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Hawke[_2_] Hawke[_2_] is offline
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Default $4 dollar gas and its effects on metalworking


"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"Hawke" wrote in message
...

On Apr 17, 10:18 am, Gunner wrote:
On Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:09:54 -0700 (PDT),

wrote:

The young generally didnt give a **** about anything other

than
sound
bytes with zip data backing those sound bytes up.

Meism and Nowism along with Cliche politics is more their

forte.

Gunner

Well, yes - agree. They have largely given up, they have seen
their
elders engage in endless vituperative debate, and nothing

happens
except things get worse..why should they give a rats arse about
the
dinosaurs, thrashing around, making lots of noise, but basically
doing
nothing except blaming "someone else"....so, can opening

themselves,
listening to sound bites, me too isms - desperately hoping,
without
any real conviction, that someone will offer hope and

inspiration,
not
just more lies and broken promises.........

$4 gas is the least of our problems.....

Given up? The little skulls filled with mush never started. They

were
educated to be leftards..which took too much effort so they have
simply become semimoble couch potatos who bow to the latest

fashion
trends which make them all look the same, with little incentive

to
do
anything other than ****, get drunk and have a ready supply of
ringtones to download.

Gunner

And here we see a rare agreement between my views and Gunner's.
BOTH liberals and the right were
involved in the deceptive "re-engineering"
of our educational system over a period of
decades starting over 100 years ago.

Real education, it was decided,
was for the elite classes and
what was needed was a system
of "socialization" and indoctrination
to produce happy non-thinking
obedient worker drones
and cannon fodder for the military.

The logical problem with this kind of claim is that the people

making
it,
including Gunner and, perhaps, you, are all products of this
"indoctrinating
educational system." Presumably you then are either a happy

non-thinking
obedient worker drone, or cannon fodder.

It's clear that most people are aware of what the problems are;
complaints
about education are nearly universal, so it's safe to say that

nearly
everyone else recognizes the same things that you do. Maybe

education
hasn't
hurt them none; they can read the writing on the wall. Somehow,
they've
escaped the grand conspiracy to turn them into mindless drones.

--
Ed Huntress

"Spare yourself the anxiety of thinking of this
school thing as a conspiracy, even though the
project is indeed riddled with petty conspirators.
It was and is a fully rational transaction in which
all of us play a part. We trade the liberty of our
kids and our free will for a secure social order
and a very prosperous economy. It's a bargain
in which most of us agree to become as children
ourselves, under the same tutelage which holds
the young, in exchange for food, entertainment,
and safety. The difficulty is that the contract fixes
the goal of human life so low that students go
mad trying to escape it."
Quoted from "The Underground History of American Education"
by John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto wrote an article for _Harper's_ a few years ago, which supposedly
summarized his argument. I remember thinking at the time that it

sounded
like elaborated and generalized grumbling; the Prussian connection was
evidence of nothing much, IMO, as education has always been a kind of
socialization, and the Prussian model just happened to be the one that
was
widely admired at the time American public education was becoming
generalized.

The trouble with Gatto's complaint, as well as most complaints about
education, is that the complaints all tend to sound the same, but the
solutions are all contradictory. The complaints are that we know too

little,
that we think too little, or that we're unable to learn anything except

what
we're spoon-fed. The solutions are that we spend too little time in

school;
we spend too much time in school (Gatto's position). School is too
permissive; school is too authoritarian. We spend too much time

teaching
by
rote; we don't require kids to commit to memory the foundations of
western
thought.

And on, and on, and on. No two critics see the problem in the same way,

and
few offer remedies that aren't contradicting the *last* remedy that

someone
published.

All they have in common is that they don't like what's going on. They

all
seem to have a utopian vision of what education should be, but their

utopias
contradict each other.

It makes one skeptical about the whole enterprise.


We are all prodcuts of some system or other
but there are enough misfits, loners and individualists
to escape the zombification process and become
real thinking human beings. Plenty have done it
and, with the incredibly liberating power of the Internet,
the medium in which we are now having this exchange,
the process is accelerated.

Citizen Jimserac

That sounds like a retread of most complaints about education we've

been
hearing for 50 years or more. Now it's the Internet. Good luck.

--
Ed Huntress



I think the complainers have forgotten what we had before the adoption

of
universal public education. It used to be that everyone was ignorant and
illiterate except for a tiny minority of elites that were able to pay

for
a
private education or tutoring. When it was decided that everyone would
benefit from universal education some kind of system where all children
were
to be "educated" had to be chosen. For many years the system we had was
the
envy of the world and was unquestionably the best system invented to
educate
the children of an entire nation. Now it's charged with doing the same

job
for a country of 300 million with a huge number of children of different
countries speaking different languages as well an underclass and a huge
income disparity to deal with. All in all it's still doing a rather
remarkable job. In addition, if you look at what the statistics are when
you
take out blacks and Hispanics you find that the system is excellent. An
objective view shows that the minorities throw the stats way out of

whack
by
pulling down the averages for the whole system. What's ironic is that

the
minorities take the least advantage of our free system and by all

accounts
they would benefit the most from it. What's that saying about advice

most
needed is advice least heeded? Those who need it the most use it the
least.
No wonder the system appears broken. I think it's not the system that's
flawed but the children who are in it.

Hawke


Without checking the numbers and some of the facts, I'd say that sounds
about right on the surface. Asian-Americans seem to do very well indeed

with
our educational system. It must be good for some people...maybe the ones

who
have family support and motivation.



I think you hit on it exactly. The two keys are self motivation and family
support. Anyone with a modicum of either of those attributes is going to do
well in our system. Sadly, only a minority of people have those things in a
sufficient supply.

The best thing we can do for the people of this country is to provide a good
educational system for each new generation. I once heard someone say that we
can't guarantee that everyone will have a good home but we can guarantee
everyone will have a good school. If we were really serious about doing that
we'd solve a lot of the problems. One place to start is to pay for public
education out of the general fund and not have it paid locally the way it is
now. Wealthy areas have great schools. Poor areas have schools that suck. If
we provided the money to all schools equally and gave enough to ensure they
all were top notch I think we would see a big improvement in our schools.
Despite what some say money does do a lot to making one school better than
the others, like just about anything else in life.


Hawke