. It doesn't mind if it is being made in a dangerous neighbourhood, nor does it mind if it is being fed junk food.

Steel doesn't get child-molested because a school can save some cash by not running thorough background checks, or is desperate for staff because there are twice as many schools and only the same pool of qualified teachers.

Also, steel doesn't suddenly get weak because one of the steelworkers "isn't a people person". It doesn't break just because the steelworker's boring.

THe market works in car factories, steel mills, stores and whatever else. It would work for schools as well.

You are treating people like a comodity, a major flaw and short-sighted. A store sells you defective goods, you throw it out, take it back, don't shop there again. Your kid gets a bad education and comes out stupid - you going to trade your kid in for a fresh one?

There's no fundamental difference, from an economic perspective.

And of course an economic perspective must be one that results in the best education. Because it makes more sense than looking at the problem from a pragmatic, educational, perspective...

Comparing a school to a train system is absurd.

Indeed, it should be compared to a grocery store, right?

::rolleyes::

It happens now.

I live in a rather rural area, and some students have a 30 minute or more commute to the highschool. Factor in a meandering bus route and there are children on the bus for over an hour.

And yet you expect them to travel further still for the next school along because it provides a better service? Or do you think they'd choose a closer one, even if its shit, due to proximity?

I see no specific reason why things would change, for the better or for the worse.

Because, unless you are proposing wall to wall schools, one on every street corner, or a way to have two schools to defy physics and occupy the same place, when given a choice, this will be a factor in deciding what school to go to.

Again, think outside the box. Parents would be incined to have their children go to a school on or near their route to work, perhaps.

I agree, they would for their own convenience. And this is where your idea falls down. Schools will be selected on convenience, presentation, marketing rather on the quality of education provided. Just as people buy Nike shoes for reasons other than quality of workmanship.

One room schoolhouses were, by many accounts, better than current schools.

Small class sizes are good. However, you surely don't expect a single teacher to competently cover all aspects of education from science, to theology, to literature, to maths? What about computers? Spending money on 50 computers that hundreds of classes will use is cost-effective. A small school with only 50 people cannot justify the outlay of $1,500 *per student* on computers. Same goes for lab equipment, textbooks, etc etc. Economy of scale.

Sure it is.

There are '5 billion' restaraunts and most of them maintain a similar level of quality because they purchase and serve generally similar products.

They confrom to norms and customer demands.

Perhaps you should check to see how many of those places get shut down for failing to meet health and safety standards. I know that even in the UK a lot of places don't get frequent inspections.

Now remember that while a case of food-poisoning is very unpleasant, generations of children being molested is more so.

In comparison to starting up a train service, starting a school would be quite easy.

Hah...

But if you had a list of available teachers, a suitable building, compotent administrators and some capital, it would indeed be quit easy.

Teachers aren't like steel-workers or train drivers. I'm sure Peachy could inform you of why this argument falls short much better than I.

Prevent public money from entering religious schools.

It really is that simple.

"religious schools" - and how precisely do you determine this? What happens if the school has a creeping religious policy? Going to have inspectors in all the time to check on this? Funded by public money? CLose down a "sucessful" school just because its sucess isn't quite how you'd like it to work?

What would cause a school to 'just collapse'?

Considering you think schools are so similar to corporate endeavours, ask Golden Wonder crisps...

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 08:52 PM

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT I'M UNBINDING THAT FUCKING BACKSPACE KEY.

It's cost me more fucking elegant replies than I care to mention.

What fucking moronic coder for Firefox (Open Source being good my ass) would make 'back' the backspace key?

Think you're in a text box and you aren't, hit backspace and BAM, fucking lose everything.

Fucking horrific.

I don't feel like retyping my response now, I'll do it tommorow, after I unbind that God-forsaken key.

Ace42X

01-19-2006, 09:39 PM

GMA']GOD FUCKING DAMMIT I'M UNBINDING THAT FUCKING BACKSPACE KEY.

It's cost me more fucking elegant replies than I care to mention.

What fucking moronic coder for Firefox (Open Source being good my ass) would make 'back' the backspace key?

Think you're in a text box and you aren't, hit backspace and BAM, fucking lose everything.

Fucking horrific.

I don't feel like retyping my response now, I'll do it tommorow, after I unbind that God-forsaken key.

Not possible. The code that links the two is buried DEEP DEEP DEEP in the very guts of your PC, at assembly level I believe. It's more a windows thing than a firefox thing. And yes, I hate it.

EN[i]GMA

01-19-2006, 10:11 PM

Not possible. The code that links the two is buried DEEP DEEP DEEP in the very guts of your PC, at assembly level I believe. It's more a windows thing than a firefox thing. And yes, I hate it.

Fucking worthless as fuck.

I came to that realization myself as I found nothing of any use on google or on FIrefox's site.

Apparently using XUL you can add keyboard shortcuts, but I doubt you can remove current ones not to mention I barely know HTML let alone XML.

I can't believe a config file doesn't exist for this, somewhere.

Who would fucking think that someone, somehwere might possibly want to configure his keyboard shortcuts?

Why must programmers be so fucking stupid when it comes to usability. I'm not that much of a technological savant, but these things seem basic to me.

Useless.

Ace42X

01-20-2006, 12:34 AM

GMA']
Why must programmers be so fucking stupid when it comes to usability. I'm not that much of a technological savant, but these things seem basic to me.

It's an anachronism harking back to the days when people thought a PC didn't need to store more than two digits for a year.

D_Raay

01-20-2006, 12:41 AM

GMA']You said: "2.Taking Public Funding Away from Public Schools

If a school is failing, the solution isn't to give 50 scholarships to 50 children and leave 500 behind, but to fix the problem, fix the whole school."

Vouchers don't have anything to do with 'giving scholarships to a few kids' and 'leaving the rest behind'.
Many argue that given the limited budget for schools, a voucher system weakens public schools while at the same time not necessarily providing enough money for people to attend private schools. (The opponents assert a tendency of the costs of tuition to rise along with its demand, which further compounds the problem.) This weakens the educational possibilities for many. Since vouchers typically pay much less than the tuition charged by the private schools, only the richer students and those given scholarships will be able to attend them. Opponents also claim that the vouchers are tantamount to providing taxpayer-subsidized white flight from urban public schools, whose student bodies are predominantly non-white in most large cities.

D_Raay

01-20-2006, 12:49 AM

No it wouldn't.

Using public money to promote religion is what violates the Constitution.

Saying a prayer before a football game was rule unconstitutional, to give you an example.

So will 'public money for private religious schools'.
"Believing with you that man owes account to none other for his faith or his worship than to God...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their federal legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."

Mr. Jefferson's understanding of the wall of separation was that it would keep the federal government from inhibiting religious choice by picking one national church. (Jefferson wouldn't have liked the Taliban.)

School choice programs are structured so that parents may use vouchers to choose another public school, a non-sectarian private school, a Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or any other denomination, religious school. Just like college kids may select to attend a Catholic university even though they are using a federal Pell Grant or the GI Bill to pay for tuition.

It would be unconstitutional to prohibit any school on the basis of it's religion.

EN[i]GMA

01-20-2006, 02:44 PM

Wrong all away across the line. Firstly, steel-mills are infinitly simpler constructs than schools. They require less diverse equipment, less vetting for the staff, and employ a single mechanism for making a single product. The raw materials go in, a simple production-line procedure is followed, the product comes out. The steel doesn't take drugs, or bully the other alloys, or bunk off. In a steel mill, the workers don't scoop out dollops and go "oh, this steel is a bit different to that steel, and needs special treatment." Steel doesn't have abusive parents or pay taxes, and isn't stupid or clever.

Secondly, steel mills do not have to cater directly to individual families. They ship in bulk to wholesalers and they get their materials in bulk. They don't sell individual ingots to people's doorsteps, nor do people just turn up with an individual hunk of ore and go "can you make this into some metal for me..."

A school has to be wholesaler and retailer - that is twice the work in itself.

Steel can be shipped around the world, and it won't complain. It doesn't mind if it is being made in a dangerous neighbourhood, nor does it mind if it is being fed junk food.

Steel doesn't get child-molested because a school can save some cash by not running thorough background checks, or is desperate for staff because there are twice as many schools and only the same pool of qualified teachers.

Also, steel doesn't suddenly get weak because one of the steelworkers "isn't a people person". It doesn't break just because the steelworker's boring.

Obviously the problems faced will be different, that's not the point.

The point was that the market will respond to the problems to create a solution.

You are treating people like a comodity, a major flaw and short-sighted. A store sells you defective goods, you throw it out, take it back, don't shop there again. Your kid gets a bad education and comes out stupid - you going to trade your kid in for a fresh one?

'People' aren't a commodity but education is.

We're selling education, are we not?

And of course an economic perspective must be one that results in the best education. Because it makes more sense than looking at the problem from a pragmatic, educational, perspective...

Well then fill me in. I'd love to hear your take.

And yet you expect them to travel further still for the next school along because it provides a better service? Or do you think they'd choose a closer one, even if its shit, due to proximity?

Well, no, not really.

Those particular studens may indeed be closer to another school, because districts aren't based entirely on distance and geography but on divisions such as township lines and county lines.

Depending on your location, you may have access to more than one school or you may be near a school and not have access to it; it's all very spotty.

Because, unless you are proposing wall to wall schools, one on every street corner, or a way to have two schools to defy physics and occupy the same place, when given a choice, this will be a factor in deciding what school to go to.

What pointless literalism.

I agree, they would for their own convenience. And this is where your idea falls down. Schools will be selected on convenience, presentation, marketing rather on the quality of education provided. Just as people buy Nike shoes for reasons other than quality of workmanship.

But everything is selected on those criteria. I don't think you can show me anything that isn't.

And again, its not like the current system is ideal.

Small class sizes are good. However, you surely don't expect a single teacher to competently cover all aspects of education from science, to theology, to literature, to maths? What about computers? Spending money on 50 computers that hundreds of classes will use is cost-effective. A small school with only 50 people cannot justify the outlay of $1,500 *per student* on computers. Same goes for lab equipment, textbooks, etc etc. Economy of scale.

I don't think you have a proper understanding of economies of scale, or how schools are and are not economies of scale.

The 'computer's example is not an example of an econy of scale, because assuming the ratio of computers per students to be the same, the overall student body doesn't matter because, with voucher, per pupil income can be considered to be basically even.

Lab equipment, textbooks, and most other things are not influenced by economies of scale all that much.

A textbook is $50 bucks or so a piece, regardless of how many students you have.

I don't see how any of this would lead to an economy of scale being formed.

Perhaps you should check to see how many of those places get shut down for failing to meet health and safety standards. I know that even in the UK a lot of places don't get frequent inspections.

Now remember that while a case of food-poisoning is very unpleasant, generations of children being molested is more so.

Arguing from ignorance, I see.

Can you prove that 'more children would be molested' under a voucher system?

Teachers aren't like steel-workers or train drivers. I'm sure Peachy could inform you of why this argument falls short much better than I.

May she please do.

"religious schools" - and how precisely do you determine this? What happens if the school has a creeping religious policy? Going to have inspectors in all the time to check on this? Funded by public money? CLose down a "sucessful" school just because its sucess isn't quite how you'd like it to work?

We managed to shoot down ID.

A few court cases generally flesh out a precedent.

Considering you think schools are so similar to corporate endeavours, ask Golden Wonder crisps...

Crazy British and your crazy words!

My other post was more intriticate/eloquent, but whatever, the major points are mostly the same.

EN[i]GMA

01-20-2006, 02:47 PM

Many argue that given the limited budget for schools, a voucher system weakens public schools while at the same time not necessarily providing enough money for people to attend private schools.

A poorly designed system could yes, but I'm not in the business of designing things poorly.

(The opponents assert a tendency of the costs of tuition to rise along with its demand, which further compounds the problem.)

Is that a fair assumption?

This weakens the educational possibilities for many. Since vouchers typically pay much less than the tuition charged by the private schools,

Charged NOW.

This is because of scarcity. There are very few private schools now and a lot of demand for them.

only the richer students and those given scholarships will be able to attend them.

As of now, maybe.

But the vouchers could easily be $7.5k a year and be no more expensive than the current system.

That's plenty of money.

Opponents also claim that the vouchers are tantamount to providing taxpayer-subsidized white flight from urban public schools, whose student bodies are predominantly non-white in most large cities.

They can 'claim' whatever they like; where's the evidence?

EN[i]GMA

01-20-2006, 02:49 PM

"Believing with you that man owes account to none other for his faith or his worship than to God...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their federal legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."

Mr. Jefferson's understanding of the wall of separation was that it would keep the federal government from inhibiting religious choice by picking one national church. (Jefferson wouldn't have liked the Taliban.)

School choice programs are structured so that parents may use vouchers to choose another public school, a non-sectarian private school, a Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or any other denomination, religious school. Just like college kids may select to attend a Catholic university even though they are using a federal Pell Grant or the GI Bill to pay for tuition.

It would be unconstitutional to prohibit any school on the basis of it's religion.

It's perfectly constitutional to exclude public funding for religious institutions.

Like I said, a simply proviso against funding for religious schools is Constitutional and advisable.

This law doesn't prohibit excercise of religion, it only prohibits public funding of it; they are different things entirely.

D_Raay

01-20-2006, 03:47 PM

GMA']It's perfectly constitutional to exclude public funding for religious institutions.

Like I said, a simply proviso against funding for religious schools is Constitutional and advisable.

This law doesn't prohibit excercise of religion, it only prohibits public funding of it; they are different things entirely.
And who do you think is the architect of such programs? And what makes you think they would exclude religious schools from them?

In a perfect world... well you know where I am going.

Ace42X

01-20-2006, 06:30 PM

GMA']The point was that the market will respond to the problems to create a solution.

To create a solution to THEIR problems, not the problems of students. Under the current system, the only goal is (presumably) education. Under a competitive system, the goal is bums on seats. Quality of education is irrelevant, just as long as the vouchers are coming in.

Your naive suggestion that academic improvements alone will be what secures this is a nonsense. It is like saying that a failing company's solution will be "Yeah, we'll just improve the quality of the product" - as anyone even vaguely aquainted with simple ecomics can tell you, that is very seldom, if ever, the answer.

Improving quality costs the manufacturer, and thus they need to raise the costs to meet this (otherwise they will run at even more of a loss, and fail even quicker.)

Cutting corners costs the manufacturer nothing, and gives them cash in their wallet right here and now.

Expecting school companies to raise their quality is like expecting butchers to sell only steaks, and reduce the amount they charge for them for the privlidge.

'People' aren't a commodity but education is.

We're selling education, are we not?

No. Who would buy "education?" GMSisko? They are buying diplomas, pieces of paper. Rubber-stamped entitlements to a better life. The knowledge acquired is irrelevant. Qualifications don't take into account "Yeah, I did worse in the test, but I know more about him" - there isn't a sub-rating for that, and nor does it go down too well in CVs I'd imagine.

And when you are selling test results (We will get your kid an A*), education is lost as Peachy points out. You end up giving out qualifications in being able to pass tests, not in the core subject.

That is certainly the case here in the UK - Students have become incredibly proficient at taking tests, much better than parents, etc, but are learning next to nothing.

