Social Democracy
Jess Anderson
Donald and Laura have been talking about economic remedies
to problems in poor communities, with emphasis on black
communities. Among other things, they mention the voucher
system for aiding education. I'm very leery of that.
In my view, the two most critical underpinnings of political
life in the US are the freedom of speech and the separation
of church and state. In both cases there are countless
de facto instances of these principles being eroded. It tells
me something that exactly these two are the ones most under
attack by the rabid right.
I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
expense. One of the key arguments among proponents of
vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
their kids go to school.
I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
My basic approach to this whole class of problems is this,
and in this order:
1. Every person must have adequate nutrition.
2. Every person must have adequate housing.
3. Every person must have adequate physical security.
4. Every person must have adequate health care.
5. Every person must have adequate education to age 18.
6. Every person must have adequate employment opportunity.
The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
Several notes:
- We are talking about rural poor as well as urban
poor. We are talking about Doing the Right Thing
for all poor. We are talking about doing the most
for those who are the worst-off right now.
- Most of this basic infrastrucure is in place but
severely dilapidated or hopelessly outdated, and
certainly access to it is monstrously unequal.
- These items are all interconnected and furthermore
imply the refurbishing of other parts of our
infrastructure, most notably transportation and
communications.
- Community based initiatives are best. Where they
don't exist, they should be fostered, probably with
dollar-based incentives. Each successively more
inclusive level of government should be involved
primarily to assure quality and performance standards
are met and to provide resources that lower levels
lack (one hopes only temporarily).
- Clearly, for the first few generations (the six goals
would take at least 50 years to realize fully), much
of the employment would be at taxpayer expense. There's
no way around it, those who have the money will have to pay
for those who don't. But the pay*back* would be enormous:
the basis for a *real* Land of the Free would exist.
- On the matter of priorities, resource allocation should
be based on the principle of "worst-first." This means
rebuilding decayed urban centers and providing for the
rural poor. It will definitely mean an overall *lowering*
of living standards for the rich and the middle class
for a very long time, unless it also involves a complete
restructuring of business ethics, the elimination of the
laissez-faire idea and the bases for the idea of greed.
There *is* enough productivity in the existing United
States to bring all this to pass.
Yep, it's social democracy, plain and simple. If there's
been any coherent theme in the presidential run-up, it has
been the clear statement that people want to feel in control
of their own lives. I see all of the above as the shortest,
most workable route to that goal. I think it addresses
every point raised by Donald's and Laura's concerns, too, in
particular what to do about the economic inequalities that
result from racism. People will fix it themselves, given
the resources. I think getting the resources to them fairly
is well over half the battle.
That's my dream, anyway.
--
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
>expense. One of the key arguments among proponents of
>vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
>their kids go to school.
>
>I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
>
School choice is the buzzword for those who believe that competition
can fix everything. It can't. Public education is inherently socialistic
and not amenable to the conventions of free-market economy. There's just
not enough incentive to make a bad school good just because it's losing
students.
I was an education reporter for a daily paper for four years before going
to hell (enrolling in law school). The folks who opposed school choice
did so mostly because (1) poor children still won't have the means to
choose (a criticism the Bushies have tried to quell with this ineffectual
"voucher" proposal). (2) It's a waste to abandon bad schools when they can
be fixed by direction of the government (Gawd, I'm such a liberal).
Bad schools get bad because bad teachers are assigned there as
punishment or for racial reasons. In Montgomery, Ala., new teachers
were asked if they would mind working in a predominantly black
school. The white teachers, of course, mostly said they would mind.
Black teachers were assigned to them. Now, before you assume I'm making
a racist distinction between black and white teachers, you should know
that the majority of the black teachers in Montgomery were graduates of
Alabama State University, the biggest diploma mill in the state. ASU law-
yers have fought teacher testing (and won), claiming it would be racially
discriminatory, when in fact it only discriminated against ASU grads,
who hadn't been taught a damn thing. Until all teachers are convinced
it's an honor and a challenge to be assigned to a difficult school --
one whose students often come to schoool hungry, abused and without
stable parenting, the class difference between schools will persist.
It certainly wouldn't hurt to pay good teachers more to go to these
schools.
This state is also about to hear whether it has perpetuated an unequal
funding scheme. If the judge says yes, and the state's forced to pour
more money into poor, rural (some mostly black) systems, someone had
better make sure a lot of that money goes to open Head Start-type pro-
grams. All the money in the world won't teach those children if they
come from homes where Mama is too busy just trying to survive to
read to them or talk to them. A few generations of that kind of stuff
would do a lot to close the class gap, IMHO.
Just telling you a lot of stuff you already knew...
_______________________________________________________________________
| "Be frank and explicit with your lawyer...It is his business to |
| confuse the issue afterwards." -- J.R. Solly |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| __ Tracey McCartney University of Alabama School of Law __ |
|_/_______________...@ua1vm.ua.edu______________________/_|
PS thanks for the response on the gay-rights lawyer thing. Keep it up.
Michael A. Thomas
>
> Donald and Laura have been talking about economic remedies
> to problems in poor communities, with emphasis on black
> communities. Among other things, they mention the voucher
> system for aiding education. I'm very leery of that.
>
> to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
> expense.
Public expense? This is such a common fallicy that it warrants
some examination. The "public" is nothing more than the individuals
who comprise it. The public is one and the same, by and large,
with those who are sending (or have sent) their children to
schools. It is their money, it was derived from them in the
first place. It did not just materialize into the tax coffers.
It was produced.
Lets put this another way: if the government allows me to
keep some of my income, and I run out and buy an Ford Explorer
does that imply that the government is "funding" Ford? Only
in a society which does not recognize property rights whatsoever
could that implication be true.
Vouchers, and (better) tax credits for education do nothing
more than allow people to short circuit the government and directly
fund schools. It allows parents to be consumers, not guinea pigs.
Tax credits (as I've heard them proposed) have any additional
benifit which would allow *all* individuals to contribute part
of their tax burden *directly* to the school(s) of their choice.
The same goes for business. I have to tell you, even though
I don't have children I would love to be able to directly
support various schools which I find worthy (such as ones
which cater to disadvantaged children) rather than sending
it through the rathole of government.
Certainly the rabid right is going to send their children to
bigots-r-us schools but in the long run this is a no-op since
they religious right does not seem to have any problem instilling
their children with hate as it stands now. The net effect of
vouchers/credits is that parents will be empowered with some
say so over the quality of their childrens education. Public
schools have utterly failed, it is time to try something new.
> One of the key arguments among proponents of
> vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
> their kids go to school.
>
> I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
Why? Because it would make schools directly accountable to
parents and their children might get a decent education in
spite of the best efforts of our public education system
to the contrary?
What is it about education of children that blinders people
so much? The argument that parents are irresponsible could
be used as a basis for outlawing moral preaching in churches
too. IMHO, it is the teaching of ethics and morality which
defines a societies civility toward one another far more than
Reading Writing and Arithmetic. Nobody in their right mind
would dare call for such a proscription (here in America at least).
Why does the same standard not apply to education?
The typical argument that I've heard is that if parents
weren't compelled to send their children to school they
wouldn't. Is their any basis for this attitude in reality?
There are laws which compell parents to feed their children
too, but is their any basis to believe that those laws factor
in parents decisions to feed their children? I don't think
so.
> My basic approach to this whole class of problems is this,
> and in this order:
>
> 1. Every person must have adequate nutrition.
> 2. Every person must have adequate housing.
> 3. Every person must have adequate physical security.
> 4. Every person must have adequate health care.
> 5. Every person must have adequate education to age 18.
> 6. Every person must have adequate employment opportunity.
Of course none of these things are facts of nature. How
does one make certain these basic needs are met? I'm sure
the answer follows...
> The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
> basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
> fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
And here we have it: force. Brute force, the point of
a gun. How nice. From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need. How very, um, Marxist.
And who makes these decisions as to how much each
individual is going to bear? No answer here. If history
has taught us anything, it will be of the form of a
Stalin, or a Tito, or a Mao. But those weren't really
socialist societies you say? Perhaps that is because
the premise of to each according to his need from each
according to his ability is flawed, and the only way
to achieve this end is through brute force. Mao certainly
believed that when he said "the root of all political
power is achieved by the muzzle of a gun". Why should
we doubt him?
> Several notes:
>
> - We are talking about rural poor as well as urban
> poor. We are talking about Doing the Right Thing
> for all poor. We are talking about doing the most
> for those who are the worst-off right now.
>
> - Most of this basic infrastrucure is in place but
> severely dilapidated or hopelessly outdated, and
> certainly access to it is monstrously unequal.
What standards apply? Who makes this decision?
Who pays for it? (we already know the answer to
that one though...)
> - Community based initiatives are best. Where they
> don't exist, they should be fostered, probably with
> dollar-based incentives. Each successively more
> inclusive level of government should be involved
> primarily to assure quality and performance standards
> are met and to provide resources that lower levels
> lack (one hopes only temporarily).
Hope springs eternal. Let's just say that it will
be permanent.
> - Clearly, for the first few generations (the six goals
> would take at least 50 years to realize fully), much
> of the employment would be at taxpayer expense. There's
> no way around it, those who have the money will have to pay
> for those who don't. But the pay*back* would be enormous:
> the basis for a *real* Land of the Free would exist.
This is hilarious. It might take 50 years to achieve.
How many 5 year plans did the Soviets endure 14?, 15? before
they saw through this sham for what it is. I'm afraid we have
ample evidence that it will take forever to achieve this
goal, and that society will rot in hell in the mean time.
> - On the matter of priorities, resource allocation should
> be based on the principle of "worst-first." This means
> rebuilding decayed urban centers and providing for the
> rural poor. It will definitely mean an overall *lowering*
> of living standards for the rich and the middle class
> for a very long time, unless it also involves a complete
> restructuring of business ethics, the elimination of the
> laissez-faire idea and the bases for the idea of greed.
> There *is* enough productivity in the existing United
> States to bring all this to pass.
How does one "eliminate laissez-faire and the bases for
the idea of greed"? By the point of a gun, that how. To deny
that human nature does not account for "self" is just whistling
in the dark. And of course there is no accounting for just
what the fountainhead of all of this productivity is. It is
a fact of nature, not to be investigated, not to be questioned.
Here today, here forever. But what about the xSSR? There seems
to be no abundance of productivity over there. Is the US
just a fluke? Blankout.
I heard a quip which sums this entire sentiment.
"Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Socialism
is the equal distribution of poverty". The only thing that
socialism has managed to do in the past 100 years is reduce
semi productive societies to barbarism, factionalism (aka
Balkanization) and abject poverty. When they say that it
will take sacrifice, brother they mean it -- the sacrifice
of happiness on earth to an unnamed and inescapable black
hole of bare subsistance living (when it is *that* sucessful).
> Yep, it's social democracy, plain and simple. If there's
> been any coherent theme in the presidential run-up, it has
> been the clear statement that people want to feel in control
> of their own lives. I see all of the above as the shortest,
> most workable route to that goal. I think it addresses
> every point raised by Donald's and Laura's concerns, too, in
> particular what to do about the economic inequalities that
> result from racism. People will fix it themselves, given
> the resources. I think getting the resources to them fairly
> is well over half the battle.
You are correct that people will fix it themselves, but
history shows that you are dead wrong in your means to those
ends. We do not need any more Noble Experiments.
--
Michael Thomas (mi...@gordian.com)
"I don't think Bambi Eyes will get you that flame thrower..."
-- Hobbes to Calvin
USnail: 20361 Irvine Ave Santa Ana Heights, Ca, 92707-5637
PaBell: (714) 850-0205 (714) 850-0533 (fax)
Jennifer S Broekman
>In article <1992Oct18.1...@macc.wisc.edu>,
>ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
> Vouchers, and (better) tax credits for education do nothing
>more than allow people to short circuit the government and directly
>fund schools. It allows parents to be consumers, not guinea pigs.
So they can pretend even less responsibility for the education than
they already do? "Of course I care about Janie's education! I send her
to the best school in the district!" Even the best school in the district
can fail to do what's right for the kids attending it. Parent participation
in the school is much more likely to improve their children's education
than bussing them to the 'best school'. I went to the 'best school' in my
high school district. I was bored out of my mind. Vouchers and tax credits
won't help if parents don't care enough to say "Wait! My child isn't getting
what she/he needs and I care about that." You can have gifted programs and
remedial programs and special whatever, but it's *not* going to work without
parental input.
>Tax credits (as I've heard them proposed) have any additional
>benifit which would allow *all* individuals to contribute part
>of their tax burden *directly* to the school(s) of their choice.
>The same goes for business. I have to tell you, even though
>I don't have children I would love to be able to directly
>support various schools which I find worthy (such as ones
>which cater to disadvantaged children) rather than sending
>it through the rathole of government.
How will you choose the ones which cater to disadvantaged children?
Certainly the School for the Deaf could use use the money, and deaf
people are at a definite disadvantage. And the schools around here
need all the help they can get.
>> One of the key arguments among proponents of
>> vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
>> their kids go to school.
>>
>> I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
>
> Why? Because it would make schools directly accountable to
>parents and their children might get a decent education in
>spite of the best efforts of our public education system
>to the contrary?
Accountability and choice are not the same thing. Schools are not
factories. They don't function best when they're huge. Allowing parents
to choose which school their children go to will not solve the problem.
If you want to improve the schools, make sure that every school gets the
same raw materials per student, and make the superintendent accountable
to the parents. And *don't* let schools overfill.
My high school was next to lily-white (Indians and Asians, but next to
no Hispanics or Africans). If you gave the majority of the parents in that
community the choice of that school with African-Americans and Hispanics
in it and the lily-white parochial schools at the same price, they would
choose the parochial schools. Not because they're better, not because
they're members of the ultra-right, but because they're racist. And the
parochial schools have nice, safe entry exams that they're *sure* no
African-Americans could pass. Is giving them the free choice to send
their kids away going to help anything? Or would it make more sense to
integrate the school and not give them that choice? Even though some
parents will still pull their children, it won't be *nearly* as many if
it costs them more than their child's education.
> The typical argument that I've heard is that if parents
>weren't compelled to send their children to school they
>wouldn't. Is their any basis for this attitude in reality?
A large percentage of the parents in the town I went to high school in
would rather send their child to a white school than a good school that
happened to contain blacks. I found this out by witnessing the packed
auditorium protesting the idea that the district lines be redrawn in such a
way that more than four black children would attend the high school. Not
protesting the fact that the school didn't have a chemistry teacher trained
in chemistry. Not protesting the fact that the school library was inadequate
and the audio-visual equipment mostly non-functional. Just the fact that
their children would be exposed to those horrible nasty drug-dealing black
kids from over there. Is that sufficient basis?
>There are laws which compell parents to feed their children
>too, but is their any basis to believe that those laws factor
>in parents decisions to feed their children? I don't think
>so.
Unfortunately, there are all too many parents who feel that their children
don't *need* any of that fancy education. Meat and potatoes may enable
a kid to grow up physically strong, but the bigotry the parents in my town
would have taught in the schools does *not* result in healthy young adults.
>> The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
>> basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
>> fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
>
> And here we have it: force. Brute force, the point of
>a gun. How nice. From each according to his ability,
>to each according to his need. How very, um, Marxist.
Not to mention Christian. "Give to everyone who asks you for
something." (Luke 6:30) Or "Sell all you have and give money
to the poor." (Luke 18:22) Marx wasn't the only one who suggested
that the rich don't need everything they have and that the poor
aren't getting what they need.
>> - Most of this basic infrastrucure is in place but
>> severely dilapidated or hopelessly outdated, and
>> certainly access to it is monstrously unequal.
>
> What standards apply? Who makes this decision?
> Who pays for it? (we already know the answer to
> that one though...)
What standards apply to the choice of school under a voucher system?
Surely a parent in New York can't spend their child to school in
California, but can a parent in one NYC school district send their
child to a school in another?
> You are correct that people will fix it themselves, but
>history shows that you are dead wrong in your means to those
>ends. We do not need any more Noble Experiments.
People have been fixing it themselves in this country for the past
five hundred years. By finding new and innovative ways to blind
themselves to the long term future. Overt discrimination may slide
into the background, but I doubt that anyone who's on the receiving
end will be satisfied by the promise that Adam Smith and diffusion will
solve their problems in a hundred years or so.
-jenneke
Dr: Sorry, Sam. It's gotta come out. Otherwise, it'll hurt continuously
for the rest of your life and you'll die painfully.
Sam: But Doc, it's *part* of me. And operations *hurt*. I'd much rather
just smile and pray the pain goes away...
My biggest budget problem is food:
My stomach wants four meals a day.
My budget wants two.
Jess Anderson
>In article <1992Oct18.1...@macc.wisc.edu>,
>ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
>>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
>>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
>>expense.
>Public expense?
Yes, tax money used to fund religious exterprises, like the
tax-free status churches enjoy. You know, forcing *me* to
pay for *your* church. My taxes go up to give you a voucher
so you can send your rug-rat to Fundy Killer Kollege.
Public expense. Why is that so hard to understand? It
contrasts to private expense, where you pay for your kid's
uneducation with your own money, not mine. It's a pretty
well understood system, so what's your problem? What you
say about it below (including misuses of the language that
I will gently point out) makes little sense.
>This is such a common fallicy that it warrants some
>examination.
It would be considered phallusy in some circles to point out
that the word is fallacy. What does it mean to say "public
expense is a fallacy," which is what you said? You mean
there is no such thing? Then it's all private expense, huh?
I mean, the choices are two in number, and just those two,
yes?
>The "public" is nothing more than the individuals who
>comprise it.
The whole comprises the parts. The public comprises the
people, not the other way round, as you have it. In the
discussion, the public refers mainly to taxpayers, and
public money is taxes paid by the people together with other
government income (bonds, mostly).
I believe these are the generally accepted understandings
associated with the terms. Your usual line of argument is
to run off into such fugues as the following, usually
accompanied later on by topic-switching. Let's just try to
keep it on track, shall we?
>The public is one and the same, by and large, with those who
>are sending (or have sent) their children to schools.
