Posted on 08/05/2013 9:26:13 AM PDT by jazusamo
It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
San Francisco and New York are both plagued with large "homeless" populations today, largely as a result of previous housing "reforms" that made housing more expensive, and severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built.
The solution? Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable lifestyle for more people.
Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values.
Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners.
By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students — often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
Indeed.
I was a gifted child at a time before gifted children programs existed. (At least, none existed where we lived.) The teachers would explain the material. Then they would sit me down with some of the slower students to explain it to them in terms they could understand. I was also sent to tutor other classes; in sixth grade, I spent at least an hour a day tutoring kindergartners. Many of my classes had extra credit independent learning material, which I went through pretty quickly.
There *are* ways to engage the brighter students, even when students of different abilities are stuck into the same class. What my teachers did with me can be done by any teacher.
Quite a bit of it, actually. Mentally ill people cannot be locked up indefinitely (thanks, ACLU!) unless they have actually committed a crime. Without committing a crime, they end up on the streets, like stray dogs, unable to take care of themselves. The drug addicts are in the same situation, although I have less sympathy for them than for the mentally ill. They chose to try the drugs that they became addicted to, while mentally ill people didn't choose to become mentally ill.
My youngest was in that trap, so was his Dad 40 years earlier. Both of them ended up dropping out of high school due to pure boredom. Both scored in the 95% on the SAT's. Ran for the school board on this platform, lost, just too mean!
“Jimmy Carter first fixed the nation’s public school system by establishing a cabinet-level Department of Education in 1979.”
Why is there no popular movement dedicated to the abolition of the Department of Education?
Beats me. I think it should be done urgently.
That used to be a part of the Republican agenda, along with de-funding taxpayer-funded leftist public radio, the arts, etc. I haven’t heard even a whisper in app the last two decades about any of these things. It’s as if they finally just conceded to all this, and it all became a given that the taxpayers are required to fund the left’s agenda and outlets.
Spot on, as always.
Nicely done.
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