This is the direct product of "competition" between schools - the school isn't interested in the wellbeing of a student beyond their test-scores. "Our top students forget every word of French they ever learned three days after the exam" doesn't appear on prospecti, "90% of our students got an A*" does.

Now, as a parent, what school are you going to send your kid to? The one that gets him the best grades and will get him to the most prodigious universities, or the ones where all the students learn loads, and will go on to be very sucessful despite their weaker grades 10 years AFTER you have already made your mind up, but get lame scores?

How are you going to measure the quality of a school so that the parents know? Standardised test scores. What will stop schools doing anything they can to secure high test-scores? Generosity? From a faceless corporation?

The profit will be in the test scores, in the appearance of success, not in the benefit students may or may not get ten years down the line, by which point the whole school has completely changed ANYWAY...

You can argue against this until you are blue in the face, but that is how schooling has gone here since league-tables were introduced. All manner of chicanery has ensued, and the people doing so don't even directly profit from it. Are you saying that with the added incentive of pure capitalist profit people will be LESS enticed to pull a fast one?

Yah, right, whatever.

You guys McDonaldising your fat-asses is one thing, but McDonaldising your education system? Total no-brainer.

Well then fill me in. I'd love to hear your take.

Well, going off the subject a bit, from a pragmatic point of view education is not a discrete unit that can be valued or sold. A simple look at GMSisko, Valvano and their ilk should tell you that. When people use "book learnin'" as a term of derision, it is ridiculous to think that it can be treated like a lump of coal.

How would you determine its value? By the use the recipient will put it to? By the quality with which it is supplied? By the change / impact it has upon the recipient? By its potential for economic renumeration?

How do you measure it?

At the moment it is only measured by form of examination - through tests or coursework. As any psychology undergraduate can tell you, these sorts of examination only *actually* measure your aptitude for these tests, it doesn't actually measure a tangible ability. Artistic endeavours are based on subjective perception.

These fail to satisfy the above criteria - A piece of paper saying you passed can be put to good or bad use, but doesn't guarantee the person with it is competent or apt. The ability of the recipient to pass tests has no bearing on the quality of tranmission - a teacher can be perfectly eloquent, and yet still have students unrecptive or unable to pass tests. A lot of education has no practical impact for the recipient's career path.

If you try to put arbitrary tags on, what I personally consider to be intrinsic, value of information, you are only going to run into problems.

Either way, something as intangible and subjective of this value cannot be adequately measured by US. That means it cannot be quantified, which means the quality cannot be authoritatively, definitively, ascertained. Which leaves infinite scope for a corporation to tell the world, without fear of refutation, that what THEIR project offers is superior, because (in the small print) their arbitrary definition of success is being met.

Of course, there is no reason to believe that their unwritten definition of success is beneficial to a single actual student. My ability to get a high grade in French hasn't been in the slightest bit beneficial to me, I can barely speak any French, and I take an active interest in Europe and France. Did this stop my school including me in the stats that proclaim how successful their modenr languages department is? No.

And why? Because their department is very succesful, lots of people in my year-group got good grades in the subject, just like me. It is the same across the whole country. There is an "equilibrium" of inferiority clear across the country, and me moving to another school whose modern languages fared better in ofsted reports and league tables would not have changed a single thing. We'd read the same books, from the same pool of teachers and have the same test.

What incentive is there, then, for the example I've given to change? How would I know that an alternative school had a radically different and superior (despite these things being blocked by standards - a school can't just make up its own tests and apply its own marking criteria, otherwise there would be chaos) language department let this be known? It won't score any better in tests, and the parents won';t know the alternatives are inferior until their child has already passed, gotten a good grade, and goes "hang on, I can't speak French..." - 6 years AFTER they started learning the subject. Six years after the school has been making money off them. 6 years of nice safe secure low-risk profit, without them having to rock the boat one jot.

What pointless literalism.

Yes, because in your world transport and travelling distance isn't an issue... For those of us here in the real world, location location location is important. So important business managers use it three times when advising people starting on a business.

But everything is selected on those criteria. I don't think you can show me anything that isn't.

And again, its not like the current system is ideal.

The current system is striving to make convenient schools of an equal quality to distant ones. A laissez fare system has no such onus on them. Yes, every COMMODITY is selected based on convenience, which is why a nationalised schooling system that is working on providing an egalitarian service is ABOVE this problem. The school around the corner should be just as good as the one in the next state.

Under your system the school around the corner could be absolutely terrible in terms of pure education, but due to convenience, incredibly successful.

Just as fat yanks prefer a drive-through McDonalds to something fresh. But unlike a burger, which just clogs up arteries and expands the backside - the McDonaldising of education will just accelerate "Stupid in America" (To keep banging on about the title).

I don't think you have a proper understanding of economies of scale, or how schools are and are not economies of scale.

I think you are desperately trying to avoid thinking about this rationally.

The 'computer's example is not an example of an econy of scale, because assuming the ratio of computers per students to be the same, the overall student body doesn't matter because, with voucher, per pupil income can be considered to be basically even.

Nonsense. If you had thought about it for three seconds, you'd see precisely the flaw in your argument. Instead you just jump in without a second's pause for thought, making me waste my time with a rebuttal.

Assume a ratio of 1 computer for every 10 students.

Small school has 20 students, that's 2 computers, which means that you can't have a 20-man IT class without 80% of the students failing to get a computer.

A large school has 200 students, that's 20 computers, which means 100% of a 20-man IT class get access to a computer.

Simple maths, and an economy of scale. It applies to textbooks, lab equipment, everything.

Ditto with staff.

I don't see how any of this would lead to an economy of scale being formed.

Which is why most of your economically based arguments sound so hollow.

Can you prove that 'more children would be molested' under a voucher system?

Quite simply, yes, undeniably so - more schools = more people employed teaching. More teachers mean that more child molesters will slip through the net, even assuming that the system doesn't make it proportionately more likely. Even if the percentage remains the same, the net increase means an increase.

However, the percentage will not stay the same. The current detection and prevention rate is dependant on the number of people policing. By increasing the total number of teachers without increasing the policing correspondingly, you add more stress to the detection and prevention system. Thus an increase in the number of occurences is unavoidable.

We managed to shoot down ID.

A few court cases generally flesh out a precedent.

While your courts may hold power over institutions nominally owned by the public, I dare say your government interfering in the way corporations run their business is less likely to suceed. Can you see a Microsoft owned school backing down from a court-case? Who precisely is going to pay the cost of you fighting it?

EN[i]GMA

01-20-2006, 07:19 PM

To create a solution to THEIR problems, not the problems of students. Under the current system, the only goal is (presumably) education. Under a competitive system, the goal is bums on seats. Quality of education is irrelevant, just as long as the vouchers are coming in.

The goal is 'education' if people decide it's education.

I can't understand how, if the people don't really want 'education', how ANY system can supply it.

Your naive suggestion that academic improvements alone will be what secures this is a nonsense. It is like saying that a failing company's solution will be "Yeah, we'll just improve the quality of the product" - as anyone even vaguely aquainted with simple ecomics can tell you, that is very seldom, if ever, the answer.

So people would continue to send their children to schools that cut costs by getting rid of teachers, consilidating classes and generally taking advantage of them?

If society is so haphazard in its attitude towards the ecucation of its children, nothing is going to improve the situation.

If the only way to make stupid people not stupid is to educate them, and they don't want to be educated, you're basically fucked and scheme for educating them will fail.

You can't help a drug addict unless he wants help; you can't help an ignorance addict unless he wants to be educated, or more accuratly, wants his children to be educated.

Improving quality costs the manufacturer, and thus they need to raise the costs to meet this (otherwise they will run at even more of a loss, and fail even quicker.)

It's entirely possible to increase efficiency and increase quality.

Other school systems are both better and more efficient that ours.

Cutting corners costs the manufacturer nothing, and gives them cash in their wallet right here and now.

Which is suicide for the business.

Expecting school companies to raise their quality is like expecting butchers to sell only steaks, and reduce the amount they charge for them for the privlidge.

No, no its not.

THese is fallacious because of the existence of vouchers.

If everyone had vouchers for steak, would anyone buy hamburger? Of course not.

They would use their vouchers for the best they could get.

No. Who would buy "education?" GMSisko? They are buying diplomas, pieces of paper. Rubber-stamped entitlements to a better life. The knowledge acquired is irrelevant. Qualifications don't take into account "Yeah, I did worse in the test, but I know more about him" - there isn't a sub-rating for that, and nor does it go down too well in CVs I'd imagine.

But its the state that is the chief proprietor of these tests.

As of now, they don't listen to the incredible evidence against standardized testing, and since they are a near-monopoly, you have to play ball.

Its likely that such schools would exist in a voucher system, but good schools that provided a real education would also exist.

Its up for the market to decide from there. But if society chooses meaningless numbers instead of education, that means society itself is uneducated and pretty much wants to be, which is a situation that can't be easily rectified.

And when you are selling test results (We will get your kid an A*), education is lost as Peachy points out. You end up giving out qualifications in being able to pass tests, not in the core subject.

Exactly.

This is what is happening now.

But I don't see how you can declare that this would happen. Parents aren't fans of these tests and neither are kids.

That is certainly the case here in the UK - Students have become incredibly proficient at taking tests, much better than parents, etc, but are learning next to nothing.

I agree entirely.

And would you or anyone send their kids to such a horrible school? Some mabye, but most no.

Do you really think there will be no way to evaluate intelligence or proficience other than a few rote tests?

This is the direct product of "competition" between schools - the school isn't interested in the wellbeing of a student beyond their test-scores. "Our top students forget every word of French they ever learned three days after the exam" doesn't appear on prospecti, "90% of our students got an A*" does.

'Competition' is whatever people want it to be.

Now, as a parent, what school are you going to send your kid to? The one that gets him the best grades and will get him to the most prodigious universities, or the ones where all the students learn loads, and will go on to be very sucessful despite their weaker grades 10 years AFTER you have already made your mind up, but get lame scores?

A real, good education would supply the knowledge necessary to test well and enough sound learning to insure the knowledge is retained.

How are you going to measure the quality of a school so that the parents know? Standardised test scores. What will stop schools doing anything they can to secure high test-scores? Generosity? From a faceless corporation?

What then, do you propose? How do we gauge intelligence?

Surely tests belie SOME sort of skill or talent, much more than an entirely subjective analysis would.

You can argue against this until you are blue in the face, but that is how schooling has gone here since league-tables were introduced. All manner of chicanery has ensued, and the people doing so don't even directly profit from it. Are you saying that with the added incentive of pure capitalist profit people will be LESS enticed to pull a fast one?

Yah, right, whatever.

You guys McDonaldising your fat-asses is one thing, but McDonaldising your education system? Total no-brainer.

Well, going off the subject a bit, from a pragmatic point of view education is not a discrete unit that can be valued or sold. A simple look at GMSisko, Valvano and their ilk should tell you that. When people use "book learnin'" as a term of derision, it is ridiculous to think that it can be treated like a lump of coal.

I think it's rediculous to think they can be 'educated' at all.

How would you determine its value? By the use the recipient will put it to? By the quality with which it is supplied? By the change / impact it has upon the recipient? By its potential for economic renumeration?

How do you measure it?

Good questions all.

At the moment it is only measured by form of examination - through tests or coursework. As any psychology undergraduate can tell you, these sorts of examination only *actually* measure your aptitude for these tests, it doesn't actually measure a tangible ability. Artistic endeavours are based on subjective perception.

It's entirely possible that newer, better forms of testing could be used.

THere are numerous types of tests that test different forms of aptitude.

Tests that measure knowledge, IQ, writing ability, reading comprehension, etc.

It's not unrealistic to come up with a form of testing that rather accurately assess talent.

These fail to satisfy the above criteria - A piece of paper saying you passed can be put to good or bad use, but doesn't guarantee the person with it is competent or apt. The ability of the recipient to pass tests has no bearing on the quality of tranmission - a teacher can be perfectly eloquent, and yet still have students unrecptive or unable to pass tests. A lot of education has no practical impact for the recipient's career path.

If you try to put arbitrary tags on, what I personally consider to be intrinsic, value of information, you are only going to run into problems.

Intriguing, but at the same time somewhat wishy-washy.

How then are we to determine intelligence?

"If it looks like intelligence, and smells like intelligence, than it must be intelligence!"?

Either way, something as intangible and subjective of this value cannot be adequately measured by US. That means it cannot be quantified, which means the quality cannot be authoritatively, definitively, ascertained. Which leaves infinite scope for a corporation to tell the world, without fear of refutation, that what THEIR project offers is superior, because (in the small print) their arbitrary definition of success is being met.

And also means that any form of education can not be easily compared to another, or declared better than another.

Why is your education, or my education better than GMsiskos?

THe criteria you use to determine this is evidence of some underlying objectivity to knowledge and thought.

Of course, there is no reason to believe that their unwritten definition of success is beneficial to a single actual student. My ability to get a high grade in French hasn't been in the slightest bit beneficial to me, I can barely speak any French, and I take an active interest in Europe and France. Did this stop my school including me in the stats that proclaim how successful their modenr languages department is? No.

But is is possible that their higher scores indicate they are better than other schools at teaching French.

Indeed, if we don't score anyone, how are we to determine anything?

Some sort of judging will need to be done, and it will almost certainly be numerical in nature.

And why? Because their department is very succesful, lots of people in my year-group got good grades in the subject, just like me. It is the same across the whole country. There is an "equilibrium" of inferiority clear across the country, and me moving to another school whose modern languages fared better in ofsted reports and league tables would not have changed a single thing. We'd read the same books, from the same pool of teachers and have the same test.

What incentive is there, then, for the example I've given to change? How would I know that an alternative school had a radically different and superior (despite these things being blocked by standards - a school can't just make up its own tests and apply its own marking criteria, otherwise there would be chaos) language department let this be known? It won't score any better in tests, and the parents won';t know the alternatives are inferior until their child has already passed, gotten a good grade, and goes "hang on, I can't speak French..." - 6 years AFTER they started learning the subject. Six years after the school has been making money off them. 6 years of nice safe secure low-risk profit, without them having to rock the boat one jot.

What does this then say about the education system as a whole?

How could you make it effective?

I mean, I can think of ways, but they require some unrealistic things, namely an intelligent, interested body.

I know nearly no SPanish because I took no interest in learning it, for example. Could I have learned it? Maybe, though I doubt any high school class (3 years) can teach you anything close a to an entire language, or even a reasonable facsimile of it.l

Yes, because in your world transport and travelling distance isn't an issue... For those of us here in the real world, location location location is important. So important business managers use it three times when advising people starting on a business.

Which wasn't my point, but whatever.

The current system is striving to make convenient schools of an equal quality to distant ones. A laissez fare system has no such onus on them. Yes, every COMMODITY is selected based on convenience, which is why a nationalised schooling system that is working on providing an egalitarian service is ABOVE this problem. The school around the corner should be just as good as the one in the next state.

Which may or may not be a good thing at all.

Under your system the school around the corner could be absolutely terrible in terms of pure education, but due to convenience, incredibly successful.

