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To: GSlob
“Concerning the advancement of learning, I do subscribe to the opinion… that, for grammar schools, there are already too many… the great number of schools which are in your Highness’s realm doth cause a want, and likewise an overthrow [surfeit] – both of them inconvenient and one of them dangerous; for by means thereof they find want in the country and towns, both of servants for husbandry and of apprentices for trade; and on the other side there being more Scholars bred than the State can prefer and employ… it must needs fall out that many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations and unprofitable for that in which they were bred up, which will fill the realm full of indigent, idle and wanton people…”
--Francis Bacon, 1611

Point well taken. I would point out that Booker T. Washington in his book "Up From Slavery" mentioned the same sort of thing in re: education of the Negro [to use his term] in the second half of the 19th century.

While I don't have the direct quote in front of me, it ran something along the lines of how Negro youth, were being taught a form of education "both of them inconvenient and one of them dangerous". He said that since Negroes at that time earned their keep by unskilled, manual labor (waiters, washerwomen, etc.) education should focus on how to work better, more efficiently, more business-like, at those jobs so to advance them, i.e, go from a washerwoman to a micro-business owner who employees two other washerwomen; go from being a wait to being a headwaiter and perhaps even a matrie d'hotel.

However the "liberal arts" education that was being given the Negro youth -- handwriting, geography, science,Latin,etc. -- ended up both boring the youth (hence the high drop out rate)and causing in them a contempt for manual labor and the long, slow climb up the economic ladder.

One result of this was that a huge number of young Negro girls, esp. in big cities, turned to prostitution*. In exchange for "putting out" they got money, attention, and nice, flashy things: like feather boas, silk stocking, and dressed that sparkled when they walked. You know, the kind(s) of things they felt they deserved b/c they had had an education.

(* And youths in to crime)

55 posted on 01/21/2006 2:45:22 PM PST by yankeedame ("Oh, I can take it but I'd much rather dish it out.")
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To: yankeedame
Well, everyone has one's limits in everything - be it the weight one can lift, or the speed at which one can run, or one's ability to absorb and profit from education. Thus the only proper and necessary form of educational segregation is by ability - into separate and by design unequal educational streams. From the retardees to the gifted and maybe even "super-gifted" - at one extreme they will struggle with the multiplication table within 6x6, while at another they will be doing [in their heads] multidimensional geometry as visualization exercises. To each one's own.
56 posted on 01/21/2006 3:14:02 PM PST by GSlob
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