Posted on 12/29/2010 5:50:30 AM PST by IbJensen
If a school-sucking alien mothership appears, I’ll be fine. My husband runs code for them, so he has a ‘deal.’ But it’s also nice to know I’ll have some company on the mother ship.
Heh, I might have known Pat would have to hire a programmer. He only writes Greek.
All well and good. Except a bit more unlikely than revoking Medicare. Ain’t gonna happen.
Too many people think of education as a “right” to which all (even the willingly ignorant) must have “equal” access.
You certainly are entitled to your opinion, but your reference to “Greek kids” is confusing. You are aware that the article discusses Biblical and pre-Biblical Greek, aren’t you, and not Greek spoken today by “Greek kids”??? And forgive me if I am ignorant of what “IE” is, but Russian is a Sanskrit language using the Cyrillic alphabet, which bears very little relation to English. My dad, a chemist, was fluent in Russian because so much of the research he studied was Russian.
Large and intractable institutions can lose their legitimacy seemly overnight. Some examples are the Protestant Reformation, The American Revolution, the abolishment of slavery, universal sufferage, Jim Crow, equal work for equal pay, etc.
The truth is that states across this nation, and the federal government, are facing impossible budget pressures. The U.S. spends **more** on K-12 education ( not including college) than it does on the military ( federal, state, and local combined). Offering vouchers and tax credits of $3,000 to $4,000 per normal child and eliminating masses of government teachers, and other school workers, from future state pensions would do **wonders** for state budgets.
Also....With so much of the GDP going into K-12 education it is an enormous drag on the economy. This is money that could and should be invested in growing jobs. All the school taxes that are hidden in every product and service produced in the U.S. make our products uncompetitive abroad and drives businesses off-shore.
Once vouchers, tax credits, and charters are established, parents should gradually be expected to take on the full cost of educating their own children.
That's even worse. Including anything like that in school materials is basically child abuse.
Even though my verbal scores on the MCAT were in the 90 percentile, I still feel as if my education in the foundation languages ( Greek and French) of English was lacking.
In a free economy you would be completely free to educate your children as you wished.
The foundation languages of English are French and German, both of which make sense to study. At least German is the modern descendant of one of the the base languages for English.
I guess the public schools do serve a purpose then!!
There is no law of physics to prevent a private (and intelligently run) school from teaching modern/live languages instead of ancient/dead ones.
My daughter is minoring in Ancient Greek...I asked her “Will this help you on your MCAT verbals? Does it help you understand English better? Will you be able to go to Greece and speak with the natives? Is this useful AT ALL in the modern world?” Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
But she thinks it’s cool she can read the gospels in the original language.
Who gets to define the word "intelligent'?.
In my schools we just showed up at the school yard in the morning and lined up with our classmates when it was time to go into school in the morning. Same process at lunch time. During warmer months one of the gym teachers who helped organize and "officiate" sports games for the older kids during the lunch break would blow his whistle at the appointed time to let everyone know that they had to line up to go back into school.
Call me an oddball, but I don't understand why this process would require bells or loudspeakers.
Of course, things changed in high school, but only because the students moved from one classroom to another throughout the course of the day -- and therefore the automated bell system indicated the end of each period.
It wasn’t until 2 years ago my middle school started with bells. I liked it SO much better without.
One of the local elementary schools still has the old school bell in the tower. They use that for everything other than the fire alarm/tornado drill. Very sweet and quaint
Depending on your perspective, be it worldly or eternal,
you have to ask which one will do her more good in the
loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong
run.
meh....she has to minor in something, so I don’t have any strong feelings either way, I just kind of think it’s a funny choice.
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