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Education Systems Across the World: A Discussion
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I'm not sure what you're proposing as the solution here.
The Clinton Administration aside we stop short of sending jack booted thugs into peoples homes to steal their children because they aren't zealous about parent-teacher conferences.
Sometimes children get stuck with imperfect parents. Short of insurmountable abuse they play the hand they are dealt and many turn out just great.
Are you suggesting we give these people money? We keep financing these dregs wholesale without discretion or screening and they turn around and blow it on booze and lottery tickets.
Public school is similar. It's welfare with a good political lobby.
As I said in my first post in this discussion, I don't have a solution.
I also agree with what you are saying, especially in that there is a fine line between giving every child an equal chance at life and removing them from parental influence entirely. Also throwing money at a problem indiscriminately is not a flawless solution.
However, anyone that says money and luck (of the parents) doesn't play a major role in educational and life opportunities (as ege was saying to an extent) is full of shit.
I don't have a perfect answer, and in an imperfect world I don't know if there is one. I'm not proposing a communist system. I'm just saying "Hey, here's a problem. It would be awesome if we could come up with a solution that didn't create worse problems. Thoughts?"
I think i'm about £20000 in debt at the end of my 3 year degree, but I don't know for certain and it's a 0% interest loan so it's not too bad.
I think this is the point where we all just point, laugh, and mock you.
Hence my comment.
Naturally. I wouldn't expect an intelligent response from the resident socialist.
Keep tossing my money at the problem, convince others you and those like-minded are "doing something about it" and keep watching the education system fail while you blame everything but the very system you endorse.
Socialism is evil? Works pretty well for us over here, we have some of the best schools in Europe, we get paid to attend college and many cities will guarantee you a cheap flat if you move there to study. Also the doctor will fix me up for free.
We had them, but you had to be in AP/honor roll classes to get access to that sort of thing. Markets and "real" econ was generally provided through Junior Achievement programs, which are actually good programs because they engage people in business/the sciences to teach.
Heck, they don't even teach kids how to balance a checkbook in "normal" classes. Talk about home economics things that kids REALLY need these days... That, and what APR means.
Here's the point, Kevin - when you use terms like "dregs", you pretty much give up being taken seriously.
Because the best primary and secondary education system exists in a free market paradise.
Oh wait, its actually in fucking Finland, and the reason that they are successful is because the worst performing students there do phenomenally.
/point
/laugh
The US spent fifty years fighting a system that called itself Communism, and most Americans will connect Communism to Socialism.
I disagree with them, and think its a damn shame, but I understand it.
I don't even completely disagree with Communism. I just don't think it's a type that can work out with human's greed.
The reason they don't fly is a lot of times, the damage is self-inflicted. The community right next to where I live has a school district in crisis - we've actually had to bail them out, pretty much. You know why? Because every time the school board put up a mill levy, they'd vote it down. So they literally starved their schools to death, and then couldn't figure out why things got so shitty.
Oh, and if we're going to talk about why education in the US sucks, let's not ignore the elephant in the room - the fact we have an anti-intellectual streak a mile wide. When you celebrate ignorance, you should expect education to suffer.
Of course it's a big factor. I'm just saying that it's not as big a factor as you seem to think, when you say stupid shit like:
"You kind of run into social stratification when you only offer rich people's kids the best opportunities for education."
How exactly is that stupid? Okay, go ahead and add "a large majority of the time" to the end of my sentence if that helps. So it doesn't happen like that 100% of the time, only 99% of the time because there are some cases where the parents may not be filthy rich, and instead only make a five figure income twice that of the poverty level in this country, and choose to spend a lot of that on their children's education.
Again it still rings true that the best educational opportunities in this country are purchased.
Every education opportunity in this country is purchased by someone, be it a parent or the taxpayers... and with all things you get what you pay for.
Those who cower from tyrants deserve their chains."
-unknown
Yes, this is true. However, it doesn't have to work that way.
The cost of making every public school in America an equal to an elite prep school in regards to teacher quality and structural quality would be about two arms, two legs, and probably some vital organs.
That is primarily because of teacher quality. In Finland, for instance, teaching is highly respected as a profession, and many of the most brilliant people in Finland go into teaching. This is not just because they are paid more, but because they are respected by the populace at large, which itself is connected to a distinct lack of anti-intellectualism in Finland.
The US, in contrast, has an anti-intellectualism streak "a mile wide" as someone else noted, and it is almost expected that teachers will get shitted on by parents anywhere. Of course, if a teacher is making more money they are willing to put up with more crap (as in elite prep schools), and the rich are less likely to be anti-intellectual anyway.
In conclusion, I disagree, we're sort of stuck with it being that way until our culture changes, which probably will never happen. Oh well.
Actually it does, burying or otherwise obfuscating the cost does not eliminate it. A quality education is going to require a greater expenditure of resources then an average one (and an average one will require more then a poor one).
A quality education is an expensive one (I'm sure all my fellow college graduates can agree with that one).
The US education system is in need of some overhauling... there are some real gaps at a fundamental level with respect to math and science (to much wishy washy hand holding for my tastes)
Those who cower from tyrants deserve their chains."