It could be, yes, just as in the current system, the school could suck and nothing reasonable could be done to change it.

For example, who am I to vote for to change schools for the better?

Neither party has a serious proposal; they simply don't care.

The people generally aren't clamoring for change; they simply don't care.

These are the days of our lives.

Just as fat yanks prefer a drive-through McDonalds to something fresh. But unlike a burger, which just clogs up arteries and expands the backside - the McDonaldising of education will just accelerate "Stupid in America" (To keep banging on about the title).

It's already here, and businesses is already booming.

Nonsense. If you had thought about it for three seconds, you'd see precisely the flaw in your argument. Instead you just jump in without a second's pause for thought, making me waste my time with a rebuttal.

Assume a ratio of 1 computer for every 10 students.

Small school has 20 students, that's 2 computers, which means that you can't have a 20-man IT class without 80% of the students failing to get a computer.

A large school has 200 students, that's 20 computers, which means 100% of a 20-man IT class get access to a computer.

Or, Miss. Applebury tells 'Jim' and 'John' to use the 2 computers while the other 18 students do something else.

The '2 person IT class' (How I wish my school had IT classes. If only I had a choice in where I went to school, I could have had high school computer science education.) has 100% computer usage.

100% of the people told to use a computer, use a computer.

There is no fundamental difference; that's an arbitrary distinction and it's totally fallacious.

Why a '20 person school' would have a '20 person IT class' is beyond me. Instead, it could have a 2 person IT class, or whatever.

I think 20 is a rather low number, but the point remains the same.

I can think of one area where an economy of scale would be a factor: administration. A school needs a principal, a board, an intern, a clerk, a basic set of people to actually run the school itself.

This is pretty costly and would prohibit ultra-small schools.

But once you account for that, the economy of scale loses its affect.

The difference between 1 librarian and a school of 1000 kids and 2 librarians in a school of 2000 kids is very minor.

Which is why most of your economically based arguments sound so hollow.

I'm not so sure.

I've never been particulary impressed with yours.

Quite simply, yes, undeniably so - more schools = more people employed teaching.

Not necessarily.

It's all about the student to teacher ratio.

You could say it would lower, but I would think this is a good thing. Smaller classes are generally regarded as better, are they not?

More teachers mean that more child molesters will slip through the net, even assuming that the system doesn't make it proportionately more likely. Even if the percentage remains the same, the net increase means an increase.

Well then we should just do away with teachers and thus do away with child molestation entirely, right?

But of course that's not your point.

However, the percentage will not stay the same. The current detection and prevention rate is dependant on the number of people policing. By increasing the total number of teachers without increasing the policing correspondingly, you add more stress to the detection and prevention system. Thus an increase in the number of occurences is unavoidable.

An unfounded assumption; the policing need not get any worse.

A school found to have a number of molestors would empty very quickly, I assure you.

While your courts may hold power over institutions nominally owned by the public, I dare say your government interfering in the way corporations run their business is less likely to suceed. Can you see a Microsoft owned school backing down from a court-case? Who precisely is going to pay the cost of you fighting it?

It's not about 'Microsofts school' at all, its about the publically funded vouchers.

The school can exist and do whatever it wants, it just can't recieve public money, as outlined in the Constitution.

Ace42X

01-20-2006, 10:47 PM

GMA']
I can't understand how, if the people don't really want 'education', how ANY system can supply it.

Why on earth do you think education is mandatory, then? Really, this is getting tiresome now.

So people would continue to send their children to schools that cut costs by getting rid of teachers, consilidating classes and generally taking advantage of them?

"So people would continue to eat at places that cut costs by getting rid of fresh vegetables, using mechanically reclaimed meat (eyelids), and generally taking advantage of them?"

Yes, it happens every day, and it took Supersize me to even make the smallest dent. How long as Mc Ds been around? That's precisely how many years worth of screwed children your system would create before the corporations have to even think about a token gesture.

If society is so haphazard in its attitude towards the ecucation of its children, nothing is going to improve the situation.

You could say that about road-safety. The government passes laws for a reason. Because people don't "just generally do what's best for them" - which is what your system relies on.

If the only way to make stupid people not stupid is to educate them, and they don't want to be educated, you're basically fucked and scheme for educating them will fail.

And yet, here at least, school is full of children who'd rather be playing games than getting an education.

Please, at least try to think through what you are saying before posting.

You can't help an ignorance addict unless he wants to be educated, or more accuratly, wants his children to be educated.

And yet it is happening in schools everywhere in the world. I, for one, certainly didn't want to be educated and would rather have been palying games than acquiring information that I just as soon forgot. Here I am, educated.

QED, your argument is a nonsense. You can force an education on children, and, indeed, we are. Same goes for minimum standards, something your system has no checks or balances on whatsoever. Other than assuming that a bunch of lazy reprobates care enough about their children to intervene, when they can't even be bothered to make their own food, preferring to eat at Mc Donalds and give themselves heart disease.

It's entirely possible to increase efficiency and increase quality.

Yes, you just run the conveyor belts faster as use the MAGIC glue. Actually, in reality, this is a nonsense. You have to pay for quality, and when consumers are shopping, a low price is THE incentive. For a company to spend more on a product and charge less is not more "efficient" (infact, efficiency doesn't come into this at all) - it is cutting down profit margins, something companies DON'T DO. They don't just give cash away, you know. If you do some research, you discover only the most abjectly mismanaged companies can profit by efficiency streamlining. If a company could avoid giving its workforce free biscuits, they'd've done so *long* before they needed to raid the cookie jar for cash to throw into increasing quality. This is precisely why all streamlining exercises offer returns significantly less than estimated.

Other school systems are both better and more efficient that ours.

That is true, however that is not because money is being washed down the drain on luxuries like gold-plated swivel chairs for the office staff. You think a corporately owned school is going to throw money into the area? Pay for proper nutritional meals, instead of doing a deal with their other corporate interests to get super-cheap fast-food in the cafeteria?

Because of the goodness of their hearts? It's certainly not goingto be to compete with other schools - they can no more afford to throw money away on extras than anyone else.

Which is suicide for the business.

Rubbish. Cutting corners is a way to increase profit margins instantly with little to no risk. Increased profit margins is the very life blood of business, its strength.

You think parents will take into account cheap ass plastic seats that hurt your back when picking a school? They won't even see them, let alone use them enough to realise how incredinlu uncomfortable they are.

WHAM, instant savings, money in the bank.

One less healthy meal in the cafeteria per week - are the parents going to even know, much less care that their children have one less salad a week?

BIFF, instant cash.

Cheaper textbooks - the children only need to know what's on the tests, right? Yeah some MIGHT like to read around the subject, but the CEOs would like a new boat...

How could a parent possibly know that the text-books their kids are reading only teach the bare minimum? They can't know "what isn't being taught".

Parents can be short-changed in an infinite number of subtle ways that save the corporations a killing, and whose cumulative effect is immense. And they will never be able to put a finger on what's wrong. They'll never have a kid in a different school to compare the two.

So, given the undeniable fact that parents will never be in a position to compare these things - what is in it for a school to perform over-the-odds? Yes its better, but as you know, the butcher the tinker and the cobbler don't do their jobs out of the goodness of their own hearts. Why would a corporation give away money to outperform its competitors when NO-ONE WILL EVER KNOW?

Answer: They won't - they're a business just like every other company.

THese is fallacious because of the existence of vouchers.

If everyone had vouchers for steak, would anyone buy hamburger? Of course not.

They would use their vouchers for the best they could get.

Again, not an option. No matter how many vouchers a parent has, they can't and won't ship their children inter-state just so that their child can be at a school that is superior to a nearby one in one or another department. Likewise there are practical limits on the number of people a good school can take on before quality drops off. They might have some very talented and capable teachers, but those teachers can only teach so many kids in one go. There is not an unlimited number of good teachers, and the number of good teachers is not proportional to the number of schools that spring up.

It's a nice dream to suggest that competition will magically turn crap teachers into good ones, ugly buildings in run-down neighbourhoods into gleaming edifices, and everyone with vouchers will shop at a local farmer's market instead of eating unhealthy burgers.

Fact of the matter is, they won't. Nothing will change because their is no onus on the corporations to change anything. A company is not going to buy a school that is running at a loss and then spend MORE money on it. That is just not good business sense.

A company won't set up right next to an existing school, because "brand loyalty" to that school (IE the fact that changing schools involves paper-work and disruption, buying a new uniform, getting new text books, changing the school run, etc etc etc, speaking to new teachers) will limit the uptake of students, no matter how good the new school is by comparison. The new school has to provide everything the existing school does (same outlay) for *half* the profit. Add to that the costs of setting up the school (buying materials, etc) and that is an idiotic business proposition.

So the school will have to set up suitably far from an existing school. And as schools are situated where they are for a reason, the new school is at a disadvantage in terms of location. No football field, no cafeteria, no rooms, no nothing except what gets built. And that will cost more than they could get out of some sort of voucher scheme unless you increased funding anyway. And increasing funding defies the purpose of a voucher scheme, as you could build a new school just as easily under the current system, and not be wasting half the cash on a redundant building.

But its the state that is the chief proprietor of these tests.

And you think five billion different diplomas from five billion different schools with five billion different marking criteria will mean anything to a potential employer? What's to stop all schools handing out perfect A*s?

Its likely that such schools would exist in a voucher system, but good schools that provided a real education would also exist.

Why? Why would a corporation running a school adopt a LESS lucrative business model than their competitors? An allergy to high profit margins? What's to stop them being bought out by their more-profitable rivals, and then junked? How many times would a company get junked before parents said "Yeah, their schools are nice, but we've moved daisy every single year, and they don't last very long." ?

Its up for the market to decide from there.

And it has, on McDonalds. So now we've discovered that the market creates fat ignorant slobs, why are we in favour of giving over our children's future to it?

But if society chooses meaningless numbers instead of education, that means society itself is uneducated and pretty much wants to be, which is a situation that can't be easily rectified.

Naive. People eat at McDonalds because they are told to. Because making the wrong decision is made easy for them. These corporations hire people to guarantee that the consumer's path of least resistance is the path which leads to their doors. A government is more than able to put up barriers and speed bumps to guide people to making the right choice. Infact, last I heard, that was the whole point of a republic style government. Until the US becomes a pure democracy, your elected officials are obliged to work in the people's best interests, as opposed to what the majority of them demand.

Perhaps if you had a voucher system for healthy food that was non-transferable for burgers, your country would be a bit leaner, eh?

Exactly.
This is what is happening now.

But I don't see how you can declare that this would happen. Parents aren't fans of these tests and neither are kids.

So you are saying that parents would knowingly send their children to a less convenient school, which will give their child a lower grade and possibly even fail them, because they dislike standardised testing?

Or are you saying that companies, which are run on statistics and measurements and reports, aren't going to be in favour of something as perfectly mechanical as using standardised testing as a pure and simpel bottom line?

And would you or anyone send their kids to such a horrible school? Some mabye, but most no.

Again, you are daydreaming. Parents don't have the time or the ability to go to a school for five years day in day out to check it out for their kids. They have to make a decision based on an out of hours walk-around and a prospectus. Marketing. There is no possible way they can appreciate the content until their kid has come out the other end. So, unless you have the plans of a time machine, school choices are going to continue to be superficial. Something companies love, as superficial is what they are good at catering for.

Do you really think there will be no way to evaluate intelligence or proficience other than a few rote tests?

No way that corporations can package and sell. No way that they can use.

'Competition' is whatever people want it to be.

In that it is a function of the market. But as the market is solely determined by what the corporations involved offer you, it is what THEY want it to be. And test scores are perfect, as they can be spun, twisted, boosted, sold, printed, argued, inflated, etc etc etc.

A real, good education would supply the knowledge necessary to test well and enough sound learning to insure the knowledge is retained.

Yes, but as that is superflous to getting the test scores, and the test scores are what count, it is, and always will be, redundant. That's fat a corporation won't be able to resist trimming. That's free money, just waiting to be taken.

What then, do you propose? How do we gauge intelligence?

Intelligence, in its literal sense, is unimportant in most jobs. It has no bearing on education or knowledge. That is why IQ tests tend to be abstract. Education is the imparting of KNOWLEDGE. One can have knowledge without understanding.

Surely tests belie SOME sort of skill or talent, much more than an entirely subjective analysis would.

Yes and no. Talent is innate - it is not something you learn, and so you might as well test it raw before education, as after it. Skills, practical abilities, can be tested, but they can only be tested by employing that skill directly. You can be marked in "reading" but being able to read flawlessly does not mean you have a command of the English language, or even an understanding of what you are actually reading.

While you could theoretically break a subject down into catergories and sub-catergories, etc etc - it would be meaningless. How does knowing someone's reading speed vs comprehension of adjectives, vs the weakness of their ability to conjugate at speed, compared to a large familiarty with complex grammatical structures tell you anything MEANINGFUL about them?

Really, the employer would need to test you in the actual job in order to correctly analyse your suitability for it. Your ability to perform totally unrelated tasks has no bearing on it. I have an A-level in computing, for example, but if I was asked to code in assembly, I would be totally lost. Despite it being a qualification in the exact same field, it is of no use. This is a case clear across the board, and no doubt the case elsewhere too.

My solution, unpopular though it is, would be a rating system based on participation. Interaction with the subject. - Although this is subjective, only the crudest of marking schemes (or even better, none at all) would be necessary. Did the person attend, did they take information onboard? If so, rubber stamp it with "they did this." - no meaningless ranking, just saying they attained a minimum level.

Then let employers provide their own training and marking scheme, totally intenal and used to pick a potential employee from their applicants based on job aptitude, rather than an aptitude for an irrelevant test.

I think it's rediculous to think they can be 'educated' at all.

Maybe, but it is too late for them now. With a more sophisticated mandatory education system there could be hope for them. With a laissez faire "pick what you want" system, they'll pick a big mac with lard every time.

It's entirely possible that newer, better forms of testing could be used.

'Fraid not. It is basic psychology. Psychology Made Simple, page 3, to be precise. No test, no matter how sophisticated, can test anything other than the participants aptitude for the test.

THere are numerous types of tests that test different forms of aptitude.

Tests that measure knowledge, IQ, writing ability, reading comprehension, etc.

See, the reply is in your own words. "That test different forms of aptitude" - yes, they test "aptitude at general knoledge tests" "aptitude at taking IQ tests" "Aptitude at writing ability tests" "Aptitude at reading comprehension tests" etc.

The multiplicity is an illusion - each new test is merely testing the ability to do that new test.

It's not unrealistic to come up with a form of testing that rather accurately assess talent.

Not unless your test involves perfectly replicating a real-world situation. Something that is impossible, technically, due to an application of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. In practice, it is possible, but not practical.

You can put potential pilots into a flight simulator (and they will still swear it's not the same as the real thing!), but every single kid in a yeargroup into a simulated archeological dig?

Intriguing, but at the same time somewhat wishy-washy.

How then are we to determine intelligence?

"If it looks like intelligence, and smells like intelligence, than it must be intelligence!"?

It is a toughie, but how many jobs require intelligence? I can't think of many. Most jobs just require a linear set of responses. "If this is so, change that" - that isn't intelligence, that's learning by rote, conditioning.

