Originally posted by Liberator
Quite.
What Bob said is absolutly true. I understand that most teachers are underpaid, but I also see administration at the county and state levels that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars and then they go fishing everyday, not doing anything to earn their exhorbitant salary.
I want to highlight one phrase from Mr. Jefferson's divinely inspired document:
The only guarantee that the Government you all seem so willing to let make all your most intimate decisions is allowed to make is that it's citizens are allowed to work toward(ie pursue) happiness in life. They cannot guarantee hapiness itself, be it through "free" services.
Education is reqired for everybody to have the same shot at happiness, to not hold certain segments of society to the same standard of performance is a disservice, to both parties. The standard is not overly high, it is in fact quite low as to what is needed in today's world. Everybody should be able to meet it regardless of creed or most especially color.
And as far as "Diversity Studies" goes, I speak from a position of some knowledge. My sister is studying to be a special education teacher. She is forced to sit through class with an instructor who continously berates his class for being caucation and tells them how racist they are. It is abhorent to me that she be forced to sit there and taught that she should treat her future black students differently just because they are black.
1. If there is a course such as Diversity Studies, it sounds like bull**** to me. However, since I have never encountered a course such as this, could you please tell me what that course entails. In any case, I find it very hard to believe that the professor berates the class for being white. Sorry, but for all your talk of "reverse rascism", I have very rarely seen anything of the kind.
2. It sounds like when you talk about eduction, you are talking about the teachers being hired (or not hired) under Affirmative Action. However, a far more important issue is not the teachers, its the students and the quality of education they get. There may or may not be some unfair hiring practices in the teaching profession, just like there may or may not be in any profession. But thats another topic.
Would you agree that all students, regardless of colour, religion, disability, sexual orientantion, or nationality, currently living in the States deserve to get a quality education for free from the government?
K-12 education is not "intimate decisions", its a basic education. The reason that schools are falling apart and kids are reading textbooks in which thr USSR is still "the enemy" is not due to the fact that teachers are lazy, under qualified or opportunists. Its because Uncle Sam spends many times more building tanks and guns then on educating the nations youth. America's military budget is more than that of the next 40 competitors COMBINED.
Man, you guys have enough planes and shells to last you for a thousand years. The kids, however, are redifining the word "dumb." Then, those same dumb, poor kids go off and joing the Army to pay for college, and get shiped of to Iraq in order to use some of those guns that are just lying around collecting dust. Then, the defense contractors and government offcials gobble up billions in taxpayer's money, making new and better guns and planes, because the boogeyman is just around the corner.
Don't you see the irony? In this system, having a crap education system pays off, as it produces the one resource crucial to war which can not be manufactured: people.