-unknown
In Turkey, being a teacher is one of the most respectful paths one can take. It's a tradition passed on by Ataturk (Turkey's founder and war hero) and the extremely high esteem he held teachers in. In pretty much every aspect and field of life you tell them you're a teacher and they'll treat you with a great amount of veneration; people will give their place in lines or their seats on crowded public transportation, they'll give discounts and special deals, and all sorts of similar preferential treatment. Hell, in some regions it's said that once a teacher starts talking everyone shuts the fuck up and listens. That's just how it goes.
How much do teachers get paid in Turkey? Next to nothing.
How many top students become teachers in Turkey, Ege?
A lot of top students go into academia to become teachers.
So I guess that the lack of respect teachers have in America (encapsulated in the phrase "Those who can't do, teach") causes quite a bit of the problems in the US education system. It isn't anything like Japan, but Teacher just isn't up there with, say, lawyer or doctor as an elite profession.
Because it truthfully isn't.
Do you know how much and how hard doctors and lawyers have to work, how much training and education they have to go through, as opposed to teachers who basically get three months off every year?
So you think lawyers get paid a lot because it's a prestigious profession, and not because the job they do requires a great deal of temporal and monetary investment and is fucking hard and demanding as hell?
Also, I've actually received comments from people that they see my move to teaching after earning a B.CS degree from UWaterloo as a noble gesture of self-sacrifice or something, that I'm turning down at least a well-paying IT job to go teach in a high school. I don't know how that fits into the correlation of prestige with salary, but I do think I'd be prouder to say I was a high school teacher than to say I was an IT employee and believe me - it'll be a paycut. In fact, I'm pretty sure my first year of full-time high school teaching (if I can find one) will be a paycut from my last summer job, when I worked IT for a hospital alliance between 3rd and 4th year.
Then again, I've always been fucking weird.
Ontario has a population of 13 million. Also, I don't like where that logic leads, because here, school boards have a lot control over which schools stay open and offer which programs, and it is -not- going well. A lot of school boards are in deficit and debt, with quite a few of them forcibly taken over by the province to fix their books. The Toronto Catholic School Board is in all sorts of shit, after it was revealed that trustees were keeping office supplies including computers and furniture, plus expensing stuff like car costs, cell bills and trips to the Caribbean. Trustees are under huge amounts of pressure to keep open schools with declining enrollments, blocking them from opening schools in booming areas, and... they just don't have the capacity or understanding to deal with issues like this.
I don't think it's a matter of scope. I think it's a matter of vision and will. My belief is this: schools should have purpose. If the purpose of a school is to mandate all citizens receive a base level of education, then the system it's built upon should be very different than if the purpose of a school is to train the capable individuals for careers in academia or other fields requiring advanced knowledge. While universal education is good - a guy I knew referred to it as stupidity insurance - at some point, you have to weed out those unsuited for higher levels of education so you can focus on those with real interest and ability. Here in North America, we've let that threshold advance slowly upwards, such that people have the "right" to a high school degree now and teachers are at fault if they fail. Arguably, it's progressed upwards to undergraduates too - my university faculty, among others, lowered their pass rate from 65% to 60% to deal with students from the newly truncated 12-grade curriculum, who were just getting their asses kicked in first-year university compared to their 13-grade cohorts. Even in high school, my vice-principal told me that Bachelor's degrees don't mean anything any more - Master's degrees are the new Bachelor's degrees - and coming out of my undergraduate studies, I completely see that as true (even though I hated her).
This might be partially defensive thinking on my part here. Because I mean, is it going to be on me if I get students who just can't do integration by substitution?
Not quite ruining us, but people are figuring out how to exploit it far more quickly than they are patching it up. The way I'm going at the moment, I will be able to pass perfectly well and gain university entrance (it's a bit harder than a normal pass) without even going to a single exam.
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Well, yes, and no. If you have fixed resources and you're asked to produce x million units of something or 60x million units, obviously the latter is going to be more difficult. But it's not like there's just one guy in a basement in each country being asked to build an education system.
According to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
The USA's GDP/C is ~$45.8k while Finland's is ~$35.3. Which ought to mean that, if the USA were willing to spend the same proportion of its GDP on high school education that Finland spends on its high school education, each American school would have considerably more money than each Finnish school. Maybe it wouldn't solve all the problems, maybe it still wouldn't be able to match the Finnish outcomes... but I'm willing to bet it would be a huge improvement.
It takes a bit of effort and actually wanting to pass, which is really lacking in a hell of a lot of people I know. They're just terribly slow at fixing it.
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I don't think things work at all that way, beyond a minimum 'you gotta spend X to get the basics done' point. How funds are spent is vital. Here's an example from today's Times of London - its on the front page, click over timesonline.co.uk to read the article - maternity spending in the NHS has increased a fair bit since 10-20 years ago in real terms, but they've spent that money almost exclusively on giant buildings while cutting funding for staff retention and training. As a result, the process of giving birth in the UK has become more and more... well, shithouse. Rushed, no choice about how it goes down, and dangerous. The maternal mortality rate there is one of the highest in Europe, a group of countries which includes fucking Romania (course, things are still pretty good compared to the developing world). Its a really good example of misdirected funding - if the money was just spent on different things, the system would work way better.
I've noticed this tendency in a lot of bureaucracies, too, including the one I work for - it seems to me that the people in charge of spending the money feel somehow safer putting it into nice neat buildings and shiny toys rather than giving it to messy icky people. Trouble is, the system doesn't work without people. A really nice classroom with aircon and computers is useless without a good teacher who's got a good curriculum to work with, and good management support.