I have always kept health insurance myself. But if you get into an accident, by law you must be helped at the hospital to which they take you, until you are stabilized, even if you cannot pay. The rest of us will pay for you. It is added to our bills. If you get cancer, you can run up bills in excess of $250,000 in a few months. But we the public come out ahead on that one: they won't treat cancer unless you have the cash. I hope you do. Of course, you could always try a free clinic, but then that would make you a sponge also.
"Amy Blankenship" wrote in news:QmH1j.526$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews6.bellsouth.net:
(1) From what I've seen of the curricula. (2) From people I've known throughout my life.
Lucky you. I went to what was basically "sweat hog high". Most of what I've learned, I learned through reading.
I know poeple who had a lto of variety of courses, as did you. I've also known people wose public "education" was pathetic.
SO what? THis isn't about whether you personally got to study philospohy in high school, or whther my "English" classes in HS consisted of trying to teach remedial reading to the kids who just kept getting passed along. The fact aht you personally studied X or Y does not in any way mean that all, many, or most children actually receive an education.
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That doesn't really follow - I said, basically, "X seems to have been the case, and if it was, I think it had to do with Y", and it's not really logical to reject Y because X might not have been accurate. IOW, Y was a proposed contribution to X, but if X is not accurate, that in and of itself in no way disproves Y.
I did not do so. It's got to do with learning to take responsibility for oneself, which does have an impact upon how seriously one takes one's education.
So mere material acquisition, and being able to relinquish personal responsibility, equates to "higher standard of living"...?
As I said, many kids have no real *role* in their households, other than to exist - and I'll add, receive all sorts of comforts and funds regardless of how they behave. And, sorry, but no, that is not psychologically beneficial.
It should have been patently obvious that my point was not to try to return to that. The point was about the localized nature of education in the past, mroe integrated, so to speak, into the local community.
THe point is to look at what has worked in the past, consider *why* it worked, and think of how to apply those principles to the future - the point is *not* about some simplistic assunption of "returning to the supposed good old days". Part of what has been recurring throughout this thread is the fact that schools *are* often more like old turn-of-the century factories than they are like, oh, say, Socrates' interactive circle of students (i.e. hands-on so to speak), and wven worse, too many schools *are* mroe like warehouses than even factories.
Nobody was suggesting a return to the late 1800's/early 1900's, so stop trying to make it seem that such was the case. You claim tah tyou are reading a history of education, so, what, are you going to skip the parts that talk about that era? Or are you going to read about what worked, and possible reasons for successes? Why do you speak as though the rest of us are too intellectually deficient to do the same?
Pretty cool. How high are the runs near you- top to bottom? More than 800ft?
Parents of kids, whether in private or public schools, have to be involved in their kid's education, and be advocates for their kids. A well known private school near here has been known to have a history of abuse in it. Just because you're spending $30K/annum doesn't mean you don't have to check in once in a while.
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I know guys who went there, and they all said it was widely known what was going on, and they are all now big supporters of diverse, co-educational, public schools. (Like me. I went to a rival private school back then for a very short time, and would never put my kid through a private school environment either.)
A few years ago we moved our kid out of a plainly mediocre school led by a plainly mediocre principal to a great one led by a great one. This happens all the time despite the 'official version' of things they tell you at the board of education. (This second *principal* doubled as the school's hockey coach...7 a.m. practices...how cool is that? I've never known an administrator to volunteer like that.)
We are still dealing with the shadow cast by the poor teaching she got at the other place. People tell us we're crazy when the find out how she's doing, but we have high expectations to suit her abilities.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
GROUP. Community. People voting to act as a unit.
It only worked at that time because the world was a very different place.
These days, there are very few jobs one can do if one is illiterate. If kids are at least taught to read and do math, they have a higher chance of finding work. ALso, unless you're goign to propose that illiterate people not be allowed to vote because they can't read the ballots, and presumably are not sufficiently educated to make good choices, it's a fact that education makes people better citizens - democracy is generalyl spearheaded by the educated, because they've learned enough to know that freedom is a good thing.
But it shouldn't *have* to be, that's part of the point.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
Like in the days of the railroad tycoons and the company towns?
But the way you talk, for there to be freedom, nobody can ever choose to be enough of a part of a community to agree to act in accordance with a community's decision to act as a unit.
I say "community", and you launch into a tirade about governemnt.
WHy do you react *that* way?
