re: #307 Obdicut

I do definitely think that what Ludwig said about Jewish culture the other day is a big part of it. Jewish culture holds learning up as the highest achievement, and a doctor, a professor, is far more cherished than a franchise owner or an athelete.

In general American culture, we lionize kids who are sports stars. We ostracize kids that are nerds and scientists. And the GOP publicly castigates scientists as everything from immoral to greedy liars. We have a gigantic anti-science, anti-intellectual streak in this country, and one of the major parties celebrates it on a daily basis. But it’s far beyond the GOP; the anti-intellectual streak in the US runs wide, and deep, and they did not start it nor are they the source of it.

We need to change our culture. We need to celebrate scientists, and we need to stop pretending that everyone who earns a million dollars is somehow proved to be worthy or intelligent or anything else by virtue of doing so.

And there you have it. A culture that values education creates good schools and doesn’t tolerate BS in them.

One that thinks that “book smart” is both an insult, and something less than whatever kind of not smart they are going to promote as a sop to being ignorant, will produce public schools like the ones we have in all too many areas.

I really don’t have the time tonight to get into an endless education debate or discussion. The very short form is that if you pay enough for enough good people to become teachers such that individual kids get individual attention - fit to their learning styles - coupled with actual standards of syllabus - or you get left behind a grade, you get a functioning school system.

On the other hand, is kids don’t do well on tests so the obvious answer becomes lowering standards so everyone can feel like they have passed when they haven’t and if voters act like they are bleeding when it comes to paying for schools and teacher salaries, we get the mess we have.

To do it right we need to double teacher salaries to insure that talented people do the job - it isn’t like they are doing anything important, like educating the next generation or anything right (!?!) and we need to double or triple the number of teachers. That means we need to pay for it.

In terms of actual money spent - it really isn’t all that much. The Federal government needs to subsidize poorer areas so the standards are the same, rather than basing everything on property taxes, and strong real standards of hat constitutes an education need to be set by educators and professors, not politicians.

The simple fact of the matter is that kids in almost every other Western nation dut ours and they end up paying less than we do over all or per capita. Then again in a nation like Israel, if it is a choice between buying text books for a school or building a new gym, the books win every time. In America, the Gym wins every time.