The public is a *much* larger class than those who even
*have* children, Michael. It includes the children. It is
everybody who is a citizen, and parenting is not a test for
citizenship. In the context of the voucher debate, public
(as in public funding) refers to the government as fiscal
agent for all the citizens.
So let's get that cleared up.
>It is their money, it was derived from them in the first
>place. It did not just materialize into the tax coffers. It
>was produced.
That doesn't say anything. We all know where the tax money
comes from, so maybe we already have that cleared up.
Now if we're ready to proceed, we can. If not, let's hear
your dissent from just this much. We have to agree about
what the public money is before we can discuss rationally
how that money is used.
John_...@cellbio.duke.edu
Anderson) writes:
>Donald and Laura have been talking about economic remedies
>to problems in poor communities, with emphasis on black
>communities. Among other things, they mention the voucher
>system for aiding education. I'm very leery of that.
The voucher system is the single hokiest campaign issue of this election year.
It is the least explained concept. Who will pay for the vouchers? Who will be
able to use them? The rich who already can afford private schools? Will they
completely cover the cost of private schools? If not they don't really allow
poor students to attend private schools or will this simply lower the use of
scholarships by poor children? Will they be tax credits against federal or
state income taxes? Etc.
>In my view, the two most critical underpinnings of political
>life in the US are the freedom of speech and the separation
>of church and state. In both cases there are countless
>de facto instances of these principles being eroded. It tells
>me something that exactly these two are the ones most under
>attack by the rabid right.
The issue of separation of church and state is being so studiously avoided that
one wonders if we could make an issue of it by opening Santeria private schools
and financing sacrifices. I, for one, don't want my tax dollars supporting the
teaching of religious beliefs in an indoctrinaire way.
>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
>expense. One of the key arguments among proponents of
>vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
>their kids go to school.
Including home.
>I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
Here is where we differ. I strongly believe that kids should be able to attend
any school which meets state-suppported certification and/or standards. On the
other hand, I don't believe that any school should be allowed to discriminate
on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, etc., including religious
schools which proport to teach to the level of those standards. Religious
schools should only be allowed to discriminate on the basis of religious
affiliation. But religious schools should not be allowed to accept public
money.
>My basic approach to this whole class of problems is this,
>and in this order:
>
>1. Every person must have adequate nutrition.
>2. Every person must have adequate housing.
>3. Every person must have adequate physical security.
>4. Every person must have adequate health care.
>5. Every person must have adequate education to age 18.
>6. Every person must have adequate employment opportunity.
Agreed. Though I would not have an age limit on education.
>The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
>basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
>fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
[non educational issues deleted]
During the Carter administration, there was a program which funded community
based initiatives. Federal tax moneys went for pilot programs in education,
social service, small business growth, etc. In addition general revenue
sharing reallocated dollars from high income communities to lower ones.
Republicans, led by Reagan, claimed that the Federal Government had too much
control over local and state governments. They then did away with revenue
sharing and the community programs while leaving most of the mandates. The
effect was to make it virtually impossible for local governments to be creative
and put tax raising onto the local governments themselves. The most needy, the
poorest, reverted to their pre revenue sharing inability to raise revenues. Is
it any wonder that crime is up in those areas, that schools have deteriorated,
that health is failing?
If those children in our American inner cities could be guaranteed admission in
the elite day school programs, in our best prep schools, in a ratio equivalent
to their population rate, do you really think any of our rich young students
would still be studying in America?
No. The answer is to build schools in our cities which are ALL so good that
the middle class and the wealthy will want to go to them.
If you don't think its possible then you haven't seen the magnet schools in
North Carolina, and most particularly the School of Science and Math and the
School of the Arts, which take students from every district in the state. We
know that building better schools attracts students from the classes which
would otherwise be sending their children to private schools.
Some people will want to have their children educated in religious schools.
Let them. Some people will have the money to send their children whereever
they want. Let them. But make them pay in taxes for the education of all our
youth through a system of public schools that are held accountable to standards
agreed to on a national basis and paid for on at least a statewide basis.
This doesn't mean that I'm against local control. Our educational system needs
the involvement of parents, teachers, administrators, and youth. But it needs
the checks and balances of statewide or national standards and funding, and the
attention to local needs and resources.
MOTSS relevance. It is imperative that we who do not have children of our own
(realizing many of us do) assume our responsibility for the education of the
youth of our nation. We need to make a commitment of our money, our time, and
our votes, to assure that education reflects not only heterosexual values, and
that gay, Lesbian, bi and queer, and heterosexual teachers and students are all
able to teach or learn openly and honestly.
John Graves
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct18....@gordian.com>
> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> >In article <1992Oct18.1...@macc.wisc.edu>,
> >ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
> > Vouchers, and (better) tax credits for education do nothing
> >more than allow people to short circuit the government and directly
> >fund schools. It allows parents to be consumers, not guinea pigs.
>
> So they can pretend even less responsibility for the education than
> they already do? "Of course I care about Janie's education! I send her
> to the best school in the district!" Even the best school in the district
> can fail to do what's right for the kids attending it. Parent participation
> in the school is much more likely to improve their children's education
> than bussing them to the 'best school'. I went to the 'best school' in my
> high school district. I was bored out of my mind. Vouchers and tax credits
> won't help if parents don't care enough to say "Wait! My child isn't getting
> what she/he needs and I care about that." You can have gifted programs and
> remedial programs and special whatever, but it's *not* going to work without
> parental input.
Indeed this is true of any system: if parents don't care, nothing
can be done. Nothing will alter this; no system, not mine, not yours,
not anybodies. However, we must look at what will give parents
incentive to care. This is the key aspect, IMHO. Choice is but one
part of this motivation.
A school system where a parent has only one option, like it or
lump it, is not very conducive participation. Yes, parents can
run down to PTA meetings and school board meetings and be the
perfect citizen, but what if the parents aren't articulate?
What if the parents aren't educated? What is the likelyhood of
satisfaction for their problems? Vanishingly small I'd say.
Then what? What recourse does this parent have at this point?
There is only one: apathy. There is no secret here.
Choice gives everybody the same opportunity to vote for
their childrens best interest: with their wallet. Crude
instrument that it is, it has one thing going for it:
it works in every other domain.
> >Tax credits (as I've heard them proposed) have any additional
> >benifit which would allow *all* individuals to contribute part
> >of their tax burden *directly* to the school(s) of their choice.
> >The same goes for business. I have to tell you, even though
> >I don't have children I would love to be able to directly
> >support various schools which I find worthy (such as ones
> >which cater to disadvantaged children) rather than sending
> >it through the rathole of government.
>
> How will you choose the ones which cater to disadvantaged children?
> Certainly the School for the Deaf could use use the money, and deaf
> people are at a definite disadvantage. And the schools around here
> need all the help they can get.
How do you choose anything? How do you choose which charities
to donate money to? You do some reading, listening and thinking.
People will certainly differ on their priorities; this is a
strength, not a weakness in my opinion. I probably wouldn't
have thought of a Deaf School as an example, but obviously you
did. If you think they are worthy, then you should be able to
support them. If that's not enough you can try to convince me
to support them. Persuasion is much better tool than buying off
some bureaucrat who could actually give a damn about peoples
problems.
> Accountability and choice are not the same thing. Schools are not
> factories. They don't function best when they're huge. Allowing parents
> to choose which school their children go to will not solve the problem.
> If you want to improve the schools, make sure that every school gets the
> same raw materials per student, and make the superintendent accountable
> to the parents. And *don't* let schools overfill.
Choice would certainly bring all of these things. If you want
better teacher/student ratios send your children to schools which
offer them. You may not find the ideal wish list of things you
want in a school, but life offers no such guarentees. A declining
enrollment (aka revenue) should be *very* high incentive for
superintendents.
As far as the same raw materials, you are wrong. Schooling is no
different than other human endeavors; as new ideas and better methods
take hold quality improves. Relegating all schools to have the exact
same methods and materials insures that improvement is stiffled.
Again, diversity is a boon not a bane.
> My high school was next to lily-white (Indians and Asians, but next to
> no Hispanics or Africans). If you gave the majority of the parents in that
> community the choice of that school with African-Americans and Hispanics
> in it and the lily-white parochial schools at the same price, they would
> choose the parochial schools. Not because they're better, not because
> they're members of the ultra-right, but because they're racist. And the
> parochial schools have nice, safe entry exams that they're *sure* no
> African-Americans could pass. Is giving them the free choice to send
> their kids away going to help anything? Or would it make more sense to
> integrate the school and not give them that choice? Even though some
> parents will still pull their children, it won't be *nearly* as many if
> it costs them more than their child's education.
I don't think choice is going to particularily help race relations
but I don't think that it will hurt it either. If you look at this
from the opposite standpoint, the standpoint of African Americans,
you will find their schools as being the worst without question. It
is poor people who benifit the most from choice programs not the
middle class or (especially) upper class. Inner city schools are
*terrible*, and there is no way out for even the most diligent and
caring of parents. Giving them the ability to choose a better
alternative is the only decent thing we can do as human beings.
But everybody will shut their doors because they are racist?
Money talks. To think that *everybody* is so racist that they wouldn't
take black children is naive. Sure there are going to be some,
but the vast majority will see them for what they really are:
a market opportunity.
> >> The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
> >> basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
> >> fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
> >
> > And here we have it: force. Brute force, the point of
> >a gun. How nice. From each according to his ability,
> >to each according to his need. How very, um, Marxist.
>
> Not to mention Christian. "Give to everyone who asks you for
> something." (Luke 6:30) Or "Sell all you have and give money
> to the poor." (Luke 18:22) Marx wasn't the only one who suggested
> that the rich don't need everything they have and that the poor
> aren't getting what they need.
An astute observation -- to which I concur. Brute force
by an omniscient God (and his mystics at an Oracle) or
brute force by an omnipresent "society" makes little
difference. Mearly a simple substitution, I'd say.
> > You are correct that people will fix it themselves, but
> >history shows that you are dead wrong in your means to those
> >ends. We do not need any more Noble Experiments.
>
> People have been fixing it themselves in this country for the past
> five hundred years. By finding new and innovative ways to blind
> themselves to the long term future. Overt discrimination may slide
> into the background, but I doubt that anyone who's on the receiving
> end will be satisfied by the promise that Adam Smith and diffusion will
> solve their problems in a hundred years or so.
And indeed this country has produced the largest gains against
human misery in the history of man. Incomplete yes, as with all
things man, but at least it has the record of producing positive
results -- which is more than Socialism or Mysticism can say for
itself.
Matthew Melmon
(Jess Anderson) wrote:
> Now if we're ready to proceed, we can. If not, let's hear
> your dissent from just this much. We have to agree about
> what the public money is before we can discuss rationally
> how that money is used.
'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
people who earned it in the first place.
In other word, that arbitrary percentage of private income
flushed into a septic tank of bumbling corruption, inefficiency,
and 'I Know Better' crusaders.
Melmothra, ACC
Jess Anderson
In article <mattm-191...@mcmelmon.apple.com>
ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
>In article <1992Oct19.0...@macc.wisc.edu>,
>ande...@macc.wisc.edu >(Jess Anderson) wrote:
>>Now if we're ready to proceed, we can. If not, let's hear
>>your dissent from just this much. We have to agree about
>>what the public money is before we can discuss rationally
>>how that money is used.
>'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
>that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
>people who earned it in the first place.
Those who don't earn can just die, of course. People already
know your feelings on that point.
>In other word, that arbitrary percentage of private income
>flushed into a septic tank of bumbling corruption, inefficiency,
>and 'I Know Better' crusaders.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ordinarily, I give credit for confessions, but since you've
made it clear your social and political philosophy is somewhere
to the right of Attilla, readers know how little importance to
attach to it.
>Matthew Melmon ACC
melmac wet on match
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct18....@gordian.com>
> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> >In article <1992Oct18.1...@macc.wisc.edu>,
> >ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
>
> >>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
> >>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
> >>expense.
>
> >Public expense?
>
> Yes, tax money used to fund religious exterprises, like the
> tax-free status churches enjoy. You know, forcing *me* to
> pay for *your* church. My taxes go up to give you a voucher
> so you can send your rug-rat to Fundy Killer Kollege.
> Public expense. Why is that so hard to understand? It
> contrasts to private expense, where you pay for your kid's
> uneducation with your own money, not mine. It's a pretty
> well understood system, so what's your problem? What you
> say about it below (including misuses of the language that
> I will gently point out) makes little sense.
Ah, I see. So if I keep my own money instead of sending
in to the government it is *still* public money. The last
I heard if I retain my money and send it somewhere there
is no component of public funding. I, however, believe in
property rights which you seem to summarily dismiss.
Lets try this again: allowing parents (or anybody for that
matter) to retain their earnings (ie not be taxed) and make
a choice as to where they send that money is not "public
funding". Perhaps this is more of a voice for Tax Credits
rather than Vouchers, but the principles remain the similar.
With tax credits, you and you *personally* would get to
absolutely insure that *your* money does not even one iota
benefit religious organizations. The same cannot be said
of even public education today with the morass of conflicting
definitions.
But it's someone elses money you have problems with? If you
try to alter their purposes for it that is known as theft (or
it's sibling taxation). Your indignation/envy/lust at how they
spend their money does not lay a moral claim on it. If you want to
take their money, by force, you will need to justify it.
For what it's worth, Vouchers and Tax Credits are only a step
in the direction of full privatization of schools. They are
not a perfect end all solution to educations woes -- they
do however move things in the right direction.
>
> >This is such a common fallicy that it warrants some
> >examination.
>
> It would be considered phallusy in some circles to point out
> that the word is fallacy.
A spelling flame, yawn.
> What does it mean to say "public
> expense is a fallacy," which is what you said? You mean
> there is no such thing? Then it's all private expense, huh?
> I mean, the choices are two in number, and just those two,
> yes?
I did not say this. I said that vouchers and tax credits
as a form of public spending is a fallacy. If this was not
clear, I apologize.
> >The "public" is nothing more than the individuals who
> >comprise it.
>
> The whole comprises the parts. The public comprises the
> people, not the other way round, as you have it. In the
> discussion, the public refers mainly to taxpayers, and
> public money is taxes paid by the people together with other
> government income (bonds, mostly).
There is no sentient organic whole as "The public" or
"The society". You are committing the fallacy of reification here.
> >The public is one and the same, by and large, with those who
> >are sending (or have sent) their children to schools.
>
> The public is a *much* larger class than those who even
> *have* children, Michael. It includes the children. It is
> everybody who is a citizen, and parenting is not a test for
> citizenship. In the context of the voucher debate, public
> (as in public funding) refers to the government as fiscal
> agent for all the citizens.
My point is that the public who is *paying* for childrens
education is by and large the same as who's producing them.
Most folks who pay taxes are parents (or will be). There is no
mystery here.
I never claimed that children are not citizens, or that
there exists tests for becoming a citizen based on the
ability to procreate (gad, I cannot believe this needs
to be clarified in *this* forum!). These are your words,
not mine.
> >It is their money, it was derived from them in the first
> >place. It did not just materialize into the tax coffers. It
> >was produced.
>
> That doesn't say anything. We all know where the tax money
> comes from, so maybe we already have that cleared up.
I'm not particularly convinced you understand it; your
reification of "public" being the source of my doubt.
Melinda Shore
> Lets try this again: allowing parents (or anybody for that
>matter) to retain their earnings (ie not be taxed) and make
>a choice as to where they send that money is not "public
>funding". Perhaps this is more of a voice for Tax Credits
>rather than Vouchers, but the principles remain the similar.
Oh, bother. I'm still, after all these years on the net,
astonished when a gay person (or anyone else subject to
systematic exclusion) starts spouting even small-l
libertarian mumbo-jumbo.
What we're concerned about is equal access to education.
Poor implementation doesn't invalidate the idea, any more
than the existence of AIX would suggest that Unix is a poor
OS design. The way to improve public education, that is to
say, education for *all* young people, is not to encourage
their parents to yank them out and send them to private
schools, but rather to have structures that encourage
parents to concern themselves directly with the quality of
public education. If parents don't want their children
exposed to mainstream social ideas, evil socialistic
teachers, or ordinary middle-class riffraff, let them pay
to send their kids somewhere else. Our first concern
should be quality public education.
Out of curiosity, how do you free marketeers think
education should be handled in remote rural areas, where
there would be little economic incentive for the creation
of private schools? Let the parents do home schooling?
And, frankly, what you're asking us to do is subsidize
private education. Doesn't sound very free-market to me.
--
Melinda Shore - Cornell Theory Center - sh...@tc.cornell.edu
Rod Williams
>
>'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
>that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
>people who earned it in the first place.
This Reagan-inspired, ever-so-hip, government-is-the-enemy
twaddle is tedious beyond relief, especially from one so
callow. Of course, Reagan and Bush themselves did their
utmost to make it come true. What you fail to realize,
Matthew, is that this was not always so, and need never be
again.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
rod williams -=- pacific bell -=- san francisco -=- rjw...@pacbell.com
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct19....@tc.cornell.edu>
sh...@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) writes:
>In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com>
>mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>>[predictably confused twaddle]
>And, frankly, what you're asking us to do is subsidize
>private education. Doesn't sound very free-market to me.
Those people have never, ever been advocates of free
markets. "Free" markets is cant they try to bamboozle people
with; what they want is anything *but* free markets. They
want the public purse to guarantee that fat cats will
continue to receive high earnings on investments in grossly
mismanaged and even failed businesses. The savings and loan
fiasco is typical of their idea of "free" markets. Free, to
them, means free *for* them; you and I still have to pay, of
course.
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> > Lets try this again: allowing parents (or anybody for that
> >matter) to retain their earnings (ie not be taxed) and make
> >a choice as to where they send that money is not "public
> >funding". Perhaps this is more of a voice for Tax Credits
> >rather than Vouchers, but the principles remain the similar.
>
> Oh, bother. I'm still, after all these years on the net,
> astonished when a gay person (or anyone else subject to
> systematic exclusion) starts spouting even small-l
> libertarian mumbo-jumbo.
