Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were still literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent blacks and 17 percent of whites can't read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, and white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did 60 years ago, but 60 years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.
----------
In other words, if we wish our children to be educated, the LAST PLACE we should send them is public funded schooling.
Abundance: Some Lessons From The Underground History Of American Education Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate, and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version, you find your self in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, astute analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable that only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818, the US was a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
----------
More bad news: In ranking, U.S. students trail global leaders - USATODAY.com United States students are continuing to trail behind their peers in a pack of higher performing nations, according to results from a key international assessment. Scores from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment to be released Tuesday show 15-year-old students in the U.S. performing about average in reading and science, and below average in math. Out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math.
Due to the inverse relationship of education quality versus public spending, it is clear that to improve our educational system, requires a complete removal of government - taxation as well as regulation.
No one would willingly spend their resources on an education system that incrementally devolves into utter garbage. But when failing, it's only retort is to give it more money !
Time to end the Federal Department of Education, and all the programs it spawned.
Then we will be left in a society where only those who are rich can afford an education.
Bull. Public education is needed to educate those who could not afford it.
What we need to look at as a society is why we paying athletes multi-million dollar contracts yet school teachers have to get by on $30K a year and have to pay for school supplies out of hteir own pockets
What we need to look at as a society is why government wants to spend money on building and lobbying sports teams, when public schools are not getting the supplies they need to fix broken desks and windows, and get text books into classrooms
What we need to look at as a society is why parents would rather leave their child in front of a TV than to sit with them 20 minutes a day with their school homework
Public Education is needed ; a huge reform is needed, but part in parcal it fails because PARENTS fail at being PARENTS and being apart of the PROCESS of learning.
If you had read the article (quite long), you would have found that "primitive" un-schooled Americans were more literate than the "modern" well-schooled Americans.
This begs the question: WHAT were modern students being taught, if not to be as literate as their forefathers?
Last edited by jetgraphics; 04-14-2011 at 01:42 AM..
There are many educators who realized that schools cannot be reformed. John Holt was one of them. Home Holt eventually decided that schools could not be reformed and spent his remaining years thinking about, supporting, and writing about places where and people from whom children could learn without conventional schooling.
====
Who is John Holt?
A major influence in "home schooling" - a radical idea in the 1970s.
Conservatives always talk about personal responsibility, pulling yourself up for your bootstraps. Yet when a kid can't read, it's always the schools or teachers fault and never the kids or parents.
At first when I saw the title, I thought they were talking about higher education. But it looks like their talking about grade school and high school. It'd be silly to eliminate public spending on that.
If you had read the article (quite long), you would have found that "primitive" un-schooled Americans were more literate than the "modern" well-schooled Americans.
This begs the question: WHAT were modern students being taught, if not to be literate as their forefathers?
I read the article (its been linked elsewhere)
You forget that public education had something done to it that wasn't there before (at least not in existence when I went to school)
The passage of the No Child Left Behind act (one of Bush's and Kennedy's many f-ups).
Illiterate students are Passed because of NCLB. because teachers do not want to keep students behind, since it AFFECTS funding for that school. Some schools are actually penalized (pay a fine) if their "quota" of students graudating do not meet an "arbitrary" number that the government came up with
your article simplifies it way too much (despite its length); there are many factors into education that can affect why our system as it is, IS NOW FAILING than it did 20 years ago, despite it being the same system in existence for nearly 60 years.
Stupid laws (NCLB)
Stupid Teacher Tenure policies (keeping bad teachers on payroll)
Stupid pay structure (not keeping good teachers because the pay is next to **** poor)
Stupid unions that keep bad pay structures and tenure policies
Parents who do not help their children to learn
Parents who are not involved in their children's school life (PTA, School Events, etc)
Governments who do not fund public education adequately
We have governments who want to pay millions of dollars to woo sports teams to make a home in their city, yet will cut the budgets by millions of dollars for the schools.
How does that compare with USA spending per pupil?
I don't know, but I do know that education is 100% publicly funded in Cuba. Do you want to know what their literacy rate was prior to being publicly funded, 60-70%.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NJBest
At first when I saw the title, I thought they were talking about higher education. But it looks like their talking about grade school and high school. It'd be silly to eliminate public spending on that.
Not silly, but radical. Some people want take back the USA to the 1880's, before child labor laws and other nonsense.
Last edited by Savoir Faire; 04-14-2011 at 01:58 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
