bintananth
behind a desk
Professional educators have been around for thousands of years and it wasn't until sending kids to school became mandatory that those educators were available to people who weren't extremely wealthy.
Thus Buzzes the Babylon Bee
- Thread starter Reap the Whirlwind
- Start date
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
You are again showing your ignorance.
Communities (in America at least) built their own schoolhouses and hired their own teachers well before government got itself involved in education.
bintananth
behind a desk
Those teachers were professionals and the money needed to pay their salaries (and build the damn schoolhouse in the first place) had to come from somewhere and that somewhere was almost always, formally or informally, some form of local taxes.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
A private agreement among citizens to pay a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse without question bears more resemblance to a private school than a public school.
Because there's no threat of force behind the collection of such funds, and the parents can choose to withdraw their children from such and won't keep being taxed regardless. Depending on contracts involved, they might not get back the money they paid for that quarter, semester, or possibly year's tuition, but they aren't stuck paying for it indefinitely whether they use it or not, and as such, there is more direct accountability.
Trying to pretend 'a group of people got together to hire a teacher cooperatively' is the same as mandatory government schooling at the best reveals a very powerful bias in your thinking.
The value of professional teachers is also quite overstated, there's been a number of studies that have demonstrated that there is little connection between a teacher's performance and thier training as a teacher (this is distinct from their knowledge of the subject. If you have a college degree in math you're going to teach math better than someone without that knowledge, but if you have a degree in math and a degree in education, you're unlikely to outperform the guy with just a math degree).
So I guess my response is to try to fix this problem by making the schools actually good instead of just getting rid of them.
I'm sure my parents would disagree with you, but I honestly think it's something of a crap shoot. At the university level, essentially what you get is exactly what you just described, and a lot of those people in the STEM field especially, are only really there so they can do research they want to do. Some of them are still pretty good at instructing, but others can't teach worth a damn. I had a few instructors who were obviously brilliant, but could not convey what they knew in a way students could understand. I think at least some of that is attitude, but I honestly wonder if you either just have the ability or don't. Of course, the Marxism that's been intertwined with professional education for decades isn't helping things either.
Last edited:
Texas officially declares that performing sex-change surgeries on kids is child abuse
We're being told these days that having "top" or "bottom" surgery on little kids is actually going to make them healthier human beings.
notthebee.com
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I would be perfectly fine with the current schools staying open, so long as they have to compete with other schools for the per-student vouchers or similar a reformed system would have.
They'd have to get their shit in order or go broke real quick.
Yeah, the meme, which seems more or less true, is that the students listen to 8 hours of lectures, then go home and ask their parents to actually learn anything. The point where teachers outperform parents who care seems to be fairly high up the chain of education: the advantage of a teacher in teaching reading and writing skills vs parents probably doesn't really manifest until, what, high school texts? And even there it seems less the teacher and more just forcing students to read and write a bunch. If the high school isn't even doing that, its still pretty useless.
Now, you can have parents teach stupid shit, but teachers don't seem to be particularly good at not teaching stupid shit either: new math has been a long running, well deserved mockable thing.
Now, you can have parents teach stupid shit, but teachers don't seem to be particularly good at not teaching stupid shit either: new math has been a long running, well deserved mockable thing.
ParadiseLost
Well-known member
If you think there's remotely enough private schools or charter schools to even ATTEMPT to replace public schools, you are flat out disconnected to reality.
Sure, private schools are technically 25% of America's schools... but they only serve 10% of America's students.
There wouldn't be remotely enough supply for many people to switch.
Also, because of the voucher system and because of people interested in switching who do now have the option, the price of private schools would likely go up.
Its also worth noting that the percentage of American students in private schools has been declining; from 1995 to 2021 there was a 20% decline in the percentage of students in private schools.
Beyond this, 78% of private schools are religious, meaning there is a lack of secular schools, which is what quite a number of parents would prefer.
Any sort of belief that a pure per-student voucher system would result in a massive win for private education and a loss for the public school system is pure wish fulfillment fantasy.
It also ignores that both Private and Public schools have a ridiculously large range of quality, with Public Schools ranging from "Upper Middle Class Suburbs with 8 digit facilities"* to "you have gang wars in the hallways," and Private Schools ranging from "literal memetic boarding school for the super elite" to "the education is a joke and the teachers were just desperate for any job."
* The schools of the real upper middle class are very different from the schools of the proles.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
It's not 'pure wish fulfillment fantasy.' It's recognizing that breaking a state-enforced near-monopoly is good for almost everyone involved.
If thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per student are freed up from state schools, you can bet your ass private schools will start popping up left and right to meet that demand. The transition wouldn't happen all at once or in some single magical moment, but give it 5-10 years, and you'd see a massive move to meet market demand, just like with any other service industry.
Based on my experience when it comes from homeschooling, the teaching gap doesn't close until being a college junior pursuing an actual bachelors degree in English Writing. There was nothing covered by my first and second years of college English that had not been covered, from a technical side, by my mother's education and in fact I, and my brothers, were both well advanced of other freshmen and sophmores when it came to reading and writing skills. The only new theories of literature interpretation I was exposed to was Critical studies versions of literary interpretation (which I actively mocked and got away with because this was the 00s and you were still allowed to oppose the bullshit), and it literally took until my Junior year of college for me to regularly encounter other students of my caliber in English and where I actually had to start putting in hard work on my essays to meet professor expectations... in my major classes, in my non-major classes essays never got that challenging.
For my younger brothers, neither of whom studied English as their major, their writing and reading skills were never challenged by anything in college, and they breezed through the lower level mandatory English comp and lit classes actively wondering just how stupid their peers were for having to be taught stuff that we'd know since middle school...
The number of essays I wrote between 12 and 4 the morning they were due...
I got A's and B's on those, by the way. And yes, that is 12 AM there.
I hope to Yahweh this isn't true. Sensitive documents like this should've been destroyed lest they reveal the deep hidden vulnerabilities of our military! 
babylonbee.com
Taliban Enjoys Deep Belly Laugh Over Diversity Training Materials Left Behind By U.S. Military
KABUL—According to sources in Afghanistan, the Taliban was having a "deep belly laugh" over the diversity training materials left behind by the U.S. military previously stationed there. Taliban fighters captured books like Antiracist Baby, White Fragility, and The GayBCs and collectively cracked...
babylonbee.com
Didn't even have the courtesy of giving it dick-sucking lips and big T&A...
stephen the barbarian
Well-known member
Whitestrake Pelinal
Like a dream without a dreamer
Feminists Frantically Research What People Do With Babies Other Than Killing Them
AUSTIN, TX—After the Supreme Court declined to block the new Texas heartbeat law, feminists have been in a complete panic trying to figure out what one does with babies other than killing them. “They don’t teach any of this in feminist class,” said one frantic feminist.Babies have long been the...
babylonbee.com
That's...completely false. Home schooled childred end up with higher levels of understanding the fundamentals (reading, math, arythmatic, history) than pretty much 95% of public schooled children.