Which is to imply that gay people should have similar beliefs
on the subject of private property etc? Where in the charter is
that clause? Listen Melinda, the only thing that binds gay
people together is their desire/lust/love for the same sex.
There is no gay party line; there is no gay political theory.
You can be suprised all you like, but that does not lend one
iota of credence for your viewpoint.
I continue to be astonished that anybody in this day and age
could possibly hold onto the nonsensical delusions of 19th century
socialist thought after it has been thoroughly discredited with
ample supplies of blood and suffering. How many "fine tunings"
of totalitarianism do we have to go through to discredit it?
> What we're concerned about is equal access to education.
> Poor implementation doesn't invalidate the idea, any more
> than the existence of AIX would suggest that Unix is a poor
> OS design. The way to improve public education, that is to
> say, education for *all* young people, is not to encourage
> their parents to yank them out and send them to private
> schools, but rather to have structures that encourage
> parents to concern themselves directly with the quality of
> public education. If parents don't want their children
> exposed to mainstream social ideas, evil socialistic
> teachers, or ordinary middle-class riffraff, let them pay
> to send their kids somewhere else. Our first concern
> should be quality public education.
I believe that is what the essense of school choice is
all about: creating structures which encourage quality in
education. The religious right's co-opting of the issue
(which they certainly have done) is beside the point.
The problem with the attitude of "let them eat grass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
put them in private schools" is that very people who are
being devastated by public education CANNOT AFFORD to
put them in private schools. The poor and disadvantaged
would be the primary benificiaries of being able to shop
around, not the middle and upper class.
Poor implementation does not invalidate a design, but
once you see enough hacks on top of hacks you start to
doubt the structural integrity of the system. There are
many contradictions with the premise of public education
The entire Pandora's Box on the subject of morality is
one. In this case, the practical and the theoretical
agree: public education is a disaster.
> And, frankly, what you're asking us to do is subsidize
> private education. Doesn't sound very free-market to me.
Um, except that I did not claim that vouchers/credits are
a "free market". I said they are a step in that direction.
We are, in fact, saddled with public funding of education
for the foreseeable future. Even big and small 'l' libertarians
realize that. That does not mean that you have to play by all
or nothing rules though...
Chuck Fisher
>The voucher system is the single hokiest campaign issue of this election year.
>It is the least explained concept. Who will pay for the vouchers? Who will be
>able to use them? The rich who already can afford private schools? Will they
>completely cover the cost of private schools? If not they don't really allow
>poor students to attend private schools or will this simply lower the use of
>scholarships by poor children? Will they be tax credits against federal or
>state income taxes? Etc.
To answer some of your questions. *All* tax payers will "pay for" the
vouchers. Parents which have children in school would be issued the
vouchers. Here's the rub: the vouchers will be around $1+K whereas
the average tuition for a private school is around $6K per year. So
poor families wouldn't really be able to use them, and more wealthy
families would receive essentially a tax credit (on their Federal
taxes.) The primary difference between the Bush and Clinton plans is
that Bush would allow the vouchers to be used for *any* school,
including religious schools. The Clinton plan allows vouchers for only
*public* schools.
Chuck
--
Chuck Fisher (800) 359-7997 Work
ncselxsi system administrator (415) 964-2819 Home
uucp: ...!netcom!ncselxsi!fisher
Michael A. Thomas
>
> Those people have never, ever been advocates of free
> markets. "Free" markets is cant they try to bamboozle people
> with; what they want is anything *but* free markets. They
> want the public purse to guarantee that fat cats will
> continue to receive high earnings on investments in grossly
> mismanaged and even failed businesses. The savings and loan
> fiasco is typical of their idea of "free" markets. Free, to
> them, means free *for* them; you and I still have to pay, of
> course.
Aside from being ungrammatical, I assume this is some sort
of swipe at libertarianism. I challange you to come up with
where I have advocated "wanting the public purse to guarantee
that fat cats will continue to receive high earnings on investments
is grossly mismanaged and even failed businesses". One instance.
You are a liar, Anderson.
The S&L fiasco is primarily due to the fact that government
did *NOT* have its hands out of the free market. Or are you
forgeting the $100000 insurance policy that our government
extends carte blanc to S&L's.
Put your proof where your mouth is.
Matthew Melmon
(Jess Anderson) wrote:
> In article <mattm-191...@mcmelmon.apple.com>
> ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
> Those who don't earn can just die, of course. People already
> know your feelings on that point.
And even some that do. I just wish they'd hurry up about it.
Melmothra, acc
Michael A. Thomas
>
> To answer some of your questions. *All* tax payers will "pay for" the
> vouchers. Parents which have children in school would be issued the
> vouchers. Here's the rub: the vouchers will be around $1+K whereas
> the average tuition for a private school is around $6K per year.
Actually, this does not jibe with my understanding. I have heard
that the average Public school is about $5k and the average Private
school is $2k. These proposals vary all over the place, and I know
that there is a debate going on about a proposal in Ca going on
in ca.politics (being gay, I'm not *that* interested about vouchers/credits
to dive into the various facts and figures of every proposal).
> So
> poor families wouldn't really be able to use them, and more wealthy
> families would receive essentially a tax credit (on their Federal
> taxes.) The primary difference between the Bush and Clinton plans is
> that Bush would allow the vouchers to be used for *any* school,
> including religious schools. The Clinton plan allows vouchers for only
> *public* schools.
I'm haven't actually heard Shrub's plan, but it's probably going
to be a mute point in 2 weeks. Even choice within the context of
public schools is better than no choice at all.
The plan that I have heard which seems quite reasonable is to give
all people a tax credit of n dollars, regardless of whether you have
children or not -- and allow business to do the same. In this case people
and business would be able to directly fund education to worthy schools
which targets there own special area/desires (and horrors, business
would probably opt for supporting schools which teach children to read
and write). All people would have a vested interest in choosing schools
which produce educated children, not just parents. Scholarship funds for
disadvantaged students would be within reach of all people, not just
Carnagie's and the likes.
If tax credits are not enough for poor people (which is likely to
be the case) government could make up the difference between some
target number (say the same $5k we spend per child today) and what
their credit amount is minus any scholarships fund money coming to
the school from third parties. NB, I do not purport to be a policy
expert in this area so you really shouldn't be relying me as an
authoritative source on any particular proposal.
Matthew Melmon
Williams) wrote:
>
> > ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
> >
> >'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
> >that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
> >people who earned it in the first place.
>
> This Reagan-inspired, ever-so-hip, government-is-the-enemy
> twaddle is tedious beyond relief, especially from one so
> callow. Of course, Reagan and Bush themselves did their
> utmost to make it come true. What you fail to realize,
> Matthew, is that this was not always so, and need never be
> again.
I'm *so* sorry you find it tedious. But do tell, when was
public money something other than an aribtrary percentage of
private income? I would be *very* interested in hearing the
Truth as spoken by Rod Williams on the subject, though I do
think you will find yourself hard pressed to come up with
some other definition.
Or perhaps you are upset by my contention that Big Government
is less efficient at the spending of money than is the
private sector?
Or perhaps you are little more than a tired liberal rising to
the defense of those failed policies conceived in a bygone
era?
Melmothra, acc
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct20....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>I'm not *that* interested about vouchers/credits
>to dive into the various facts and figures of every proposal).
Really, no one expects you to be armed with facts.
Why go back on your record?
> I'm haven't actually heard Shrub's plan, but it's probably going
>to be a mute point in 2 weeks.
Well, hush mah mouth!
Rod Williams
>> rjw...@PacBell.COM (Rod Williams) wrote:
>> > ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
>> >'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
>> >that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
>> >people who earned it in the first place.
>>
>> This Reagan-inspired, ever-so-hip, government-is-the-enemy
>> twaddle is tedious beyond relief, especially from one so
>> callow. Of course, Reagan and Bush themselves did their
>> utmost to make it come true. What you fail to realize,
>> Matthew, is that this was not always so, and need never be
>> again.
>
>I'm *so* sorry you find it tedious. But do tell, when was
>public money something other than an aribtrary percentage of
>private income? I would be *very* interested in hearing the
>Truth as spoken by Rod Williams on the subject, though I do
>think you will find yourself hard pressed to come up with
>some other definition.
>
>Or perhaps you are upset by my contention that Big Government
>is less efficient at the spending of money than is the
>private sector?
Efficiency has nothing to do with it. The private sector
has no interest in providing access for *all* to adequate
education and healthcare (for example). Providing that is
not a function of the private sector -- it is a function of
government.
>Or perhaps you are little more than a tired liberal rising to
>the defense of those failed policies conceived in a bygone
>era?
You're probably referring to the Johnson/Nixon social
policies, flawed no doubt, that Reagan and Bush successfully
gutted, caused to fail and replaced with nothing but blame
-- policies that went a long way toward addressing the
inequities in our society; policies that changed people's
lives for the better and gave hope to millions; policies
that enjoyed widespread public support through the
*leadership* of Presidents who, for whatever crass political
reasons, had the integrity to try to unite rather than divide
the country. If defense of those makes me a tired liberal,
please pass the NoDoz.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct20.0...@PacBell.COM>
rjw...@PacBell.COM (Rod Williams) writes:
Extremely well known in these parts for his critical acumen
and keen historical interests, nevertheless has the most
curious little lapse whilst trying to converse with Lemon:
Dear man, how *could* you forget? Johnson was elected in
1964, and our little cherub was just getting his scrawny
butt born about then. Naturally, having no personal history
of note until after the election of that paragon of
intelligence in 1980, he would obviously not be aware of,
and could care less about, anything that preceded His Most
August Self onto the planet, just as he evidently cares for
little else now. By relating facts, especially relevant
ones, you are merely providing grist for the Millmothra of
Anti-Intellect Infamy. Really, it's a beach-blanket
wasteland that passes for a mind in that fellow, probably
couldn't distinguish Avedon from Avalon or Flaubert from
Funicello.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct20.0...@macc.wisc.edu>
ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
Sorry, screwed up big time. I meant to delete all the
middle part of the cited article.
Laura Creighton
>>
>>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
>>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
>>expense. One of the key arguments among proponents of
>>vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
>>their kids go to school.
>>
>>I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
>>
>(Rest of stuff, with which I also agree, deleted)
>School choice is the buzzword for those who believe that competition
>can fix everything. It can't. Public education is inherently socialistic
>and not amenable to the conventions of free-market economy. There's just
>not enough incentive to make a bad school good just because it's losing
>students.
I never said that there was. 500 angry parents saying that if you
do not fix your stinking lousy school we will just hire our own
teachers and start our own school, may get a reform. And if it
doesn't, a new school might be better.
It is hard to think how it could be worse than the existing ones.
>
>I was an education reporter for a daily paper for four years before going
>to hell (enrolling in law school). The folks who opposed school choice
>did so mostly because (1) poor children still won't have the means to
>choose (a criticism the Bushies have tried to quell with this ineffectual
>"voucher" proposal). (2) It's a waste to abandon bad schools when they can
>be fixed by direction of the government (Gawd, I'm such a liberal).
I just don't believe that bad schools can be fixed by direction of
the goverment. I think that if that were the case they would have
been fixed in the last 20 years. I think that the entire school
model that is used is an 1860s enachronism.
The only way to fix this is to decentrallise like crazy, and vouchers
would help this. Nothing is perfect, but, in counter to what you
say I find that the only people who dislike vouchers do so because
they have a violent dislike of supporting any religion, and therefore
hate any program that might ever send money to any religions, and
those who think that some bettter government can do the job of
educating well, and we should wait for that government.
Those who can afford it have shipped their kids out of public
schools because they are not willing to wait. Why should
poor people not have similar choices?
>Bad schools get bad because bad teachers are assigned there as
>punishment or for racial reasons. In Montgomery, Ala., new teachers
>were asked if they would mind working in a predominantly black
>school. The white teachers, of course, mostly said they would mind.
>Black teachers were assigned to them. Now, before you assume I'm making
>a racist distinction between black and white teachers, you should know
>that the majority of the black teachers in Montgomery were graduates of
>Alabama State University, the biggest diploma mill in the state. ASU law-
>yers have fought teacher testing (and won), claiming it would be racially
>discriminatory, when in fact it only discriminated against ASU grads,
>who hadn't been taught a damn thing. Until all teachers are convinced
>it's an honor and a challenge to be assigned to a difficult school --
>one whose students often come to schoool hungry, abused and without
>stable parenting, the class difference between schools will persist.
I've talked to a few teachers, and read the writings of countless
more who believe that it is the teaching/education bureacracy
which treats them as peasants and binds their hands when it
comes to teaching. The idea of getting 20 or so of their fellow
teachers together and starting a school founded on their ideals
of teaching excites them a great deal.
If ASU is a diploma mill which turns out non-teachers, who
somehow are qualified to teach, then all the more reason to
believe that 400 angry parents will do more than the education
system. Either the tests proposed were flawed (possible)
or somebody decided to play politics with the education system
and decided that it was better to let ASU turn out tons of
incompetant Black teachers in order to say ``ho ho ho! how
wonderful we are to have so many Black teachers.''
This really stinks. I see no reason why the Black ASU graduates
wouldn't have made good teachers if they did not go to a
diploma mill. But somehow, somewhere, somebody decided that
ASU should continue to produce lousy teachers, rahter than making
it shut down, and really train those teachers-to-be someplace
else.
This is what you are saying, right? I know nothing about ASU,
and fully expect this posting to be replied by dozens of people
who think that ASU is a great place.
There is something wrong with an edication system which is
more concerned with racial equality than teching students.
Having done extensive reading on the subject, I am convinced
that the horror of segregated Black schools which did not
teach Blacks well bred the sort of reformer who truly
believed that if integration was acheived then all would
be great.
The integrated inner city schools are proving this belief false.
>It certainly wouldn't hurt to pay good teachers more to go to these
>schools.
Sure. Now how do you intend to get pay-for-merit into the
teaching establishment without somethingg like vouchers?
>
>This state is also about to hear whether it has perpetuated an unequal
>funding scheme. If the judge says yes, and the state's forced to pour
>more money into poor, rural (some mostly black) systems, someone had
>better make sure a lot of that money goes to open Head Start-type pro-
>grams. All the money in the world won't teach those children if they
>come from homes where Mama is too busy just trying to survive to
>read to them or talk to them. A few generations of that kind of stuff
>would do a lot to close the class gap, IMHO.
The existing system is based on the idea that all students could
go home and get mom and dad to help them with homework.
This ideal is hopeless. Mom works nights and Dad hasn't been
seen for a dozen years.
My mother (a teacher) used to keep her classroom open from 3pm
(school's end) to 8 pm, just to help any student with anything.
Students she never taught, in all grades, showed up. It was
an enormous success, because the students really wanted to
learn, and really didn't have anybody at home to help them.
This propram went on for 2 years until a student decided to
shoot out all the windows of the school. At that point the
principal decided that my mother could not keep a classroom
open after school, because if a child was shot because they
were staying after school, for hours, there was no way the
insurance could handle it.
Boiling insurance companies in moulten lead is chief among the
joys I must forgo because murder is wrong.
>
>Just telling you a lot of stuff you already knew...
Yes. But that is also part of discussion.
Thank you.
--
Since Ryan White was buried in April 1990, his grave has been vandalized
*more than* four times.
(this news courtesy Phil Paxton ipw...@indycms.bitnet)
Laura Creighton
to...@toad.com
hoptoad!laura
Laura Creighton
>> Lets try this again: allowing parents (or anybody for that
>>matter) to retain their earnings (ie not be taxed) and make
>>a choice as to where they send that money is not "public
>>funding". Perhaps this is more of a voice for Tax Credits
>>rather than Vouchers, but the principles remain the similar.
>
>Oh, bother. I'm still, after all these years on the net,
>astonished when a gay person (or anyone else subject to
>systematic exclusion) starts spouting even small-l
>libertarian mumbo-jumbo.
>
>What we're concerned about is equal access to education.
>Poor implementation doesn't invalidate the idea, any more
>than the existence of AIX would suggest that Unix is a poor
>OS design. The way to improve public education, that is to
>say, education for *all* young people, is not to encourage
>their parents to yank them out and send them to private
>schools, but rather to have structures that encourage
>parents to concern themselves directly with the quality of
>public education.
Vouchers would do this nicely. What do you have against them?
The parents who can afford them are *already* yanking their
children out into private schools, including the majority
of children of US private school teachers. We don't
have to worry about vouchers encouraging this practice, it is
already as encouraged as it can get.
> If parents don't want their children
>exposed to mainstream social ideas, evil socialistic
>teachers, or ordinary middle-class riffraff, let them pay
>to send their kids somewhere else.
Plenty of parents are already sending their children to private
schools which more fully develop mainstream social ideals and
incredibly socialistic teachers. You can't find much in the
way of ``middle class riffraff'' in public schools -- the middle
class, at least in urban environments, are spending their $$
setting up private schools and sending their children to them.
Public schools, at least in the urban environment, are increasingly
becoming the schools for those who could not afford to do differently.
>Our first concern
>should be quality public education.
We've been concerned about this for generations. The problem is that
we cannot reach anything approaching a consensus as to how to
acheive this.
>
>Out of curiosity, how do you free marketeers think
>education should be handled in remote rural areas, where
>there would be little economic incentive for the creation
>of private schools? Let the parents do home schooling?
Actually, remote rural areas do far better than the inner
city. Rural parents can get so involved on the school board that
they can force school closings, and start up new schools.
There are some dreadful, terrible, rural schools. But with a
voucher system parents could decide to chuck the whole thing and
found a new school with new teachers, and a different direction.
Some of these new schools would be equally lousy or worse than
what exists. But waiting for the government to figure out the
right way to do things is waiting at the expense of existing
children in existing schools.
Gene W. Smith
>'Public money' is that arbitrary percentage of private income
>that the government feels it is better able to spend than the
>people who earned it in the first place.
You forgot the stuff which is borrowed. You also forgot that
without a government, there would be no private income, since this
distinction is constructed by society.
>In other word, that arbitrary percentage of private income
>flushed into a septic tank of bumbling corruption, inefficiency,
>and 'I Know Better' crusaders.
Right. Let's get rid of the Tax and Spend Republicans and their
crazed fiscal idiocy!
