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As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gig

by Ntrails 12y ago

As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing: "Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet." Rather than pretending it could ever be the case, I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where it happens :)

tartuffe78 12y ago
"... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course
- acdha 12y ago
  … which will be paid at a much higher level for decades by the adults who received a solid education even if their parents couldn't have afforded it. This is hardly a zero-sum game.
Haul4ss 12y ago
As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster. - You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand. - You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs. - You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English. - In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine. - You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way. And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats. I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).

by Ntrails 12y ago

tartuffe78 12y ago

"... free of charge to its citizens...", except for taxes of course

acdha 12y ago
… which will be paid at a much higher level for decades by the adults who received a solid education even if their parents couldn't have afforded it. This is hardly a zero-sum game.

Haul4ss 12y ago

As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster. - You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand. - You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs. - You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English. - In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine. - You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way. And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats. I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).