How is a waiting period in violation of the right to bear arms? That amendment does not address the issue at all - it does not say "at the drop of a hat". I've been a gun owner and handgunner for most of my life, but I don't think that it's necessarily a good idea for someone to be able to buy a firearm in the heat of an emotional problem. Personally, I'm not necessarily even against making people take a safety course before they can purchase their first firearm, because too many poele have no idea of how to handle firearms safely (whcih is one of the things one would learn when arms were considered essential parts of a household).
And what any of that has to do with apprenticeships, I don't know. I've never said anything against apprenticeships. Or do you *assume* that "education" *has* to mean "kindergarten through graduate school"? Hell, when I was in school, everything was a lot better when they still had "tech track" programs, where kids *could* choose to learn a trade, as opposed to everyone acting as though a college education was The Universal End-All And Be-All for *everyone*. Doing away with that created a lot of problems, and created Zero solutions.
But even apprentices benefit greatly if they learn to read, write, and do some math.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
No, it's not a leap of faith. It's based upon what I knmow of societies that are getting education as opposed to communities which don't, and upon what I know, and have observed, of how communities function.
Not lack of crime, *reduction* in crime.
Many convicts end up back in prison primarliy because they have never learned basic life-skills, including literacy.
During the Depression, people were on fairly equal footing - the division between the completely impoverished and the fabulously wealthy was not as great as it is now.
True, but when one cannot find work because one is uneducated, one is likely to resort to crime, not because one is immoral, but because one is hungry.
Also, when on eis illiterate and innumerate, one is far elss likely to realize that there are better ways to live. Education **can**, if it's truely education, teach both skills, and the fact that ther are productive ways to use them.
From what I can tell, most of the current school system sucks. So no, I don't give a hang what they're currently pretending to teach. WHen schoold had out birth control pills (i.e., hormones) to 9-yr-ols without parental knowledge, and with Zwero regard to the child's current or future health, it shows that both soceity, and the schools, are totally FUBARed.
Dopn't put words into my mot\\uth as though I'm saying anything different
- I'm trying to think of how education can be made available to children, NOT abotu the current cluster-f*ck that gets *passed off* as being some sort of "education".
WHcih is **not** the same thing as saying that "under no circumstances whatsoever can the education of children be of benefit to a society".
Because the current mess is little more than a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, which merely uses education as a pretext or excuse for its existence. WHen a school graduates nealry half o f its children while they're still illiterate, yet takes a couple million $$ to build a friggin' football stadium for the high school, that is not education, it a bureaucracy run amok.
For tha umpteenth time: I believe in education, not in ever-expanding bureaucracy.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
Actually, my friend has been trying to hire some US company to do some pharmaceutical-production work, but ended up having to turn to a Eurpean company, because the US companies were run by US-"educated" nitwits who simply could not do the work. ((It's an injectible product, so the mfg quality has to be very rigorously controlled.))
When I talk about poor education, including lack of critical/logical thinking skills, impacting a society, I'm not just blithering - a poor- quality education makes for poor-quality workers. It's pathetic to be
*forced* to out-source so as to find people with the appropriate skill- levels...
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
I love how you just nixed the rest of the qualifier.
THat is intellectually dishonest.
Yeah, given that you're going to simply ignore the actual premise (which, in this case, was, "if a community votes as a whole to achieve a specified goal").
THen the 3rd can leave the community.
Sometimes a prject can benefit everyone in a community. If your community/town makes great furniture, and the community 10 miles away makes great cookware, it stands to reason that everyone in both communities/towns wouldbenefit if there were a *road* between the two, since it's damn difficult to get your goods to market if there are no roads. If One person refuses to help build the road, then that person can either leave any town/community which will benefit, and/or relinquish
*any* benefit that the road would bring, regardless of what that benefit might be - supplies, medicines, mail-order deliveries, books, doctor's visits, anything.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
I merely suggest that all children should be able to receive the goods, so to speak.
I do not think it is ethical that children be foreced to suffer for things they've had no hand in - people have children, and iMO, if they aren't going to be responsible for providing for theose children, the children shouldbe given *permanently* to people who will, i.e. none of this crap about giving the children back, tearing them away from the homes/parents they've known so as to hand them back to some whining louse. Poeple are so concerned with the right to have kids, and precious few give one iota of a rat's arse about the *children*.
I personally do not think (based upon what I've observed for the past few decades) that mass-schooling works at all as well as mass-transit. Mass- production is OK for toasters, but not for children. Not all parents are capable of home-shooling their kids, so sorry, but I do think that the memebers of the community should share the task of seeing to it that the children have a *chance* to learn the skills they need to take advantage of opportunities.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
None,. but as I keep saying, what I'm trying to get at is giving children an opportunity to be *educated*, not forcing them to be warehoused or turned into factory-wheel cogs, no matter how fancy-assed that warehouse or tool-and-die plant might be.
