OoF comes in to confirm my suspicions about the newest generation:
Paragraph one: Your argument boiled down; "Liberals at one point made educational mistakes, and therefore I will ignore the Texan education problems." Past mistakes by liberals do not justify current mistakes by conservatives. So, I don't really get the point in even bringing up fuzzy math.
Because Fuzzy Math is currently the curriculum in some schools. Unlike this curriculum, which may be approved but is not implemented and therefore not finalized. Education only gets brought up and bloviated about when it doesn't trend towards ever lower standards and feel-goodery.
Then, you cite our lower ranking in education. Do the European and Japanese schools ranking so much higher than ours include Christianity in the curriculum? Do they ignore natural selection? No. So once again, what is your point? This paragraph really does not make any points, but instead it seems as though you are only attempting to divert our attention from the real problems at hand.
Neither of those things have been explicitly stated as part of the curriculum. Neither Christianity nor ignorance of natural selection have been singled out. Macro-evolution maybe, but Macro-evolution and natural selection are two different things. The former is an extrapolation of the latter which has not been observed.
Paragraph two: WAIT, are you trying to say that people write articles with a...bias?!? Well who cares, because you can't put a bias in quotes that are as obviously direct as these. And then, you insult the critical thinking skills of your enemies. Instead of making a valid point backed up by solid evidence, you instead made an unfounded claim. Please extrapolate upon this, because the only person I see parroting pablum is you. If you had any real points, you wouldn't be substituting them with diversions and abuse.
The "credentialed" status of the person in question is irrelevant to his views or expertise in education. The only reason the article would bring it up is to attempt to discredit him through personal attack.
As for having real points, I've yet to see anything but regurgitated slop from you. You always engage in such ridiculous class warfare and race baiting that I can only believe your views were drummed into you by teacher. 18 year-olds do not generally think they are avatars of the poor and oppressed, or that anyone who believes things other than they do are agents for white suburbia. These are both positions you have espoused and I can't believe you came to them without significant indoctrination from your teachers. As selfish, self-righteous, and idiotic as teenagers in general can be, few of them are as consistently mired in doctrinaire textbook liberalism as you are.
Paragraph three: One teacher, without the approval of Obama, did something stupid. Because of something as irrelevant as that, you're going to ignore the Texas problem? If you want to see children singing praises to a president, then get on Youtube and look up nearly any president. Here are children singing to
Nixon. That wasn't a scandal.
It was more than one teacher, I could provide several more links. One important difference between the videos is that the children singing praises to Obama were preschoolers, whereas the ones in your video are middle-schoolers at least, high-schoolers most likely. Furthermore it was not conducted in a classroom, it was an event outside of class to greet the President. Tacky and self-serving as it might be (thanks Tricky Dick), it is nowhere near the level of the Obama praisefests.
Paragraph four: Does the education system need to be reformed? Yes. Would taking the government out of schools help? No. All that would do is make high-level schools exclusive to the rich who can afford them and low-level schools would be exclusive to the poor. The rich will be educated, and the poor will not. But, considering your constant support of a two class system (the haves and the have-nots), I should not be suprised.
The rich already have all the benefits of high education. Our current system of education already fails the poor. Inner city schools (where the poorest live) are the worst. They are inferior to other schools despite whatever funding they get. In inner city schools they have given up on the poor, most of whom suffer from broken homes and live as generational dependents of the very government that purports to be educating them.
It is ridiculous that posters here want to pretend that the politicians you elect time and time again for decades have no impact on the culture of the region or quality of education. If people vote for Democrats because Democrats promise to help them, and forty years later they are in worse financial and educational position despite all the liberal "help," how can anyone conclude that Democratic policies are not at least a driver of the problem? That is asinine. It assumes a zero-sum game where poverty and crime are intrinsic and the only reason you have elections is so that politicians can pretend to do something, and all the talk about policy is theater. Maybe that's the case where you all are from, but in America we don't subscribe to that philosophy. Or at least I don't. You can't keep electing people who think poverty can be solved by the printing press and expect the relative value of your society to increase. Since the primary mode of Democratic help is through government largesse, removing government from schooling is likely to improve the situation dramatically.
The federal government should thus be removed from schooling. Every federal (and even state in many instances) dollar that goes to fund public schools has a detrimental effect on performance. Local funding always has the greatest positive impact because local communities suffer from the results of failing schools where states and the federal government do not. Local funding also has fewer restrictions on it. Municipalities should be able to decide if they want a municipal school, but there should not be a federal department of education.
As far as your class warfare bullshit OoF, this is exactly what I was alluding to earlier. You, not I, are the one constantly going on about the haves and the have-nots. You are the one constantly railing about sinister suburbia. You sound like you absorbed your teacher's leftist "critique" eagerly and left your critical thinking apparatus at home. Since it most likely was too radical even for your parents to buy into, you feel like you've unlocked some new wisdom to slay the evil racist suburban dragons with. It's just that nobody understands your brilliance.