--
Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University
gsm...@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Jess Anderson
In article <168849EB9...@ua1vm.ua.edu>
TMCC...@ua1vm.ua.edu (Tracey McCartney) writes:
>School choice is the buzzword for those who believe that
>competition can fix everything. It can't.
That other buzzword, New World Order, is the same illusion.
Interesting too, is the way the one form of propaganda fits
with the other.
>Public education is inherently socialistic and not amenable
>to the conventions of free-market economy.
Now *there* is a giant mouthful. Can you hear the sound of
many knees jerking? I thought you could. You *know* that
they're going to say: public funding of education is screwed
up, and it's all the fault of those socialists, the
privatization of everything is the only way to go. And of
course, all that means is that they want yet more forms of
stealing to be legal.
>I was an education reporter for a daily paper for four years
>before going to hell (enrolling in law school). The folks
>who opposed school choice did so mostly because
>(1) poor children still won't have the means to choose (a
>criticism the Bushies have tried to quell with this
>ineffectual "voucher" proposal).
Thank you.
>(2) It's a waste to abandon bad schools when they can be
>fixed by direction of the government (Gawd, I'm such a
>liberal).
Nothing you need to apologize for. It's not quite the sin
it's made out to be. Just be prepared (but then, I knew you
would be) for a giant wave of anti-government sentiment from
those who don't know (or conveniently forget) how it got
into its present state.
>[other interesting stuff deleted]
Roy S. Rapoport
->
->In article <168849EB9...@ua1vm.ua.edu>
->TMCC...@ua1vm.ua.edu (Tracey McCartney) writes:
->>Public education is inherently socialistic and not amenable
->>to the conventions of free-market economy.
->
->Now *there* is a giant mouthful. Can you hear the sound of
->many knees jerking? I thought you could. You *know* that
->they're going to say: public funding of education is screwed
->up, and it's all the fault of those socialists, the
->privatization of everything is the only way to go. And of
->course, all that means is that they want yet more forms of
->stealing to be legal.
Look, we have a problem with education, right?
There are two things we can do about it:
A) Fix it.
That is, put money into it, reform it, take care of it, heal it.
That's the 'socialist' thing to do, I suppose.
B) Abandon it.
Let each person fend for their own, find their own school, take care of
their own.
I don't have any children. I may never have them. But damnit, I went to a
damn fine public high school, who I was _proud_ of going to. My sister is
now going to the same school and tells me what it has become, and how
disgusted she is with it.
My god, there's only a four year difference between us ...
And I go to a damn fine public university, and I talk with people who went
here before me, and it's so obvious things have become worse ...
Things are bad, and they _can_ be better if we work at them.
I don't think this country's public education system is ready for a
euthanasia _quite_ yet ... and I think this is what a voucher system could
cause. Of course, I may just be unclear on the concept.
Throwing a bucket of cold water at the beaurocrats' faces is a good thing.
It's about time we did it.
But not pay for public education? Sure, but if you advocate that, then why
pay for a public health system? A public transportation system? A public
road system?
I mean, America is a socialistic nation, though maybe not as socialistic as
many of us would like. When you go on a street and you don't pay tolls when
you enter it, that's socialist.
I don't think _anyone_ wants the alternative. Do they?
-roy
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roy S. Rapoport r...@soda.berkeley.edu r...@ocf.berkeley.edu
"Letters from you make me feel good." -Laura Creighton
DISCLAIMER: "I meant every word of it, but I doubt anyone else did."
Jess Anderson
(Don't faint, John, I'm about to agree with you on an
unprecedented scale. :-)
Me:
>>In my view, the two most critical underpinnings of political
>>life in the US are the freedom of speech and the separation
>>of church and state. In both cases there are countless
>>de facto instances of these principles being eroded. It tells
>>me something that exactly these two are the ones most under
>>attack by the rabid right.
>The issue of separation of church and state is being so
>studiously avoided that one wonders if we could make an
>issue of it by opening Santeria private schools and
>financing sacrifices.
Please, no satire, you'll upset the sheep.
>I, for one, don't want my tax dollars supporting the
>teaching of religious beliefs [...]
Of course, they already do, by virtue of the tax-exempt
status of religious property, but I'd like to end that, too.
>>I think the voucher system opens even larger doors leading
>>to further intrusion of religion-based education at public
>>expense. One of the key arguments among proponents of
>>vouchers is that parents should be able to choose where
>>their kids go to school.
>Including home.
Which in practical terms translates to tax-supported
religious education, mostly of the fundy/creationist type.
But I think the principle has been upheld in the courts
(seems to me it was Menonnites).
>>I think that too is a Very Bad Thing.
>Here is where we differ.
Not that much. Let me say, though, that parental choice
depends to some degree on the idea of parents owning
children as a kind of chattel. The state (quite properly, I
think) interferes in cases of parental abuse of a child's
body, but never acts in defense of the child's mind. It
should, and not just for psychological terror, though that
would be a good thing, but also for perpetuating ignorance.
>I strongly believe that kids should be able to attend any
>school which meets state-suppported certification and/or
>standards.
This is a major issue, and in fact a very difficult one.
One of the problems here is that we lack a clear vision, as
a society, of what education is and of why we have it. To a
very great extent, what we call education has very little to
do with learning, in any academic sense. Rather, it is
about social control -- obedience, above all -- and
vocational training.
Now I have nothing against vocational training, and I'm not
suggesting the little monsters should have no norms of
behavior, but I am suggesting that cognitive development has
certainly gotten the short end of the stick. I am also
quite persuaded this is no accident, but rather the result
of a conscious political program to produce intellectually
mediocre citizens, people who are not fully equipped to
interpret the actions and policies of their governments.
This has been an explicit goal of industrial societies since
at least Adam Smith.
The relevance of this to your remarks is on the issue of
standards. Not all standards are created equal, so to speak.
So which standards, devised when, where, and for what
purpose, that has to be kept in mind. If one of the goals
of a broad-based humanistic education is to promote
democratic ideals and social equality in a culturally and
ethnically diverse society, various systems of what passes
for standards today will require major revisions.
That said, I think we agree on your main point.
>On the other hand, I don't believe that any school should be
>allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, sexual
>orientation, etc., including religious schools which purport
>to teach to the level of those standards. Religious schools
>should only be allowed to discriminate on the basis of
>religious affiliation. But religious schools should not be
>allowed to accept public money.
Once again, including tax exemptions. I believe strongly in
the complete desecularization of religion, insofar as its
relationship to government is concerned. If they want to
practice human sacrifice, that's fine with me, as long as
they're adults and only kill each other. Anything else is
state religion, and in an overwhelmingly Christian country,
with its long tradition of religious imperialism, that's
equivalent to a religious state. Not much equality there,
for non-Christians. From what you say elsewhere, we may
well be fairly close to agreement on most of this too.
>>My basic approach to this whole class of problems is this,
>>and in this order:
>>1. Every person must have adequate nutrition.
>>2. Every person must have adequate housing.
>>3. Every person must have adequate physical security.
>>4. Every person must have adequate health care.
>>5. Every person must have adequate education to age 18.
>>6. Every person must have adequate employment opportunity.
>Agreed. Though I would not have an age limit on education.
I sought to avoid paying for perpetual students. I don't
mind paying up to age 20 or even 25, but I don't propose to
pay up to age 50, say.
>>The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
>>basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
>>fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
>During the Carter administration, there was a program which
>funded community based initiatives. Federal tax moneys went
>for pilot programs in education, social service, small
>business growth, etc. In addition general revenue sharing
>reallocated dollars from high income communities to lower
>ones.
I don't allege that this was in any way a main ingredient,
but it must be comported with the runaway inflation of the
Carter years.
>Republicans, led by Reagan, claimed that the Federal
>Government had too much control over local and state
>governments.
The Dixiecrats of the 60s (Republicans in sheep's clothing)
had but to wait a couple decades to get their man in. And
I'm far from opposed to *every* kind of deregulation.
Bureaucracies exist *primarily* to continue themselves in
existence, at all levels of government. Much of this is
entirely out of control and much of it is entirely a waste.
But not all of it: accountability, oversight and maintenance
of standards (equal access, for one) are still necessary
functions.
>They then did away with revenue sharing and the community
>programs while leaving most of the mandates. The effect was
>to make it virtually impossible for local governments to be
>creative and put tax raising onto the local governments
>themselves. The most needy, the poorest, reverted to their
>pre revenue sharing inability to raise revenues. Is it any
>wonder that crime is up in those areas, that schools have
>deteriorated, that health is failing?
When the Fed cut back drastically on revenue-sharing (and
states did likewise wrt to cities), nobody gave back any of
the money, did they? Taxes are supposed to go down markedly
(well, they did, for the rich) if the Fed provides less
service. Well, that's all too complicated for right now, so
let's save that for another day.
>If those children in our American inner cities could be
>guaranteed admission in the elite day school programs, in
>our best prep schools, in a ratio equivalent to their
>population rate, do you really think any of our rich young
>students would still be studying in America?
I don't think they would have to go abroad or anything.
Tuition would simply rise. If you're earning a couple
hundred thousand a year, it doesn't make any real difference
to you whether tuition for your kid is $10,000 or $25,000;
you can afford it. You can be sure the vouchers won't keep
up (that's the point of vouchers, after all).
>No. The answer is to build schools in our cities which are
>ALL so good that the middle class and the wealthy will want
>to go to them.
Such an obvious idea, don't you think? Don't leave out
rural schools, either, for we still have a lot of those, and
will have as long as we continue to eat. The idea does not
address notions of class especially well, and I suspect the
wealthy will remain interested in attaching elite status to
schools ordinary folks can't afford, and they have the clout
to make it so.
>If you don't think its possible then you haven't seen the
>magnet schools in North Carolina, and most particularly the
>School of Science and Math and the School of the Arts, which
>take students from every district in the state. We know
>that building better schools attracts students from the
>classes which would otherwise be sending their children to
>private schools.
An excellent example, right there in Jesse Helms's state.
You can get a good public school system if you will invest
in it and involve your community. It pays back, big time.
>Some people will want to have their children educated in
>religious schools. Let them. Some people will have the
>money to send their children whereever they want. Let them.
>But make them pay in taxes for the education of all our
>youth through a system of public schools that are held
>accountable to standards agreed to on a national basis and
>paid for on at least a statewide basis.
Yes, yes, and yes.
>This doesn't mean that I'm against local control. Our
>educational system needs the involvement of parents,
>teachers, administrators, and youth. But it needs the
>checks and balances of statewide or national standards and
>funding, and the attention to local needs and resources.
All that and more. It also needs a basic re-evaluation of
the whole purpose of education. I will speak to that in
another article, however. I agreed with what you said about
LGB values, too.
Jess Anderson
I apologize in advance for the enormous length of this.
It's my response to three related postings that came as one.
In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>In article <1992Oct18.2...@news.columbia.edu>,
>js...@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Jennifer S Broekman) writes:
>>In article <1992Oct18....@gordian.com>
>>mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>>>In article <1992Oct18.1...@macc.wisc.edu>,
>>>ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
The one small quote from me is *way* down there.
>>>Vouchers, and (better) tax credits for education do
>>>nothing more than allow people to short circuit the
>>>government and directly fund schools. It allows parents to
>>>be consumers, not guinea pigs.
That misses the point. Parents can directly fund schools
now. Parents get consumer control already (really, "guinea
pigs" is below even your standard) by virtue of their vote
in federal, state, and local elections, for example for
boards of education. A portion of my local taxes directly
funds the local school system; indeed the funds are
specifically earmarked for that purpose and cannot be
diverted into general operating revenues of the
municipality.
>>So they can pretend even less responsibility for the
>>education than they already do? "Of course I care about
>>Janie's education! I send her to the best school in the
>>district!" Even the best school in the district can fail to
>>do what's right for the kids attending it.
Good points.
>>Parent participation in the school is much more likely to
>>improve their children's education than bussing them to the
>>'best school'. I went to the 'best school' in my high
>>school district. I was bored out of my mind. Vouchers and
>>tax credits won't help if parents don't care enough to say
>>"Wait! My child isn't getting what she/he needs and I care
>>about that." You can have gifted programs and remedial
>>programs and special whatever, but it's *not* going to work
>>without parental input.
I agree that parent participation (why limit it to that,
actually? I'm not a parent, but I pay close attention to the
relevant issues in my community) is very useful and very
important. However, we must have gifted programs, special-ed
programs, remedial programs, and so on, *even* if
circumstances mitigate against optimum parent participation.
I'm not that keen on schools functioning _in loco parentis_,
but there are many cases in which a child's only option for
personal and social stability is the school. The community
at large should recognize this and provide for it, not
*just* through schools, of course.
>Indeed this is true of any system: if parents don't care,
>nothing can be done.
Even when parents don't care, something *must* be done
*anyway.* Doing nothing is a luxury we don't have and
couldn't afford if we did. Prison costs quite a bit too,
not to mention other costs of asocial behavior, one of the
primary results of doing nothing. Having a defeatist
attitude doesn't help much.
>Nothing will alter this; no system, not mine, not yours, not
>anybodies [anybody's].
Provided it's an immutable fact. I think it's neither.
>However, we must look at what will give parents incentive to
>care. This is the key aspect, IMHO. Choice is but one part
>of this motivation.
Incentives you might also consider for parents would be
jobs. A decent place to live, some security, and a living
wage are time-honored incentives for participation in
community life. These are in fact the *main* ways of
binding people into effective social and political units.
The disintegration we see (in several senses of the word)
results primarily from the *denial* of these opportunities,
which in effect reduces choice and undermines participation
in the system at any level.
I know you'll think it's a commie plot, but why don't you
first go out there and ask the folks if they want a safe,
clean place to live and a decent job? If they say yes,
you're not going to call 'em commies, are you?
>A school system where a parent has only one option, like it
>or lump it, is not very conducive [to] participation.
Not anything on the scale of unemployment, say.
>Yes, parents can run down to PTA meetings and school board
>meetings and be the perfect citizen[s], but what if the
>parents aren't articulate? What if the parents aren't
>educated?
Yes, what about that? What's your plan? Are you advocating
that there be a literacy test or something (seems a very
dangerous step for *you* to propose)?
>What is the likelyhood [likelihood] of satisfaction for
>their problems? Vanishingly small I'd say.
Other than just making the claim, what's your evidence
for it?
>Then what? What recourse does this parent have at this
>point? There is only one: apathy. There is no secret here.
The meaning of what you just said must be a secret too.
Poor parents are not all that apathetic in any dimension,
seems to me. In fact to me the most amazing thing is
how hope blossoms from bleakness over very small things.
You completely discount, I think, the basic humanity
and intelligence of poor people. I guess you see them
as inert, uneducated, inarticulate masses. The facts
are quite otherwise. Given a chance to express themselves,
poor people do so very readily and with great eloquence.
They cut pretty quickly and cleverly through the BS of
the sort you tend to propose with your anti-socialist
hysteria.
>Choice gives everybody the same opportunity to vote for
>their childrens['] best interest[s]: with their wallet.
>Crude instrument that it is, it has one thing going for it:
>it works in every other domain.
You're forgetting about a sizable number of empty wallets,
whose owners it appears you're prepared to disenfranchise.
>>>Tax credits (as I've heard them proposed) have any
>>>additional benifit [benefit] which would allow *all*
>>>individuals to contribute part of their tax burden
>>>*directly* to the school(s) of their choice. The same goes
>>>for business.
"Divert" is the word, not "contribute." What you've just
said is the functional equivalent of "I don't want to pay
for public schooling." That's like saying "I don't want to
pay into Social Security." That's like saying "I don't have
children, why I should I pay for those people over there,
they breed like flies anyway." And so on. I've met radishes
with more humanity than you have.
>>>I have to tell you, even though I don't have children I
>>>would love to be able to directly support various schools
>>>which I find worthy (such as ones which cater to
>>>disadvantaged children) rather than sending it through the
>>>rathole of government.
Nobody's ever stopped you from supporting any school you
like. But *your* worthiness test does not equate to the
greatest good for the greatest number; rather, it equates to
continued suffering for a disgustingly large number.
>>How will you choose the ones which cater to disadvantaged
>>children? Certainly the School for the Deaf could use use
>>the money, and deaf people are at a definite disadvantage.
>>And the schools around here need all the help they can get.
The society must provide for all its citizens, all of
them, the basic things on my earlier list, including
education for all sorts of special groups.
>How do you choose anything? How do you choose which
>charities to donate money to? You do some reading,
>listening and thinking. People will certainly differ on
>their priorities; this is a strength, not a weakness in my
>opinion.
Education is not a charity. Education is an obligation of
every citizen to guarantee for every other citizen. It is a
major ingredient in the entire fabric of society. You may
not sell off the public's cotton for your silk shorts.
>I probably wouldn't have thought of a Deaf School as an
>example, but obviously you did. If you think they are
>worthy, then you should be able to support them. If that's
>not enough you can try to convince me to support them.
Well, she could try to flap to the moon under her own power,
too, but let's keep the discussion down here where the
problems really are.
>Persuasion is much better tool than buying off some
>bureaucrat who could actually give a damn about peoples
>problems.
What a cynic! Lots of bureaucrats are very dedicated
people, working very hard for wages considerably below those
obtaining in the private sector. Just because you don't
care all that much about the fates of lots of your fellow
citizens doesn't mean everybody is that callous. You're
against the government, that socialist monolith bugbear
roaring in your ear, without actually being *for* anything.
>>Accountability and choice are not the same thing. Schools
>>are not factories. They don't function best when they're
>>huge. Allowing parents to choose which school their children
>>go to will not solve the problem. If you want to improve
>>the schools, make sure that every school gets the same raw
>>materials per student, and make the superintendent
>>accountable to the parents. And *don't* let schools
>>overfill.
Now watch what he does with that entirely sensible advice:
>Choice would certainly bring all of these things. If you
>want better teacher/student ratios send your children to
>schools which offer them.
Yeah, that will really help decayed schools a *lot*, I bet.
Just abandon them and the people in them, uh-huh.
>You may not find the ideal wish list of things you want in
>a school, but life offers no such guarentees [guarantees].