WHat you cite is what I've consistently citred as being not education, but self-perpetuating buraucracy run amok. IMO, most of what you mention is complete BS and people should not be forced to pay for it, if they are not using such facilities.
OTOH, I'd be willing to volunteer to teach reading and writing, if it would be permitted - which it sn't, because I'm a "loon" - a loon with a 164 IQ, bachelor's in science, and a wazoo-full of post-grad and continuing education credits plus various sorts of job expereince, but a loon nonetheless, so there ya go, the masses have spoken. WHcih still doesn't mean that I think children ought to have the opportunity to receive education...children aren't born as stupid as most parents are, it takes years of training, and puberty, to turn them into acceptable idiots. ((Yes, I *am* feeling somewhat cynical today.))
OK, so what is the curriculum of your idyllic one-room schoolhouse and what is one from a modern school system? Let's put them side by side and compare. But first we need to decide what the _basis_ of the comparison is. For instance, are we going for shee volume of information taught? Are we looking at fitness for the job? If so, how can we determine what job the graduates of each would be going into? (I can't believe I am having to define the expression "what basis", but there you have it.)
How many people do you know that were educated in the 1850's? Would you consider them to be as much of a representative sample as the people you know from current school districts?
So, _some_ school systems are bad, others are good. Do you _really_ think that one room schoolhouses would have been uniformly good?
I am a product of the public school system (mostly in Mississippi, no less). Clearly, a quality education CAN be had in the public schools. Your blanket statement that one-room schoolhouses were somehow better than current public schools just doesn't hold up.
Nor does it prove it. The biggest problem with your assertion is not whether or not any presumed quality in way-back education might have been caused by community involvement is true or not, but that even if it is true, there's probably not much we can do to generate community involvement.
Being able to eat when you are hungry and live in climate-controlled comfort certainly does.
And how is the educational system supposed to solve this?
I agree with that. However, if the things that made old time schools work (to whatever extent they did) was community involvement, but community involvement is not something that can be made to happen, it may not be terribly useful to try to emphasize that aspect too much. Instead, we should look at what we _can_ do.
The reason education worked in the past is simple...it was educating people for what their roles were going to be in the future. The problem we have now is two-fold:
1) Our education is already behind the curve in that we're educating people in a way that worked for roles they would have filled 50 years ago.
2) Even if we were able to educate people for jobs that exist the moment someone graduates, likely those jobs will not exist within 10 years. So we need to educate people to be creative and adaptable. Today's schools do not do that well, and today's teachers are probably the worst suited to be capable of imparting those skills.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
More to the point, when I used to pay my doctors directly, they didn't overcharge - they cwertainly didn't starve , but they couldn't get away with overcharging, because then, people would just go to a differnt doctor.
The whole HOMo nonsense caused a price inflation.
ALso, there is a difference between having helath insurance, and being forced to go through this halfasses HMO crap system that they invented during, what was it, the Nixon years? Doctors are manipulated into over- charging by the HMO system. Now, it's called "health insurance", but what it actually is, is a series of gigantic HMOs.
We used to pay the physician directly, and the insurance was there for "the big stuff". As above, it helped keep costs down. Now, everyone is forced into this bureaucratic nightmare - rather than paying th ephysician, we have to pay the bureaucracy, which then pays the physician, so the doc almost *has* to overcharge just to get what s/he
*should* get. It's lunacy.
Yup. As far as I know, the AMA has nothing to do with it, unless what he's going on about is specialist training - and that's just common sense; you don't want a family practice doc, or an orthopedist, doing brain surgery - you want someone who has trained, and continues to train, in the methodologies of brain surgery.
Well, it's also dang hard to cope with more than one or maybe two specialties - there isjust so much knowledge... But malpractice insurance *is8 a killer. What it is, is that the good physicians are forced to pay for the few bad apples, plus those people who do consider lawsuits a form of retirement plan, and *everyone* suffers because of it.
Exactly. THe determiner is the HNMO/"Insurance" groups. THey decide what is considered a "fair and customary" price, I think that's the term. But ifthe Doc charges you that price, they don't get it all from the HMO
- they get a percentage. So they charge more, so that they get the fiar price doled out to them by the HMO.