You have a critique, you have talking points, but you do not think critically. You accept without review the idea that government is an inexorably positive force on education whose removal would be a blow to an unspecified "poor," even as the results of the current system show poor lay around you in squalor by a government that has done nothing but encroach further and further for decades on end. You resign yourself to the belief that if government created the problem then therefore government must fix it to be responsible. You never apply this logic to anywhere else, however. For instance, you probably do not trust Wall Street to fix Wall Street.
Back to the poor, somehow they managed to get educated long before the NEA came into existence. If there were not a public monopoly on education that pilfered from everyone's pocket regardless of their use then private schools could stand on a more competitive footing (lower price). Dare I even mention homeschooling?
Paragraph six: As already explained, THEY ARE TOO FUCKING POOR. Please though, continue to ignore facts so you can instead make erroneous links to serve your own needs.
California is "too fucking poor?" That's what you consider a fact? California is a solidly blue state with solidly blue educators who teach the same crap that you have clearly absorbed to perfection. California has routinely done everything "right" in the liberal playbook you subscribe to. They celebrate diversity in schools, they have strong teacher's unions, they resist English immersion, I can recall one story from my ex-girlfriend (lived in Tahoe) who said one of her teachers brought in something from Rush Limbaugh and asked them to point out the inaccuracies (inaccuracies which I am sure the teacher himself provided). They have a fondness for Keynesian economic policies and lax law enforcement. California is a model citizen for Democratic education policy. California was at one point the 7th largest economy in the world. The idea that "too poor" could ever describe California, even in its bankruptcy, is ridiculous.
Yet California is now bankrupt suffering under the weight of their own fantasies. That is why the article lamented California's fall from the market. They were mired so long in the very policies Texas is trying to de-emphasize in their curriculum that they eventually reaped the toxic results.
Paragraph seven: Seriously? How is teaching religion in schools a step in the right direction? You seem to be against indoctrinating children into loving Obama, yet it's fine regarding God? You don't want to teach natural selection, even though it is something that has been observed in nature repeatedly? If you aren't a troll, you're just a stupid person with a large vocabularly.
Catholic Schools are some of the best schools in the nation (and the world, globally). Catholic Schools do not accept "Jesus did it" as an acceptable answer on any science exam. Unlike public schools which must bow to "everybody gets a prize" political correctness and appeal to the lowest common denominator, Catholic Schools attempt to elevate the moral character of students, to varying degrees of success. Catholic Schools also try to serve the poorest areas of the nation where no-one else will tread, just like Catholic hospitals. You give me the choice between a public school and a Catholic school, and I will always choose the Catholic school. Even non-Catholics choose Catholic schools because the quality of education is higher. Catholic Schools do teach God, and their students do better than those God-free, prayer-free public schools.
I've not made any statements on natural selection, which you have conflated with Macro-evolution.
No President should ever be worshiped in a classroom setting, period. Especially by children still in the most malleable stages of their lives.
Firestorm said:
You argue again and again about how the world is biased against rich white males yet you don't seem to be able to see anything from the perspective of anyone but yourself.
Pot meet Kettle, seriously. I have never claimed the world is "biased against rich white males." That's more class warfare bullshit that you and Oddish on Fire share an affinity for. Don't put words in my mouth. I understand perfectly the perspective of most of the other people and have deemed it laughable in the face of the facts. I refuse to be demagogued by people complaining about "perspective," especially since they rarely extend the same courtesy.
Nobody has said California's education system was so great. And maybe we wouldn't need to worry about the sciences in your country if you didn't have a certain group of nutjobs stopping schools from teaching scientific theories because it goes against what's written in a book from thousands of years ago.
Even if we were discussing natural selection instead of Macro-evolution, using that one topic as an indicator for the sciences in general is logically errant. Natural selection is scientifically proven and can be tested with reliable results repeatedly after accounting for any mitigating factors. Macro-evolution is a theory that proposes the diversification of species with natural selection as its basis, but no one has yet been able to get one species to turn into another through the reproductive methods available to natural selection.
Not all change is good change. Texas is taking a step in a direction, but it's the wrong one.
Considering False Hope and Unspecified Change is what our current President campaigned on, I find it hard to believe people don't think all change is good change. Revolutionaries of the kind behind CanadaCare and ObamaCare never care about the results of their change, only that the change happens and empowers them as designed. Texas is taking a step in a different direction, and since unspecified change is all the rage, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Which is a lot more than anyone else here gives Texas. Or Christianity for that matter. Nobody would even have posted this topic if it weren't a magnet for drawing out every leftist foreigner (and leftist Americans with the same leanings) looking for another excuse to call Americans, Christianity, and specifically the American South backward.
If America had a first-rate public education system I wouldn't be so animated. But it doesn't. The same complaints about "anti-science" and "teaching religion" have been bogeymen trotted out by the people who let this system degrade to its current state in the first place. Maybe actual scholarly progress at the expense of the sacred cows of Macro-evolution and Secular Humanism is worth trying for a little while.
I don't have to agree with everything Texas is doing. In fact I don't. But they are trying to do something different and constructive. I am tired of an institution whose representatives only suggest the solution "give us more money." While I'm sure there are private and Catholic schools that occasionally cry poor mouth, that is not their first, last, and only suggested recourse.