Sure as eggs is eggs, my marks have never had any bearing on the amount of intelligence I have displayed.

How would you measure it? Gramatical ability? Someone could be thick as pigshit, but have studied a course in formal grammer and thus make us both look "stupid." Logic? Same with studying formal logic. Breadth of knowledge? I know every US state capital - does that make me smarter than anyone else?
I haven't formally studied the tribes of the Amazon, and probably couldn't tell you too much about their lives and customs - does that make me less smart than someone who has watched the discovery channel? Quickness of mind? You can be quick witted, but poorly educated.

Why is your education, or my education better than GMsiskos?

Good question - whose to say it is? For all we know, the idiot is highly qualified thanks to good ol' silver spoon. He could've been nurse-maided through every test he ever took, and thus regurgitated precisely what was asked of him without any comprehension whatsoever.

Another question would be to substitute in Samiam - the guy's an idiot with a weak grasp of logic. Now, assuming he does actual have a degree in history, which I very much doubt given his total ignorance on the subject, one must ask what is the point of testing, even at the highest of levels, if it can pass someone who is so inept? Do you have any suggestions on how degree level testing can be markedly improved and made more reliable? Because I am sure plenty of people would like to know, and under a voucher scheme, I do not see CEOs with their harvard business school diplomas throwing them out of the window and rubbishing them any time soon.

THe criteria you use to determine this is evidence of some underlying objectivity to knowledge and thought.

Sorry, can't work like that. For a test RESULT to be meaningful, there must be a right and a wrong way to answer. As the right answer is just a combination of facts, when these facts are presented, irrespective of how they were achieved, the person must be given a pass. So, if two people provided identical pieces of work, one being objective and using knowledge and though, and the other didn't - you would still be unable to tell the two apart. You can't mark a test on what you think might be UNDER the answer, or BEHIND it. That is the enemy of objectivity, and completely incompatible with a static ranking or score.

But is is possible that their higher scores indicate they are better than other schools at teaching French.

Possible, but it doesn't logically follow. It is just as possible that they cheated, or that the students got lucky and the teacher coincidentally covered the exact same subject, with answers, in the previous class.

All they really show is that they are better at teaching their students to pass french tests. A student need not be able to speak french in order to pass the test.

Indeed, if we don't score anyone, how are we to determine anything?

There are alternatives. A scoring system can only be divisive, and generally demotivates the majority of students. It needs a radical overhaul, and there is no point in proposing alternatives until you know what you want the system to achieve.

Some sort of judging will need to be done, and it will almost certainly be numerical in nature.

If you put numbers on things which defy quantifying, you'll only end up getting nonsense out, I'm afraid. Which is fine if it is only the illusion of success that you actually needed.

What does this then say about the education system as a whole?

It has failings, and a voucher system will only amplify this, in my opinion. Just as digging out the foundations of the tower of pizza in an attempt to buttress it only made its balance even more precarious.

How could you make it effective?

Depends, but it would have to be uniform. There is no good having one school in the middle of Texas superlative, and everyone else in the country unable to get their kids into it, irrespective of the vouchers they keep waving around.

I mean, I can think of ways, but they require some unrealistic things, namely an intelligent, interested body.

Heh, you could be talking about the government... I guess all the same problems apply to selecting the judiciary, and other representatives.

Could I have learned it? Maybe, though I doubt any high school class (3 years) can teach you anything close a to an entire language, or even a reasonable facsimile of it.

The countries in Europe put us to shame.

Which may or may not be a good thing at all.

Crap schools = crap education, and it is all very well you opining that eventually, 6-7 years down the line their attendance might take a hit, but that's no good for the generation of idiots taught in the meantime. And it certainly doesn't provide an incentive for the "good" schools to say good once the competition has disappeared. At least an egalitarian system is trying to address crap schools, rather than passing of hundreds, maybe even thousands of children as "a lost cause" in one sitting.

It could be, yes, just as in the current system, the school could suck and nothing reasonable could be done to change it.

If "nothing reasonable" can be done, the same would be true of the school under a voucher scheme. If, as you suggest, the same kids up and move, they would then have to go to a rival school in the same area, the problem would just get pushed onto another company, with "nothing reasonable" to do about it, and so on. Eventually, no businesses are willing to set up schools that are going to fail because "nothing reasonable can be done".

Even when it works, your system is doomed to fail. What happens to the kids who get "downsized" ? You create another state run school in exactly the same place? And because it is another state sink school, it is run just the same as always?

For example, who am I to vote for to change schools for the better?

Neither party has a serious proposal; they simply don't care.

The people generally aren't clamoring for change; they simply don't care.

These are the days of our lives.

And you see it being different under a voucher scheme? You think that introducing a bunch of profit-hungry sharks into the mix will elleviate anything? "This school was brought to you by McDonalds, and our cafeteria only sells apples and oranges and stuff you don't find in Maccy D's" ?

It's already here, and businesses is already booming.

And you want to give them the kids, that'll help matters!

Or, Miss. Applebury tells 'Jim' and 'John' to use the 2 computers while the other 18 students do something else.

Like play with matches? For someone still in school, you seem to have a very distorted view of what it's like. Children, left to their own devices, don't generally teach themselves. Otherwise a school of 5,000 people would only need 1 teacher. "Jim, John, you're on the computers today. Ackbar, Audley, Andrew, Alice, Amy, Anitia, Anastasia, Alex, Aluicious, Barney, Bernard, Bertie, Bob, Brad, Beulice... etc... etc... You teach each other stuff..."

No, in the scenario you describe, you'd need another teacher to work with the pupils not on the computers to lead their completely different class.

And one teacher for two students is hardly economically valid. Which comes back to the economy of scale.

The '2 person IT class' (How I wish my school had IT classes. If only I had a choice in where I went to school, I could have had high school computer science education.) has 100% computer usage.

And also requires independant supervision and direction, which requires more staffing, and more expense.

There is no fundamental difference; that's an arbitrary distinction and it's totally fallacious.

Why a '20 person school' would have a '20 person IT class' is beyond me. Instead, it could have a 2 person IT class, or whatever.

I think 20 is a rather low number, but the point remains the same.

So the 2 person IT class requires a teacher for it, so now instead of 20 people with one teacher, you end up with 18 with one and 2 with another... That's a great division of resources. Why not give every two children in America a home tutor, while you are being so generous?

But once you account for that, the economy of scale loses its affect.

The difference between 1 librarian and a school of 1000 kids and 2 librarians in a school of 2000 kids is very minor.

An illogical and fallacious division of labour. The assumption that two people must be precisely twice efficient as one person is quite quite wrong, as common sense should tell you. By your argument, one person hand-crafting pots individually should be half as productive as two people working on a rudimentary production line, this is not the case. The very foundation of modern industry is based on this, and for you to overlook something so obvious is a rather poor indictment.

It's all about the student to teacher ratio.

You could say it would lower, but I would think this is a good thing. Smaller classes are generally regarded as better, are they not?

They are better, they also cost more. All those teachers need to be paid, and I am not how your vouchers are going to do this. Unless, of course, your voucher scheme is contingent on *spending more public money on schools anyway* - IE throwing cash at the problem.

An unfounded assumption; the policing need not get any worse.

More teachers = more cases. That is immutable fact. It is plain, simple, irrefutable maths. Unless, of course, you are suggesting the scheme will magically LOWER the proportion of incidence?

Now, more cases = more work for the people responsible for policing this. You are expecting the people responsible to work harder without an increase in resources - a naive and totally irresponsible expectation.

Twice as many teachers = twice as many molestors = twice as much resources needed to maintain the same level of policing.

Assuming the current ratios stay the same, and you have yet to give a single reason why they wouldn't. I have actually given an argument (increased demand means greater need for teachers) why the ratios would, if anything, shift to encompass more molestors. The same is true of sub-standard, or otherwise under-qualified teachers.

A school found to have a number of molestors would empty very quickly, I assure you.

*After* the damage is done. And this effect would be spread across the whole schooling system, not concentrated in one school.

It's not about 'Microsofts school' at all, its about the publically funded vouchers.

The school can exist and do whatever it wants, it just can't recieve public money, as outlined in the Constitution.

The consumers won't like that, nor will the corporations. Which sinks the two people that your scheme relies on support from.

And good riddance.

EN[i]GMA

01-21-2006, 12:06 AM

Why on earth do you think education is mandatory, then? Really, this is getting tiresome now.

I think you're misunderstanding me.

If people don't really want to be educated, then they won't be.

You can fill them full of all kinds of facts, send them to mandatory schools, etc, but there is no gurantee they will learn anything.

This is true for a significant portion of people.

Again, the current system is a perfect example.

Kids are, ostensibly, getting an education, but most of them are rock-stupid upon exit.

"So people would continue to eat at places that cut costs by getting rid of fresh vegetables, using mechanically reclaimed meat (eyelids), and generally taking advantage of them?"

Yes, it happens every day, and it took Supersize me to even make the smallest dent. How long as Mc Ds been around? That's precisely how many years worth of screwed children your system would create before the corporations have to even think about a token gesture.

I feel as though this is an entirely different topic and a lenthy one at that, so I'll sort of skim over an answer.

Should people be free to choose 'McDonalds'? I think so.

Now you're going to argue that 'McDonalds' wields psychological power over people, that they are indeed forced to eat there, and I'm going to say no, and we're going to solve nothing.

You could say that about road-safety. The government passes laws for a reason. Because people don't "just generally do what's best for them" - which is what your system relies on.

Again, should there be laws like this?

Specifically seat-belt laws. Should seat-belt laws exist?

I say no; if someone wants to kill themselves, let them.

I assume you would say yes, they should exist.

And yet, here at least, school is full of children who'd rather be playing games than getting an education.

Please, at least try to think through what you are saying before posting.

And if they would REALLY rather be playing games, if that was all they could focus on, they wouldn't be learning anything.

Yeah, they'd like to play games, but most children also like to learn, or at least realize they need to learn or, failing that, be told to learn.

The point is though, if they are not generally compliant, the education willnot be successful.

You can't force it into them, really.

And yet it is happening in schools everywhere in the world. I, for one, certainly didn't want to be educated and would rather have been palying games than acquiring information that I just as soon forgot. Here I am, educated.

Yes, but look at those who didn't remember shit.

There are many examples.

Is 'mandatory schooling' the only real option? Probably.

But we have 'mandatory schooling' AND an ignorant populous.

There's clearly something else.

QED, your argument is a nonsense. You can force an education on children, and, indeed, we are.

But are we doing it well?

Same goes for minimum standards, something your system has no checks or balances on whatsoever.

The market.

Other than assuming that a bunch of lazy reprobates care enough about their children to intervene, when they can't even be bothered to make their own food, preferring to eat at Mc Donalds and give themselves heart disease.

But any government run or democratic system assumes that they are willing to take part on the democratic process.

You could have a real great proposal, but if said reprobates don't go out and vote for it, it may amount to squat.

'Lazy reprobates' are not a 'market problem' or a 'voucher problem', they are indeed a human problem.

Short of make people 'not irresponsible', there isn't much we can do.

Yes, you just run the conveyor belts faster as use the MAGIC glue. Actually, in reality, this is a nonsense. You have to pay for quality, and when consumers are shopping, a low price is THE incentive. For a company to spend more on a product and charge less is not more "efficient" (infact, efficiency doesn't come into this at all) - it is cutting down profit margins, something companies DON'T DO. They don't just give cash away, you know. If you do some research, you discover only the most abjectly mismanaged companies can profit by efficiency streamlining. If a company could avoid giving its workforce free biscuits, they'd've done so *long* before they needed to raid the cookie jar for cash to throw into increasing quality. This is precisely why all streamlining exercises offer returns significantly less than estimated.

One can lower cost of production and increase quality at the same time, as I point out again.

Technological innovation, changes in the labor market, changes in competition, etc. all effect this.

If I weren't so tired, I would come up with an example. Maybe tommorow.

That is true, however that is not because money is being washed down the drain on luxuries like gold-plated swivel chairs for the office staff. You think a corporately owned school is going to throw money into the area? Pay for proper nutritional meals, instead of doing a deal with their other corporate interests to get super-cheap fast-food in the cafeteria?

Perhaps you're not up-to-date with current school food fare.

It's nothing to be proud of.

Because of the goodness of their hearts? It's certainly not goingto be to compete with other schools - they can no more afford to throw money away on extras than anyone else.

'Throw money away'?

"We'll feed your kids shit" hardly helps your PR. It hardly brings the customers to your doorstep.

Rubbish. Cutting corners is a way to increase profit margins instantly with little to no risk. Increased profit margins is the very life blood of business, its strength.

You think parents will take into account cheap ass plastic seats that hurt your back when picking a school? They won't even see them, let alone use them enough to realise how incredinlu uncomfortable they are.

So I take it your proposal includes 'nice fluffy seats'?

WHAM, instant savings, money in the bank.

One less healthy meal in the cafeteria per week - are the parents going to even know, much less care that their children have one less salad a week?

Things such as meals would be agreed to before the year started.

Serving things you didn't originally claim to serve easily constitutes fraud.

BIFF, instant cash.

Cheaper textbooks - the children only need to know what's on the tests, right? Yeah some MIGHT like to read around the subject, but the CEOs would like a new boat...

How could a parent possibly know that the text-books their kids are reading only teach the bare minimum? They can't know "what isn't being taught".

Schools that don't teach adequetely won't be that difficult to spot.

Private regulation industries would likely exist to review and grade schools. They could take care of a number of these problems.

THey could weigh lunchs, seats, curriculum, etc. and give information to parents.

A very simple, logical market extention.

Parents can be short-changed in an infinite number of subtle ways that save the corporations a killing, and whose cumulative effect is immense. And they will never be able to put a finger on what's wrong. They'll never have a kid in a different school to compare the two.

So, given the undeniable fact that parents will never be in a position to compare these things

Unless the facts are presented to them by a third party, be it the media, the government or a private regulatory organization.

- what is in it for a school to perform over-the-odds?

Money.

Yes its better, but as you know, the butcher the tinker and the cobbler don't do their jobs out of the goodness of their own hearts. Why would a corporation give away money to outperform its competitors when NO-ONE WILL EVER KNOW?

Answer: They won't - they're a business just like every other company.

You're becoming predictable.

Again, not an option. No matter how many vouchers a parent has, they can't and won't ship their children inter-state just so that their child can be at a school that is superior to a nearby one in one or another department. Likewise there are practical limits on the number of people a good school can take on before quality drops off. They might have some very talented and capable teachers, but those teachers can only teach so many kids in one go. There is not an unlimited number of good teachers, and the number of good teachers is not proportional to the number of schools that spring up.

It's a nice dream to suggest that competition will magically turn crap teachers into good ones, ugly buildings in run-down neighbourhoods into gleaming edifices, and everyone with vouchers will shop at a local farmer's market instead of eating unhealthy burgers.

Fact of the matter is, they won't. Nothing will change because their is no onus on the corporations to change anything.

Of course there is. There's money.

People have to pay them for rendering a service.

A company is not going to buy a school that is running at a loss and then spend MORE money on it. That is just not good business sense.

If you can turn it around, it is.

