Public schools. Good? Bad? Politcal Machines?

[ArtificialOne]

I heard on talk radio about a supposedly rabbid socialist teacher union and thought I'd finally try to find info on the web about them. I came across this info. Just thought it would be interesting to see a debate/discussion on quality, politics, etc of the school system.

Has some good stuff about Teacher Unions.. long read though.

http://wwx2.tripod.com/

Article about politics and political correctness interfering with facts.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770

Fundamentals?

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...7/ai_n16366947

.....wow I found this amazing

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/bacc1.htm

[Beneath the Shadows]

I don't see how any teacher can be allowed to teach a political ideal in there class, unless their class is supposed to teach it. As far as I'm concerned, teachers should teach the curriculum the school provides. If the teacher disagrees with the schools curriculum, he/she should bring it up with the school board, but in the mean time, until the issue is resolved, teach what he/she his instructed to teach.

[delicti]

Originally Posted by Beneath the Shadows

I don't see how any teacher can be allowed to teach a political ideal in there class, unless their class is supposed to teach it. As far as I'm concerned, teachers should teach the curriculum the school provides. If the teacher disagrees with the schools curriculum, he/she should bring it up with the school board, but in the mean time, until the issue is resolved, teach what he/she his instructed to teach.

Agreed completely. We have enough trouble distinguishing fact from opinion as a society (as a species, really); we don't need teachers exacerbating the issue.

[Drake Dun]

Looking at it from a perspective of "what's good for society" or whatever, I think government subsidy of education makes sense. In the modern world, anything else is basically throwing out even casual pretense to a classless society. It would be easier to just reinstate feudalism and be done with it.

At the same time, I think people are on to something with the idea of vouchers and what not. The failures of government-controlled education are much in evidence, and it seems like there ought to be a way to get government-funded education working in a market environment. That way poor kids get to learn stuff, but the schools can reach the levels of quality you see more often in the private sector than in the public.

Drake

[Lapin]

I went to public school. They try so hard to skate over nasty bits of history, actually not allowing teachers to discuss matters throughly until students are older. They needn't bother.

When my History class, in 11th grade I might add, was finally allowed to go in-depth with the Holocaust, do you know what half the class did?

They -laughed-.

At the videos, at the documentaries, at the book, at all of it. When one video stated that gays were also rounded up, they laughed for the entire class.

Meanwhile, two kids and myself stared at everything in silence, not even bothering to tell them to quiet, because then they'd laugh at us.

So I wonder what's worse, denial, anger and anti-Semitism, or being indifferent, even amused by it?

Though I might add, those kids and myself were different from the rest of our class, made up of WASPs, blacks, and Hispanics.

We have relatives with numbers burned in their arms.

[ArtificialOne]

I think it's a scary world when schools cherry pick knowledge, and especially when they don't punish kids for acting out like they did in your class. Schooling is more than just shoving info down your throat.

[Lapin]

I don't think anything would have made it real for them. None of them had any personal connection to it. They just couldn't look at those people who'd died over sixty years ago, and feel any empathy. To them, it really was history, and not their history.

To those kids and me though, it was a family history lesson. I suppose we looked at the people crying and screaming, and saw our own relatives. I saw my Roma relatives, wearing long sleeves to hide their forearms, even in Texan heat. I saw pictures of second-cousins and great-aunts who were rounded up. I don't know what the two Jewish kids saw.

Looking at any of the war tapes makes me shake though. I had to cover my eyes through half the Vietnam ones. I just don't understand how they could disconnect themselves.

Teachers are scared to teach their students a lot of things for those reasons I think. They're scared of students like me having breakdowns, and they're scared of other students claiming the whole thing is a lie.

[Onetwothree]

I get emotional about those things too. The worst thing for me was the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I just...do not grasp how a human being can unleash that thing. Killing 70,000 each time it was dropped. Totally decimated a city, destroyed families, and tons of lives. ~140,000 died. I find that unbelievable. That's almost more than all of the people you will meet in your entire life.

[Crying_Crimson_Tears]

I get emotional at those things too.

It upsets me that mankind could unleash such weapons against others. That's someone's daughter, brother, cousin, mother, grandfather etc. etc. that you've killed. It's unhumane.

I think that's why teachers hesitate at teaching such things. They don't want kids going home and telling their parents what they watched in school and how it made them feel. Parents want to shlter their kids from such things.

[Totschläger]

Exactly. Parents think that if we aren't exposed to past atrocities, we won't get any ideas like that and go off and kill people. But if they do that, when we do find out about those things, we won't know how to handle it. This sometimes leads to idolizing the event. Which in turn leads to history repeating itself.