>A declining enrollment (aka revenue) should be *very* high
>incentive for superintendents.
To do what? Commit suicide? Nah, they should light out
after you, since you're the one who caused their enrollments
to decline by denying them the sorts of resources Jennifer
mentions.
>As far as the same raw materials, you are wrong. Schooling
>is no different than other human endeavors; as new ideas and
>better methods take hold quality improves.
This must be wilful misconstruction, from what you say
next. But not all new ideas are good, not all methods are
better, and not all change is progress or equivalent to an
improvement in quality. Schooling *is*, in fact, different
from many other human endeavors. It must be, since it's a
prerequisite to most of them.
>Relegating all schools to have the exact same methods and
>materials insures that improvement is stiffled [stifled].
Providing materials and resources up to a certain standard
does not imply the sort of uniformity you seem to envision.
Resources (as in materials) are just that; teachers and
administrators and community groups involved in education
are creative people. They will naturally use the resources
in a great variety of ways, which makes perfect sense.
>Again, diversity is a boon not a bane.
Then foster it.
>>My high school was next to lily-white (Indians and Asians,
>>but next to no Hispanics or Africans). If you gave the
>>majority of the parents in that community the choice of that
>>school with African-Americans and Hispanics in it and the
>>lily-white parochial schools at the same price, they would
>>choose the parochial schools. Not because they're better,
>>not because they're members of the ultra-right, but because
>>they're racist.
Exactly the same thing would occur nearly everywhere.
>>And the parochial schools have nice, safe entry exams that
>>they're *sure* no African-Americans could pass. Is giving
>>them the free choice to send their kids away going to help
>>anything? Or would it make more sense to integrate the
>>school and not give them that choice? Even though some
>>parents will still pull their children, it won't be *nearly*
>>as many if it costs them more than their child's education.
I agree. One term in the larger equation here is that
people like Michael want to redefine the social fabric to
their own personal advantage, rather than buy into any
notion that perhaps the haves will have to do with a wee bit
less so that the have-nots can have more. They resist with
tooth and nail (shortly, we'll see the guns) any suggestion
that there is a "greater good." The frontier is what they
grew up with, cowboy-style, and they don't want it ever to
stop.
>I don't think choice is going to particularily [particularly]
>help race relations but I don't think that it will hurt it either.
But then, you wouldn't.
>If you look at this from the opposite standpoint, the
>standpoint of African Americans, you will find their schools
>as being the worst without question.
I honestly don't think you've done much looking at it from
their standpoint.
>It is poor people who benifit [benefit] the most from choice
>programs not the middle class or (especially) upper class.
Do you whistle in the dark, too? How is this supposed
benefit going to materialize, by turning around and clapping
three times?
>Inner city schools are *terrible*, and there is no way out
>for even the most diligent and caring of parents. Giving
>them the ability to choose a better alternative is the only
>decent thing we can do as human beings.
Yeah, like rebuild their schools (and a whole lot of other
things, but the schools are not the worst place to start).
I expect that better alternative would find more than a
trivial number of supporters. I think we should try it. I
know you don't, but you haven't really said why not.
>But everybody will shut their doors because they are racist?
>Money talks. To think that *everybody* is so racist that
>they wouldn't take black children is naive. Sure there are
Bet it doesn't seem so naive to the kids who don't get
taken. Of course, not *everybody* is racist. Just the ones
that want to fund more white flight are.
>going to be some, but the vast majority will see them for
>what they really are: a market opportunity.
When you go the library (I wonder if you do?), do you seek
learning or market opportunities? Have you no virtues
greater than market opportunity? A school is not purely an
adjunct to commercial values. Learning is a good in its own
right. It's at this level that your point of view is
particularly corrupt.
>>>>The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
>>>>basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
>>>>fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
>>>And here we have it: force. Brute force, the point of a
>>>gun. How nice. From each according to his ability, to each
>>>according to his need. How very, um, Marxist.
What a comic! I suppose you disapproved, then, of the
integration of the Little Rock public schools, of the
University of Mississippi, and so on. I hope you never had
to pass people with bayonets to get into your classroom
buildings. I did. But there are occasions, when a person
doesn't want to be bombed (as my campus was) or beaten, or
killed. That's when force becomes necessary. Naturally, if
our policies hadn't been racist from the start, we would not
be talking about a context that gives you an opportunity to
spout that *particular* brand of twaddle.
>>Not to mention Christian. "Give to everyone who asks you
>>for something." (Luke 6:30) Or "Sell all you have and give
>>money to the poor." (Luke 18:22) Marx wasn't the only one
>>who suggested that the rich don't need everything they have
>>and that the poor aren't getting what they need.
Forgive him, he's a little excitable about Marx.
>An astute observation -- to which I concur. Brute force by
>an omniscient God (and his mystics at an Oracle) or brute
>force by an omnipresent "society" makes little difference.
>Mearly [merely] a simple substitution, I'd say.
But economic force, that you freely use. I think the
message is getting clearer and clearer.
>>>You are correct that people will fix it themselves, but
>>>history shows that you are dead wrong in your means to those
>>>ends. We do not need any more Noble Experiments.
Which history was that? Which noble experiment was that?
Are you raving about communists again?
>>People have been fixing it themselves in this country for
>>the past five hundred years. By finding new and innovative
>>ways to blind themselves to the long term future. Overt
>>discrimination may slide into the background, but I doubt
>>that anyone who's on the receiving end will be satisfied by
>>the promise that Adam Smith and diffusion will solve their
>>problems in a hundred years or so.
Thank you. And bingo.
>And indeed this country has produced the largest gains
>against human misery in the history of man.
Women to one side, of course. The gains you speak of are
not too visible in quite a few large neighborhoods, guess
which ones. Why don't you just trot out to just about any
one of those neighborhoods and take a look around. Then
find a street corner (lots of people *bound* to be hanging
around to listen, because they sure don't have jobs) and
start giving them your advanced course in social progress,
all about how much their misery has gained from your
progress. I'm sure you'll have quite an effect.
>Incomplete yes, as with all things man [sic], but at least
>it has the record of producing positive results -- which is
>more than Socialism or Mysticism can say for itself.
The closest thing we've had to mysticism has been the kind
of faith you seem to have in trickle-down sociology. Once
again, what you call positive results have accrued to the
beneficiaries of white privilege, *way* beyond any skimpy
benefits (you know, three meals a day -- in prison) that
nonwhites can realize from your schemes.
Melinda Shore
> Which is to imply that gay people should have similar beliefs
>on the subject of private property etc?
Not at all. However, you'd think that people who have
experienced systematic discrimination would look for
systematic solutions, rather than adhering to the folly
that our individual experiences have no relationship to
the larger whole.
> The problem with the attitude of "let them eat grass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
>put them in private schools" is that very people who are
>being devastated by public education CANNOT AFFORD to
>put them in private schools.
Well, duh. And your approach to fixing the problem is
to dismantle existing public school structures and let
the market create alternatives. Well, guess what? The
market cannot provide universal access to education,
simply by virtue of the nature of the undertaking. And
the entire libertoonian approach completely ignores the
notion of public good, completely ignores the long-term
competitive and humanitarian advantages of a healthy,
educated citizenry, and leaves those outside the mainstream
to fend for themselves in an environment where there are
little or no incentives to provide basic human services
to them. The voucher system is a placebo, providing
no real choices to those with marginal incomes while
destroying the likelihood of genuine reforms in the
public schools.
Robert Coren
education, with its side issue of "choice". I think the current
situation in Massachusetts is instructive.
Last year, the state passed a "school choice" law, which provides that
any school district (which means, in essence, any municipality) may
choose whether to accept students from other school districts. For
every student resident in one district who attends school in another,
state aid-to-education funds are transferred from the sending district
to the receiving district, at the rate per pupil that the receiving
district spends.
The official theory is that this would create healthy competition
between school districts, since it would give those districts whose
students were choosing to go elsewhere an incentive to improve so as to
attract more students.
In practice, of course, the effects are a little different. Education
in Massachusetts is largely funded by property taxes, so that
wealthier communities tend to have more money available to spend on
schools, with the not surprising result that they often have, and even
more often are perceived to have, better schools than the poorer
communities. This makes them more attractive to families in those
poorer communities -- especially the richer residents of those poorer
communities, since the original version of the law made no provision
of funds for transportation between districts, so only those families
that could afford to transport their children to adjoining (or not
necessarily adjoining) towns could make use of the "choice" in the
first place.
[I think that some tinkering was done this year to try to correct some
of the most glaring inequities, although I don't remember the details;
the basic scheme was not significantly changed.]
So now rich communities are drawing students *and funds* from poorer
communities, who are supposed to "compete" on ever-shrinking budgets.
Not only that, but because the funds are transferred at the (almost
certainly larger) rate of spending of the receiving district, the
available funds *per pupil* in the sending district are reduced. Also,
many of the parents have less incentive to press for the improvement
in the local schools, still less to agree to higher taxes for that
purpose, precisely because they have an alternative that costs them
very little. This seems unlikely to improve the overall state of
education in Massachusetts. Rather, it perpetuates a "them that has,
gets" situation, with ever-deteriorating conditions for them that
don't.
Apart from its inherent merits, or lack of them, it's also interesting
to observe how this law got passed in the first place. It appeared in
the state budget rather late in the approval process (needless to say,
the state budget is passed at, or after, the legal deadline), and
never had any floor debate at all -- most of the legislators weren't
aware that this provision was there when they voted on the budget.
This was the work of Senate President William Bulger, one of the most
powerful politicians in the state, whose pet project "school choice"
has been for a long time. There is a strong and entirely plausible
suspicion that its real purpose is to give his South Boston
constituents a way to avoid sending their children to desegregated
Boston schools.
Matthew Melmon
Williams) wrote:
> Efficiency has nothing to do with it. The private sector
> has no interest in providing access for *all* to adequate
> education and healthcare (for example). Providing that is
> not a function of the private sector -- it is a function of
> government.
If, in meeting it's obligations, government grabs too many
resources from the private sector, the economy will contract.
If the economy continues to contract, the government will
find it increasingly difficult to meet it's obligations to
the masses. If, in response to this, it pulls *more* from
the private sector, the economy will contract further.
If the government taxes nothing, it will have no revenue and
fail in it's obligation. If the government taxes everything,
there will be no private sector and the government take will
be 100% of nothing. At some point in between, there is a
balance. *I* am of the opinion were have crossed the balance,
and the government is pulling too many resources from the
private sector.
In-efficient, in addition to self-destructive.
Melmothra, acc
Melinda Shore
Robert's description of Massachusetts' school choice law
just reinforces what we all already know: the far right
simply wants to keep the populace ignorant and undereducated
in order to create more Republicans. And they worry about
*us* recruiting - sheesh.
Michael A. Thomas
I will not answer any of the appeals to emotion or ad-hominems.
In article <1992Oct20.1...@macc.wisc.edu>, ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
> >>>Vouchers, and (better) tax credits for education do
> >>>nothing more than allow people to short circuit the
> >>>government and directly fund schools. It allows parents to
> >>>be consumers, not guinea pigs.
>
> That misses the point. Parents can directly fund schools
> now. Parents get consumer control already (really, "guinea
> pigs" is below even your standard) by virtue of their vote
> in federal, state, and local elections, for example for
> boards of education. A portion of my local taxes directly
> funds the local school system; indeed the funds are
> specifically earmarked for that purpose and cannot be
> diverted into general operating revenues of the
> municipality.
Voting is not direct control. Would you consider a vote on
the color of your next car to be equivalent of direct control?
> I agree that parent participation (why limit it to that,
> actually? I'm not a parent, but I pay close attention to the
> relevant issues in my community) is very useful and very
> important. However, we must have gifted programs, special-ed
> programs, remedial programs, and so on, *even* if
> circumstances mitigate against optimum parent participation.
> I'm not that keen on schools functioning _in loco parentis_,
> but there are many cases in which a child's only option for
> personal and social stability is the school. The community
> at large should recognize this and provide for it, not
> *just* through schools, of course.
Which is exactly what privitizing schools can provide. Privatized
schools do not have to (by mandate) cater to a broad spectrum of
children, they can specialize. Colleges do this sort of thing
already. Is there any reason to believe that privatized pre-college
would be otherwise? If so why?
> >Indeed this is true of any system: if parents don't care,
> >nothing can be done.
>
> Even when parents don't care, something *must* be done
> *anyway.* Doing nothing is a luxury we don't have and
> couldn't afford if we did. Prison costs quite a bit too,
> not to mention other costs of asocial behavior, one of the
> primary results of doing nothing. Having a defeatist
> attitude doesn't help much.
Here I think you are wrong. The problem is that the
bulk of motivation to succeed in school comes from
proper ethical and moral values (and I do *not* mean
this in the religious sense). Instilling self esteem
in a child is imperative. However, public schools are
not in the business of teaching morality to children;
this is something that is left to parents. This is not
necessarily a Good Thing, but given the political/religious
differences that parents have, it is the only *workable*
solution that public schools can provide.
If a parent defaults on this responsibility (as often
they do), then all is lost. A privatized school system
could easily overcome these problems since there is
not this necessary and artificial barrier between moral
teaching and "fact" teaching. The two are intertwined
and is totally unreasonable to seperate them. It's like
teaching children about the holocaust and then making
no value judgement about it -- how are children to take
this other than tacit acceptance?
Of course public schools do end up teaching morality
of a form, it is inescapable, but there is no coherent
message, no real theme. The morality that is taught is
the least common denominator -- which is pretty low
and gets worse as more contradictions are found.
> >However, we must look at what will give parents incentive to
> >care. This is the key aspect, IMHO. Choice is but one part
> >of this motivation.
>
> Incentives you might also consider for parents would be
> jobs. A decent place to live, some security, and a living
> wage are time-honored incentives for participation in
> community life. These are in fact the *main* ways of
> binding people into effective social and political units.
> The disintegration we see (in several senses of the word)
> results primarily from the *denial* of these opportunities,
> which in effect reduces choice and undermines participation
> in the system at any level.
I don't think we disagree on the fact, I think we disagree
on the means -- an important distinction. Bear this in mind.
> >A school system where a parent has only one option, like it
> >or lump it, is not very conducive [to] participation.
>
> Not anything on the scale of unemployment, say.
Um, where did I claim that choice would solve all of
societies ills? Even full employment will not salvage
public schools. This is true even in middle class America.
> >Yes, parents can run down to PTA meetings and school board
> >meetings and be the perfect citizen[s], but what if the
> >parents aren't articulate? What if the parents aren't
> >educated?
>
> Yes, what about that? What's your plan? Are you advocating
> that there be a literacy test or something (seems a very
> dangerous step for *you* to propose)?
I don't see how you read that into this statement. Parents
who are not articulate have little chance of improving their
childrens lot given the current system. This is not as it
should be. A choice system gives parents direct control over
at least one aspect of their childs education.
[btw, I prefer how I wrote it]
> >What is the likelyhood [likelihood] of satisfaction for
> >their problems? Vanishingly small I'd say.
>
> Other than just making the claim, what's your evidence
> for it?
What percentage of illiterate parents participate in
the system as it stands today? I cannot believe it is
very high, and I have seen many reports that support
that contention. If you have evidence to the contrary
I'd be happy to see it.
> >Then what? What recourse does this parent have at this
> >point? There is only one: apathy. There is no secret here.
>
> The meaning of what you just said must be a secret too.
> Poor parents are not all that apathetic in any dimension,
> seems to me. In fact to me the most amazing thing is
> how hope blossoms from bleakness over very small things.
> You completely discount, I think, the basic humanity
> and intelligence of poor people. I guess you see them
> as inert, uneducated, inarticulate masses. The facts
> are quite otherwise. Given a chance to express themselves,
> poor people do so very readily and with great eloquence.
> They cut pretty quickly and cleverly through the BS of
> the sort you tend to propose with your anti-socialist
> hysteria.
No. I have a great deal hope that the uneducated inarticulate
masses can lift themselves out of poverty when they are not
stifled and told to obey. It is this aspect of socialism,
the paternalistic urge, that I wholeheartedly think is not
only counterproductive but downright demeaning.
I am not the one who is telling poor people that their
lot in life is inescapable, and that they need help from
society at large if only they'd just shut up. Choice is
about empowering people, *all* people. It means that you
trust them to take control over their own lives, not
just be the chattel of some guilty, paternalistic government.
> Nobody's ever stopped you from supporting any school you
> like. But *your* worthiness test does not equate to the
> greatest good for the greatest number; rather, it equates to
> continued suffering for a disgustingly large number.
Um, care to try that again? The government is currently
picking a substantial part of my wallet. That *is* effectively
stopping me.
And how do you know what *my* worthiness test is? That's
very presumptuous.
> >>How will you choose the ones which cater to disadvantaged
> >>children? Certainly the School for the Deaf could use use
> >>the money, and deaf people are at a definite disadvantage.
> >>And the schools around here need all the help they can get.
>
> The society must provide for all its citizens, all of
> them, the basic things on my earlier list, including
> education for all sorts of special groups.
Why? These are not facts of nature, they have to come
from somewhere -- they don't grow on trees. It is not
a question of whether these things are Good Things, it
is only a question of what system has the best likelihood
of providing these things. My contention is that your
system, socialism, does not deliver on that promise.
(not that this is any sort of endorsement of Mill's
greatest good test)
> >How do you choose anything? How do you choose which
> >charities to donate money to? You do some reading,
> >listening and thinking. People will certainly differ on
> >their priorities; this is a strength, not a weakness in my
> >opinion.
>
> Education is not a charity. Education is an obligation of
> every citizen to guarantee for every other citizen. It is a
> major ingredient in the entire fabric of society. You may
> not sell off the public's cotton for your silk shorts.
Another bald assertion. Your contention is not as self evident
as you would like to believe. Provide backing for this assertion,
and why the only way to achieve the goals is through force. Remember
the goals themselves are not at issue, only the means.
> >Persuasion is much better tool than buying off some
> >bureaucrat who could actually give a damn about peoples
> >problems.