Using your tried-and-true schooling tactics, you can easily make a profit.

Maybe install some uncomfortable chairs, for instance. I heard they can save you a bundle.

A company won't set up right next to an existing school, because "brand loyalty" to that school (IE the fact that changing schools involves paper-work and disruption, buying a new uniform, getting new text books, changing the school run, etc etc etc, speaking to new teachers) will limit the uptake of students, no matter how good the new school is by comparison. The new school has to provide everything the existing school does (same outlay) for *half* the profit. Add to that the costs of setting up the school (buying materials, etc) and that is an idiotic business proposition.

So the school will have to set up suitably far from an existing school. And as schools are situated where they are for a reason, the new school is at a disadvantage in terms of location. No football field, no cafeteria, no rooms, no nothing except what gets built. And that will cost more than they could get out of some sort of voucher scheme unless you increased funding anyway. And increasing funding defies the purpose of a voucher scheme, as you could build a new school just as easily under the current system, and not be wasting half the cash on a redundant building.

There are actually probably enough school buildings now, or at least near enough.

Depending on the area, the locality of the school may not be a factor (Bussing) so competition will exist.

Even in areas of less competition, they will still have to render the best service, because if say, 5% of students leave the school, that will be a significant loss.

They can't afford that.

And you think five billion different diplomas from five billion different schools with five billion different marking criteria will mean anything to a potential employer? What's to stop all schools handing out perfect A*s?

Private regulatory agencies.

Somewhat like the Underwriters Labratories.

Why? Why would a corporation running a school adopt a LESS lucrative business model than their competitors? An allergy to high profit margins? What's to stop them being bought out by their more-profitable rivals, and then junked? How many times would a company get junked before parents said "Yeah, their schools are nice, but we've moved daisy every single year, and they don't last very long." ?

This assumes that everyone would keep their kids in a bad school.

A small percentage moving out of a school and into anotehr would shift around profits greatly.

5% moving away from one school and into another results in 10% change in overall profit.

I don't see how the 'ruthless competitor' can squeeze 10 or more percentage points of profit without reducing quality so much as to influene MORE people to leave.

As soon as you reduce quality some, some people leave, taking their money with them.

THen, to recoup, you ahve to lower quality even more which results in MORE people moving.

No more than 10 or 15% of people need to actually move out or divert their funds to have grave impact on the profit margins.

And it has, on McDonalds. So now we've discovered that the market creates fat ignorant slobs, why are we in favour of giving over our children's future to it?

And we've found that it produces fantastic cars.

What's your point?

Naive. People eat at McDonalds because they are told to.

No choice involved, eh?

Because making the wrong decision is made easy for them. These corporations hire people to guarantee that the consumer's path of least resistance is the path which leads to their doors. A government is more than able to put up barriers and speed bumps to guide people to making the right choice. Infact, last I heard, that was the whole point of a republic style government. Until the US becomes a pure democracy, your elected officials are obliged to work in the people's best interests, as opposed to what the majority of them demand.

Perhaps if you had a voucher system for healthy food that was non-transferable for burgers, your country would be a bit leaner, eh?

Perhaps indeed. (What a meaningless 'sentence'. I really am tired.)

I actually have some thoughts, but I can't currently articulate them. Need caffeine.

So you are saying that parents would knowingly send their children to a less convenient school, which will give their child a lower grade and possibly even fail them, because they dislike standardised testing?

If it would be a better school overall, yes.

Or are you saying that companies, which are run on statistics and measurements and reports, aren't going to be in favour of something as perfectly mechanical as using standardised testing as a pure and simpel bottom line?

Because without them, we're 'groping in the dark' as it were.

Again, you are daydreaming. Parents don't have the time or the ability to go to a school for five years day in day out to check it out for their kids. They have to make a decision based on an out of hours walk-around and a prospectus.

Or use informatin gleaned from sources such as friends, family, the media, private regulatory organizations and the government.

I'll reply to the rest tommorow. I found the latter half to be much more interesting and thought provoking. Need to bring my A-game as it were, and not slog through my tired talking points as you slog through yours.

STANKY808

01-21-2006, 01:20 PM

GMA']
Again, should there be laws like this?

Specifically seat-belt laws. Should seat-belt laws exist?

I say no; if someone wants to kill themselves, let them.

I assume you would say yes, they should exist.

Excuse me for a moment while I jump in here and go tangential. I've seen this sort of thing before and just don't get it. It seems the sentiment is one that rests on the idea that only the person not wearing the seatbelt is affected. This is just not so. Firstly, for those free market lovers, there is an economic cost involved due to things like lost productivity. Not to mention health care costs if the person isn't insured or is under-insured. Then if anyone cares about that person they can be adversely affected emotionally as well. And what about the potential other drivers involved? I know I'd feel rather awful if I were in an accident with another car and someone died cause they weren't wearing their seatbelt.
Anyhow, carry on.

Oh and Stossel is a fuckin' ass.

yeahwho

01-21-2006, 01:39 PM

Excuse me for a moment while I jump in here and go tangential. I've seen this sort of thing before and just don't get it. It seems the sentiment is one that rests on the idea that only the person not wearing the seatbelt is affected. This is just not so. Firstly, for those free market lovers, there is an economic cost involved due to things like lost productivity. Not to mention health care costs if the person isn't insured or is under-insured. Then if anyone cares about that person they can be adversely affected emotionally as well. And what about the potential other drivers involved? I know I'd feel rather awful if I were in an accident with another car and someone died cause they weren't wearing their seatbelt.
Anyhow, carry on.

Oh and Stossel is a fuckin' ass.

Thanks for saving me the time. (y)

cj hood

01-21-2006, 02:00 PM

EN[i]GMA

01-21-2006, 05:36 PM

Intelligence, in its literal sense, is unimportant in most jobs. It has no bearing on education or knowledge. That is why IQ tests tend to be abstract. Education is the imparting of KNOWLEDGE. One can have knowledge without understanding.

I didn't mean 'pure intellect', I should have specified.

I was reffering to individual intelligences, for specific tasks.

Like, some people are able to easily learn languages. How do we judge this?

Yes and no. Talent is innate - it is not something you learn, and so you might as well test it raw before education, as after it. Skills, practical abilities, can be tested, but they can only be tested by employing that skill directly. You can be marked in "reading" but being able to read flawlessly does not mean you have a command of the English language, or even an understanding of what you are actually reading.

While you could theoretically break a subject down into catergories and sub-catergories, etc etc - it would be meaningless. How does knowing someone's reading speed vs comprehension of adjectives, vs the weakness of their ability to conjugate at speed, compared to a large familiarty with complex grammatical structures tell you anything MEANINGFUL about them?

But again, if someone did have a fast reading speed, could comprehend well and conjugate well, that would tell they are either talented at langauge, or know the rules very well.

Such a person might make a good copy-editor or clerk or something of the sort.

Really, the employer would need to test you in the actual job in order to correctly analyse your suitability for it. Your ability to perform totally unrelated tasks has no bearing on it. I have an A-level in computing, for example, but if I was asked to code in assembly, I would be totally lost. Despite it being a qualification in the exact same field, it is of no use. This is a case clear across the board, and no doubt the case elsewhere too.

But I would venture to say you would more easily learn another type of coding (Maybe not assembly) more easily given your background and skill.

Knowledge of C++, for example, means you can almost certainly learn Java, as I hear they are quite similar.

Parrellels such as that could be made in all sorts of jobs, I would think.

My solution, unpopular though it is, would be a rating system based on participation.

Eh.

I doubt such a system is truly practical.

Interaction with the subject. - Although this is subjective, only the crudest of marking schemes (or even better, none at all) would be necessary. Did the person attend, did they take information onboard? If so, rubber stamp it with "they did this." - no meaningless ranking, just saying they attained a minimum level.

Then let employers provide their own training and marking scheme, totally intenal and used to pick a potential employee from their applicants based on job aptitude, rather than an aptitude for an irrelevant test.

But is this realistic?

I believe the current system DOES transmit useful information to employers; it wouldn't exist if it didn't.

It would be hard to train people, basically at random, for these sorts of jobs.

How is one to attain a position of an intellectual, or soemthing, without these 'guidelines' in place?

To be a true intellectual, say an expert on Russian history, one has to spend years learning.

It would be crucial to know if the person actually has the mental talent to be a historian, or computer engineer, or whatever.

I imagine that 'job training' as a form of aptitude testing would be highly innefficient.

Maybe, but it is too late for them now. With a more sophisticated mandatory education system there could be hope for them. With a laissez faire "pick what you want" system, they'll pick a big mac with lard every time.

Reassuring prospect for humanity itself, isn't it?

That humans are so cretinous, ignorant and base as to sacrifice their own children, I think, is evidence for humanities general tendancy to fuck anything up.

'Fraid not. It is basic psychology. Psychology Made Simple, page 3, to be precise. No test, no matter how sophisticated, can test anything other than the participants aptitude for the test.

So if I ask to you to spot the flaw in a number of example paragraphs, your results will not at all indicate your aptitude for spotting spelling and grammatical mistakes?

Certainly it won't be perfect, but its better than nothing. Better than saying "Well, he did attend grammar class".

See, the reply is in your own words. "That test different forms of aptitude" - yes, they test "aptitude at general knoledge tests" "aptitude at taking IQ tests" "Aptitude at writing ability tests" "Aptitude at reading comprehension tests" etc.

The multiplicity is an illusion - each new test is merely testing the ability to do that new test.

Do you also take a stand against other psychological test, personality tests, etc?

Do you think them at all valid?

Not unless your test involves perfectly replicating a real-world situation. Something that is impossible, technically, due to an application of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. In practice, it is possible, but not practical.

You can put potential pilots into a flight simulator (and they will still swear it's not the same as the real thing!), but every single kid in a yeargroup into a simulated archeological dig?

Eh, it's possible.

Someone with the time and talent could exactly model a dig-site using sonar and gps technology.

Get correct 'shovel' and 'dirt physics' (Some new game engines are quite good at physics, namely Source), and voila, simulated dig.

Depending one the computer/graphics engine, it could look BETTER than a real dig with 8x anti-aliasing and trilinear texture filtering.

It is a toughie, but how many jobs require intelligence?

Quite a few.

Certainly the most important jobs.

'President' for example, would be a job best handled by a towering intellect.

Ditto for engineer, professor, physicist, etc.

I can't think of many. Most jobs just require a linear set of responses. "If this is so, change that" - that isn't intelligence, that's learning by rote, conditioning.

Reminds me of this: http://www.despair.com/motivation.html

Sure as eggs is eggs, my marks have never had any bearing on the amount of intelligence I have displayed.

I concur with this.

My grades are not at all indicitve of my intellect.

Even my standardized test scores (Which are much better) don't accuretly assess my knowledge, because they don't have history sections, whatnot.

How would you measure it? Gramatical ability? Someone could be thick as pigshit, but have studied a course in formal grammer and thus make us both look "stupid." Logic? Same with studying formal logic. Breadth of knowledge? I know every US state capital - does that make me smarter than anyone else?
I haven't formally studied the tribes of the Amazon, and probably couldn't tell you too much about their lives and customs - does that make me less smart than someone who has watched the discovery channel? Quickness of mind? You can be quick witted, but poorly educated.

But I would say some combination of these, somewhere along the line, constitutes real 'intelligence'.

I guess its just subjective; whatever you say 'intelligence' is, it is.

Good question - whose to say it is? For all we know, the idiot is highly qualified thanks to good ol' silver spoon. He could've been nurse-maided through every test he ever took, and thus regurgitated precisely what was asked of him without any comprehension whatsoever.

Now lets not stretch the bounds of logic itselft; he's a total fucking idiot.

We don't need to beat around the bush about some things.

Another question would be to substitute in Samiam - the guy's an idiot with a weak grasp of logic. Now, assuming he does actual have a degree in history, which I very much doubt given his total ignorance on the subject, one must ask what is the point of testing, even at the highest of levels, if it can pass someone who is so inept? Do you have any suggestions on how degree level testing can be markedly improved and made more reliable? Because I am sure plenty of people would like to know, and under a voucher scheme, I do not see CEOs with their harvard business school diplomas throwing them out of the window and rubbishing them any time soon.

That brings up an interesting point: MBA schools.

They are hyper-competitive, as you probably know.

Do you think there's anything to the rankings? Is a Harvard MBA as good as a University of Trashtown MBA?

Surely companies would realize this, if it were true.

They would save millions by hiring 'any old MBA'.

Or perhaps they've found there is something to the process.

Sorry, can't work like that. For a test RESULT to be meaningful, there must be a right and a wrong way to answer. As the right answer is just a combination of facts, when these facts are presented, irrespective of how they were achieved, the person must be given a pass. So, if two people provided identical pieces of work, one being objective and using knowledge and though, and the other didn't - you would still be unable to tell the two apart. You can't mark a test on what you think might be UNDER the answer, or BEHIND it. That is the enemy of objectivity, and completely incompatible with a static ranking or score.

Possible, but it doesn't logically follow. It is just as possible that they cheated, or that the students got lucky and the teacher coincidentally covered the exact same subject, with answers, in the previous class.

All they really show is that they are better at teaching their students to pass french tests. A student need not be able to speak french in order to pass the test.

So then we're back to sqaure one.

How the hell do we figure out if anyone knows how to speak French?

It seems as if we're floating in a sea of subjectivity.

How do I even know you can speak English? Obviously I'm interpreting your statements in order to gauge your aptitude at language; a form of 'test'.

Logically, you could be 'cheating', by having an editor or something go over your posts, but your 'results', in the form of your responses and writings, I think, constitute evidence that you do in fact know how to speak English proficiently.

The exact criteria I used to determine this (Lack of spelling, grammatical errors. Proper sentence structure. Subject/verb agreement. Proper conjugation. Use of complex sentence structures. Proper use of clauses.) can all be tested, to a reasonable degree.

If its absolutely impossible to determine if someone can really speak a langauge via a test, how can you do it in real life?

Maybe the person just knows, phonetically, the things he's saying and has no understanding. It's possible, though not plausable.

By saying tests are invalid, you seem to be saying TESTING is invalid, and testing is what we do, constantly.

It's part of how we percieve things.

There are alternatives. A scoring system can only be divisive, and generally demotivates the majority of students. It needs a radical overhaul, and there is no point in proposing alternatives until you know what you want the system to achieve.

Alright.

Lay some basics out.

Depends, but it would have to be uniform. There is no good having one school in the middle of Texas superlative, and everyone else in the country unable to get their kids into it, irrespective of the vouchers they keep waving around.

But all schools, and all teachers, and all students, and all areas are not the same.

'Uniform' may be very bad. 'Uniform' for special ed children? Of course not. 'Uniform' for both city and country schools? Could be problematic. 'Uniform' for disabled children?

One size doesn't fit all.

Heh, you could be talking about the government... I guess all the same problems apply to selecting the judiciary, and other representatives.

Indeed.

THe basic flaw in all attempts to make things better, is that they assume that a there is a populous who really wants to make things better, or can make things better.

That may not always be a fair assumption.

The countries in Europe put us to shame.

Indeed they do.

I believe they teach langauges from the first year on though, not simply a few years at the end, when children are past their prime langauge learning talents.

