Inconvenient Truth At School

As far as colleges go - you are only partly right. Colleges and universities receive monies from parents, endowments, loans, etc, but they also receive HUGE amounts of money from state and federal governments. This has become a very big deal in Virginia as many freshman classes have become populated by more and more out-of-staters with Virginia kids wait listed or declined. I'm not speaking of kids with low GPA's, but of valedictorians with 4.0+ GPA with significant course work, volunteerism, sports, music - the whole package. There has been somewhat of a blow-back from the General Assembly asking why state tax dollars are going to these institutions when highly qualified kids are not being admitted. Community colleges use even more state tax dollars than the 4 year universities as they typically don't have the endowments, but at least all kids can use these facilities.

People who want separation of schools from the government need to recognize that far more than K-12 schools use government dollars. The public universities and community colleges take quite a bite of the apple also.

On your other subject of charity - Why, in your opinion, would businesses and individuals donate to charitable institutions to pay for education of the poor?

I did a similar experiment in 1982, except it was with an final exam in Algebra II I gave in 1967 to a 1982 calculus class as a first exam. Every kid in the calculus class had an "A" average in his/her math classes. of the 16 kids in the calculus class, two got "A"'s; none of the others got above a "C" and about half failed.

One only has to look at high school textbooks from the 1960s and compare them with those with today's book to see that much of the content has been removed. But I must say this has been a continuous thing. A second year algebra book published in the 1930s had much higher content that one of the 1950s.

Don't know. The '60s geometry textbooks were strong on logic. They still have some of it, because I wonder if the teachers are even aware of it. A few years ago, I was a substitute and taught a section which dealt with logical principles. I was just explaining the text, but the kids acted as though I were trying them to teach Greek. I think they were learning to do proofs by rote.

Love your word "educrats." You've got it. Principals and V.P.s
are mostly interested in showing the management a clean record and the parents a "succeeding" child. To hell with standards. Every lazy idiot must be "supported." A friend of mine told me she was at a seminar where the teachers were taught various holds in order to disable attacking students while retaining their sense of dignity and empowerment - the student's!!!

I sometimes wonder if the "plot theorists" were right when suggesting that Communists were implementing their strategy of dismantling democracy from within. You know, corrupt and destroy the youth, thus the future of the state, etc., etc. Nothing would surprise me less than some investigator proving that they had actually done it! :))

When I was teaching, it was a big problem to stop children talking, to make them remove their hats, to make them stand, etc.,etc., just to listen to the national anthem.
When I reprimanded one for not showing respect for at least the soldiers who were dying every week, he said, "What war?"

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