As I Said . . . (TPP)

This is from Steve Ruis on the Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP and how it got through Congress so far, even though its contents are secret …

As I Said . . . (TPP).

A rant concerning education

There is fraud in many, many realms of work and human enterprise. Including lawyers, doctors, businessmen, accountants, engineers, policemen, nurses, painters, taxi drivers, politicians, ‘reformers’, housewives, babies, children, students, the retired, stockholders, hunter-gatherers, soldiers, officers, spies, writers like me… (Sorry if I left out your favorite group; I got tired of typing this list) We are all sometimes crooked, no? Including some teachers.

But I think the problem is deeper. Yes, there is an awful lot of corruption and outright graft in education (as it is in many other areas). But I think that education and upbringing of the next generation is one of the most important things we can do. The last thing we really want is to have gangs of unemployed, disengaged kids hanging on street-corners, engaging in thuggish and criminal behavior, getting locked up for various offenses, engaging in violence and so on … regardless of whether their freaking math and reading test scores were ‘proficient’, ‘advanced’, ‘basic’, or ‘below basic’ – that’s not really important. What’s important is, are they becoming good human beings, or otherwise? And is it the sole job of the classroom teacher to fix all that? I don’t think he or she could if they tried. And, lord knows, they have been trying. And in the past 10 years they have been forced to work harder and harder, to no real human avail nor real improvement.

One could easily make the argument that we don’t spend nearly enough money on education. Heck, every single student should begin learning a foreign language soon after they learn to write their own. Plus, they should get really good coaching in some sort of physical endeavor (not necessarily a sport). Plus, they should all learn to play a musical instrument and to cook good food. And to appreciate good literature, music, and other cultures. And learn how to use various tools (metal, wood, software, and much, much more).

And to learn how society actually does function, and how it SHOULD work, why it works the way it does instead of the way it should, and to try to figure out ways from get from the actual present situation to an improved situation.

We are doing very little of any of this with our most underprivileged young society members. The kids who are raised in our ghettoes very seldom get to learn any of that stuff. Instead, society waits until they do something really, really wrong, and then locks them up. But it’s really, really expensive to keep someone locked up for 30 or 40 years – at about $20,000 per prisoner per year, that’s six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars ($600,000 to $800,000) per prisoner. It would have been a lot cheaper in the long run to invest in after-school programs to seriously engage students in sports, music, and much, much more, including lots of field trips to museums, zoos, mountains, beaches, factories, farms, and much, much more.

Instead, we are narrowing our educational goals more and more onto things that really don’t matter very much at all. (Have you actually LOOKED at the inane questions they ask on these dinky standardized NCLB tests? They were written by people who have absolutely no experience in the real world, or chose to ignore everything they ever learned about it.)