>
> What a cynic! Lots of bureaucrats are very dedicated
> people, working very hard for wages considerably below those
> obtaining in the private sector. Just because you don't
> care all that much about the fates of lots of your fellow
> citizens doesn't mean everybody is that callous. You're
> against the government, that socialist monolith bugbear
> roaring in your ear, without actually being *for* anything.
Trust me dear, you and your generation have provided ample
reason to be cynical. However, my cynicism is directed at
the system, not the individuals. Individuals in bureaucracies
cannot win because the game is rigged against them. It's the
system which needs to be abandoned, not the people.
> >Choice would certainly bring all of these things. If you
> >want better teacher/student ratios send your children to
> >schools which offer them.
>
> Yeah, that will really help decayed schools a *lot*, I bet.
> Just abandon them and the people in them, uh-huh.
I mean really, am I supposed to feel all teary eyed that some
terrible schools will shape up or shut down? Horrors!
> >As far as the same raw materials, you are wrong. Schooling
> >is no different than other human endeavors; as new ideas and
> >better methods take hold quality improves.
>
> This must be wilful misconstruction, from what you say
> next. But not all new ideas are good, not all methods are
> better, and not all change is progress or equivalent to an
> improvement in quality. Schooling *is*, in fact, different
> from many other human endeavors. It must be, since it's a
> prerequisite to most of them.
Nobody ever said that all changes are always toward the
better. Without experimentation, there is NO CHANCE of anything
getting any better than the status quo -- certainly not a
very cheery thought. Stagnation is hardly an option in
our current situation.
People are not perfect, and in this respect education is
absolutely no different. As new models of teaching and
theory's of education come about somebody is going to
have to try the theories out in the real world. Providing
the parents are agreeable of course, this is a normal
part of living.
> >Relegating all schools to have the exact same methods and
> >materials insures that improvement is stiffled [stifled].
>
> Providing materials and resources up to a certain standard
> does not imply the sort of uniformity you seem to envision.
> Resources (as in materials) are just that; teachers and
> administrators and community groups involved in education
> are creative people. They will naturally use the resources
> in a great variety of ways, which makes perfect sense.
The swipe that I took was mostly aimed at the reactionary
stance that most schools have taken. Change is not their
friend because it stirs up the shit. Just look at the
BS that school districts have to go through to purchace
textbooks. What they end up getting is the most milquetoast
and diluted books possible, so as not to "offend" anyone.
Schools need to have a much freer hand to actually provide
education to children. The problem with public schools is
that the odds are stacked against them because of the
fact/morality dichotomy I wrote about above.
A healthy competition in schooling would be extremely
beneficial. As far as a modicum of resources, this is
necessary but only to a degree. The most necessary ingrediant
is the proper intellectual tools. That teacher in Chicago
comes immediately to mind (do you remember her name?) where
she was educating children out of her back bedroom in a
no nonsense manner and doing a spectacularly good job at
it.
> Yeah, like rebuild their schools (and a whole lot of other
> things, but the schools are not the worst place to start).
> I expect that better alternative would find more than a
> trivial number of supporters. I think we should try it. I
> know you don't, but you haven't really said why not.
What better alternatives are those? And if this is so easy
why aren't these trivial number of supporters already doing
something?
> >going to be some, but the vast majority will see them for
> >what they really are: a market opportunity.
>
> When you go the library (I wonder if you do?), do you seek
> learning or market opportunities? Have you no virtues
> greater than market opportunity? A school is not purely an
> adjunct to commercial values. Learning is a good in its own
> right. It's at this level that your point of view is
> particularly corrupt.
Repeat after me: money is not the root of all evil. The
pursuit of money is not evil on its face. Gad, what tripe.
> >>>>The costs of providing suitable infrastructure for these
> >>>>basic social needs must be borne by the entire society in
> >>>>fair and equitable way, according to ability to pay.
>
> >>>And here we have it: force. Brute force, the point of a
> >>>gun. How nice. From each according to his ability, to each
> >>>according to his need. How very, um, Marxist.
>
> What a comic! I suppose you disapproved, then, of the
> integration of the Little Rock public schools, of the
> University of Mississippi, and so on. I hope you never had
> to pass people with bayonets to get into your classroom
> buildings. I did. But there are occasions, when a person
> doesn't want to be bombed (as my campus was) or beaten, or
> killed. That's when force becomes necessary. Naturally, if
> our policies hadn't been racist from the start, we would not
> be talking about a context that gives you an opportunity to
> spout that *particular* brand of twaddle.
An outright lie. There is no possible way that my interpretation
of "borne by society" as "from each according to his ability..."
translates to approval of segregation, beatings, killings and
other things which require coersion.
Retract this, Anderson.
> >>>You are correct that people will fix it themselves, but
> >>>history shows that you are dead wrong in your means to those
> >>>ends. We do not need any more Noble Experiments.
>
> Which history was that? Which noble experiment was that?
> Are you raving about communists again?
I suppose that the last 100 years mean nothing to you. I
guess that ignoring history is the only way to hold so
tenaciously to such failed social policies. Some of us have
read our history. Some of us have learned something from it.
> >And indeed this country has produced the largest gains
> >against human misery in the history of man.
>
> Women to one side, of course. The gains you speak of are
> not too visible in quite a few large neighborhoods, guess
> which ones. Why don't you just trot out to just about any
> one of those neighborhoods and take a look around. Then
> find a street corner (lots of people *bound* to be hanging
> around to listen, because they sure don't have jobs) and
> start giving them your advanced course in social progress,
> all about how much their misery has gained from your
> progress. I'm sure you'll have quite an effect.
Compared to the Dark Ages? Compared to Eastern Europe and
the xSSR? Yes, this quite an easy comparison to make. It
is only in your cushy academic environment that you could
possibly have the gall to claim otherwise.
> >Incomplete yes, as with all things man [sic], but at least
> >it has the record of producing positive results -- which is
> >more than Socialism or Mysticism can say for itself.
>
> The closest thing we've had to mysticism has been the kind
> of faith you seem to have in trickle-down sociology. Once
> again, what you call positive results have accrued to the
> beneficiaries of white privilege, *way* beyond any skimpy
> benefits (you know, three meals a day -- in prison) that
> nonwhites can realize from your schemes.
Tell that to Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Tell
that to Stalin and Mao. We've had quite enough of mysticism
and totalitarianism, thank you very much.
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> > Which is to imply that gay people should have similar beliefs
> >on the subject of private property etc?
>
> Not at all. However, you'd think that people who have
> experienced systematic discrimination would look for
> systematic solutions, rather than adhering to the folly
> that our individual experiences have no relationship to
> the larger whole.
In fact I do look for systematic solutions. They involve
property rights though. As you said before, just because
a system is not practiced perfectly does not necessarily
invalidate the ideas. (Although AIX sure casts a shadow of
doubt on that :-)
> > The problem with the attitude of "let them eat grass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
> >put them in private schools" is that very people who are
> >being devastated by public education CANNOT AFFORD to
> >put them in private schools.
>
> Well, duh. And your approach to fixing the problem is
> to dismantle existing public school structures and let
> the market create alternatives. Well, guess what? The
> market cannot provide universal access to education,
> simply by virtue of the nature of the undertaking. And
> the entire libertoonian approach completely ignores the
> notion of public good, completely ignores the long-term
> competitive and humanitarian advantages of a healthy,
> educated citizenry, and leaves those outside the mainstream
> to fend for themselves in an environment where there are
> little or no incentives to provide basic human services
> to them.
Wrong. Although libertarian thought does not recognize
public good as some reified entity, the good of individuals
wrt one another is the (supposed) goal of *any* social system --
at least ones which are not nakedly aggressive toward other
humans. I consider socialism's or libertarianism's goals to have
this property.
Utopia is not an option. It is not in the realm of the
possible. Some people are going to lose out and there is
nothing that can be done to stop that. To speak of universals
is to speak of utopias.
Socialism cannot produce universal access to education without
destroying the reasons that education is desirable. Libertarianism
cannot produce universal access (nor does it purport to) but it
does not destroy the incentives of bettering ones self with the
reward feedback. These are not independant systems: they are
extraordinarily intertwined.
There is a vast difference between saying that the public good
cannot be planned or predicted and that somebody does not "care".
In fact there are many good reasons in a libertarian system to
have healthy, educated people. It's not good business to hire
idiots, right?
Besides, as I have stated before, a libertarian government does
not purport to be the entire social fabric of a society. It is
mearly the limits placed on government and individual action.
Saying that somebody who believes that government should be
shackled is not at all the same thing as saying "Let them eat
grass".
> The voucher system is a placebo, providing
> no real choices to those with marginal incomes while
> destroying the likelihood of genuine reforms in the
> public schools.
It's been 20 years and a 2x increase in funding (real dollars).
When will these real reforms be forthcoming?
Rod Williams
>> rjw...@PacBell.COM (Rod Williams) wrote:
>> Efficiency has nothing to do with it. The private sector
>> has no interest in providing access for *all* to adequate
>> education and healthcare (for example). Providing that is
>> not a function of the private sector -- it is a function of
>> government.
>
>If, in meeting it's obligations, government grabs too many
>resources from the private sector, the economy will contract.
>If the economy continues to contract, the government will
>find it increasingly difficult to meet it's obligations to
>the masses. If, in response to this, it pulls *more* from
>the private sector, the economy will contract further.
>
>If the government taxes nothing, it will have no revenue and
>fail in it's obligation. If the government taxes everything,
>there will be no private sector and the government take will
>be 100% of nothing. At some point in between, there is a
>balance...
No argument here.
> ... *I* am of the opinion were have crossed the balance,
>and the government is pulling too many resources from the
>private sector.
This is certainly arguable. Americans are taxed quite a
bit less than citizens in the rest of the industrialized
world, including several countries whose healthy economies,
educational standards and universal access to health and
social services leave us in the shade. Where we'd probably
agree, however, is that the resources currently being
pulled from the private sector in the US are being
squandered (inefficiently :-)) on bureaucratic waste and
things we don't need -- like, for example, at least 50% of
the "defense" budget...
Michael A. Thomas
> []
> Robert's description of Massachusetts' school choice law
> just reinforces what we all already know: the far right
> simply wants to keep the populace ignorant and undereducated
> in order to create more Republicans. And they worry about
> *us* recruiting - sheesh.
There is no secret here. We all know what *their* motivation
on the entire choice issue is. But to rebut an Arab saying:
my enemies enemy is not necessarily my friend. It does mean
that you ought to look pretty damn close at your ideas though.
Jennifer S Broekman
>ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
> For what it's worth, Vouchers and Tax Credits are only a step
>in the direction of full privatization of schools. They are
>not a perfect end all solution to educations woes -- they
>do however move things in the right direction.
At least, for those who have money.
>> The public is a *much* larger class than those who even
>> *have* children, Michael. It includes the children. It is
>> everybody who is a citizen, and parenting is not a test for
>> citizenship. In the context of the voucher debate, public
>> (as in public funding) refers to the government as fiscal
>> agent for all the citizens.
>
> My point is that the public who is *paying* for childrens
>education is by and large the same as who's producing them.
>Most folks who pay taxes are parents (or will be). There is no
>mystery here.
>> >It is their money, it was derived from them in the first
>> >place. It did not just materialize into the tax coffers. It
>> >was produced.
Not all parents pay taxes. Under a system in which all schools
charge tuition (privatization), those parents who happen to be
dirt poor, can't send their children to school. That *was* what
the public school system was created to avoid.
Suppose your system was instituted. There are no school taxes. All
schools are private (and, by extension, all have their individual
ideologies). Suppose further that you are a poor single mother. Let's
take an example from around here. We'll call her 'Emily'. Emily is a
young black woman. She begged cab money off of me over a year ago
so that she could go to a hospital that had space for her to give
birth. Emily now spends her time begging for change in a local bank,
with her child beside her. (I have no idea where she got the stroller
the kid sits in, or how she's kept them both fed.) Now assuming you
survive until the child is five, how are you going to pay for
schooling? Which is going to be more important: the child going to
school this year or the child having a winter coat that fits well
enough to keep hir warm?
-jenneke
My biggest budget problem is food:
My stomach wants four meals a day.
My budget wants two.
Penny Chase
I continue to be astonished that anybody in this day and age
could possibly hold onto the nonsensical delusions of 19th century
socialist thought after it has been thoroughly discredited with
ample supplies of blood and suffering. How many "fine tunings"
of totalitarianism do we have to go through to discredit it?
I thought we were talking about public education. Neither a
nineteenth century nor a socialist idea.
Penny
--
UUCP: { ... }!linus!pc
INTERNET: p...@mitre.org
mike.siemon
should note that in this thread, as in most others, I can be taken as
a reliable second to her remarks)
In article <1992Oct20.1...@tc.cornell.edu>, sh...@dinah.tc.cornell.edu
(Melinda Shore) writes:
> the entire libertoonian approach completely ignores the
> notion of public good, completely ignores the long-term
> competitive and humanitarian advantages of a healthy,
> educated citizenry, and leaves those outside the mainstream
> to fend for themselves in an environment where there are
> little or no incentives to provide basic human services
What strikes me is the (common) contrast of human social evolution
with biology. There, the reproductive fitness of individuals is
*the* basis of all surviving modification -- the many hopeful tries
at selection above the individual level (species selection, kin
selection as anything more than the sociobiological integration of
the individual) simply fail the mathematical and empirical tests.
Our genomes propagate by the inexorable mathematics of individual
reproductive success.
This tends to be HARD for people to seriously understand -- because
we are so enmeshed in a transmission of "traits" that pays no mind
to genetics -- the transmission of culture through learning. Social
evolution is poorly or not at all described by the theorems of the
population geneticists, however -- culture is a melding of influence
and even Lamarckian in character, not the blind working out of some
"given" individual traits.
And that is what is odd about the libertarians. The economic model
that is the basis of their assertions is deterministically Darwinian
and individual -- while it is blithely applied to the specific realm
of discourse in which it most obviously fails to meet its own axioms.
Libertarians want -- I protest that this is my conclusion after many
years of watching them! -- to believe that the ONLY human relations
are those mediated by money, and that learning (outside the arena of
prices) is impossible. Just as the only genetic "learning" is the
differential survival of alleles.
--
Michael L. Siemon "Oh, stand, stand at the window,
As the tears scald and start;
m...@usl.com You shall love your crooked neighbor
standard disclaimer With your crooked heart."
Matthew Melmon
Williams) wrote:
> This is certainly arguable. Americans are taxed quite a
> bit less than citizens in the rest of the industrialized
> world, including several countries whose healthy economies,
This is an often-cited fallacy. Americans are taxed equally,
if not more, than any other industrialized nation save perhaps
England. The United States Federal Government taxes us. Our
state governments tax us. We are taxed for Social Security and
for various Federal Insurance programs. For comparisons with
other nations, only Federal Income tax is used.
This does not include sales tax, gasoline tax, luxury tax,
cigarette tax, etc/etc. The United States has a *ridiculous*
tax policy, and is never used as an example of 'how to tax
your populace.' The Japanese do not point at American tax
policy unless they're looking for a joke. The Europeans
shake their heads. The Four Tigers say "Income tax?"
I make slightly more than the California median family income. If I
add up my Federal, State, Social Security, and insurance taxes,
and divide that number by the the total amount I am paid,
the ratio is 40%. As all I can do at this point is buy basic
goods - no tax shelters or savings plan to speak of - I must
also eat the sales tax. In other words, I piss away nearly
50% of my income to taxes.
In which industrialied countries, Mr. Williams, would this
figure represent something 'quit a bit less' than the
local tax rate?
Melmothra, acc
Michael A. Thomas
Libertarianism/Capitalism is Social Darwinism. Yawn.
cbe
This is only a further evolution of the destruction of the republic.
It appears that what such systems will establish is a further class
stratified society. It will probably institutionalize that class
system in a fashion not unlike that seen in the UK. Nevertheless, I
suspect that the truly "good" upper-class schools will be made off
limits, probably by cost, to the hoi polloi. The best private schools
will probably refuse to participate in a voucher system.
For those schools that become "voucherized" or its equivalent, the
same erosion of quality will be seen as has occurred with the public
schools for all the plan does is ignore the basic problem. The public
schools have gone to pot because parental (and other) America has not
supported the *idea* of education, has foisted on schools the tasks
properly those of parents (eeek! sounds like family values), and has
so resisted true evaluation of their childrens' performance and
abilities as to render the grading and promotion system a farce. This
too will happen to the voucher schools. It is not only the inner city
schools that are producing know-nothing graduates.
>So now rich communities are drawing students *and funds* from poorer
>communities, who are supposed to "compete" on ever-shrinking budgets.
>Not only that, but because the funds are transferred at the (almost
>certainly larger) rate of spending of the receiving district, the
>available funds *per pupil* in the sending district are reduced. Also,
>many of the parents have less incentive to press for the improvement
>in the local schools, still less to agree to higher taxes for that
>purpose, precisely because they have an alternative that costs them
>very little. This seems unlikely to improve the overall state of
>education in Massachusetts. Rather, it perpetuates a "them that has,
>gets" situation, with ever-deteriorating conditions for them that
>don't.
A year or two ago when this voucher (and the MA plan is similar) plan
was broached, either The Progressive or Dollars and Sense predicted
this outcome. It is nothing more than a scheme to further the
interest of the upper and upper middle class.
I bring up a scenario that I have wondered about before: Consider
what would have to be done to control a country such as this. It is
obvious ('tho at times I wonder) that a coup d'etat is improbable.
Even a National Socialist (Nazi for those who see socialist plots
under every rock) type "legal" takeover is unlikely although we seem to be
coming perilously close. So what is a good plutocracy to do? First,
control the media. But that is of little use unless you have a
citizenry who can be taught not to think, can be easily stampeded by
cant, flag-waving, and boogey-men, can be addicted to mindless
entertainment, and can be so inured to rational discourse that you
can tell them a lie is the truth. How do you accomplish such a task?
