Posted on 02/15/2007 4:49:32 PM PST by John Jorsett
I don't know. Seems to me that a lot of wikipedia content is better than the non-offensive, vapid crap they put in textbooks.
Take the science articles in wikipedia. You won't get that in practically any high school, even most of the best. Don't even mention engineering or anything related to computers.
Ted, you're embarrassing yourself and the citizens of Alaska.
Now, I don't know specifically why high schoolers are so ignorant, but this has been going on for a long, long time. I remember I had a friend in the late 80s who went to Beverly Hills High, one of the best in the country. He was a decent guy and not dumb, but he couldn't write at all.
This was way before major digital initiatives and so I think we can pretty much guarantee that they did not cause the problem.
Unfortunately, they haven't managed to cure it, or reverse the slide, either.
I visited a junior high school in a nice area of Los Angeles. I was in a classroom trying to sort out a networking problem when I overheard that people in the class, even after half the term had ended, were having trouble figuring out where to save files. Surely this should have been a known quantity since Day One?
Apparently not.
The teacher seemed nice enough but completely burned out.
It didn't seem to me like the 60 shiny new Dell computers in the room were doing much of anything, besides confusing people.
D
Ted, you're embarrassing yourself and the citizens of Alaska.
The Federal government has no Constitutional authority to have anything to do with education. Or about 90% of what it meddles in.
Starve Leviathan!
Not to mention intruding on my right to surf that site during boring lecture classes...
They use bribery, or the threat to cut off funding as a way to get what they want. It's kind of funny that they take money from the people and then use it as a carrot to dictate our behavior.
It appears that the definition of those sites is so vague that it could include sites such as Wikipedia, according to commentators
to
U.S. senator: It's time to ban Wikipedia in schools, libraries
"Despite its faults, Wikipedia is the best source for biographies of muscians, sports, and geography. I literally surf the site while I'm at work (like I'm doing now Mu-ha-ha-ha)"
Yep. The trick is that if its something controversial you've got to check the references they used - but frankly thats a skill kids need anyway - there is too much attitude that if its on a web site then its true... banning Wikipedia would just hurt education.
Stevens is a drooling idiot. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource. The explicit sections of it (with photos of genitalia, etc) are clearly separate and anyone with a basic knowledge of software firewalls can easily block them where kids are present.
Shouldn't this larcenous fathead be out dedicating an eight-lane highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere, instead of trying to control what he doesn't comprehend? When it comes to other people's money, Stevens has stickier fingers than a pine tar salesman. I swear, if the Democrats weren't so treacherous, I'd be ashamed to be a Republican.
You think it's the federal government's job to decide what websites should be used in school?
You are at the wrong site:
www.democraticunderground.com
how About workin on some OIL DRILLIN!!!
In fairness to Ted, he's done more on ANWR then anybody else, and always been stimied at the last second by the D's. It's hopeless now that the D's have the majority.
The one skill that has increased is the ability to write English probably due to the massive amounts of writing that children do to each other. Beyond that skill, I have seen nothing that would form a compelling argument for computers in the schools.
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