Crap schools = crap education, and it is all very well you opining that eventually, 6-7 years down the line their attendance might take a hit, but that's no good for the generation of idiots taught in the meantime. And it certainly doesn't provide an incentive for the "good" schools to say good once the competition has disappeared. At least an egalitarian system is trying to address crap schools, rather than passing of hundreds, maybe even thousands of children as "a lost cause" in one sitting.

Well, our 'egalitarian system' is costing us money, stupidifying (Word? Should be) our children and generally fucking us over in the world economy.

Look at the state of engineering education among American children. It's deplorable.

If "nothing reasonable" can be done, the same would be true of the school under a voucher scheme. If, as you suggest, the same kids up and move, they would then have to go to a rival school in the same area, the problem would just get pushed onto another company, with "nothing reasonable" to do about it, and so on. Eventually, no businesses are willing to set up schools that are going to fail because "nothing reasonable can be done".

Even when it works, your system is doomed to fail. What happens to the kids who get "downsized" ? You create another state run school in exactly the same place? And because it is another state sink school, it is run just the same as always?

[quote]
And you see it being different under a voucher scheme? You think that introducing a bunch of profit-hungry sharks into the mix will elleviate anything? "This school was brought to you by McDonalds, and our cafeteria only sells apples and oranges and stuff you don't find in Maccy D's" ?

Well if that indeed is the case, what difference does it make what we do?

Fucked if we do, fucked if we don't.

Hardly an inspiring process.

Like play with matches? For someone still in school, you seem to have a very distorted view of what it's like. Children, left to their own devices, don't generally teach themselves. Otherwise a school of 5,000 people would only need 1 teacher. "Jim, John, you're on the computers today. Ackbar, Audley, Andrew, Alice, Amy, Anitia, Anastasia, Alex, Aluicious, Barney, Bernard, Bertie, Bob, Brad, Beulice... etc... etc... You teach each other stuff..."

No, in the scenario you describe, you'd need another teacher to work with the pupils not on the computers to lead their completely different class.

And one teacher for two students is hardly economically valid. Which comes back to the economy of scale.

Like I said, 20 students is a poor example.

I concede that, in a 20 student set, or even a 100 student set, economies of scale are a large factor, but the larger the school gets, say 400 student school vs. a 500 student school, the less the economies of scale matter.

If economies of scale really were this prevelent, we'd all go to giant 10,000 student schools.

So the 2 person IT class requires a teacher for it, so now instead of 20 people with one teacher, you end up with 18 with one and 2 with another... That's a great division of resources. Why not give every two children in America a home tutor, while you are being so generous?

You're looking at it all wrong. We'll just ship the kids THESE THINGS: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0789719959/103-4567975-1331862?v=glance&n=283155

and call it a day.

An illogical and fallacious division of labour. The assumption that two people must be precisely twice efficient as one person is quite quite wrong, as common sense should tell you. By your argument, one person hand-crafting pots individually should be half as productive as two people working on a rudimentary production line, this is not the case. The very foundation of modern industry is based on this, and for you to overlook something so obvious is a rather poor indictment.

So I assume the two librarians are going to set up some sort of 'assembly line' in order to funnel more books into and out of the hands of students, per day?

1 librarian, with 1000 students in a library of 10,000 books vs 2 librarians, with 2000 students in a library of 20,000 books would be nearly similar in results.

Twice as many books could be catalogued, checked out, put back, etc, or one could do one task while the other did another.

Its not as if there is a huge benefit to having a great number of librarians, working as some team.

Most of what a librarian does is sit behind a counter and check out books.

I do want to hear your idea for a 'library production line' though.

They are better, they also cost more. All those teachers need to be paid, and I am not how your vouchers are going to do this. Unless, of course, your voucher scheme is contingent on *spending more public money on schools anyway* - IE throwing cash at the problem.

Reducing waste. There's a lot of it.

More teachers = more cases. That is immutable fact. It is plain, simple, irrefutable maths. Unless, of course, you are suggesting the scheme will magically LOWER the proportion of incidence?

Hold up.

More molesters as teachers due to increased number of teachers, yes.

But you're making a leap in logic in saying overall occurance of molestation itself would go up because of this.

The molestors aren't just sitting around now, waiting for a teacher job in a voucher school to open up, they're, you know, molesting.

There need not be any overall increase in occurences, only a change in the number of them from teachers.

Now, more cases = more work for the people responsible for policing this. You are expecting the people responsible to work harder without an increase in resources - a naive and totally irresponsible expectation.

Not necessarily.

The current teachers are already qualified.

THe overall number of people becoming teachers would likely increase, but not drastically, at any one time.

They needn't be 'overworked' and they woulldn't be overworked.

It's not as if, tommorow, they'll be a million new teachers to check.

Twice as many teachers = twice as many molestors = twice as much resources needed to maintain the same level of policing.

Not at all.

The current teachers are already 'policed'.

ANd neither of us knows the real number of teachers or the way policing will be conducted.

The consumers won't like that, nor will the corporations. Which sinks the two people that your scheme relies on support from.

And good riddance.

The Republic's lasted this long...

EN[i]GMA

01-21-2006, 05:38 PM

Funkaloyd

01-21-2006, 07:25 PM

Isn't it an old libertarian line that "corporations are made of people"? Well, society is made of individuals.

STANKY808

01-21-2006, 09:46 PM

GMA']So 'individual freedom' gets in the way of 'collective good' and you crush 'individual freedom'.

How comforting.

Everything you said is true, but I think true freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes and do things that hurt the collective good.

THe state isn't your dad, telling you to 'wear a seatbelt', not should it be.

But is Stossel an ass? HELL YES!

yeahwho

01-21-2006, 11:10 PM

But is Stossel an ass? HELL YES!

When the revolution comes, Stossel will have to be one of the first to go. His outrage shoud be aimed at his sponsors.

Ace42X

01-22-2006, 02:05 PM

GMA']
If people don't really want to be educated, then they won't be.

Again, the current system is a perfect example.

Then the same is true under your system, which is equally doomed to failure.

Should people be free to choose 'McDonalds'? I think so.

Now you're going to argue that 'McDonalds' wields psychological power over people, that they are indeed forced to eat there, and I'm going to say no, and we're going to solve nothing.

And you'll be factually and objectively wrong. Just like you are every time you deny the power of marketing over people's free will. Yeah it will solve nothing, but you refusing to accept undeniable fact *won't* solve anything.

Why don't you stand outside McDonalds and ask the people who go in "Do you want to be fat and ugly?" and "Do you want to be constipated?" and "Do you like paying lots of money to be poisoned?"

The answer will be no, I'd wager.

So why are they engaging in an activity that they REALLY don't want to? Why are millions of people, who REALLY don't want to be fat engaging in activity which fills them with self-loathing and causes them pain and suffering? Because they have made a reasonable and informed choice?

Specifically seat-belt laws. Should seat-belt laws exist?
I say no; if someone wants to kill themselves, let them.

And then the kids are orphaned, and become criminals and deprivates as is so often the case and go on to commit crimes... That's a world I want to live in.

Also, people who don't wear seat-belts often kill other people who are sensible enough to wear seat-belts.

You can equally apply it to drink-driving laws as well.

Stupidity and poor education kills people, and like so many crimes of negligence, it is often innocent bystanders that get it.

And if they would REALLY rather be playing games, if that was all they could focus on, they wouldn't be learning anything.

You can REALLY want to be playing games, and yet still be able to focus on other things. I can tell you honestly that I would REALLY have preferred to play games than sit through boring schoolwork, and that never stopped me from learning a single thing.

Sorry, but that argument is just plain wrong.

But we have 'mandatory schooling' AND an ignorant populous.

GIGO - Garbage in, garbage out. You teach kids shit and poorly, they learn shit and poorly. Your system has no provision to help this, and offers businesses every opportunity to put a spin on what they feed the children.

But are we doing it well?

We could be doing it better, but paying companies with vested interests to do it isn't going to help.

The market.

The market doesn't regulate a damned thing. It doesn't stop people from paying through the nose to make themselves chronically ill and miserable. It doesn't stop people eating at McDonalds, it pushes them through the goddamn door.

It's the market that has produced a bunch of fat sofa-surfing blobbish idiots, and it is completely insane that you think it is going to work against its best interests to undo everything it has worked so hard to achieve. Can you SERIOUSLY see a school owned by McDonalds teaching kids about how unhealthy McDonalds meals are? Basic nutrition? Or a MS owned school teaching the virtues of open source programming?

That's like expecting a tobacco company to sponsor a "smoking kills" campaign. Just plain stupid.

But any government run or democratic system assumes that they are willing to take part on the democratic process.

An economy is not a democratic system, and corporately controlled schools sure as hell are not.

One can lower cost of production and increase quality at the same time, as I point out again.

Technological innovation, changes in the labor market, changes in competition, etc. all effect this.

If I weren't so tired, I would come up with an example. Maybe tommorow.

You can't. You cannot intentionally lower the cost of production and increase quality at the same time without incurring a LOSS IN PROFIT. Technological innovation doesn't just magically happen. If it is public, your competitors can benefit from it just as easily, conferring no advantage and not allowing you to lower prices. If it is private, then you must have PAID for the innovation in research and development. You cannot afford to pay for R and D *AND* also lower your profit per unit without your company losing money. *AND* you have to spend more capital on upgrading and buying the new technology. That again HURTS profitability, and PISSES OFF shareholders.

Any idiot could tell you this, so why someone like you, who takes an active interest in the field, can't see it is beyond me.

All the things you have put forward merely increase profits, giving companies the OPPORTUNITY to allocate resources to improving quality. However, your belief that they automatically would is not just silly, but also quite quite wrong. Those increases in profits are what a company WANTS. They are not going to go to their shareholders "Yeah, we could all have that profit, you know that thing were are all here for, the only reason you bought shares, the thing the law obliges us to prioritise acquiring... Or we could, you know, just give it to consumers out of the goodness of our hearts, in direct contradiction of all economic reason..."

Come off it. If a change in competition has given them more money, companies do not instantly think about how they can get give it away to you or me.

Perhaps you're not up-to-date with current school food fare.

It's nothing to be proud of.

I am, and that is precisely my point. You expect a business to buy into this market having looked at the income and outgoing of the school, and then think about how they can pour money *into* it?

You expect McDonalds to buy a school and say "No kids here will eat shitty fastfood!" ?

"We'll feed your kids shit" hardly helps your PR. It hardly brings the customers to your doorstep.

And yet feeding your kids shit is precisely what McDonalds does, and their PR doesn't stop customers from flocking to their doorstep. Proof positive, QED, that your faith in the market is quite frankly farcical. By your argument McDonalds would be out of business. It isn't, and neither would the new brand of McDonalds schools.

Things such as meals would be agreed to before the year started.
Serving things you didn't originally claim to serve easily constitutes fraud.

Nonsense on both accounts. Schools CAN'T agree to that. If a caterer pulls out, a caterer pulls out. By your rationale, if a caterer trebled prices, a school would be obliged to stick with them so that they "served what they served."

And I think you'll find that schools don't actually specify menus in their prospectuses, and are not sold on a "Fish on a friday" tagline.

It is both a school's and a business's prerogative to alter their services as circumstances change. Even assuming that they COULD be made liable, their user agreements would include the option to change services as necessary, just like all EULAs have. And don't even say "then parent's would go to another school" - that's like saying "people would use a different operating system if they didn't like the EULA"

IT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN REALITY. Nice dream, but doesn't happen, at all, ever. Even assuming that it COULD happen, and it doesn't, you are assuming that a company would voluntarily leave itself totally open to litigation by NOT putting a standard disclaimer in a standard contract. How many pieces of software have you seen without EULAs in order to attract customers, hmmm?

Fact of the matter is, all schools would need a similar contract, and thus there would be no escaping it.

And, once again, accepting the increasingly improbable arguments FOR your case, you assume that there aren't ways around it anyway. For example, Sony's PSP has included firmware updates which damage the efficiency of the console, blocking users from accessing homemade, and perfectly legal, software.

Has this harmed PSP sales? Not a jot.

Schools that don't teach adequetely won't be that difficult to spot.

Adequately is not the problem. Adequate is merely "what is required to pass a test." Adequate is precisely what your countrymen are taught at the moment. And that is why they are "stupid."

Private regulation industries would likely exist to review and grade schools. They could take care of a number of these problems.

THey could weigh lunchs, seats, curriculum, etc. and give information to parents.

A very simple, logical market extention.

As is bribery... Who is going to pay for this "logical market extention" ? The government? Parents? Corporations <snigger> ?

They could just as easily pay for a private school.

Unless the facts are presented to them by a third party, be it the media, the government or a private regulatory organization.

Because the media never receive kickbacks from the government or its lobbyists. It's not like Fox would purposely withold censure of a Murdock run school, right?

"Private regulatory organisation" - who can get paid by parents once, and schools twice. How are they going to measure this? Burst into a school? If they are private they can't. Make an appointment? Give the school a chance to put on their super-salad menu? Sheperd them round the top-tier classes? Show them the new computer labs?

Hahahahahahahahah... Really, the naivety is astounding.

Money.

Which, according to you, will appear out of thin air. Because at the moment schools make so much that the seats are paved with gold. And if there are twice as many schools, dividing the money they get from the government in half, and this money has to give shareholders a nice stake, as well as paying for the corporate staff, etc... Everyone will be rich as hogs, right? Especially all the other people who have to get paid now... Like the private regulators, and the bus drivers overtime as they ferry kids from even further afield costing more petrol. And then there is the extra moeny being spent on nice meals to lure 15% of kids, even though that has to go up for 100% of the school population.

You're becoming predictable.

That is because you seem totally unable to see the blindingly obvious.

Of course there is. There's money.

People have to pay them for rendering a service.

Despite this service costing more than it does for the current schools to run, whilst paying them half the money they get from the government...

So even though, under your system, it is costing the corporations just to keep their doors open, they are going to be inspired to voluntarily INCREASE their overheads? Hahahahahahahaha, what the hell were you thinking?!?

If you can turn it around, it is.

Using your tried-and-true schooling tactics, you can easily make a profit.

How? A failing school currently running at capacity gets 100% of its income from the government for its cheap ass service. Now that parents are able to put their children elsewhere, what is the company going to do to not only stop the children from jumping ship, but also make a profit on a school that was failing when it was eating up 100% of the government money?

What, they are going to spend money on this FAILING SCHOOL to increase the capacity of a FAILING school, so that when they spend MORE MONEY on "turning it around" they can increase the number of students they have to SPEND MONEY on?

Schools aren't getting enough money under a monopoly, and you think that companies can expect to make a profit when they don't have the benfit of a monopoly? That flies in the face of reason.

Depending on the area, the locality of the school may not be a factor (Bussing) so competition will exist.

Because moving yourself into direct competition with a rival is what every fledgling enterprise wants...

Even in areas of less competition, they will still have to render the best service, because if say, 5% of students leave the school, that will be a significant loss.

They can't afford that.

So, "even in areas of less competition" - a company buying into an area will have to invest heavily just to avoid a "significant loss"

And you can't see the flaw in this?