ALso, salary is one thing, the cost of doing business is another. In some places, obstetritians have become an extict species because they have to pay out *more* (in insurance, and business costs) than they earn.
The worst is socialized medicine. I lived in Canada for 10 years, and between the waiting times to see specialists, the fact that you couldn't get any testing that wasn't approved (meaning, common and average, IOW, if you had an unusual condition, you were prob out of luck), and so on - well, if there is one thing that makes me shudder, it's the talk of socializing the US system. I'd prefer to see vouchers given to low- income folks...
Sorry. What I posted is the law and the simple truth. You simply do not know the facts of life for the uninsured. I suggest getting some knowledge of how the system works before it is too late. You are heading for a lot of trouble. Even with Medicare Part D you need an insurance company to negotiate rates for drugs. This is true also for hospital visits. The "cash" rate is up to 2-4 X more than the insurance rate.
"Don" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
Establishment of parameters.
Well, I guess I just think that it's worthwhile to teach kids toread and write. I know how hard it is to overcome parental resistance to education, and how much of a good start good education can be (again, not saying the source is, or has to be, the public warehouse). I personally think that parents who block the development (including education) of a child are committing abuse, a vie rooted in my personal experience, because it *does* impinge upon so many areas of life.
Minding one's own business is fine, but to just leave kids to suffer the consequences of parental shitheadedness is IMO at best hard-hearted, but it also is short-sighted. To say much more, I'd have to go into the reasons for my view, which reasons are largely (1) personal expereince, and (2) observation of other people I've known. I really do not want to get into all of that, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but suffice it to say that I'm not merely making stuff up as I go along - when I say that lack of education, or poor education, and parental neglect impact not only the adults whom the children gorw up to be, but also the society in which they live.
But it;s late right now and I'm too tired to continue ...gotta get some ZZZs.
"Amy Blankenship" wrote in news:cM%2j.4129$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews2.bellsouth.net:
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THAT WAS NOT THE DAMN POINT ALREADY. It was one frigging example, a
*postulate*, a *possible example*.
You continually denegrate other people's supposed "lack of comprehension", yet overlook your own.
Again, you have gotten a pit-bull lock-hold on as *example* mentioned as a possible illustration of an alternativge to massive (as in, New York City, etc.) school bureaucracy. And *totally* missed the point.
THe point was in no way that they were some idyllic ideal to which weneed to return - the point was about local/community-based education, community involvement in education.
And you can stop yuelping about how you went to publice school - so did I, it's not special.
Self-defeatism *certainly* won't agenerate community involvement - you've thrown in th etowel before you've even entered the ring. Yeesh.
So the onlyu thing you can see is either material glut, or starvation? How tediously black-or-white.
Again, I didn't say it was. It's one of the things that interferes with education.
[ ... ]
I hate defeatism. I really do. It's too damn easy to say "it can't be done, so we won't try". Defeatism is one of the major factors behind most problems - people don't even bothe rtrying to do anything, because it's easier to just sit back and say it can't be done.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Kris Krieger" Newsgroups: alt.planning.urban,alt.architecture Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:22 AM Subject: Re: The value of shopping local
Not really... I was replying to your post as I went along. You hadn't yet made your point that you hadn't really thought out your one-room schoolhouse example.<
That's not defeatism, it's accepting the things we cannot change and having the wisdom to know the difference.
And you criticize my reading comprehension...
How bout: we're not likely to solve that one at first, so look at things we CAN control and go after those first?
I noticed you deleted my points about the more likely causes of why the school systems worked in the past and what we _actually_ need to do to solve it. Sounds like you're not interested in any other perspectives than yours. I suppose if you say "the reason schools were better then is X" and X is something that's conspicuously difficult to recapture under today's circumstances, then you don't need to feel so bad about not coming up with any actual workable strategies for solving the problem.
"Amy Blankenship" wrote in news:JMf3j.19066$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews6.bellsouth.net:
It wasn't a matter of not thinking it out, it was a matter of suggesting soemhting that other people might be interested in thinking about, esp. given that the ORS was not the main point, despite your insistance upon trying to make it so.
Sorry, but it's too easy to use aphorisms as "justifications" for not trying to come up with solutions to problems - I've seen it doen far too often. Granted, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to try to make changes, but that doesn't mean that no changes can ever be made. Suggesting that it's useless to even try is not wisdom, but defeatism.
No, i merely suggest that you be a bit slower when it comes to criticizing others, and a bit more cognizant of the times you err.
