Public Education: The Real Fix
I have a simpler solution. It will save a ton of tax dollars and achieve better learning outcomes. Teach children the basic needs in learning and life: reading, writing, math along with some basic science and core history. Then give them one elective period where they can pursue whatever topic they, their parents and/or educators want.
I have a simpler solution. It will save a ton of tax dollars and achieve better learning outcomes.
Teach children the basic needs in learning and life: reading, writing, math along with some basic science and core history.
Then give them one elective period where they can pursue whatever topic they, their parents and/or educators want.
Teach them better communication and life training skills that actually are important in daily life, e.g., like maintaining a checking account, writing a business letter and resume.
There is no need to teach religious thought, political philosophy or any of that other tripe that has little to do with REAL learning in public education.
Teach kids to learn for learning’s sake, how to research any topic and to enjoy the learning process.
Our schools have become another business and political football field. Our classrooms are labs for babysitting our children until 3 PM.
If we do the above our kids will get much more out of education and of life and we can stop trying to run public education like an industrial assembly-line plant. We have to modify education to fit our children, not force our children to fit into education.
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain
Peter Stern, a former director of information services, university professor and public school administrator, is a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in Driftwood, Texas.
The Politics Of Dilatoriousness
Damn it, Congress! Do something, already, you stagnating assemblage of self-interested fools! We finally have a President who wants to move our Nation forward, and all (most of) you nabobs do is sit around and bluster nonsense. The credit card companies, having discovered all the loopholes in your consumer protection initiatives, continue to violate the folks for whom you claim to be looking out.
Damn it, Congress!
Do something, already, you stagnating assemblage of self-interested fools!
We finally have a President who wants to move our Nation forward, and all (most of) you nabobs do is sit around and bluster nonsense.
The credit card companies, having discovered all the loopholes in your consumer protection initiatives, continue to violate the folks for whom you claim to be looking out.
Meanwhile, executives at the big banks you bailed out have pocketed all the tax revenue you handed over to them to stay in business – more moneys that came from the same taxpayers whom they’d been raping all along.
Because 30% of the aging white people in America are regurgitating talking point chunks spewed forth by a handful of grossly overpaid ultraconservatives – they who control the radio and cable airwaves, leaving no room for open and fair discussion with any semblance of balance – you run and hide from comprehensive, universal real health care reform.
Everyone knows that the alleged “health care insurance providers” are nothing of the sort; they are conduits for huge paychecks and bonuses that go directly from the contributors’ paychecks into the executives’ bank accounts.
Not one of these companies gives anything close to a shit about the human beings they claim to cover. It’s all about profit, as proven by their sickeningly obscene profits.
It’s not about, as you insist, the cost to taxpayers – anyone with half a brain can figure that out. What it’s really about are the vulgar contributions delivered by truckloads to your campaign war chests.
While people are scraping by, either underemployed or unable to find employment at all, you sit on your privileged asses and osmose money by the barrel for allowing the annihilation of Middle America to happen.
When it comes to throwing indeterminate sums of taxpayer money at wars with no reason to be waged whatsoever, replete with loss of life and untold human suffering, you can’t piss it away fast enough.
But when it comes to actually returning tax moneys to the people in the form of infrastructure improvement or, gawd forbid, health care for everyone, your argument is “it’s socialism” that will “cost too much.”
Not providing health care to everyone is costing all of us far too much!
And it’s been going on far too long.
Like anything else, universal health care is not the perfect solution; yet, we remain the only industrialized country that refuses to care for our own.
For every Canadian citizen who seeks specialized treatment in the U.S. (typically of the privileged class), I’m certain there are thousands who are generally satisfied with their overall care.
Like Canadians, folks in the United Kingdom tend to live to a ripe old age, and more often than not they’re hearty and hale. I read the daily news from England; there’s no endemic of Brits dying because they’ve been failed by a tax-funded health care system.
During three years spent living in Germany, not once did I see any citizen of that country sickly or in dire trauma because they lacked access to health care – and it was the U.S. government that restructured and set up their system.
Germans, too, tend to be active well into ripe old age.
The people of Hawaii swear by their “socialized” universal health care, where all medical expenses are fully covered by the state.
Contrary to what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently spouted on ABC-TV, the “crap” Americans are fed up with is that which comes from the House and Senate (yes, members of both parties are guilty) to serve only the interests of the ersatz lawmakers and their corporate sponsors.
Be careful about taking a stand, however. The reaction by the media to Rep. Patrick Kennedy’s (D-RI) fiery address on the House floor provided their own self-impeachment.
Across the board, “news” organizations labeled Kennedy’s indictment of their complicity in misdirecting attention away from the national debate by repeatedly focusing on salacious side issues (most recently the tale of fallen NY Rep. Eric Massa; several years ago Kennedy’s own substance abuse problem), rather than the important business at hand, as a “blow-up” and a “rant.”
Their self-serving reaction only succeeded in proving his point.
Thus, until the monopoly of corporate-friendly information dissemination is broken, all we’ll get is tripe masquerading as filet – democracy in action be damned.
Shalom.
(Jerry Tenuto is an erstwhile Philosopher and sometime Educator. A veteran with seven years of service in the U.S. Army, he holds a BS and MA in Communications from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Depending upon your taste in political stew, you can either blame or thank Jerry for his weekly “Out Of The Blue” feature in The Lone Star Iconoclast. Visit his blog Blue State View at illinoiscentral.blogspot.com)
