Why We Have A Poor Educational System

[ThomWV]

Why has our educational system failed?

Because if you really want to enslave a population you need to keep them dumb enough that they don't know its happening.

[bryant69]

1. That seems like a simplistic answer to me

Unless you think Clinton purposefully hurt education as well.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Katherine Brengle]

2. I think the government, regardless of party, has an interest in keeping people

at a certain level intelligence-wise.

They want us just smart enough to function within our social framework, but not smart enough to bust out.

[frazzled]

3. Oh great, the conspiracy theory of education

It would take a hell of a lot of conspirators to pull that one off.

Why don't you try an array of complex, interacting reasons such as:

Poverty
Lack of attracting the best and brightest to the teaching profession
Underfunding
Lack of value put on education in our society at large
Environmental and dietary factors that create learning problems
Need for more early childhood programs in lower income families

[HamdenRice]

6. It's not a "conspiracy theory" it's a conspiracy fact

Our worst problem with poor education, overall ignorance and the triumph of religion over science is in the South. And it is well documented in American social history that after Reconstruction, the elites of the South decided to withhold funding from education for both blacks and whites, but especially whites, in order (1) to keep taxes as low as possible and (2) to keep the lower classes pliable and obedient.

The idea that this mentality could not possibly continue to hold sway in certain elite families, such as the Bushes, is naive.

Just throwing around the term "conspiracy theory" as though there are no documented cases of conspiracies is a silly way of foreclosing inquiry into the origins of some of our problems.

[Demeter]

7. And Really Crappy Teachers Colleges Full of Crackpot Theorists

I took a course at one on transaction grammar. You would not believe how little the education majors knew about English construction rules, let alone spelling.

They had to spend all their studying on "Teaching theory"

[Thothmes]

9. Theory of education

I agree with you to up to a point. I would place a significant portion of the blame on the parents of the children who are not getting an education. The reasons are myrid. But it has generally been my experience that when the parents of a child take an active, positive interest in the education of their children, a significant number of those reasons you have listed can be overcome.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. IMO, the answer is too much local control and too much local financing, just like voting

procedures and voting equipment.

There's great variation in the quality of facilities, curriculum, staffing, and discipline fairness, just like there's great variation in voting equipment, procedural rules, staffing, and registration purges.

Thousands of counties each have too much say and bear too much of the financial burden for both K-12 education and for voting. Wealthy counties tend to have excellent schools and excellent voting equipment and procedures, while poor counties tend to have neither.

The solution to both educational unfairness and voting unfairness IMO is the same: national or at least statewide funding and administration.

[Thothmes]

10. the answer

Every state in the Union funds (to some extent) and administers their own educational programs. Hence the wide variation in both the quality of education in this country. The federal government does not have a Constitutionally mandated roll in the education of its citizens. This has been left to the States by the X Admendment to the Constitution. If you want the Feds fully involved in creating a Federal educational system, then the Constitution should be amended to mandate Federal involvement in the educational process. Of course, what will the National educational system look like in a decade or so, if the Republicans again gain control of the Congress and the White House.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

14. Only Hawaii has state funding for more than 90 percent of K-12 education. Local property

taxes take up an average 40.5 percent of the slack (the Feds support only 8.5 percent of K-12, despite their skyrocketing unfunded mandates for testing).

See http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_153.asp :

In most large states, to avoid state expenditures for poor children in cities, legislatures have left local property taxes responsible for more than half of education funding.

[bleedingheart]

5. Because being dumb is easier...intellectual laziness isn't taught

it is just easy...

As someone who has first hand seen the efforts teachers have made to help children and encourage them...it isn't our nation's teachers and it isn't some sort of conspiracy.

The majority of kids who fail to get a good education are the victims of:

1. Economics - poor kids live in poor districts and poor districts don't have the money or the resources so those kids are at a disadvantage.

2. Stupid Parents - Parents who deny that Johnny has a reading problem, Parents who do not respect or care about education themselves.

3. The child....some kids turn into adults who just don't like to think.

I never stopped learning after I left college...I learn every day...

However I feel like I am in the minority...I feel that the fact that I ask questions and think make me different from most folks. Hell I am so delighted when I find folks I can talk to that I am almost giddy.

The number of people who purposely keep themselves in the dark is immense.

The phrase Ignorance is Bliss is true...people who ignore the world around them are typically happier and when something does happen they exclaim..."I had no idea"...and that is pretty much true...they have no idea.

[hobbit709]

8. Critical thinking is not a good serf attribute

[RB TexLa]

11. I thought it was like the 24th or 25th best one in the world?

:shrug:

[unpossibles]

12. I see a range of problems, including what you say

but also including laziness and a fairly widespread disrespect for intelligence and learning inherent in our society. I don't blame "the media" or "society" per se, but everyone is at fault in some ways. We need to praise and laud education the way we do financial success, sports ability, hard work, and other talents.

Obviously we do enjoy the fruits of such things in many ways, and in some ways intelligence and success are intertwined, but not enough. How many famous intelligent people can you name off the top of your head? Now compare that to the stars in whatever entertainment form you prefer (music, sports, acting, etc.) and maybe you'll see what I mean.