[Lapin]

That's exactly it. People are being taught so little empathy nowadays. These children grow up watching violence, and they see it as entertainment, or cool. So when they see such vast amounts of it, they think that the one who ordered it must be a badass.

They just don't realize that the people who suffer are, or were, real. They've been sheltered so completely, they can't comprehend honest pain.

Most of the generation needs a painful wake-up call.

[Onetwothree]

A lot of this sounds like the same crap people said about your own generation. Every generation is fucked up. Please.

[Anguelon]

I went to public school as a child and neither political nor religious views were ever discussed in a classroom. I remember very well that I had Catholic release every Wednesday afternoon. Here in Lebanon, public school or not, you have kids expressing their political views as young as 3 years old due to what they heard from their parents. But I can say that the government university as we call it here, have students literally beating the crap out of each other when student body elections come up. Incidents as such happen at private universities but not that way. The uni I go to forbids students to talk about politics. I am honestly happy about that.

[Zenit]

I can relate to the fear and ush-up attitude when it comes to Holocaust. Here in Norway it is being treatet like no big deal, but it differs from school to school. The nearer you get to the capital, the more indifference you face.

Right now there are several parent-organizations trying to stop this program called White Busses to Poland. The kids are bussed to poland and Germany to visit the great camps of Holocaust. They think that it hurts their kids to get exposed to such atrocities...

I took that tour. I wouldn't trade it in for anything. Like Lapins class, mine were totally indifferent or even amused, but on and after the tour, it dawned on them that it was real. It really made us all mature and brought us closer as a group. And that is BIG considering that we were only 10th graders...

[Lapin]

Originally Posted by Onetwothree

A lot of this sounds like the same crap people said about your own generation. Every generation is fucked up. Please.

Err...I was talking about my generation.

[CptSternn]

Onetwo & Tot -

Good points. Public schools do tend to skip over large parts of history that make them look bad.

UK schools skip over Irish and early American history.

The UK skims over the whole American War For Independence, for obvious reasons. On a side note, Irish history is pretty much anti-brit history with a large section on American history, one part in particular

We have had 800 years of brit oppression, and our history classes reflect that.


American schools gloss over Early American history and large chunks of WW2, not to mention I remember the whole Vietnam War was discussed on just a page and a half in our high school history books.

America was founded by terrorists who felt their tax dollars were going to fund a corrupt political machine. They started the 'minute men', a volunteer army that did not wear uniforms, bought their weapons on the black market, and attacked brit patrols when they were most vulnerable.

A great film that really pushes gives you a good look at this is 'The Patriot' with Mel Gibson.

Much like 'Red Dawn', it's now hard to find on telly these days, considering America is now against the very values which led to their own Independence.

Then there is Vietnam. Americans actually refer to this as 'a draw' (tie). The American forces pulled out and the peo-ple they were fighting took over. Once that happened, that was it. There was no 'communist takeover' of Asia, like those in DC kept telling the people. The world di not come to an end, like they had predicted for a decade during the war. All the happened was America lost, and the native people got on with their lives. A story they like to forget these days, since right now it appears to be repeating itself.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are also both glossed over. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people, some at work, some at home with their children, some still in bed, were killed by American forces.

America is the only nation to ever use a nuclear weapon, and is the only nation to ever use a nuclear weapon on civilians.

The Target Committee at Los Alamos on May 10–11, 1945, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets. The committee rejected the use of the weapon against a strictly military objective because of the chance of missing a small target not surrounded by a larger urban area. The psychological effects on Japan were of great importance to the committee members. They also agreed that the initial use of the weapon should be sufficiently spectacular for its importance to be internationally recognized. The committee felt Kyoto, as an intellectual center of Japan, had a population "better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_...a_and_Nagasaki

The Americans choose the targets because they were not military targets and would have the largest body counts, which is what they wanted.

Americans, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, in efforts to end a war.

So, by that line of reasoning, if an Iraqi could get a nuclear bomb into America and set it off in efforts to stop the war in their country...

See where this is going? Tis why they limit what they teach these days.

It's ironic on some level that all the things America currently says are bad and they are fighting against are all things America has already done to other nations in the world at some point.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Forget about the material they teach. It's the attitudes they demand from a student that creeps me out.
There's no room for creativity in school.
The only way is the teacher's way. They don't teach us to search the truth. They don't teach us to think for ourselves. They teach us to obey.
Obey authority without question, because it's much more productive for the blue collar jobs most of us will end up in to be minions obeying instructions rather than free minds daring to challenge their boss to try something new. Entrepreneurial pursuits are for the rich.