Thread: education

Originally Posted by dex71

Originally Posted by w4jchosen

Someone Kill Me Know NOW

Fixed that for you,Chosen. That there is some Private School learnin'.

Crap

***Edit*** Uh I meant to do that

Originally Posted by Potemkine

Originally Posted by jason_jinx

what we really need is a thread lock on the entire off the server forums :3


but this is what a logical, healthy, debate is all about right soy? pote?


we are making some real advances in this forum......


Honestly if we are wanting to appeal to advertisers etc all they have to do is look in the off the server forum and read all this crap and get turned off

There might have been a time when the debate was real but now days it the same ol record.

Round and round we go.

Yes and no. This is indeed what a debate is. It is healthy and forces people to think critically. If you think about it, WE ALL have made major advances. Name calling is now more of a friendly prodding and all in all, the sensitive issues are not as "hot" or "angry". Tempers flare still sure, but its a TON more controlled now, and that speaks to the advances we have gained.

As for advertisers, its actually the opposite. Between this education thread, Texas BoE thread, climategate thread, "I thougth the debate was over" thread, and the abstinence thread, a total of 5 threads, we have had about 2,900 views. 5 threads, 2,900 views. How many add impressions is that? How much money have we made TTP? These debates help keep TTP afloat, plus they are fun

With the advent of all this technology and such, how much do we really have to do to learn anything? It's the age of convenience, especially with things like the Iphone, black berrys, etc... This should just make educating one's self more efficient, but I feel for some, it becomes a crutch that makes us feel that we can lower our efforts towards educating ourselves but yet still obtain the same outcome as we did when we actually had to study 8 hours a day.

There needs to be a better means of quality control over teachers, because the current system of ranking based on test scores only encourages teaching to the test.
Trade disciplines are a good idea, and are already implemented in the big school systems around my area, but maybe not a lot of other places. The main issue with these is, what are our minimum standards for education in the other disciplines, i.e. history and english, how important are ensuring those standards in order to have a marginally educated public, and then how can we ensure these standards when someone focuses on a trade rather than the other disciplines. The current system seems to be that about half or a third of the day is spent doing trade skills while the rest is general ed. This seems reasonable to me, but in order to get the most out of it, it once again falls on the teachers. Teaching high school can be soul sucking sometimes but we still have to make sure we maintain quality teaching. As for how to do so more effectively, I'm not quite ready to speculate on that, I'll have to ask some people I know.
Another thing that would help a LOT is smaller class sizes. This makes the teacher much more able to engage students and students to engage each other and the teacher as well. Things are more intimate and it is much harder for people to get "left behind". Now of course this probably comes down to, we need more teachers, and better funding both for school construction and teacher salaries. Unfortunately this is taxpayer money, but personally I see this as one of if not the single most important funnel for tax money in this country,as it is vitally important for the success of democracy to have an educated public.
And as others have said, the solution is not privatization because this just leads to a quality of education based on one's means, which I can only see resulting in less people with a quality basic education and in a cycle of poverty even harder to break when basic education is cost prohibitive or at best lower quality than those who can pay. While capitalism is great for business and economics I don't think the competitive enterprise model fits well into the purpose of public education, i.e. a marginally educated populace necessary for voters in a democracy, and the maintenance and increase in the nation's intellectual capital.

#4 followed by #1.... It is important....but the system (IMO) is badly flawed and has lost the overall goal that it should be aiming for.

I chose option 4. There is no way around a public school system in my opinion but many of them are way below par. Alabama has one of the worst school systems in the nation. More funding, higher paid teachers and smaller classrooms would have a huge impact. Our voters are too fucking stupid to realize the benefit of a state run lottery. I also think that corruption of the system is as much of an issue as anything else which leads me to feel that a federally run system would be even worse. #2 pencils would end up costing $30 each if we turned it over to the feds.

I am fortunate that the city I live in has one of the top 100 school systems in the nation. I am also proud to say that we accept $0 state or federal funding for our schools. I am pretty sure that is one of the reasons we are in the top 100. The problem is that there are many that cant afford the property taxes that we pay to have such a nice school system so in turn they do not get the education that our students get. I can also say that if I did not live in one of 3 cities around Birmingham with good systems and had children they would be in private school.

I can think of some ideas to fix the problem but I am not interested in getting into a political debate today. Lets just say that we spend plenty of money on ridiculous agendas that we could spend on education.

In short we must have a public school system but most of the ones we have now are fucking broke.