There are exceptions; people who we revere as a culture, but overall when the word "Einstein" is used as an insult, I would say we have a disdain for smart people. "Hey Brainiac!" is the kind of thing which makes the smart and unpopular kids cringe.

While this has happened for decades, I feel it is only getting worse. And no, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the aforementioned entertainment stars, just as many of those same stars ARE incredibly intelligent people, I just feel that as a society we need to stop equating intelligence with negativity.

An interesting article on scientific literacy:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2115519,00.html

We take our young children to science museums, then as they get older we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most adults have very little understanding of how the world works. So, 50 years on from CP Snow's famous 'Two Cultures' essay, is the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?
...
Given that science informs so much of our culture, and so many of us have such patchy knowledge, it is surprising that such embarrassments are not routine. It's half a century since CP Snow put forward the idea of the 'Two Cultures', the intractable divide between the sciences and the humanities, first in an article in the New Statesman, then in a lecture series at Cambridge and finally in a book. Back then, Snow, who was both a novelist and a physicist, used to employ a test at dinner parties to demonstrate his argument.

'A good many times,' he suggested, 'I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: have you ever read a work of Shakespeare's?'
...
Angier's tipping point, the reason she came to write the book, was a decision made by her sister. When the second of her two children turned 13 the sister decided that it was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo. They were, the implication went, ready to put away childish things, ready to go to the theatre and the art gallery, places where there was none of this 'mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes'. They had grown out of science.
(more at link)

[LanternWaste]

13. I remember a lot of people saying that very thing...

I remember a lot of people saying that very thing when it first started getting trendy to do so in the early 90's.

Makes me wonder, though... if three kids fail their senior year and have to repeat, we tend to blame the system; but when another classmate graduates with a 4.0, we tend to credit him/her.

Seems to me that if a school can put out a student with a 4.0 grade average, maybe we should start looking at the children and their families to see if another problem may exist.

As an aside, it seems all that is currently necessary to enslave a population is a lot of I-pods, X-Boxes and reality tv shows.

[proud2BlibKansan]

15. Because we don't value our kids

If we truly valued children in our society, we would fund schools adequately. They would be modern facilities with the latest technology, instead of 90+ year old non air conditioned buildings. Teachers would be paid as well as college grads in other professions and they would NEVER have to spend their own money on materials and supplies for their classrooms.

If we really valued our kids, we wouldn't let them drop out of school at age 16. We would have year round schools that educate all kids from the ages of 3 to 18. College would be either free or low cost.

If we really cared about our children, we wouldn't have any schools fail.

But we don't value our kids as much as we value our military industrial complex.

[Igel]

17. My high school--and a group that assessed California's

school system--says that's wrong.

My high school was working class. No amount of funding could get the recently graduated teachers to stay, or get kid to sign up for calculus. No AP classes. Provide them and the students won't come. Parents saw no point in it--most were steelworkers or worked in jobs that relied upon steelworker customers. The school was overfunded; they had chem labs and physics labs, but given that the students weren't ready for chemistry or physics it didn't matter. The biology prep room was filled with unused equipment. My best friend and I took some home; the teacher said he didn't care--it was over 10 years old, still in the box, and the teacher said that the school system assumed it had been used and broken by now. There were unopened boxes of lab equipment and glassware stacked nearly to the ceiling in the chemistry storeroom; I assume it was the same for physics. <2% of my graduating cohort went to either 2- or 4-year colleges straight from high school.

When the steel mill closed middle class, white-collar folks moved in. Ten years after I left, in the same building with most of the same teachers, there were half a dozen AP classes, the school was an environmental magnet school. They have a trout hatchery now; most of the kids go to 4-year colleges. But the school still mostly lacks air conditioning (as it had when I was there) and is still from the early '60s. It's not the physical plant; it's not even primarily the teachers; it's primarily the students, and for them parents take responsibility. But it's not funding or forcing failing kids to stay in school. It's letting them see that education matters and making them curious.

My best friend had to fight before his parents did what they absolutely had to so he could go to college. They didn't pay a cent--he got a job after school to pay for his college applications--and they seriously fought with him over it. Once they asked (they were yelling) if he was afraid to get his hands dirty or thought he was better than they were. (At one point he yelled back: "Yes, I think I'm better than you are. Now will you just sign the f**king form!") They grumbled when they drove him to Drexel. They changed their mind when they realized he'd draw a big paycheck. But by then they'd already thrown a party after the middle son finished basic training and called *him* the success in the family, not like their loser first child.

It's not primarily the schools. It's not primarily money. It's not primarily the teachers. It's primarily the parents, and then the kids themselves.


The California study showed that except for truly desperate schools--mine wasn't "truly desparate"--increased funding makes for bad students in shiny new buildings, or helps good students. First change the parents. Done at the request of the dem legislature, it suggested *not* increasing funding the same old stuff any more--they'd wasted enough money. Instead, they need to do something to make up for the parents' bad effects.

[QC]

16. Because this culture does not value education.

I'm a teacher and I see it all the time.

[One_Life_To_Give]

18. Ding, Ding, Ding

We have a winner!