THat's not what you said. And anyway, all I've bene doing all along is suggesting the ssame thing that works in archetecture, and in a great many other situations: look at history, see what worked and *why* it worked, and then give careful thought as to whether some of the historical solutions can be combined with modern methods so as to achieve a better result. Or, to put in into the form of an old adage, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water". Part of all that is *obviously* looking at a given situation and priortizing which things can, should, and need to be addressed first. I've not said anything different from that.
No, it was late, I was tired, also aching (arthritis), plus I have to budget my time, because I can't do things as quickly as I could when I was 30, or even 20, years younger (including typing), and don't weigh quite enough for a time-dilation effect to occur localy. It is also too time-consuming to go back and search for refrences on each and every tangential detail that poeple choose to focus upon, especially given that I've a couple of decades worth of accumulated reading, higher education, leisure learning, personal experinece,and personal observation to sift through. So excuse me for not living up to a higher standard of documentation than others - at least I try to be far more careful than average to use qualifiers when I'm not certain whether I remember something correctly ("IIRC") or when something is my opinion ("IMO") or when something is a matter of personal expereince and/or observation.
What I'm not interested in is when points are missed, no matter how often I attempt to clarify them, and I'm expected to defend statements that were intended to be either analogies, or possible points of consideration.
Over and above that, however, it is exceedingly insulting for you to say I've no interest in other perspectives - it simply proves that you do nto know or comprehend even the tiniest thing about me or my life. One thing is that I had to fight tooth and nail against people who insisted that i was stupid, "merely a dumb Polack", and so on, including both most of my public school teachers, and my so-called "family". Unwilling to consider other perspectives? Considering that I grew up hearing that "Hitler had the right idea", and other equally-abhorrent "values", I've gone to immense lengths to consider other perspectives so as to improve myself and try to become a better human being.
You don't feel like considering the example, wondering whether it did work, and thinking about why, and whether aspects of it might be applicable to current problems - you instead seem to expect me to lay out each and every detail for you, while you insist that this and that "can't" be changed; you also chose to be insulting when I do not lay it all out in excrutiating detail, and clipped some of your post.
I have never claimed to be omniscient or perfect, but I have tried to consider a large range of viewpoints, and I've also been able, at least occasionally, to admit that I was wrong when someone can look at a point I was trying to make, and clearly/rationally illustrate that what I'd thought was factual, was not. Yes, I do have some opinions, as does anyone, but I try very hard to avoid making personal attacks when I don't agree with someone or when I can't see tha they're making a good point. It's rather arrogant of you to claim otherwise, most especially when you refuse to even consider the *possibility* that what you might be projecting something.
++ wrote in news:c9mdnZNj-ogJ89nanZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@rcn.net:
I've saved the post so I can look those up later (my system is getting wonky again, IE is really *slow* - must be time to re-re-re-re-re-install Windows XP =:-p ).
My schooling was kind of pathetic, so I srt-of "self-schooled", whihc is the root of my views on this. ALso, given that my brain doesn't function "normally/inan average manner", I don't learn well in a classroom situation, and can't follow long lists of instructions when there is no overarching principle offered. I learn better from being able to figure out the principle, and then extrapolate the details/instructions. Which is great with computer software - people do tend to use similar principle,s so, once you figure out how one program saves files (directory structure and all of that), you can pretty easily know how
*any* prog will save files. And so on. IOW, I sort-of have to work inversely to how most things are taught in a classroom. I learned Russian from tutors, for example, through speaking, and got good whough to work with the language after a rather brief time. OTOH, learning language (German) in a classroom took me at least three times as long, and that was without having to learn a new alphabet.
OTOH, it seems to me that a lot fo people learn better tha same way. I don't know about most, but I think that kids who are having "trouble" with learning are merely having trouble with the teaching methods ;)
ANything practical works! Although food is always a good incentive
Building anything - kites, scale models, Orogami, paper models - it all is good, and all you have to do is find out what the child enjoys. IMO, the buiggest problem with classroom learning is the whole "siddown and shaddup" thing that so often happens. SOme kids do learn best in a classroom situation, but certainly not all, and esp. not those who are more rambunctious or have any sort of quirks (I dislike the term "disability", because IMO, it is too often considered to be a sort of absolute thing - rather than a wall, tho', it's more like a bumpy part of a road that one has to negotiate differently than one negotiates the smooth part of the road).
No, but if they don't share the values of the community to the extent that they are willing to support what the community has decided to do, they have _chosen_ not to be part of the community. If you want to be part of a community and take part in the advantages of doing so, you need to pull your own weight. Not that it's any of our business ;-)
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