Destroy the educational system. Naturally, you are careful so that
you will properly educate those of your class but be certain that only
the ignorant are produced in other school systems. Sure, you will
give them the trappings of graduations, promotions, etc., but you will
be certain that the great majority are so poorly educated that you can
do your will with their lost capacity for critical evaluation. In the
meantime you can use the "schools" as handy stations for instilling
the children with firm belief in the greatness of the nation, the
necessity of having the very very wealthy, the inviolability of
property, the praise that should be offerred to those who have more
than you because they must be better and wiser.........
Yes.....teach them to worship Mammon. (or some near-cognate?)
But, of course, it is only sheer fantasy.
Colburn Eigen H|u> = E|u>
cbe
>In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com
>(Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> I continue to be astonished that anybody in this day and age
> could possibly hold onto the nonsensical delusions of 19th century
> socialist thought after it has been thoroughly discredited with
> ample supplies of blood and suffering. How many "fine tunings"
> of totalitarianism do we have to go through to discredit it?
It is distressing to find that our educational system is still unable
to educate the young in what socialism is, how it differs from
communism, and the fact that most of the first world nations are
social democracies (gasp). Of course, it could be that the information was
there but belief in cant, failure to read and decide for oneself, and
willing rejection of fact are not the fault of the educational system.
While I may hold no brief for socialism, it is inimical to any
reasoned discourse when a participant has no idea of what they are
talking about. And one does wonder how these thoroughly discredited
societies such as the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. have indeed
survived all of that blood and suffering.
mike.siemon
(Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> Libertarianism/Capitalism is Social Darwinism. Yawn.
Quite. If you have something to say that is NOT trite and boring,
you might try expressing it.
Michael A. Thomas
> It is distressing to find that our educational system is still unable
> to educate the young in what socialism is, how it differs from
> communism, and the fact that most of the first world nations are
> social democracies (gasp). Of course, it could be that the information was
> there but belief in cant, failure to read and decide for oneself, and
> willing rejection of fact are not the fault of the educational system.
Oh, I'm so sorry. I failed to articulate the miniscule differences
of degree between communism and socialism. What is the real point
when I reject any system which holds property rights in utter
contempt?
So for socialism, you can keep your mind we just want the loot.
For communism, we want your mind and the loot. Big difference, NOT.
> While I may hold no brief for socialism, it is inimical to any
> reasoned discourse when a participant has no idea of what they are
> talking about. And one does wonder how these thoroughly discredited
> societies such as the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. have indeed
> survived all of that blood and suffering.
And are currently throwing off some of their socialist yoke
nevertheless...
Laura Creighton
>In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>> Which is to imply that gay people should have similar beliefs
>>on the subject of private property etc?
>
>Not at all. However, you'd think that people who have
>experienced systematic discrimination would look for
>systematic solutions, rather than adhering to the folly
>that our individual experiences have no relationship to
>the larger whole.
Except, of course, in cases where there are no sytematic
solutions. The folly we are adhering to is the the
idea that public school education stinks, and that
waiting for a systematic solution is waiting for Godot.
It would be very nice if a sytematic solution presented itself.
I'd love to embrace it. But I don't want to wait for something
which I honestly believe can never be achieved.
>
>> The problem with the attitude of "let them eat grass^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
>>put them in private schools" is that very people who are
>>being devastated by public education CANNOT AFFORD to
>>put them in private schools.
>
>Well, duh. And your approach to fixing the problem is
>to dismantle existing public school structures and let
>the market create alternatives. Well, guess what? The
>market cannot provide universal access to education,
>simply by virtue of the nature of the undertaking. And
>the entire libertoonian approach completely ignores the
>notion of public good, completely ignores the long-term
>competitive and humanitarian advantages of a healthy,
>educated citizenry, and leaves those outside the mainstream
>to fend for themselves in an environment where there are
>little or no incentives to provide basic human services
>to them. The voucher system is a placebo, providing
>no real choices to those with marginal incomes while
>destroying the likelihood of genuine reforms in the
>public schools.
What is genuinely destroying the ideal of public schools
is that they must be all things for all people. Do you
want to wait around for this to change?
I love the idea of healthy and educated citizenry.
I just don't think that is has a hell of a lot to do
with the school where my mother used to teach, and a lot
of inner-city schools.
People outside of the mainstream are *ALREADY* F-ing
fending for themselves, whether you recognise it or not.
In many existing public schools there is little or no
incentives to provide basic human services.
I am getting a better understanding of Donald
Andrew Agarrat's anger that some White liberal folk are
deciding the fate of Blacks -- African Americans --
however you call it.
Let's just wait until the education system figures out
how to do the job. Let's be good niggers and not scream
bloody blue blazes that the inner cities are not being
served. After all, if we are patient, then eventually,
in geologic time, they will figure it out.
Do you honestly think that I know nothing about inner city
schools and am proposing vouchers as a libertarian ideal?
Do you honestly think that the parents of the inner city
poor children don't give a flying fuck about the education of
their children, and therefore, their education should be
in charge of some benign government, social group, group
of sociologists who know far better than any concerned parent?
Do you hear the condescension in your voice?
I sadly believe that you do not, and am getting a new
perspective on ``what is racism'' that I didn't have
before.
What do you think Donald Andrew? Am I over-reacting?
>--
> Melinda Shore - Cornell Theory Center - sh...@tc.cornell.edu
FJ!!
>*I* am of the opinion were have crossed the balance,
>and the government is pulling too many resources from the
>private sector.
I don't think so. I laugh when I see how much taxes the richest US
citizens pay.
>In-efficient, in addition to self-destructive.
I'm not totally in the know here - hell, I don't even pay taxes -
but I have the feeling that the way tax-money is spent is not quite
efficient in the US. That seems to be a major problem. I keep hearing
that nobody spends more on healthcare than the citizens of the US, yet
it seems to be pretty inaccesible.
Then there is the second issue that you get what you pay for, and the
highest income brackets of America isn't paying that much. Not compared
to here.
FJ!!
Jess Anderson
In article <1c2gam...@crcnis1.unl.edu>
c...@unlinfo.unl.edu (Colburn Eigen) writes:
>This is only a further evolution of the destruction of the
>republic.
If more than two of our 40,000 readers gave any credence at
all to what you just said, I would be floored. They will
filter that line through a number of their insecurities and
promptly discount it to zero. They will think: he's crazy.
Some will think: old-line lefty. One of our most active
recent participants will think: totalitarian Marxist. Our
stupidest-ever participant won't think at all, and *that's*
the point: he is the paradigm for everything else you say
here: as a person he's next to nothing, as a symbol, he's
very nearly the whole show.
>For those schools that become "voucherized" or its
>equivalent, the same erosion of quality will be seen as has
>occurred with the public schools for all the plan does is
>ignore the basic problem.
Check! Not that the means make so much difference, of
course.
>The public schools have gone to
>pot because parental (and other) America has not supported
>the *idea* of education, has foisted on schools the tasks
>properly those of parents (eeek! sounds like family
>values), and has so resisted true evaluation of their
>childrens' performance and abilities as to render the
>grading and promotion system a farce. This too will happen
>to the voucher schools. It is not only the inner city
>schools that are producing know-nothing graduates.
Clearly. The results are all around us, graduates of some
the "best" schools. Easily 90% of what has been posted in
the discussion so far shows, if little else, how far the
process you describe has already gone. Quite a number of
people here (elsewhere too) are not only ignorant but glory
in it. The evidence is all around us.
Of course, if you want to do something about that, our local
far right calls you a commie. That alone ought to tell you
the Ministry of Truth is doing its job.
>A year or two ago when this voucher (and the MA plan is
>similar) plan was broached, either The Progressive or
>Dollars and Sense predicted this outcome. It is nothing
>more than a scheme to further the interest of the upper and
>upper middle class.
The proponents of such schemes want your soul. They're
almost done with the task now. Watch in horror as your
fellow citizens get with the program. The "program," in sad
fact, is actually the deprogramming of the ability to think
critically, just as you said.
>I bring up a scenario that I have wondered about before:
>Consider what would have to be done to control a country
>such as this.
You're not alone, but your numbers are dwindling rapidly.
What you call a scenario is an observable historical fact.
But not that much longer, I feel sure, because history won't
*be* observable when America (no longer a republic, but the
focus of a global consortium of economic interests) becomes
a superstate exceeding anything George Orwell could have
foreseen. All Hitler lacked was the tools and a certain
delicacy in his approach. Now it's 50 years later and the
tools exist. Want to see them in action in a small state?
Singapore. The key phrase just now is "technology leader."
>It is obvious ('tho at times I wonder) that a coup d'etat is
>improbable. Even a National Socialist (Nazi for those who
>see socialist plots under every rock) type "legal" takeover
>is unlikely although we seem to be coming perilously close.
Coming close? On track and proceeding according to plan,
more like. From a number of points of view, it's all over
but the shouting. There's really no means of raising an
effective protest. They've already won.
>So what is a good plutocracy to do? First, control the
>media. But that is of little use unless you have a citizenry
>who can be taught not to think, can be easily stampeded by
>cant, flag-waving, and boogey-men, can be addicted to
>mindless entertainment, and can be so inured to rational
>discourse that you can tell them a lie is the truth.
As I said, they've already won. See Dick. See Jane. See
ignorance run the world. See it in prime time. Puke
mightily.
>How do you accomplish such a task? Destroy the educational
>system. Naturally, you are careful so that you will properly
>educate those of your class but be certain that only the
>ignorant are produced in other school systems.
Interesting gloss on the word "properly," I'd say.
>Sure, you will give them the trappings of graduations,
>promotions, etc.,
Ceremony. We love a parade. Yellow ribbons, red ribbons,
trinkets. We love toys. Did you expect yellow and pink
triangles again, really? Another Kristallnacht? None
of that crude shit anymore, honey.
>but you will be certain that the great majority are so
>poorly educated that you can do your will with their lost
>capacity for critical evaluation.
Books, like too boring, dude, ya know? That spelling shit,
that's elitist, dude, didntcha know? Snuggle and the
Pillsbury Doughboy, that's us, ain't we cute? Perot's a
populist. Clinton's a liberal. Melmac has a steel prick
that shoots real bullets. Jake the NippleNipper, GI Joe in
action. And *Saddam's* a dictator? Oldest trick in the
world, pointing over yonder whilst lifting your wallet.
But these pickpockets picked your brain, not your wallet.
Is it any wonder, really?
>In the meantime you can
>use the "schools" as handy stations for instilling the
>children with firm belief in the greatness of the nation,
>the necessity of having the very very wealthy, the
>inviolability of property, the praise that should be
>offered to those who have more than you because they must
>be better and wiser.
Icons.
>But, of course, it is only sheer fantasy.
Yeah, sure. Fantasy. Too bad about that, eh?
Melinda Shore
> Libertarianism/Capitalism is Social Darwinism. Yawn.
Wow! Snappy comeback!!
Anne Pfohl
sh...@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) writes...
>In article <1992Oct19....@gordian.com>
>>matter) to retain their earnings (ie not be taxed) and make
>>a choice as to where they send that money is not "public
>>funding". Perhaps this is more of a voice for Tax Credits
>>rather than Vouchers, but the principles remain the similar.
>
>What we're concerned about is equal access to education.
>Poor implementation doesn't invalidate the idea,
A month or so ago, my lover and I were chatting with another
lesbian couple. We all enjoy a very comfortable middle class
standard of living, have homes in the suburbs, two cars, etc.
etc. - and no children.
Taxes came up in the conversation, and A. (not me, andother A.)
said she hated having to pay school tax. She didn't have
choldren, why should she have to pay for other people's kids'
education? My partner and I discussed how a good education for
future generations benfits all of us, and other "liberal hoo-ha"
(which I happen to believe in).
I then stated I thought that if the cost of public education were
left solely to those who had children, the quality of education
would become even worse than it is now, because of a dramatic dip
in funding, and that lower income and poor families would get the
bulk of the burden (since they rely solely on public education
for their children, and have few if any alternatives).
At this point in the conversation, B. (the other member of the
other couple - A. is her lover) shouted "Oh, I don't buy that for
a minute!" - which effectively shut me up - which isn't
necessarily a bad thing... Essentially, though, I was pissed
off, I guess.
My question is, how prevalent is this idea amongst all of us that
those without children (and the many gay and lesbian households
are childless) feel we should not pay for public education? Is
this outside of the realm of "our fair share"?
>Out of curiosity, how do you free marketeers think
>education should be handled in remote rural areas, where
>there would be little economic incentive for the creation
>of private schools? Let the parents do home schooling?
For many today, it seems to be an increasingly attractive option,
but it's also only open to those, I think, who can afford to have
one parent work in the home. Again, how realistic is this for
lower income families?
>
>And, frankly, what you're asking us to do is subsidize
>private education. Doesn't sound very free-market to me.
And how do some of us feel about subsidizing public education,
with or without children of our own? I am concerned about
education, and measures like No. 9 in Oregon show me just how
important it is for me to have a voice in what's being taught in
schools. As a taxpayer, I have a voice. The school tax I pay is
one of the taxes I feel best about paying.
>--
> Melinda Shore - Cornell Theory Center - sh...@tc.cornell.edu
Anne Pfohl
University at Buffalo
pf...@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu
Melinda Shore
> So for socialism, you can keep your mind we just want the loot.
>For communism, we want your mind and the loot. Big difference, NOT.
This is why we can't take anything you say about economics
seriously, Mike. Is this truly your understanding of
socialism and communism?
This incredibly simplistic analysis (which is completely
consistent with other simplistic libertarian analyses and
policies), coupled with a failure to distinguish between
individuals and the property that they may or may not own,
is why people of principle and social conscience *must*
reject libertarianism.
[Say, where has My Hero, Vince Manis, been keeping himself?]
Jess Anderson
In article <BwGzv...@cs.vu.nl> fjv...@cs.vu.nl (FJ!!)
writes:
>ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
>>*I* am of the opinion were have crossed the balance, and
>>the government is pulling too many resources from the
>>private sector.
More cardboard.
>I laugh when I see how much taxes the richest US citizens
>pay.
Some of us cry.
>>In-efficient, in addition to self-destructive.
Illiterate, in addition to other-destructive.
>I have the feeling that the way tax-money is spent is not
>quite efficient in the US. That seems to be a major
>problem.
Not for everybody.
>I keep hearing that nobody spends more on healthcare than
>the citizens of the US, yet it seems to be pretty
>inaccesible.
Oh, it's accessible, provided you live long enough.
>Then there is the second issue that you get what you pay
>for,
The main philosophy here is to get what you *didn't* pay
for; somebody else did, but surely not you.
>and the highest income brackets of America isn't [aren't]
>paying that much. Not compared to here.
You got high taxes. We got cheap gas. And Melmac thinks
the war was about "freedom." Yeah, but not just any old
freedom.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct21.1...@tc.cornell.edu>
sh...@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) writes:
>In article <1992Oct21....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>>Libertarianism/Capitalism is Social Darwinism. Yawn.
>Wow! Snappy comeback!!
Hope you didn't expect more. He's taken aim with Melmac's
hardware, scoring a bullseye on the past. What a shot! He
should put it in his mouth, really.
Penny Chase
(Michael A. Thomas) writes:
Actually, this does not jibe with my understanding. I have heard
that the average Public school is about $5k and the average Private
school is $2k.
I've always wondered about these per capita statistics for schools.
First, one has to keep in mind that public schools are required to
take all students, including those with physical and learning
disabilities who require more money (for lower student/teacher ratios,
expensive physical equipment, etc.). Second, what are these private
schools that go into computing the average? Sure, there are some
Riverdales and Philips Andovers, but then there are also those
Christian fundamentalist "prefab" schools with lots of students in
study cubicles reading programmed texts by themselves with little
interaction with teachers. The average cost may not mean that there
are lots of schools that really cost $2K, but that that there are a
lot more of the fundy prefabs than elite prep schools.
Julian C. Lander
I consider public education to be, at least in theory, one of
the basic requirements of a society I find acceptable.
Of course, I get my own tax money back by using the public
libraries. I go through lots of books, and I'm getting
used to inter-library loans here in Virginia. (It helps
that the library is practically next door--about a five-
minute walk away.)
Julian C. Lander
jcla...@mitre.org
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct21.0...@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> > So for socialism, you can keep your mind we just want the loot.
> >For communism, we want your mind and the loot. Big difference, NOT.
>
> This is why we can't take anything you say about economics
> seriously, Mike. Is this truly your understanding of
> socialism and communism?
I will say that is on the same order of Mike Siemon's calling
capitalism social darwinism. It utterly lacks any kind of
insight or support. It's really not even worth spending time
refuting. (As is almost any pseudo-science analogies between
human societies and physics or biology -- the missing ingredient
to all of these is man's volition).
> This incredibly simplistic analysis (which is completely
> consistent with other simplistic libertarian analyses and
> policies), coupled with a failure to distinguish between
> individuals and the property that they may or may not own,
> is why people of principle and social conscience *must*
> reject libertarianism.
Not bad for two lines though, eh? Got your attention.
Your mistake is that there is some sort of dichotomy between
mind/body. Why should I believe that? Why should there be some
sort of dichotomy between the ones mental capacities and the
items necessary for ones continuance in life (aka property).
Property is a necessary pre-condition to life as surely as
food and water are (which are in fact forms of property). A
system which tries to divorce the two is trying to go against
the grain of nature, a mighty precarious proposition I'd say.
Thomas M Farrell
I kind of have the attitude that while I don't have any kids I'm perfectly
happy to have part of my taxes support public schools... it's like paying for
the public education I already got.
Robert Coren
>
> In article <1c2gam...@crcnis1.unl.edu>
> c...@unlinfo.unl.edu (Colburn Eigen) writes:
>
> >This is only a further evolution of the destruction of the
> >republic.
>
> If more than two of our 40,000 readers gave any credence at
> all to what you just said, I would be floored.
I think you may be underestimating us a bit, Jess. Despite which
voices are loudest, progressive thought is alive and well in
soc.motss, I should think. I think Colburn and you have the right idea
about what's happening in the country, and in the world; where I
differ slightly is the degree to which you ascribe it to conscious
conspiracy (more on this below).
>
> >A year or two ago when this voucher (and the MA plan is
> >similar) plan was broached, either The Progressive or
> >Dollars and Sense predicted this outcome. It is nothing
> >more than a scheme to further the interest of the upper and
> >upper middle class.
