inkorrekt writes:
It is argued that there is shortage of money for Schools. In my state, we gave them 1-2% increase in budget every year. This has put our budget in perpetual hole. Still they want more.
In that case, you have not even kept up with the rate of inflation. With a 1-2% increase every year, your education budget has been steadily declining.
What Reagan did was to reform the upper end of the spectrum. Scchols>>Colleges>>Universities>>Research labs. He did not touch the schools.
Reagan came to office promising to eliminate the Department of Education. He abandoned that dingbat idea, but he began two trends: a reduction in federal funding for education accompanied by an empty rhetoric of reform, and a combination of increased military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy.
Reagan reached office by pretending to be a champion of the middle class; he initiated a decline in real income for the middle class that continues today. Reagan couldn't even keep his movie roles and life experiences separate in his own mind, let alone administer a large and complex nation.
Why our students fail? Yes we do not EDUCATE them. We give them papers to those who do not qualify. We have converted our Schools into social engineering labortories. We do not promote competition at all as it would diminish Self Esteem. Psychology dominates. Students are taught Multiculturalism, Sexuality, and even witchcraft and much more of non academics. The important subjects like History, English , Maths and Science are at the bottom. Even Science teaching is flawed. Instead of encouraging them to apply CRITICAL THINKING to every aspect of their studies, they are only allowed to accept some theories as FACTS and not even question them.
Hogwash. Our schools are overcrowded and underfunded, in large part because of the concentration of greater and greater wealth in fewer and fewer hands--hands that do not work in the schools' communities. School systems typically depend almost entirely on local property taxes--taxes paid by working people who struggle to make ends meet on two incomes where one used to suffice. Schools indeed have to spend too much time on social and psychological issues, because the social ills created by a oligarchy turn them into warehouses for the dispossessed.
They are not even given other options in the absence of any evidence to prove their FAITH.
Everyone is free every minute of every day to prove their faith. Forcing their views on their peers, or forcing the public to house and finance their religious organizing, doesn't prove their faith. If they want to prove their faith, let them go out to tend the ill and feed the poor.
If this is how we teach Science, no wonder they are not doing well.Here is another example of our Social engineering Laboratories contribution to the well being of our society. A student cannot even get Aspirin without Parent's approval. However, a Pregnant Teen age girl can get an ABORTION without her parent's knowledge. These can only happen in this most sophisticated and Advanced country Like the USA.
Aspirin can be fatal to some children, and dangerous to others; it can induce Reyes' syndrome or provoke internal bleeding. Do you think schools should be free--or compelled--to dispense over-the-counter medications to any student who requests them? That makes no sense to me at all.
As to minors obtaining abortions without parental notification, let me point out that this option is generally only available by a judge's order, often when the minor has shown good reason to fear the consequences of parental notification, and sometimes because a parent or other family member is responsible for the pregnancy. At any rate, what does abortion policy have to do with schools?
The ancient Romans were proud of their great civilization. They were warned about the consequences of immorality. They ignored. This great civilization became history. Will America go through the same?
The Romans were never moral in any modern sense; they were aggressive thugs. Their empire fell for many reasons, but I don't think their sexual mores had anything to do with it. An increasing reliance on mercenary soldiers, their increasingly abusive and inefficient oligarchy, an increasingly inflexible caste system--even their lead- lined wine vessels--are better causal candidates for collapse than their orgies.
Yes, we are paying heavily for the blunders committed by the Nuclear Physicist, Jimmy Carter. He gve the nuclear technology to North Korea and they are threatening us.
Nuclear technology is widely available from North Korea's friends, China and Russia among them. Carter attempted to engage North Korea and facilitate peaceful transformation there, including the peaceful use of nuclear power. Bush, on the other hand, used inflammatory rhetoric ("Axis of Evil") and a doctrine of preemptive war to persuade nations that their only safety rests in deterrent nukes of their own. Bush has ignored the North Korean bomb-building efforts in favor of a snipe hunt in Iraq for a nuclear program he knew in advance did not exist.
He also punished our friend, The Shah of Iran. Now, they are going to "NUKE" us.
The U.S. CIA assassinated the elected President of Iran and reinstalled a hated, dictatorial monarch. I don't know why the Iranians weren't more grateful.
The Shah was guilty, among other things, of greed, incompetence, and a regime of oppression that rose to the level of crimes against humanity. We should have handed him back to the Iranians for trial.
Given that the U.S. has declared its right to preemptively invade any nation it pleases, in their place I think I'd want a nuclear deterrent as well.
He also gave away the Panama Canal. He is a friend of our enemy Chavez. We have been invaded by Mexico.
The Panama Canal was only "ours" via an inequitable, perpetual lease forced upon a small country via our military might. Chavez is Bush's enemy, perhaps, but not the American people's. Our economy would collapse without Mexican immigrants to do the grueling labor no one else wants to do at scant wages.
Our life style is being diminished. We are losing all our manufacturing sector to China, India and Mexico.
We cannot compete with these nations in terms of labor-intensive industries. For decades now the U.S. should have been planning to migrate employment to higher-tech, higher value-added manufacturing.
Instead, we give tax breaks to corporations who close their plants here and re-open in other countries, exploiting the workers there, polluting without restraint, and bankrupting the communities they leave behind...the ones who cannot now afford the decent school systems they need to turn the trend around.
I think that brings us full circle.
The U.S. is reaping the disorder sewed by a reactionary, neo-conservatve oligarchy. As Ifen et al. have suggested, the only comfort remaining may well be that the American Empire must, like all things, necessarily run down.
"Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
-Sir Toby Belch,
Twelfth Night
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