Quote:
Originally posted by PornoDoggy@Feb 6 2004, 11:17 AM
Carrie ... I think that statements like "It's the gov't that took away the small hometown schools and pushed the kids out of homeschooling and farmed them into their big public school institutions" is further demonstration of the ignorance of history - willful or otherwise - that you exhibited the other day when you asserted that opportunities for black people began in 1865. Just one more thing the rite-thinkin 'merikins can fix once the shit goes down, huh?
I'm not a big fan of the educational establishment. I wen't to school back when a determination of who belonged to the cognitive elite was made by local educators, and was made pretty early. Unfortunately, the criteria applied often had as much to do with who the parents were, what neighborhood they lived in, what church they attended, what race or ethnic background, and - often the most important - how compliant the child was in the factory environment.
Great strides have been made in fixing those sorts of problems (except maybe the later - now we just drug 'em). The solutions have, as usually happens, created a whole new set of problems. Are they any worse now than they were before? I doubt it very seriously.
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PD my stance from this doesn't really come from being a right-winger. Some of it does - things like requiring students in Cali to dress/act/pray like muslims to force "tolerance" gets my blood boiling.
But if it wasn't the gov't who pushed the kids into the public schools, who was it? There are mandatory attendance laws. Your child *must* attend school or a truancy officer will show up at your door and you could face jailtime. That's the gov't, like it or not.
Thankfully there are still options like private schools and homeschooling. Here in VA the homeschoolers still have to 'report in' yearly with test results (from California standardized tests which don't match the VA SOLs, funnily enough); so it's not like declaring you're going to homeschool gets you out of the attendance requirement and risk of jail.
And I won't even get into what's on the SOLs here and the disgustingly low percentile you can "pass" with on the tests - it's shocking to look at. I don't know why they keep lowering the bar.
It's like the "no child left behind" has become "we'll lower the standards so that every child can pass"; which defeats the purpose.
I just think public schools have gone downhill so horribly decade after decade. I bet the tests that *you* were taking in 8th grade would be considered 11th-grade material now. I can't blame anyone but the gov't for that, because they're the ones that keep lowering the standards.
See what I'm saying?