This assumes that everyone would keep their kids in a bad school.

This assumes that people would eat at McDonalds. And they do.

QED.

5% moving away from one school and into another results in 10% change in overall profit.

No, it results in 10% change in the students. If that 5% movement allows a school to shut down one under-filled class and consolidate, that could actually mean a net profit. They can do away with the cost of one or more teacher, for the sake of a few students whose vouchers don't even cover her wages. Your gross simplification is quaint, but totally flawed in so many ways.

I don't see how the 'ruthless competitor' can squeeze 10 or more percentage points of profit without reducing quality so much as to influene MORE people to leave.

Then open your eyes, FFS. All the supermarket chicken that both you and I get all the time is now nearly 40% bigger because of the injection of water, growth hormones, and battery intensive farming. That 40% is all FAT. Not healthy tasty meat, watery, sugar-laden fat. But not just that 40%, the actual MEAT quantity has gotten smaller, due to the birds being grown quicker and culled younger. They don't have time to amass proper flesh, muscle and tissue.

Farms can produce many many many more birds like this than they can under a traditional or free-range system.

So, in effect the customer is getting 50% less meat, 40% more fat and additives. The farmer can sell 500% more chicken, by reducing the price only 15%.

Profits sky rocket, consumers lap it up, and we get fat and poisoned.

Quality is subjective, variable, and one of the easiest things to disguise. That's why marketing exists.

As soon as you reduce quality some, some people leave, taking their money with them.

No, not "as soon as" - as soon as people notice and are in a position to do something about it. IE Someday maybe never.

People never notice the quality decrease, because businesses are very adept at controlling it. They haven't noticed McDonalds using increasingly inferior ingriediants, they didn't notice them upping the fat content and lowering the meat content, they didn't notice them increasing the sugar in their ketchup.

Then, to recoup , you ahve to lower quality even more which results in MORE people moving.

No, you have lower quality, which gives you have tasty profit margins, and a proportionally smaller bundle of spare notes to spend on gaudy bells and whistles to show just how much BETTER your product is. Afterall, I saw it on TV, it must be true. There was a jingle and everything.

No more than 10 or 15% of people need to actually move out or divert their funds to have grave impact on the profit margins.[/quote]

Absolute fiction. You are assuming that the cost-cutting will not save them more than the number of people they expect to lose. You are also over-estimating people's appreciation of quality.

And we've found that it produces fantastic cars.

What's your point?

The fact that you can say that is my point.

No choice involved, eh?

People are choosing to be fat, ugly, miserable, and likely to die unpleasantly? Perhaps you should do a straw poll on that.

Even putting aside that for it to be a "choice" the chooser needs to be informed, convincing people that it was THEIR choice that they did what you want to is the basis of all marketing, as well as all magic tricks.

Take Derren Brown, for example, who can make people choose the box he wants them to without them even knowing he is influencing them.

If anything, I think your lack of belief in this would make you incredibly susceptible

I really am tired.

It is showing. Get some sleep. You are not as used to posting without any use of your forebrain as I am.

If it would be a better school overall, yes.

Nope, they wouldn't. A lower test score means the child is less likely to get a job they want, and thus parents equate this with a miserable life. Ask your parents, and they'll no doubt tell you that they'd rather see you in a well-paid job of your choosing with a mediocre education and a big shiney A on a diploma, rather than being intellectual and flipping burgers because you have no qualifications after failing to compete with the egg-heads at a super-school.

Because without them, we're 'groping in the dark' as it were.

So you conceed companies would be all for standardised testing?

Or use informatin gleaned from sources such as friends, family,

Unlikely to have any pertinent information. If it was "years ago" then it is irrelevant, as any reinvestment by a company would not be taken into account (further detracting from the desirability of buying a school) and anything could've changed. If they have a student in the school, then they clearly would recommend it, otherwise they'd not have their kid there ANYWAY, *or* they'd be, in effect, saying they are bad parents.

So, they either are in a worse position to know than the parents in question, or unlikely to give a useful opinion.

the media,

The liberal media?

private regulatory organizations

Bean counters...

and the government.

Who, according to you, couldn't run a bus service, and can't even fix crappy schools when they have responsibility for them. Oh, and it would cost taxpayers even more.

But again, if someone did have a fast reading speed, could comprehend well and conjugate well, that would tell they are either talented at langauge, or know the rules very well.

Such a person might make a good copy-editor or clerk or something of the sort.

Yes, but you'd not know with a blanket grade in "English" or even "English Language".

And if the test was multiple choice, it could just as easily be that "they are good at spotting the odd one out." - That one is a classic testing error.

Knowledge of C++, for example, means you can almost certainly learn Java, as I hear they are quite similar.

You could equally argue that because someone has got an A in French they could more easily learn Spanish. It doesn't mean that I can speak Spanish, or even have any sort of aptitude for it.

I doubt such a system is truly practical.

How the hell not? It's really just glorified attendence...

I believe the current system DOES transmit useful information to employers; it wouldn't exist if it didn't.

Yes, it does. But it transmits the wrong sort of information. It transmits things such as: This child didn't come from a broken home; this person probably doesn't have a drugs problem; this persons parents could afford to give him extra tutition, this person doesn't bunk off school all the time, etc etc.

All of these things are very useful to an employer, and have nothing to do with education.

Even if this person does have personal problems, it says "this person doesn't let it get in the way of work."

It doesn't say anything about actual education or wisdom though, and that is one reason why America is stupid. "This candidate is nicely conformed." 10/10.

That humans are so cretinous, ignorant and base as to sacrifice their own children, I think, is evidence for humanities general tendancy to fuck anything up.

I am not so pessimistic. Most Big Mac eaters do so because it is made easy for them. The equivalent of making the Maccy Ds downhill. By the time they contemplate the walk back up the hill, they already have a burger in hand.

So if I ask to you to spot the flaw in a number of example paragraphs, your results will not at all indicate your aptitude for spotting spelling and grammatical mistakes?

Within the framework of a printed test, after a night of cramming, without having any time to forget what I have learned.

Certainly it won't be perfect, but its better than nothing. Better than saying "Well, he did attend grammar class".

Actually, in effect, that is all it says. In the UK at least, and I assume in the US too, tests can only be made to test what is on the curriculum, IE what has been studied. A 100% mark thus reflects that a candidate has sat and listened to the class. If a class was taught perfectly, everyone would get 100% which would only tell you that the person attended the class and didn't ignore what he was told.

Thus, the score is as indicative of the teacher's ability as the student's, if you discount attendance, etc.

Do you also take a stand against other psychological test, personality tests, etc?

Do you think them at all valid?

Would depend on the context of the test. Generally I would argue that there are too many confounding variables for them to be very useful. And they can have purposes, etc... Just not ones directly related to education in the purest sense.

'President' for example, would be a job best handled by a towering intellect.

That was irony, right?

Ditto for engineer, professor, physicist, etc.

Very small strata of people in those jobs. Most people working in those areas are assistants. As for engineer, a lot of it is merely applying principles. That is not really any different to flipping a burger. A calculator can do all of it. Just key the figures into the computer, and out comes the little red light saying that it won't work and to try again.

Do you think there's anything to the rankings? Is a Harvard MBA as good as a University of Trashtown MBA?

Surely companies would realize this, if it were true.

Three words: Old Boys Network.

How do I even know you can speak English? Obviously I'm interpreting your statements in order to gauge your aptitude at language; a form of 'test'.

Which only demonstrates that I can post here in a way that will either meet or fall short of your requirements. However, unless there is a job that requires my sort of posts on the BBMB, then that information is of little use to you.

If I was transposed to a job writing (in my flawless unbroken English) about plantpots, you'd be very very disappointed very very quickly.

It's part of how we percieve things.

That's judging, not testing. Judging is subjective, and inline with my subjective definition of intelligence, apt. Testing is an attempt to put a quantative judgement on something qualitative, and hence the problem.

Lay some basics out.

For starters it would need to be non-divisive. A purely competitive system will only alienate people in the lower tiers, causing them to perform worse still. An education system should get the best out of everyone, not just the winners.

'Uniform' may be very bad. 'Uniform' for special ed children? Of course not. 'Uniform' for both city and country schools? Could be problematic. 'Uniform' for disabled children?

One size doesn't fit all.

And yet tests don't take into account the differences. You propose giving people different educations, and then the same tests. Hardly just, is it? And if you then give people different tests, they become immaterial. The differences will be subjective, defying the purpose of testing in the first place.

And it depends on the disability. Yes, a school based on a rooftop where people have to climb a ladder to get to their class isn't suitable for someone in a wheelchair, but in this day and age there is no reason why people with physical disabilities shouldn't fit in with the rest of society. Mental disabilities is difficult. Ideally schools would have special facilities for the mentally disadvantaged. If special facilities can offer better help, I am all the more for it. Same for the physically disabled, in that case. However, we are not talking about them.

Under a voucher scheme, a school may well decide that kitting out a disabled student with a carer and facilities doesn't justify the amount they could profit. WHAM, the handicapped don't get to go to school.

I believe they teach langauges from the first year on though, not simply a few years at the end, when children are past their prime langauge learning talents.

It is more a cultural phenomenon AFAIK. I learned french for the best part of a decade. Not sure how long the French children learn languages, but I am guessing not much longer.

Well, our 'egalitarian system' is costing us money, stupidifying (Word? Should be) our children and generally fucking us over in the world economy.

And yet you expect a business to enter a sector where there isn't any more money to be had.

McDonaldising it won't help one jot. It'll just put the foot on the gas.

Well if that indeed is the case, what difference does it make what we do?

None, as long as what you do is "reasonable" - by which I take you to mean unambitious.

A serious reevaulation is in order. My propositions are pretty audacious, but I think that is what it takes.

I concede that, in a 20 student set, or even a 100 student set, economies of scale are a large factor, but the larger the school gets, say 400 student school vs. a 500 student school, the less the economies of scale matter.

Heh, no. 20 vs 100 is a 500% increase. 400 vs 500 is a 125% increase.

You'd have to compare a 400 person school with a 2,000 person school. And as you can see, that would still show an economy of scale.

If economies of scale really were this prevelent, we'd all go to giant 10,000 student schools.

No, schools are generally as large as economic factors will allow. Pick a single industry that you think is most indicative of an economy of scale, and as why it isn't a single factory the size of all its competitors.

We don't see giant schools because of geographic considerations - the number of students it can comfortably cater for in a single area, and the commution time it takes to get there.

Twice as many books could be catalogued, checked out, put back, etc, or one could do one task while the other did another.

No, if one librarian is out with a cart, the desk is unmanned, this creates a backlogue of students, and adds to the walking time. By adding one person manning the desk, you can have the books being put back on shelves at the same time as the line is being steadily processed. Ditto for processing returned books.

Adding staff can help eliminate a bottleneck which massively and disproportionately slows down a process. This is one of the virtues of a production line, and why it is more efficient than multiple people working independantly.

Reducing waste. There's a lot of it.

Which is what all new managers say when they get their first crack of the whip, and all of them leave saying when they were totally unable to make a dent on it because it was necessary.

It is wishful thinking to suggest that a cookie jar hasn't been raided.

More molesters as teachers due to increased number of teachers, yes.

But you're making a leap in logic in saying overall occurance of molestation itself would go up because of this.

No, it isn't a leap at all. Incidences are proportional to opportunity, and teachers have a greater opportunity. Many paedophiles and other perverts gravitate to careers that enable them to offend precisely because of the opportunities given.

Sad, alarming, but fact.

Not necessarily.

The current teachers are already qualified.

THe overall number of people becoming teachers would likely increase, but not drastically, at any one time.

They needn't be 'overworked' and they woulldn't be overworked.

It's not as if, tommorow, they'll be a million new teachers to check.

New schools can't run without new teachers. If there are enough schools cropping up to offer competition (which your scheme relies on) then there are enough teachers to make a difference, there must be.

Not at all.

The current teachers are already 'policed'.

ANd neither of us knows the real number of teachers or the way policing will be conducted.

Totally illogical. Unless you are suggesting that the people who do police this are sitting idle enjoying getting paid for downtime, then your rebuttal is irrelevant.

Yes the current teachers are already policed, and they are being policed at capacity. To increase the teachers requires that capacity to be increased. It's simple supply and demand...

EN[i]GMA

01-23-2006, 05:53 PM

Oh dear. I think we've managed to scare everyone off yet again.

Then the same is true under your system, which is equally doomed to failure.

It's true in general.

If the kids don't want to learn, are averse to learning, you want teach them shit.

You can't.

And you'll be factually and objectively wrong. Just like you are every time you deny the power of marketing over people's free will. Yeah it will solve nothing, but you refusing to accept undeniable fact *won't* solve anything.

How much power?

McDonalds doesn't wield supreme authority over me. I can choose not to eat there quite easily, and I often do.

I don't see how the McDonalds commercial where the guy puts his BIg Mac on the turntable has any influence on people; I thought it was stupid.

Why don't you stand outside McDonalds and ask the people who go in "Do you want to be fat and ugly?" and "Do you want to be constipated?" and "Do you like paying lots of money to be poisoned?"

The answer will be no, I'd wager.

But ask them "Do you like McDonalds" and they'll probably say yes.

'There's no accounting for taste' as they say.

Ask those people if McDonalds is unhealthy; they'll say yes. They know its unhealthy but they choose to eat there anyway.

People speed all the time, but they don't want to 'die in a car accident'. But they weigh the cost, or the percieved cost, against the benefit, or the percieved benefit, and then decide.

Nobody 'wants to die' but everyone 'wants to speed' (Get there faster).

Nobody wants to 'get heart disease' but people do 'want to a eat a humburger'.

So why are they engaging in an activity that they REALLY don't want to? Why are millions of people, who REALLY don't want to be fat engaging in activity which fills them with self-loathing and causes them pain and suffering? Because they have made a reasonable and informed choice?

What if they did? What if you decided to eat there? Or me? I think you're assigning far too much power to Micky Dee's.

I can resist their weal, and so can you; why can't others?

McDonalds can't force you to eat there. In fact, right beside McDonalds are other restaurents, many of them healthier. In fact, you can eat health at McDonalds. In fact, I'd wager that they make a bigger mark up on salads and 'health food' than on burgers.

It's entirely possible that they'd rather you buy their 15 cent/2 dollar salads than any burgers.

What does McDonalds have that other, probably healthier restaruants such as Taco Bell or Subway or Wendy's don't have?

Is McDonalds 'just that damn good'? Or do people just PREFER it?

And then the kids are orphaned, and become criminals and deprivates as is so often the case and go on to commit crimes... That's a world I want to live in.

So then does it follow that you can dictate ANY behavior because it could theoretically lead to some bad outcome, somewhere down the line?

How do you reconcile this view with 'individual rights'?

Also, people who don't wear seat-belts often kill other people who are sensible enough to wear seat-belts.

How?

You can equally apply it to drink-driving laws as well.

Not quite.

Drunk driving increases your risk of getting in a wreck, very much.

Not wearing a seatbelt just increases your chance of dying in a wreck.

Stupidity and poor education kills people, and like so many crimes of negligence, it is often innocent bystanders that get it.

Most people understand that they should wear seatbelts.

