Posted on 04/14/2008 9:22:51 AM PDT by New Jersey Realist
“It’s a lot later than we think. We’re raising an illiterate and uneducated generation, and there’s more to come. On April 1, America’s Promise Alliance released a detailed study revealing that fewer than half of the teenagers in 17 of the largest U.S. cities drop out of high school before they graduate—more than 1.2 million of them. The cost of this is enormous: billions of dollars in lost productivity for expensive social services and (because ignorance begets crime) to build more prisons. This report sounded like an April Fool’s joke on the growing number of fools, meaning all of us. The high school dropout resembles the fool depicted on Tarot cards—standing at the edge of a precipice, with no idea how far he’ll fall, when fall he will. It’s no coincidence that the number symbol for the fool is a zero. A hundred times zero is still zero... The catechism of liberalism inevitably prescribes more money as the key to changing all this, but the real key is how the money is spent. The public schools in the nation’s capital spend about $25,000 per student per year, considerably more than a good private school education. Nevertheless, Washington’s schools are among the worst in the country. That’s why few congressmen send their kids to public schools. In some years, none do. Dropping out is a fool’s errand, but getting children to stay in school requires encouragement from all of us. ‘A knowledgeable fool,’ as Moliere observed, ‘is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.’ We’ve been forewarned.” —Suzanne Fields
HA, but that would defy the Libs real mission!
Keep them lazy and wanting has worked for the last sixty years.
I’ll add that a person that gets convicted should not get out of jail until they gotten their diploma or GED.
Oh for Pete’s sake - are you saying that any graduate of the government -run schools is well educated simply by 12 years of seat time ?
IMO some of the smartest people are dropouts because they are too intelligent to sit in a propaganda mill day after day, where true education takes a backseat to socialistic climate-change swill dished up as fact.
I’m a HS drop out and it was the best thing I ever did. I now have a bachelors in geology and a masters in information science.
There is one point that is missing in the HS dropout debate. From personal experience, abound 30% of the dropouts are not stupid and can read, do science, etc. They are usually two standard deviations above the average in intelligence. They drop out because they are bored due to the dumbing down of the schools. They are expected to help their class mates and learn little new. Many of them have read the text books by the first six weeks and it is drudgery to keep going. Many of them end up using drugs because they are sick and tired of the bovine fecal material that goes on in todays schools. Many are bullied because of their intelligence. From personal experience, many know more about the subject than the teachers.
Schools have dropped the advanced placement classes, art and music, where many of us excelled.
If they did something for the advanced kids, many would stay in school.
And for what it is worth, you don’t need a HS diploma or GED to get into college. You sign up for a couple of classes as a probationary student, pass them, take one or two more, and the school will accept you as a full-time student as long as you pay the bills.
BTDT.
Sorry, but you hit a real hot button with me on this subject.
It's a Bell Curve thing. A certain percentage of the population should be too dumb to earn a high school diploma.
So....What the government is doing is imprisoning children who can not benefit from school. The children are miserable ( tortured really) and the children who are capable of learning have their learning disrupted by the disgruntled prisoners.
If children want to drop out at 14 then say good bye and wish them luck....however...they should be able to come back and claim the unused 4 years of education at any time in their lives. Perhaps, for some intelligent enough to benefit from high school, a few years of grunge work will sharpen their interest in learning. If they are adults when they see the education light, then they should attend special adult high schools.
I agree with you....I think a lot of dropouts are BORED! I used to work in Human Resources....was once interviewing a young gal for a job....she apologetically said she only had a GED....I told her...that’s GREAT! What’s the problem? I wanted her to know that I recognized her motivation and that it was positive.
Good for you!
However, the kids who drop out of school in the DC system carry around a dead look in their eyes. They can’t read; they can’t speak correctly; they can’t spell. Their lives are full of that. In the DC schools hope is on a short leash, but despair ranges freely.
The whole situation is a great dilemma.
How does one regain hope for these kids?
Can anyone say “government schools?” - I wonder what the dropout rate is for private schools and home schooling ????
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That was absolutely the case with me. In utter boredom, I would hide library books under the lip of my desk and read. For some reason, on the occasions I was discovered, this infuriated the teachers more than if I had been acting out.
K-12 school? ...I resent every wasted minute I ever spent there.
Many never “drop in”! :-)
My daughter once joked, “The only thing I have every graduated from was Montessori school and space camp!”
Bingo! The smartest person that I ever met never graduated from high school. Dropped out, then started taking college classes. Now, has an M.D and a Ph.D.
Funny how we never have Congressional investigations in things like this. No we have to go after private business, like Oil and Tabasco. Could it be that Congress never investigates it own mistakes?
