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RE: Modern Education Is Anything But Modern
the absolutely BEST thing the government could do for education in the united states (or anywhere)...is nothing.
Quit.
Walk away...go do something else.
let the parents handle it..
Well, this is where we would probably disagree the most. Not everything in the world can be fixed with deregulation and education is certainly not one of those things. If you look at the nations around the world where kids are doing best in terms of their academic abilities, you'll find that lack of government involvement has never been a piece of the puzzle in the success stories so far.
It's hard for me to imagine how somebody would believe that leaving education to the parents would yield the best results. Education needs to be viewed as a public service like roads. If government doesn't build and take care of roads, infrastructure on the whole is going to fall into disrepair pretty quickly. Maybe some neighbourhoods, communities or towns will handle it themselves more efficiently, but the country as a whole will suffer. The same goes for education at least in my opinion.
A great number of parents are simply ill-equipped to handle their children's education and if the government doesn't help out, those children will be left with abysmal academic preparedness for higher education, life or whatever. On top of this, you have a great number of parents who wouldn't have the time or resources to provide their children with proper education. If the government doesn't take care of education, nobody will.
I feel that the idea that the government should walk away from everything is very political idea and it's a viewpoint that is typically American. Unfortunately, applying it to education prevents otherwise logical people from being pragmatic about public interest issues where government could and should do a lot of good IF allowed and able to do its job properly. That's a HUGE "if", but the government is the only real long-term solution that has any real chance of working. If it's not the government, there are not real market or social forces to push the system in the right direction. That's why you see countries like Finland in the forefront of truly modern education because those are places where this type of thinking is quite unpopular.
The biggest problem around the world is that governments are generally failing at this job (as they are at many others). Unfortunately, there is no realistic alternative, at least in my opinion. Still, I don't view people with your views in this as counter-productive as when the government is failing, there needs to be grass-roots movement to find and show the better way for the government to be able (and forced) to follow.
The ONLY job that the government has , legititmately..it to keep OTHER governments away.
Governments are insane..the only thing useful for them to do it keep other insane goverments away.
as for roads...I've thought about that.
the first roads were private. I'm a retired truck driver and I've been over ALL of the US interstate and a good bit of the rest of it..(including a LOT of goat trails)...the BEST roads....are private. (toll roads)..
and another thing..where the hell are our AIRCARS? if we had aircars we wouldn't NEED roads..
OR...pneumatic tubes..they had them in chicago in the 20's...
Elon Musk is talking about a hyperloop..same thing..
If the market could regulate things as efficiently as you wish it could, it would have regulated governments out of existence by now. I hope you realize that the private toll road system is a setup that would restrict trade and would leave a lot of people without proper roads since they would be too small of markets to expect a decent profit from. There were places where it was implemented and it was a total pain in the ass, that's why places like the UK got rid of it. The market is as good at defending a land from foreign invaders as it is good at building roads or providing education - not at all.
I understand why this libertarian idea is so attractive and why it's so popular stateside, but you have to try to look at failures and successes from all over the world to see that a lot of things are much more nuanced. A lot of things that I'm sure you will say cannot be achieved through increasing government are getting done by governments around the world, you just have to look at the whole sample that humanity has to offer and draw pragmatic conclusions based on the data available, not just on the beliefs you have about the world.
Let me be absolutely honest here as I would be when talking to a close friend, I really think that the idea of the free market building roads better than governments is quite frankly delusional. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
regarding tollroads..I'm not saying "would"...I'm saying "Does"..toll roads are better than gubment roads...I've been over enough of them to have a qualified opinion.
The reason the free market hasn't won out?
Well it's not a free market.
In the US, currently, there are ten MILLION rules and regulations on business. How is that free?
Government, is by definition...a monopoly on violence. Either you do what they say...or they kill you. Pretty simple.
Gubement is stoopid...they have NO idea what to do...so they do stoopid thing..and YOU must do stoopid things too. If you don't..they kill you.
There...that pretty much explains everything...any more questions?
So how are current toll roads a good example then? Private toll roads might work well right now ONLY because they are a part of a taxpayer supported network of roads that allow you to get to them and to live normally in the meantime getting from A to B and from Lambda to another unpopular and therefore unprofitable destination so you could afford to drive on them. If the WHOLE system had to be private, it would be a very different story. It's the same thing with education - go fully private and deregulated and watch it all crumble for the majority of the population.
Anyway, I would rather have a government threating to kill me if I kill someone else instead of having somebody actually kill me so they can take my house, land and profit on the truly free market from them. You know the saying, democracy is the worst form of government known to man bar everything else. (Sorry if the wording here is off, English is not my native language)
I agree, governments around the world do a lot of stupid stuff, but they do get a few things right from time to time, don't they?
I agree, governments around the world do a lot of stupid stuff, but they do get a few things right from time to time, don't they?
nope..they don't.
They TAKE CREDIT when someone else (private enterprise) does it...then rewrite the history to make it seem that they did it themselves..
I see that you ignored everything I said about Toll roads...convenient that..
yeah but...
I'm sorry, I'm rereading your comments and I can't find the toll road points you raised I didn't share my opinion on. I surely didn't ignore everything and I'm sorry the connection between what you wrote and what I wrote isn't clear enough.
I think you mentioned the high quality on US toll roads and I think I explained my view that toll roads can thrive only when they are supported by a network of public roads to bring them customers and that if there were only toll roads, the road system on the whole would be of much lower quality than it is now.
Or you meant your aircars comment? I felt that this was too much of a tangent on the topic of education and didn't feel like going down that rabbit hole where everything is even more hypothetical while we obviously have very different assumptions about the world. My short opinion on that would be that if everything was deregulated and run by the free market only (especially with science and education falling into that category) and there was no public spending, we would be further away from technological progress, not closer. But there isn't much chance of the two of us seeing eye to eye on that, right?
I agree that governments and more precisely politicians and the puppeteers that run them love taking credit for other people's achievements and they often claim credit for things that were developed in the free market because of competition. I don't disagree on that and I don't disagree that a free market is a great driving force of progress. I just think that there are areas where public spending and regulation are needed. I don't think it's a bad thing that corporations are prohibited from polluting the drinking water for instance and I'm not sure the free market has the mechanism to correct for that. There are a lot of public interest issues like the ones we're discussing that need some form of government. I see the idea that a truly free market could fix everything as baseless. It's great for many things, but not for everything, that's all.
ALL roads can be toll roads with the current electronic technology. All YOU got to do is get in and drive...the 'toll road billing blackbox' located in your car will locate you via GPS and send the milage to the appropriate road owners..dependent upon where you drive...you'll be charged a fee. I image that it would cost more to be driving on a road capable of speeds of 85mph (like the Texas Toll road about ten miles from me)..than it would be driving 15 mph on the residential streets.
At the end of the billing period...you pay.
No difference to you than paying a gas tax at the pump.
No guberment needed.
We already have ALL of that technology currently in play.
note..there are other uses for this tech...it would replace speed cops for example. The black box would KNOW how fast you are going..and what the speed limit is where you are at...if you go faster...you pay MORE...depending on how much faster you go..the more you pay.
No cops needed...no courts...no judges...it's a win/win/win.
Home-schooling is an industry in itself, with prepared materials and curricula for parents to follow while teaching their children. The results are pretty easy to find as many studies have been done that have conclusively demonstrated the advantages of homeschooling by comparing achievement in quantitative studies, here a write up from The Washington Time that is very informative: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-schooling-outstanding-results-national-tests/ - especially the quote "Five areas of academic pursuit were measured. In reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.
The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area. "