Elizabeth DeVos will become US Education Secretary - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Provision of the two UN HDI indicators other than GNP.
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#14773846
My granddad left school when he was 14 and became an electrician, aside from when he had to join the army he never did anything else. Learning an actual skill is far more useful than learning bourgeois "skills" anyway. What do they teach you in business school? How long does it take to learn how to put on a suit and pinch secretaries arses? It isn't as if it is a real job. :?:
#14773848
Decky wrote:My granddad left school when he was 14 and became an electrician, aside from when he had to join the army he never did anything else. Learning an actual skill is far more useful than learning bourgeois "skills" anyway. What do they teach you in business school? How long does it take to learn how to put on a suit and pinch secretaries arses? It isn't as if it is a real job. :?:


I believe we really should give apprenticeships a lot more consideration for students, especially at risk students, but not solely them. The minimum wage laws would probably make this very difficult. :(
#14774124
My dad completed college in Taiwan in his 20s then he decided he wanted to come to the states for his graduate degree. A major part of that was that he wanted to aim high. You would be surprised but when he was in junior high, he was not the study type. He liked to play outdoors and catch frogs. He really turned his life around during high school. He never went to the top schools in Taiwan or in the US, but he was just driven to survive and he had ambition.

I really believe that schools should encourage children to learn. If the children are unmotivated, of course they are not going to be fit to be in the workforce.

Unfortunately, many millenials of my generation are just not interested in learning. They would rather play GTA or sell drugs for easy money. This is an age of instant gratification. The better ones end up in debt from college and working several hourly paying jobs.

Society is at fault for not motivating children to want to learn useful skills. You can have bad teachers, but it takes a smart child to overcome a weak education to pursue a better future for themselves. I had a weak math and science education and yet here I am years after my first college degree, pursuing a more technical field. It is a struggle but I am confident that I will do better in the future.

I am not in a traditional business school, it is a technical college, but I feel like I am learning some useful stuff. I have met a few great instructors and some bad ones, but I always learn something from them whether it is a good thing or something to keep in mind to avoid.
#14774129
mikema63 wrote:Being able to read, do simple arithmetic, knowing history, having critical thinking skills, and a general understanding of how the world and universe operates is absolutely necessary to even function in the modern world. Universal education guarantees that all citizens of the United States have access to the tools to gain these things.


Can you prove that universal public schools actually provide any of those skills in an effective manner. Can you prove that other educational models would do less well? All I see is Urban schools in decay, with graduation rates dropping, with literacy rates dropping? Yes in Suburbs with huge parental involvement and high school taxes the the outcomes are very different. But in the Hood the parents if parents are in the picture almost never participate, the schools are under funded because of rampant corruption and waste. So you tell me how great our system is. What I see is a failed social experiment, and I would like to empower parents, children and communities with choices.
#14774223
the schools are under funded because of rampant corruption and waste

Do you have evidence for this corruption and waste, Oxy? :eh:

Of course, the real reason why schools in poorer areas are underfunded is because the schools are funded from local tax revenues. In poorer areas, the revenue from local taxes is less than the revenue from local taxes in wealthy areas, for obvious reasons. Doesn't this seem to be a more logical reason for the fact that the schools in poorer areas are underfunded, Oxy?
#14774392
LV-GUCCI-PRADA-FLEX wrote:I love this idea that selling drugs is easy money and somehow more popular than it was in the past. Like Freud wasn't a coke-pusher.


The guy who just pedals the drugs to other people might think it is easy, since he might not be making the drugs himself. I said nothing about it being more popular than it was in the past, but it is more widespread than centuries ago, for sure. They did not have crystal meth in Freud's day, did they?
#14774403
Its easier to make good money selling drugs than working honestly if you have no skills or education. I agree that it is not a new phenomenon and that the oft-sold sentiment that "kids these days" are [insert negative trait] is bullshit. Kids may play GTA nowadays, but they fucked off just as much in the past in other wholesome ways like torturing animals or setting fire to trees.

Unfortunately poverty can be a self-perpetuating cultural phenomenon. People from families that never went to college don't tend to instill in their children a desire to attend. Parents who both work, work more than one job, or are single have less time to help/motivate their children to succeed in school. Children from middle class families have a leg up because they have to do far less to achieve C-level success in schools. If a child comes from a family that emphasizes the importance of reading (parents read to kids, have books around, etc) then that child will be able to pass english/history courses with very minimal effort. Thus the passing threshold can come to represent vastly different expenditures of effort. This is obviously not motivating to some poor kid who is working his ass off and only receiving middling grades. Playing GTA is a lot easier and its fairly hard to convince young children of the importance of planning for your future and this has nothing to do with time, culture, etc.

Oxy, you are just buying into a narrative that isn't real. The people who choose to work in poor-population schools have their hearts in the right place for the most part. When they don't have their heart in the right place its because they're lazy not corrupt. If you want to fire lazy/incompetent teachers I'm on board, but tenure does exist for a reason. If you could easily fire tenured teachers then there would be an incentive to fire experienced teachers (because of their higher salaries) regardless of their competence. The only embezzlement I've ever seen in my school district was from an administrative assistant pocketing inter-mural sports fees to the tune of 10s of thousands and that assistant is now sitting in jail. There is certainly no public education cabal that steals taxpayer money to fund Democrat-training yacht parties or something.
#14774416
I'm largely worried about loans since the US has an ass-backward university funding system.

If you want to go to college, you either get born rich, get one of the comparatively few full scholarships out there, or (like the vast majority) you borrow money from the government.

On the surface, this doesn't seem SO bad as the government would be paying for schools anyway, so it's more of a tax for you personally to go to school.

But that would clearly be communism. So the US has a better solution: The government gives money for free to giant companies; these giant companies then give the government money to students; and the students then pay the company for the privilege of taking public money, handing it over to you, and taking no risk in anyway whatsoever.

A persistent problem, still, are these big companies will try to make sure you can't pay them back so that they can start dinging you with all kinds of crazy extra charges. Because that's how they make money, that and the interest you get to pay to cover their risk in fronting $0 of their money to you.

While still a shit system, Obama's Education system had it where after you were out of school, you could opt to take a percentage of your income out for 20 years and then just call it good. Which the loan companies didn't like too much as it was harder to fuck you if they only have a maximum of 20 years go milk you and there's a cap on how much they can take (they still fuck me pretty good, they won't take my money again this year).

I guess I just want to reiterate that DeVos is the head of the largest private pyramid scheme in the US, and now she's in charge of a corrupt private/public pyramid scheme that pays loan companies with public money.
#14774721
I am against the whole loan idea. Interest rates are going up. They do not stay the same.

Universities and colleges do not guarantee that tuition will stay at steady levels. It is increasingly more inaccessible for anyone to get a university or college education. And the whole 2+2 idea or 2+4 idea is not straightforward and can be dragged out painfully.

I am working on a degree in Accounting, my second degree in my life. I went with the tech school approach because I do not want to pay my alma mater more money (they ask me to donate, but they never helped me even when I applied for an office assistant job with them). Paying for higher education is a rip-off in the US.

Why is it not more affordable? If we want more able-bodied workers in the workforce then we need to make the tools more accessible for them. In the long run, this will take more strain off the welfare system and there will be more taxpayers in the population.

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