Although I finished high school and graduated, I found myself with only electives and study hall by my senior year - I was so bored.
It may possibly be ‘ok’ for only 60% of the population to earn a college bachelor’s degree. It is definitely *not* ok for only 60% of the population to achieve a high school diploma level education. Most of the 40% who don’t will never be able to manage a decent career, regardless of how intelligent they actually are, and a primary reason for that is that potential employers will look at their educational record in their resume and hire somebody else with a better educational record.
Now here you go again......tryin to be logical. Do you really think the the NEA will listen to you. Our teachers don’t get the fact that they are impacting their own families. That’s what gets me about the liberal menetality. They only look at today. They care about the money they make now......not what their own children and other children will be doing in the furture. They believe in socialism but don’t realize that the only ones that prosper under socialism are the ones at the top. The rest are all slaves.
Yes, but the intelligent ones move on and get the education. We see that it is needed. The ones without hope, without a basic education, unable to read or do basic math will be at the bottom of the ladder. Can they be helped? Only if they want it bad enough. There are many adult learning programs out there - I ran one when I worked for the Salvation Army, but you have to want it bad enough to do the work. As someone here mentioned, if you are beaten bad enough by the school system, (like D.C) you have no hope.
The population falls along the Bell Curve. A certain percentage of the population will **always** be too dumb to earn one! I am surprised that you do not seem to understand that.
What about vocational training? The push for everyone to go the academic route in HS and the "right to a college education" has to have a detrimental effect on those kids who would benefit from learning a real trade skill.
Unbelievable!
A certain percentage of the population ( possibly 30%) do not have the IQ to get a GED. There will always be a Bell Curve, and a certain number of people are absolutely incapable of learning the work needed to graduate from high school or earn a GED. They are just too dumb!
I’m a high school dropout too. I had a proctored IQ exam where I scored 156 and am now a college professor. I wasn’t dumb, it was just a horrible school system where I was constantly bullied.
My wife and I currently homeschool our two children. They’re far-better educated than their public school peers.
The world needs ditch diggers too.
I must disagree with your solution, it is no solution at all. The problem is the law forces children to attend school and then sets up a system that makes it almost impossible for the average person to send their children any where but to public(read government)schools. These schools were fine as long as they kept them at the community level, but when each state started running them they deteriorated into indoctrination centers. Many schools do not teach, they simply parrot left wing propaganda.
To force people to spend 12 years in such an institution is criminal. Their should be no laws in a free society for children to attend school, they are being forced to go at the point of a gun. This alone will breed contempt for schools and make for a poor learning environment.
The original laws in this country for school attendance were not aimed at the children but at parents who thought their children did not need to go to school but should stay home and work on the farm. They are now a full blown totalitarian dictatorship which makes criminals out of the parents and the children. Witness the recent, soon to be overturned, home school fiasco by CA lower courts which would have made criminals of thousands(including my daughter)of parents who homeschool in CA.
More laws by the government is exactly what we don't need. We need to open up schools to competition from private schools, voucher program is one way to go. We also need to drop the laws which require attendance by children. This is unconstitutional by any standard. Most children want to learn.
Knowing they can't get a job without a HS, at the least, education is all the incentive they need. Also, with competition, schools will once again start teaching the subjects that need to be taught, math, sciences, reading, and the most important, after reading, how the American constitution works, every aspect of it.
No more rules, no more government intervention. This country was educated in the past without them and can be again.
In Canada, not only are they dropping out of high school, but they’re dropping out of math and science. We’re breeding a nation of social workers up here.
The AP classes were still available to my #2 son. The teachers assigned to those classes were grossly unqualified. My son took the bull by the horns and tutored his classmates in the evenings. He also taught the class on a very frequent basis. The district employee (aka teacher) took the roll and kept a seat warm. My son scored "5" on all the AP tests. Again, there is a way to channel a bright student to avoid the boredom that leads to a dropout situation.
Just taking a small part of your excellent comment xtargeter. I have an IQ of 141 and just barely made it through HS, with Cs and C- mostly. Bored silly most of the time. When my daughter was in her senior year she decided to drop out and finish her diploma at an adult education center. She had it by Feb of the year she was supposed to graduate, months sooner than her classmates who stayed in (public) school. She was allowed to go on stage with her friends when they graduated because the Principal of her old school was a nice guy. She has no regrets and she now home schools her daughter because her son dropped out of HS his senior year because he was going crazy. He is doing fine so far but his IQ is 132, but couldn't get through HS even though he passed the test required to get the diploma.
