What role did education have in making this country great?

[rdean]

If we don't educate our children, what will the future of America be like?

 

[Artevelde]

Pretty big role I would say. But it was a lot better before the Federal government got involved.

 

[Skull Pilot]

If we don't educate our children, what will the future of America be like?

If you call social promotion and grading on a curve education then the future will be more of what we have now which is kids that can't compete.

 

[Mr. H.]

I'm still waiting for the other shoe.

 

[Katzndogz]

Parents make a mistake in relying on public education which increasingly sees itself as social laboratories rather than institutions of learning. Home schooling is one option, private school is another. There are supplemental schools too, outside of public school hours and on week-ends that will educate children. For the poor, there is the library and parental encouragement to self-educate as well as working with their chiilden to get an education is spite of public school.

 

[PredFan]

Many of the great thinkers and inventors in our history did not have college educations and some didn't finish high school.

 

[Warrior102]

If we don't educate our children, what will the future of America be like?

You should check out the public school system in Washington, D.C.

You know, our nation's Capitol?

It's the public school system Obama chose not to send his children to.

Me neither.

It's pathetic.

It's filthy.

It's unsafe.

It smells.

When I lived on Bolling AFB - my kids went to St. Thomas More.

I wouldn't get caught dead in a DC public school - and those schools should be the "Shining Example" for the rest of the country to emulate.

Instead? Pathetic.

 

[Oldstyle]

This a typical Deanie thread...

If you don't agree to more Federal dollars spent on education and more Federal control of education...then you "hate" children and don't want to see them educated which makes you an evil person. This despite the fact that under decades of increased Federal control, we already spend more per child than any other industrialized nation, yet our kids are learning less.

 

[Katzndogz]

The best thing we can do for children's education is to admit that the public education system has failed beyond the point where it can be fixed. Find another way. The worst thing we can do is take the failed policies of K-12 education and extend it into college education. Much of the same failures have already been implemented making it worse won't help.

 

[rdean]

The best thing we can do for children's education is to admit that the public education system has failed beyond the point where it can be fixed. Find another way. The worst thing we can do is take the failed policies of K-12 education and extend it into college education. Much of the same failures have already been implemented making it worse won't help.

"Make better" is not a policy. Give examples please.

 

[uscitizen]

We have the stock market. Why do we need educations?

 

[Truthmatters]

we used to have the best in the world untill the right beat the shit out of our schools

 

[rdean]

Pretty big role I would say. But it was a lot better before the Federal government got involved.

You mean in the 50's and 60's when Eisenhower and Kennedy pushed education in public schools? Eisenhower started NASA, which Kennedy promoted. Then there was the GI Bill which funded college education. In fact, wasn't it government involvement in schools that made quality education available for white people? Remember, black schools and schools in poor areas were hovels.

 

[rdean]

We have the stock market. Why do we need educations?

Hilarious.

 

[Truthmatters]

its hopeless with these people.

They refuse history when it suits them

 

[rdean]

Many of the great thinkers and inventors in our history did not have college educations and some didn't finish high school.

Some times these "stories" develop a following that's not entirely true. Republicans want to believe that education is for snobs that Americas greatest inventions were from a garage. Take the transistor for instance, invented in 1947 at Bell Labs. Yet, many Americans think Steve Jobs invented the transistor in his garage.

Many think of Alexander Grahame Bell as being a middle class man building things in his garage. Not true. He had resources because his family was rich. Able to move his family from their London operations to their North American operations.

Thomas Edison, another one that many people think worked out of his garage. He worked as a telegraph operator. He made an improvement to what he was already working on daily and sold that improvement which gave him seed money to being a research lab in Menlo Park. The research lab was not in his garage.

Of course, nothing nuclear comes from a garage.

I'm not saying that garage research hasn't happened, but it's generally mechanical, like pitting olives or ginning cotton.

Dismissing education is one of worst canards Republicans have perpetrated on this country. Worse than Iraq. Iraq only killed a few thousands Americans and maimed 40,000. What they want to do to education destroys the country's future.

 

[PredFan]

Anyone who send their kids to a government school should be prosecuted for child neglect.

 

[Katzndogz]

The best thing we can do for children's education is to admit that the public education system has failed beyond the point where it can be fixed. Find another way. The worst thing we can do is take the failed policies of K-12 education and extend it into college education. Much of the same failures have already been implemented making it worse won't help.

"Make better" is not a policy. Give examples please.

Unlike everyone else, I'm going to treat you seriously.


I never used the words "make better". Where did you get that from? We can go back to the last point in time when the educational system worked and reboot from that point or abandon the system completely and start something altogether new.

Nothing is going to improve until we recognize a few realities. The schools have failed. They no longer educate, they socialize. Money is not going to help change the philosophy of non-education. That was done in Missouri when Judge Russell Clark ordered unlimited funds for the Kansas City schools.

What education dollars can't seem to buy | Educating Ourselves

From 1985 until Judge Clark recused himself from the case in 1997, Kansas City spent more per-pupil on a cost-of-living-adjusted basis and had the lowest student-teacher ratio of any of the nation’s 280 largest school districts.
The district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. One had an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room. Others featured a planetarium, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary and a model United Nations with simultaneous-translation capability.

Despite all this, by the time that lavish spending on school facilities ended in 1999, the percentage of African-American students in the city’s schools had risen from 73 percent in 1985 to 80 percent, student performance was no better and the achievement gap between white and minority students hadn’t narrowed

If public schools are going to be exercises in social programming, admit it and create an alternative so that students who want to progress may do so, voluntarily.

 

[Artevelde]

Pretty big role I would say. But it was a lot better before the Federal government got involved.

You mean in the 50's and 60's when Eisenhower and Kennedy pushed education in public schools? Eisenhower started NASA, which Kennedy promoted. Then there was the GI Bill which funded college education. In fact, wasn't it government involvement in schools that made quality education available for white people? Remember, black schools and schools in poor areas were hovels.

Let's try for some coherence, can we?
NASA has nothing to do with education.
The GI Bill, which long predated Eisenhower and Kennedy, was indeed a great thing.
Public education is also essential, but not when it is directed from the federal level.
As for schools in poor areas being in bad shape, I happen to think that education in poor areas was far superior a couple of decades ago than now.

 

[Artevelde]

The US Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter in the late 70's. Let's ask ourselves the question if US education (public and private) has improved since then or the reverse. That should tell us something about whether the US should continue with a Federal Department of education or scrap this and leave this to the States and local authorities.