You can REALLY want to be playing games, and yet still be able to focus on other things. I can tell you honestly that I would REALLY have preferred to play games than sit through boring schoolwork, and that never stopped me from learning a single thing.

Sorry, but that argument is just plain wrong.

And you can be so focused on 'playing games' that you don't learn anything at all.

It happens.

I can probably ascribe entire sections of unlearned earth science class to thinking about Counter-Strike.

We could be doing it better, but paying companies with vested interests to do it isn't going to help.

Nice aphorism.

The market doesn't regulate a damned thing. It doesn't stop people from paying through the nose to make themselves chronically ill and miserable. It doesn't stop people eating at McDonalds, it pushes them through the goddamn door.

The market does regulate.

Think of a restaraunt that no longer exists. Market regulation.

You may not agree with the market choices, but they were made by all the actors, not just a few.

It's the market that has produced a bunch of fat sofa-surfing blobbish idiots, and it is completely insane that you think it is going to work against its best interests to undo everything it has worked so hard to achieve.

The market produced them, or they produced the market?

Can you SERIOUSLY see a school owned by McDonalds teaching kids about how unhealthy McDonalds meals are? Basic nutrition? Or a MS owned school teaching the virtues of open source programming?

That's like expecting a tobacco company to sponsor a "smoking kills" campaign. Just plain stupid.

Then don't send your kid to those schools.

An economy is not a democratic system, and corporately controlled schools sure as hell are not.

I don't think I said the market was 'democratic'.

Re-read.

But any government run or democratic system assumes that they are willing to take part on the democratic process.

I didn't refer to the market at all. I actually was refering to the idea of locally run, democratic schools; schools being ran entirely by the local populace via the schoolboard: 'Democratic schools'.

Market/democracy is an entirely different topic.

You can't. You cannot intentionally lower the cost of production and increase quality at the same time without incurring a LOSS IN PROFIT.

Raise price.

If more people buy, at the raised price, you can make a profit.

Simply lower the cost of production, increase the quality, raise the price and more people may purchase the product.

It happens.

Technological innovation doesn't just magically happen. If it is public, your competitors can benefit from it just as easily, conferring no advantage and not allowing you to lower prices.

Actually, it would force you to lower prices, because if your opponent lowered prices (Because of the decreased production cost) and grabbed a larger market share, you would have to lower prices to compete.

If what you said were true, cars would still be rediculously expensive.

If it is private, then you must have PAID for the innovation in research and development. You cannot afford to pay for R and D *AND* also lower your profit per unit without your company losing money. *AND* you have to spend more capital on upgrading and buying the new technology. That again HURTS profitability, and PISSES OFF shareholders.

Unless the investment in the R&D pays off. If what you said were true, no one would invest in R&D at all because it hurts the current bottom line.

But in a real market, people look to the future (Time preference) and save/invest.

'Hurting' your bottom line now may help in immensely in the future. 'Hurting' your bottom line now may be the only alternative.

If your innovation requires little money, but saves you an immense amount of money, you can easily lower cost per unit.

Again, if what you said were true, cost per unit would never lower at all, but instead, price is deflationary in many areas.

Some economists say price is inherently deflationary.

Any idiot could tell you this, so why someone like you, who takes an active interest in the field, can't see it is beyond me.

Again, I've never been impressed with your economic evaluation.

I find them tendentious.

All the things you have put forward merely increase profits, giving companies the OPPORTUNITY to allocate resources to improving quality. However, your belief that they automatically would is not just silly, but also quite quite wrong.

If an opponent increases quality, they also have to increase quality to compete.

Again, if what you say is true, why have cars gotten better over time?

Those companies INCREASED QUALITY and incrased profit.

Those increases in profits are what a company WANTS. They are not going to go to their shareholders "Yeah, we could all have that profit, you know that thing were are all here for, the only reason you bought shares, the thing the law obliges us to prioritise acquiring... Or we could, you know, just give it to consumers out of the goodness of our hearts, in direct contradiction of all economic reason..."

More convoluted, obfuscatory tripe.

One more time. If your reasoning were valid, no company would invest in anything because that investment takes away from the current bottom line.

All that invested money could be used to pay out to shareholders.

But because you don't into account things like other stocks, you fail to see this.

If your stock takes ALL its profits and hands them out and doesn't invest, or increase quality, or lower price, or lower production cost, via investment, it loses value over time, because other companies will invest, and increase quality, and lower production cost, and lower their price, to gather a larger market share, to make more money, to hand out to shareholders.

Shareholders will drop company A and buy up company B, even though, according to you, company A is the better deal because it takes all its profit and gives it out to shareholders.

Do you see the flaw in this reasoning?

Purchasing stock in a company that has a high potential for growth is a better idea than purchasing stock in a company that may make more money now, but won't invest at all.

Come off it. If a change in competition has given them more money, companies do not instantly think about how they can get give it away to you or me.

No they don't.

But that isn't how the market works, or has to work.

I am, and that is precisely my point. You expect a business to buy into this market having looked at the income and outgoing of the school, and then think about how they can pour money *into* it?

You expect McDonalds to buy a school and say "No kids here will eat shitty fastfood!" ?

I don't expect McDonalds to be buying schools, but whatever.

And yet feeding your kids shit is precisely what McDonalds does, and their PR doesn't stop customers from flocking to their doorstep. Proof positive, QED, that your faith in the market is quite frankly farcical. By your argument McDonalds would be out of business. It isn't, and neither would the new brand of McDonalds schools.

McDonalds fills a market want. I'm not saying that this is good or bad, merely that its true.

Burger Queen, a real restaraunt, went out of business becaues it didn't serve the market.

Is one 'better' than the other? In the eyes of consumers, yes.

Nonsense on both accounts. Schools CAN'T agree to that. If a caterer pulls out, a caterer pulls out. By your rationale, if a caterer trebled prices, a school would be obliged to stick with them so that they "served what they served."

They would probably cook their own food; construct a kitchen, as most schools do.

And I think you'll find that schools don't actually specify menus in their prospectuses, and are not sold on a "Fish on a friday" tagline.

They would if you wanted them to.

It is both a school's and a business's prerogative to alter their services as circumstances change. Even assuming that they COULD be made liable, their user agreements would include the option to change services as necessary, just like all EULAs have. And don't even say "then parent's would go to another school" - that's like saying "people would use a different operating system if they didn't like the EULA"

Interesting things, EULAs.

I'm not certain of their validity. I don't see how they are at all fair. They seem to represent government monopoly on property rights.

I don't think they hold any weight, or at least they shouldn't.

Once you buy something, its yours.

IT DOESN'T HAPPEN IN REALITY. Nice dream, but doesn't happen, at all, ever. Even assuming that it COULD happen, and it doesn't, you are assuming that a company would voluntarily leave itself totally open to litigation by NOT putting a standard disclaimer in a standard contract. How many pieces of software have you seen without EULAs in order to attract customers, hmmm?

I don't believe uTorrent has a EULA, actually.

Fact of the matter is, all schools would need a similar contract, and thus there would be no escaping it.

And, once again, accepting the increasingly improbable arguments FOR your case, you assume that there aren't ways around it anyway. For example, Sony's PSP has included firmware updates which damage the efficiency of the console, blocking users from accessing homemade, and perfectly legal, software.

Has this harmed PSP sales? Not a jot.

I haven't bought one, and I probably won't.

I think the whole thing sucks.

Adequately is not the problem. Adequate is merely "what is required to pass a test." Adequate is precisely what your countrymen are taught at the moment. And that is why they are "stupid."[/qipte]

Adequate, as in good enough?

If it were good enough, I don't think we'd be having this discussion.

[quote]
As is bribery... Who is going to pay for this "logical market extention" ? The government? Parents? Corporations <snigger> ?

Parents or schools, most likely, though its certainly possible that the government would do a rating system of its own. In fact, that might be a good idea.

Similar organizations already exist. The Better Business Bureau for instance.

A school would pay to be registered and checked; parents would only send their children to schools that passed.

Underwriters Labratory is another good example of a market regulatory institution.

They could just as easily pay for a private school.

$20 for information about a few schools?

Because the media never receive kickbacks from the government or its lobbyists. It's not like Fox would purposely withold censure of a Murdock run school, right?

"Private regulatory organisation" - who can get paid by parents once, and schools twice. How are they going to measure this? Burst into a school? If they are private they can't. Make an appointment? Give the school a chance to put on their super-salad menu? Sheperd them round the top-tier classes? Show them the new computer labs?

Stipulate in the contract a number of examinations by the regulatory company, say 3 a year, 2 of them random.

Which, according to you, will appear out of thin air. Because at the moment schools make so much that the seats are paved with gold. And if there are twice as many schools, dividing the money they get from the government in half, and this money has to give shareholders a nice stake, as well as paying for the corporate staff, etc... Everyone will be rich as hogs, right? Especially all the other people who have to get paid now... Like the private regulators, and the bus drivers overtime as they ferry kids from even further afield costing more petrol. And then there is the extra moeny being spent on nice meals to lure 15% of kids, even though that has to go up for 100% of the school population.

How much does it cost to educate a kid in Britain or elsewhere in the world?

I'd like to see the cost and compare it with America.

I think there's plenty of money to go aroung.

Despite this service costing more than it does for the current schools to run, whilst paying them half the money they get from the government...

Why would it cost more than current schools?

So even though, under your system, it is costing the corporations just to keep their doors open, they are going to be inspired to voluntarily INCREASE their overheads? Hahahahahahahaha, what the hell were you thinking?!?

Why would it 'cost to keep the doors open'?

How? A failing school currently running at capacity gets 100% of its income from the government for its cheap ass service. Now that parents are able to put their children elsewhere, what is the company going to do to not only stop the children from jumping ship, but also make a profit on a school that was failing when it was eating up 100% of the government money?

What, they are going to spend money on this FAILING SCHOOL to increase the capacity of a FAILING school, so that when they spend MORE MONEY on "turning it around" they can increase the number of students they have to SPEND MONEY on?

As longs as they don't spend more on each studen then they take in per student, they'll be fine.

Schools aren't getting enough money under a monopoly, and you think that companies can expect to make a profit when they don't have the benfit of a monopoly? That flies in the face of reason.

No, its common-sensical.

Schools have to make money to compete in a market.

Because moving yourself into direct competition with a rival is what every fledgling enterprise wants...

If its an area of moderate to high population density, there will already be a number of schools in an area.

Even in lower population density areas, there will still be schools that are relatively close.

So, "even in areas of less competition" - a company buying into an area will have to invest heavily just to avoid a "significant loss"

And you can't see the flaw in this?

They might not need to invest much at all.

Just figure out what makes a school successful and copy that.

This assumes that people would eat at McDonalds. And they do.

QED.

i'm lovin' it

(Note lower-case and lack of punctuation)

Shit this is taking a long time.

I'll reply to the rest later and will probably judiciously cut out portions.

fucktopgirl

01-23-2006, 06:02 PM

you guys are so into each others,,,imagine that kind of passion/determination in the bed!!!YOu should meet !!

Ace42X

01-23-2006, 06:05 PM

you guys are so into each others,,,imagine that kind of passion/determination in the bed!!!YOu should meet !!

Just because your most engrossing conversation is "not tonight, Josephine" doesn't mean the rest of us are in that boat.

fucktopgirl

01-23-2006, 06:27 PM

Just because your most engrossing conversation is "not tonight, Josephine" doesn't mean the rest of us are in that boat.

haha!!
yea that's right,i am into the" loveboat" thing!!Your perspicacity is unbelievable!!

EN[i]GMA

01-23-2006, 06:56 PM

you guys are so into each others,,,imagine that kind of passion/determination in the bed!!!YOu should meet !!

Is it just me or this somewhat adulatory cum (Pardon) stalkerish in its lasciviousness?

Obsequious one might even say or rather, disgusting.

And I don't know about 'passion'; I'm a rather dry individual. My wit, laden, nay sodden with acerbity, should have tipped you off by now.

Rather too much innuendo, perhaps.

marsdaddy

01-23-2006, 06:57 PM

Why don't you stand outside McDonalds and ask the people who go in "Do you want to be fat and ugly?" and "Do you want to be constipated?" and "Do you like paying lots of money to be poisoned?"

The answer will be no, I'd wager.

So why are they engaging in an activity that they REALLY don't want to? Why are millions of people, who REALLY don't want to be fat engaging in activity which fills them with self-loathing and causes them pain and suffering? Because they have made a reasonable and informed choice?
Too many arguments in one, but, related to McDonald's is that people don't think getting fat, dying from heart disease, or being poisoned will happen to them/is related to their choice. The whole "woe is me" attitude is based on a belief that it's a glanduar issue, it'll only happen if you drink the equivolent of 600 cans a day, and those digestive issues can be mastered with this little purple pill.

Look at people's reactions to Supersize Me. It's become a liberal/conservative argument rather than a common-sense one.

The self-loathing is probably the chicken to McDonald's egg.
GMA']McDonalds doesn't wield supreme authority over me. I can choose not to eat there quite easily, and I often do.

I don't see how the McDonalds commercial where the guy puts his BIg Mac on the turntable has any influence on people; I thought it was stupid.What you don't see is how McDonald's ties in their ad campaign to kids programming. So, when kids hear that familiar "I'm lovin it" theme, their ears perk up, a bit. I bet there are lots of people who grew up with this great feeling about McDonald's and they go in, subconsciously, to recreate that feeling.
GMA']But ask them "Do you like McDonalds" and they'll probably say yes.

'There's no accounting for taste' as they say.

Ask those people if McDonalds is unhealthy; they'll say yes. They know its unhealthy but they choose to eat there anyway.

People speed all the time, but they don't want to 'die in a car accident'. But they weigh the cost, or the percieved cost, against the benefit, or the percieved benefit, and then decide.

Nobody 'wants to die' but everyone 'wants to speed' (Get there faster).

Nobody wants to 'get heart disease' but people do 'want to a eat a humburger'.
So, because people are not able to see their own failability and mortality until it's often too late, there should be no government regulations?

What about stealing? I mean, everyone wants money. Why should you have some when I don't? I'll just take yours. I won't kill you, though.

EN[i]GMA

01-23-2006, 07:02 PM

haha!!
yea that's right,i am into the" loveboat" thing!!Your perspicacity is unbelievable!!

Yours, perhaps is lacking.

Excellent word though.

marsdaddy

01-23-2006, 07:09 PM

GMA']Yours, perhaps is lacking.

Excellent word though.French is her first language. It all makes sense.

fucktopgirl

01-23-2006, 07:14 PM

GMA']Is it just me or this somewhat adulatory cum (Pardon) stalkerish in its lasciviousness?

Obsequious one might even say or rather, disgusting.

And I don't know about 'passion'; I'm a rather dry individual. My wit, laden, nay sodden with acerbity, should have tipped you off by now.

Rather too much innuendo, perhaps.

yea you are too smart for me enigma,,,what can i say!!! :D
i think you tip off your own self with your acerbity/wit/powerpuffgirlpower,,!!
And do yoou speak in thoses word in your everyday life,,like you where on your horse all the time!!Dry individual,,,so you need lubrificant??

anyway carry on your debate!!