Some system we have here in this country now.
The only reason I mentioned my IQ and my Grandsons is to make a point. Drop out doesn't mean stupid in a lot of cases.
Geez, it's nice to know that I wasn't the only one.
My HS required 4 years of English to graduate. Since the two classes were COMPLETELY unrealted...I said "Fine. Howzabout I take Junior English AND AP English in my 3rd year and get the #%^%^ outta here?"
Nope. So I mostly slept through Jr. English...we diagrammed senteces for months, when we weren't watching TV shows. I took AP English my senior year (one of the few HS classes I took that was worth a flip..tested out of all my college English classes). Picked up a couple of worthless electives and the rest were studyhalls. Whatta waste of my senior year.
LOL, you have a horrific view of humanity. I feel badly for you.
i m a publik scewl teechur. My tenth grade US History class completely understands how FDR stretched out the Great Depression. They also have learned what direct relief and gov’t handouts do to a country. My ninth grade Language Arts class understands communism based on Animal Farm. There are some teachers out here trying to make a difference. It is a very difficult battle, but we still keep going.
What should it be a hot button issue, you don't sound lik eyou need government bennies?
I’d say you’re pretty accurate in your assessment.
Another axiom of that catechism is that class size is the be-all and end-all of excellece in education.
This question is addressed ONLY to those who worked for a meaningful college degree:
What was the size of your Chem 1a class?
You need to be careful how you phrase things these days:
provided that the test is administered and graded by independent non-governmental agencies...
“. I wasn’t dumb, it was just a horrible school system where I was constantly bullied.”
Same here. I seem to attract bullies.
The above is horrific and tyrannical.
A certain percentage of people fall far enough to the left of the Bell Curve that getting a GED or diploma would be impossible. You would condemn these people to life imprisonment merely because they are mentally slow? How cruel!
Well.....I would feel more than badly about these people being imprisoned. I would be outraged.
Also...As a citizen, I would not threaten my neighbor with prolonged imprisonment merely because they do not share my love of learning. I only ask that they obey the law, and live peaceably with me and their neighbors.
If they had done that they would not be in jail.
The above is horrific and tyrannical.
A certain percentage of people fall far enough to the left of the Bell Curve that getting a GED or diploma would be impossible. You would condemn these people to life imprisonment merely because they are mentally slow? How cruel!.
Well.....I would feel more than badly about these people being imprisoned. I would be outraged.
Also...As a citizen, I would not threaten my neighbor with prolonged imprisonment merely because they do not share my love of learning. I only ask that they obey the law, and live peaceably with me and their neighbors when they are released from prison. .
But,,,you, Straight Vermonter, would continue their imprisonment, not for their crime, but for your crime of being mentally dull. Now that is indeed "horrific"!
The last place to ask to see my high school diploma was the Navy in 1976. I also have two Tech School diploma's and no ones asked to see them either nor ever verified them. Heck for that matter I've never even been asked to show my Honorable Discharges from the military for employment. In the services trades it's what you know how to do that makes you valuable. Some plumbers with an 8th grade education do better than a lot of college grads.
In my state there is soon going to be a education system meltdown. Someone at the state level decided everyone needs college bound courses including Algebra {2 years required and Geometry}. This is fine for college preps headed into obvious very hi-tech fields in Science abut a waste of time for others.
We had a system that for years worked which was min effect splitting the VOC-Tech and College bound students into classes that were obviously going to be needed. What will become law next year will sent the drop out rate to the ceiling.
I barely made it out of high school myself in the 1970's and that was on the Voc-Tech path. A life long issue made extended book study a near impossibility for me. I didn't understand why till 14 years ago when doctors trying to cure me so to speak nearly killed me. I was able to do enough research on line and relied on some previous things I had learned to figure out the problem through a compensation trait I had adapted to in my youth. I did it again for my wife when six doctors could not diagnose her condition but rather in their protocol textbook treatment they refused to back away from nearly killed her.
No amount of education is valuable without good old fashioned common sense. Common sense as far as our education system goes left the building a couple of decades ago.
Ones degrees in the various arts and sciences by no means guarantees one to be successful nor does not finishing high school especially such as it has become now guarantee failure.
What the article is about is the widespread loss of interest in improving one's prospects by taking advantage of the free public education system. I'm well aware of the existence of grade school educated millionaires and worthless PHDs. These fairly rare exceptions do not alter the basic situation.
What the article is about is the widespread loss of interest in improving one's prospects by taking advantage of the free public education system. I'm well aware of the existence of grade school educated millionaires and worthless PHDs. These fairly rare exceptions do not alter the basic situation.
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