Good evening, everyone. At the moment, things are going pretty well at casa blue jersey. Now that I finally have a correct death certificate for my mom, I have been able to file her taxes and tie up most of her loose ends. I do miss her so much. I thought about writing about the ongoing GOP goat rodeo and the war on women, but so many excellent bloggers have written far more eloquently than I ever could on these issues. Instead, I am posting a bit of a rant on the issue of public education, an issue that is near and dear to me.
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
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I have always supported choice including reproductive choice, the choice to keep and bear arms, and educational choice. I think that parents have the right to choose the best education for their kids, whether it's public schools, private schools, parochial schools, and/or homeschooling. However, as progressives, it is important to acknowledge that nearly 50 million US students, roughly 85% of our children, attend US public schools. These kids are our future. While I am glad that a home schooling community has developed here at the Great Orange Satan, I am concerned that some of the comments in some of these diaries represent unwarranted criticism of the public school system. I know that homeschoolers don't want to be painted with a broad brush, but I don't think that we should dismiss the entire public school systems with a broad brush either.
Here are a few examples of what I am talking about:
I said it in grade school and I'll say it again: School sucks. You don't learn anything in school. If anything, school teaches you to hate learning with all your heart and mind and soul. The books are written by stupid people who don't know how to write, the teachers (with an exception here and there) are stupid incompetent babysitters at best and at worst sadists who enjoy observing the misery they inflict, and the buildings are dark inside and they smell bad....
The only significant schooling is home schooling.
Public school is like mowing your lawn with a hand grenade. Kids can be bullied to death, driven out by irrelevance and boredom, turned into lemmings who have had all their creativity "taught" right out of them or turned into killers by the unfairness of the whole unreality of the system.
And critical skills is [sic] something they do not teach in public schools
So your personal experience is that life is a vale of tears, we need to prepare our kids for a lifetime of drudgery, pointless tasks, and kowtowing to authority, and the best way to do this is with public schooling. Can't argue with that.
This is just a sample.
In reality, most parents do not have the time, the resources, or the desire to home school, and the public schools will continue to educate a majority of our students for the foreseeable future.
It is no surprise that many Republicans don't like public education. Certainly Rick Santorum is no fan of the public system. Milton Friedman, one of the fathers of supply-side or voodoo economics, says the following about public education:
Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend.
I am concerned when both the far right and parts of the left give up on public education. We can support a variety of educational choices without condemning the public school system. Many of the so-called experts are learning that the public school system does a pretty good job. Here is a successful businessman, Jamie Vollmer, describing his change of heart regarding the public school system. Back in the 1980s, he thought that teachers were uncaring and lazy and that schools should be run like businesses. He
described his wake-up call to an audience in Montana earlier this week:
Then one day, a teacher challenged him, asking what his ice cream company would do if blueberries sent to his factory weren’t up to high standards. Send them back, he replied.
Well, the teacher said, schools can’t send kids back. They take everyone, rich and poor, kids who don’t speak English, kids with attention-deficit disorder, head lice or other problems. That day, 250 teachers jumped to their feet shouting, “’Blueberries, pal!’” Vollmer said that’s when his ideas started to change.
Nearly every school reform is based on the core assumption that the problem with public schools is the people working there, Vollmer said. But after working as a teacher’s aide, he realized that teachers work hard, often 50 to 60 hours a week, teaching a diverse, distracted generation of kids.
Public support for public schools is eroding for many reasons, and that worries him, Vollmer said. “If public education breaks apart, America breaks down.” [emphasis mine]
I will close with a part of an e-mail I received from a friend. She is an undergraduate who is spending a semester at sea as part of her college coursework. She is currently in Africa:
Free education is something I never thought about because it was just something that was always there for me. It’s not like that around the world. In South Africa parents pay R250 a year per child to send their kids to school and many parents can’t afford to send their kids to school because that is a lot of money. I was naive to think that education was free for everyone but in reality it is not. I don’t think I was ever taught that in school. I wonder if most people just don’t know.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just my 2 cents.
So what's your f@#king problem? The community is here to listen.