Yes. But note something that I might not have made clear: the MA
"choice" law applies only to *public* schools. They have not quite
reached the point of mandating transfers of funds from the public
schools in one community to the private schools in another. Instead
they are taking a step toward the "privatization" of the public
schools, by fostering "economic competition" among them -- which
pretends to ignore various obvious facts, such as the fact that
public schools are not businesses, are not intended to be run as such,
and have no mechanism for generating revenue (nor should they).
> >I bring up a scenario that I have wondered about before:
> >Consider what would have to be done to control a country
> >such as this.
> [...]
> >So what is a good plutocracy to do? First, control the
> >media. But that is of little use unless you have a citizenry
> >who can be taught not to think....
> >How do you accomplish such a task? Destroy the educational
> >system. Naturally, you are careful so that you will properly
> >educate those of your class but be certain that only the
> >ignorant are produced in other school systems.
> >... you will be certain that the great majority are so
> >poorly educated that you can do your will with their lost
> >capacity for critical evaluation.
[...]
> >But, of course, it is only sheer fantasy.
>
> Yeah, sure. Fantasy. Too bad about that, eh?
All of this is happening, to be sure. But I think there might be an
element of fantasy here too: the notion of an all-powerful cabal (!)
that has deliberately set out to destroy the schools in order to
control the population. It's not the malice that I question; it's the
ability to cooperate on such a grand scale.
Remember that the people we're talking about -- the wealthy, the
controllers of industry -- got where they are by looking out for
themselves first and foremost, and are in competition with one
another. I don't see them sitting around in a room agreeing on a
program for ensuring the ignorance of future generations of Americans.
Nor do I see them taking the long view; everything about the way
corporate America behaves suggests a tendency to go for short-term
profit, and the hell with fifty years from now (which includes their
own descendants).
I think it's more a matter of fostering trends that appear to be
advantageous, and not doing anything to rock their own particular
boat. Keeping their own taxes down is obviously one such, so they make
a lot of noise to encourage people in the idea that all taxes are bad.
The appalling state of inner-city education doesn't do them any harm,
so they see no reason to allow their resources to be diverted toward
improving it. When crime levels reach the stage where their property
is directly threatened, they call for more police, more prisons, and
more restrictions on civil liberties. But I think it's a combination,
largely fortuitous, of short-term "gains" that perpetuates the
institutions of oppression and leads to the long-term effects that you
describe so eloquently.
Robert Coren
> A month or so ago, my lover and I were chatting with another
> lesbian couple. We all enjoy a very comfortable middle class
> standard of living, have homes in the suburbs, two cars, etc.
> etc. - and no children.
> My question is, how prevalent is this idea amongst all of us that
> those without children (and the many gay and lesbian households
> are childless) feel we should not pay for public education? Is
> this outside of the realm of "our fair share"?
There's a bumper sticker that I used to see more of than I do now,
alas, that says "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
The point being that an educated population is (as we've been saying
here) a prerequisite to a well-functioning society these days, and
that the costs of failing to educate children are borne by everybody.
Unfortunately, a disinclination to pay for something which doesn't
provide an obvious and immediate benefit to the payer seems to be
quite prevalent, and increasing. It is, in fact, this very
unwillingness to pay for the education of the children of others, and
more importantly the inability to see *why* this education is of
benefit to everybody, that undercuts the claims of libertarians that
society would work just fine if only "government" would leave it
alone.
> And how do some of us feel about subsidizing public education,
> with or without children of our own? I am concerned about
> education, and measures like No. 9 in Oregon show me just how
> important it is for me to have a voice in what's being taught in
> schools. As a taxpayer, I have a voice. The school tax I pay is
> one of the taxes I feel best about paying.
I'm 100% with you on this one. And I don't expect I'll ever have
children of my own.
All of the above, by the way, is why soc.motss *is* a reasonable place
to have political discussions like this one. The sorry state of
education in this society is one of the direst threats to our
(LGBO*folks') prospects for improvement in our lot, and in fact to our
very lives, as the OCA is busy demonstrating. Gay folks *should* care
about this stuff. And fortunately, some of us do.
Michael A. Thomas
I will assume that the public school number is mearly a matter of
public record - and not very difficult to obtain at that. In various
debates I have listened in on, I don't recall that number being
questioned. Private schools are certainly more difficult to obtain
numbers for but not undoable.
One of the things that one must consider in claiming that public
schools must take everybody is that they are in fact providing
a decent education to people with special needs. I don't think
that this is necessarily so. In certain cases, in certain areas
this may be true, but I doubt that this is the norm.
As far as fundy prefab schools go, what you are describing is
a far sight better than what is currently going on in the LA
Unified School District where children must stand in class for
lack of desks, with no books or other necessary materials, astronomical
student teacher ratios, and a disenfranchised set of teachers who
have just taken a 12% pay cut over two years.
Providing my $5k number is correct, I heard that there are 37000
teachers in the LA unified school district. The average salary plus
benefits is probably on the order $50000 (all things said and done)
which is $ 1.85 billion. I estimate the average student/teacher
ratio as being close to (or over) 30, so the total revenue of LAUSD
is about $5.55 billion. What this means is that teachers salaries
are approximately 30% of the budget. Where is the other 70% going?
Property and facilities cannot be that much since most of these
schools were built 30-40 years ago and are assumedly paid off.
(and if not, why not) Even new construction is financed with bonds.
Where is all of this money going? We already know where it ain't going.
The sad thing about public school financing is that there
is no real secret about what is happening. If the administration
is pinched for money where do they cut? Well they can be responsible
and cut the fat out of the district bureaucracy, or you can cut
textbooks, sports and other high visibility items while screaming
there isn't enough money and demanding higher levels of funding.
This is the same phenomenon that goes on in municipal government:
if cuts must be made do they kill the politicians special perks
and junkets board (PSPJB)? No, They fire police and fire fighters:
the things that everybody agrees is the cities responsibility.
There is *no* accountability to the public here. Most parents
cannot or will not run down to school board meetings challenging
the funding (as if that would do any good anyway). The district
has no incentive to lay off their friends and coworkers so they
do what must be done and the vicious cycle repeats.
This is structural given the non-competitive nature of public education.
The only way to address this issue, which has proven to work in other
fields, is competition. Competition rewards efficiency, and punishes
graft and bloat. This is why competition with education is so necessary,
it is the only way the public and especially the children will have
any chance of improving the quality of education.
Matthew Melmon
> Then there is the second issue that you get what you pay for, and the
> highest income brackets of America isn't paying that much. Not compared
> to here.
The top five percent of income earners pay twenty-five percent of the
total US tax take (this number increased 6 percentage *points* during
the Reagan administration...).
As to health care - yes, the American system is a basket case. Access
to health care, however, is fairly decent for the middle (and, of
course upper) class. Often, it is an expense born either by
the individual or by their employer. There is no national health care
in the United States (a fact which allows many Canadians to point out
they have the *first* national health care plan in North America...)
Melmothra, acc
Melinda Shore
>Why should there be some
>sort of dichotomy between the ones mental capacities and the
>items necessary for ones continuance in life (aka property).
>Property is a necessary pre-condition to life as surely as
>food and water are (which are in fact forms of property).
You are what you own? I *love* it. The obvious and
necessary corollaries, then, are that if you own a lot you
have more intrinsic value, and that if you own little you
have less value. How should this inform our decisions and
public policy? It sounds a whole lot like feudalism to
me.
But thanks for stating so succinctly why the marginalized
and disenfranchised members of our society will be
damaged by libertarian social policies.
Melinda Shore
> One of the things that one must consider in claiming that public
>schools must take everybody is that they are in fact providing
>a decent education to people with special needs. I don't think
>that this is necessarily so.
And it's not necessarily not true. When I was in the first
grade, I received *excellent* speech therapy through the
public schools, as did one of my sisters. Much later, my
youngest sister was very well served by a "Superior Learners"
program provided, again, by the public schools. Note that
in the first case we were living in New York State and in
the second case we were living in Virginia.
> As far as fundy prefab schools go, what you are describing is
>a far sight better than what is currently going on in the LA
>Unified School District where children must stand in class for
>lack of desks, with no books or other necessary materials, astronomical
>student teacher ratios, and a disenfranchised set of teachers who
>have just taken a 12% pay cut over two years.
California is probably the best example of what can happen
when you fail to support the public schools properly. I
don't know if you're old enough to remember Proposition 13,
but you can thank Governor Reagan and his braindead economic
policies for the current state of the California public
school systems.
> This is structural given the non-competitive nature of public education.
Balderdash. Again, then-Governor Reagan dismantled your
public schools. If competition awarded efficiency this
country would be in much different shape from what it's
currently in. If capitalism rewarded taking the long view,
you wouldn't see computer companies responding to the current
recession by dismantling their R&D programs and sinking all
their resources into bolstering existing products, a
terribly widespread strategy which is guaranteed to undermine
our competitiveness in the medium to long term. Capitalism
strives to maximize immediate returns and rewards the
short-sighted. That's why we're losing in the global
marketplace and why the privatization of education is
guaranteed to produce a generation of functional illiterates
who think that there were dinosaurs on the Ark.
Roger B.A. Klorese
Thomas) writes:
|> Just look at the
|> BS that school districts have to go through to purchace
|> textbooks. What they end up getting is the most milquetoast
|> and diluted books possible, so as not to "offend" anyone.
...which, of course, is caused by increased interference by yahoo parents
with the professional education process, such as you advocate.
--
ROGER B.A. KLORESE +1 415 ALL-ARFF
rog...@unpc.QueerNet.ORG {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!unpc!rogerk
"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."
-- J. Foster
Michael A. Thomas
A lament on the state of the world, with the rich irony of
not realizing that the portrait he paints is done with a
mirror.
Sad, very sad. Pathetic even, if it weren't for the fact
that this affects us all.
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct20....@gordian.com>, mi...@gordian.com (Michael A.
> Thomas) writes:
> |> Just look at the
> |> BS that school districts have to go through to purchace
> |> textbooks. What they end up getting is the most milquetoast
> |> and diluted books possible, so as not to "offend" anyone.
>
> ...which, of course, is caused by increased interference by yahoo parents
> with the professional education process, such as you advocate.
Which is to imply that you think that parental involvement in their
childrens education is a Bad Thing? Wow. Not even I would have the
audacity to claim the other side would think such a thing. Do
the words State Sponsored Mind Control bother you at all?
Jeff Baron
ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
- The top five percent of income earners pay twenty-five percent of the
- total US tax take (this number increased 6 percentage *points* during
- the Reagan administration...).
Any moron can warp statistics to say what he wants them to say.
The fact that the top 5% of income earners had their share of
federal government funding go from 19% to 25% might mean very
little *if* their incomes increased by 50% during the same period
when the rest of the nation had their incomes fall.
Tell us, Matthew, are you saying that you think that the
top 5% of the income earners should pay 5% of the national
bill? That's what you *seem* to be saying. If not, what
is your point? That they pay too much? That their percentage
should be fixed? That their burden has increased and you
wish to whine about it? Don't beat around the (ghw) bush, tell
us straightaway!
Jeff
Michael A. Thomas
> There's a bumper sticker that I used to see more of than I do now,
> alas, that says "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
> The point being that an educated population is (as we've been saying
> here) a prerequisite to a well-functioning society these days, and
> that the costs of failing to educate children are borne by everybody.
>
> Unfortunately, a disinclination to pay for something which doesn't
> provide an obvious and immediate benefit to the payer seems to be
> quite prevalent, and increasing. It is, in fact, this very
> unwillingness to pay for the education of the children of others, and
> more importantly the inability to see *why* this education is of
> benefit to everybody, that undercuts the claims of libertarians that
> society would work just fine if only "government" would leave it
> alone.
If the masses are so disinclined to take education seriously as
you posit, why on earth do they support public education? Wouldn't
it make sense if there were this wide spread sentiment that people
would eventually get pissed off and elect politicians who would
dismantle public education and send home the bacon on things they
*really* want, like football stadiums and beer factories?
The fact is that the vast majority of people *do* care very
much about education. The issue is *not* whether people will
stop caring about education if the government gets out of the
business. The issue is whether
A) The government has any business providing education
B) The government has made good on its promise of providing
quality education.
It takes a full scale cynic to believe that if people
were not compelled to educate their children they would
stop doing so. It is also quite unreasonable to think
that people would take the dog-eat-dog attitude you
suggest. After all, we don't have laws which compel
parents to potty train their children.
Why is that people think that there is some sort of magic
involved; that passing a law instantly changes social views and
mores? This is not how it works. People *must* change first
(usual starting with an enlightened minority, proceeding to
the general populace) before laws can have any hope of succeeding.
This is why education is *not* doomed to wither from neglect
and is the principle reason why idiotic things like the War
On Drugs will ultimately fail.
The entire tendency of the industrial revolution was to
educate the masses. As things become more complicated, workers
needed to know more. Business placed a higher demand for educated
people providing incentive to produce more of them. All of this
happened irrespective of whether education was public or private.
The problem with modern day society is that education has become
disembodied from the consumers and the producers. There is no
incentive to produce educated children other than the lofty
platitudes you recite.
> > And how do some of us feel about subsidizing public education,
> > with or without children of our own? I am concerned about
> > education, and measures like No. 9 in Oregon show me just how
> > important it is for me to have a voice in what's being taught in
> > schools. As a taxpayer, I have a voice. The school tax I pay is
> > one of the taxes I feel best about paying.
>
> I'm 100% with you on this one. And I don't expect I'll ever have
> children of my own.
Which is like saying that you don't mind paying gasoline tax
because it pays for improved highways (well maybe not in MA :-)
This is all perfectly reasonable, but it does not address the
question of whether force is necessary to achieve those goals.
> All of the above, by the way, is why soc.motss *is* a reasonable place
> to have political discussions like this one. The sorry state of
> education in this society is one of the direst threats to our
> (LGBO*folks') prospects for improvement in our lot, and in fact to our
> very lives, as the OCA is busy demonstrating. Gay folks *should* care
> about this stuff. And fortunately, some of us do.
I hope we can at least agree that the care part is there on all
sides, though the means to that end may differ. My feeling is that
education is *vitally* important to a civil society, and the only
thing that brings lasting tolerance and acceptance. All the more
reason not to allow the government the opportunity to screw it up.
Michael A. Thomas
> In article <1992Oct21....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> > One of the things that one must consider in claiming that public
> >schools must take everybody is that they are in fact providing
> >a decent education to people with special needs. I don't think
> >that this is necessarily so.
>
> And it's not necessarily not true. When I was in the first
> grade, I received *excellent* speech therapy through the
> public schools, as did one of my sisters. Much later, my
> youngest sister was very well served by a "Superior Learners"
> program provided, again, by the public schools. Note that
> in the first case we were living in New York State and in
> the second case we were living in Virginia.
Of course, I did not say that there weren't exceptions. Note
however, that a good deal of special education programs were mandated
by state or federal laws. The public schools did not willing go
into this endeavor.
Private business would have looked on such things as a golden
opportunity. Have you ever heard of a niche market? Playing around
in niche markets can be *very* lucrative. Instead of kicking and
screaming and saying "gee look, we now fulfill our requirement,"
you would have had businesses which *willingly* and *happily*
catered to these different segments of society.
> > As far as fundy prefab schools go, what you are describing is
> >a far sight better than what is currently going on in the LA
> >Unified School District where children must stand in class for
> >lack of desks, with no books or other necessary materials, astronomical
> >student teacher ratios, and a disenfranchised set of teachers who
> >have just taken a 12% pay cut over two years.
>
> California is probably the best example of what can happen
> when you fail to support the public schools properly. I
> don't know if you're old enough to remember Proposition 13,
> but you can thank Governor Reagan and his braindead economic
> policies for the current state of the California public
> school systems.
Yes sweetheart, I certainly am old enough. Governor Reagan
had nothing to do with proposition 13 either. It was old
Guvnor Moonbeam's administration which witnessed that magnificent
event (who did an amazing 180 about face on support once it
passed).
In fact, per capita school funding has doubled here in the much
maligned 1980's. Money does not solve all problems, especially
when it's in the hands of the government.
>
> > This is structural given the non-competitive nature of public education.
>
> Balderdash. Again, then-Governor Reagan dismantled your
> public schools. If competition awarded efficiency this
> country would be in much different shape from what it's
> currently in.
Other the obvious untruth you made above, would you care
to take a stab at what The Great Satan Reagan did to dismantle
public education?
> If capitalism rewarded taking the long view,
> you wouldn't see computer companies responding to the current
> recession by dismantling their R&D programs and sinking all
> their resources into bolstering existing products, a
> terribly widespread strategy which is guaranteed to undermine
> our competitiveness in the medium to long term. Capitalism
> strives to maximize immediate returns and rewards the
> short-sighted.
Oh, well thank goodness that centrally administered command
economies work so effectively in the long run. But one little
thing keeps bothering me: why didn't Khrustchev's prediction
come true? You remember, the one with his shoe and that podium.
I don't suppose that it has occurred to you that government
legislative fiat is the prime reason that business does not
take the long view. I can attest both from a historical and
personal standpoint that this is unequivocably true: businesses
are scared stiff of making long term goals when congress is
in session. You do not make long term goals when there is
a variable which can drastically change the way you have
to do business with absolutely no way to guess at which
way events might turn. Unlike RISC architectures, business'
predictive branch evaluators require lots of money and time,
and must be done in real time.
In fact it is capitalism which rewards the long view. Anybody
who has ever run a sucessful business intuitively knows that
one does not sacrifice the long term for the short term because
the long term will eventually catch up with you. You do not
start a business with the expectations of immediate rewards,
you have to nurture it, much like a garden, before you can
ever hope to reap benefit. Owner which milk their companies
dry are not long for the world.
Jess Anderson
In article <BwH54...@acsu.buffalo.edu>
pf...@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Anne Pfohl) writes:
>A month or so ago, my lover and I were chatting with another
>lesbian couple. We all enjoy a very comfortable middle
>class standard of living, have homes in the suburbs, two
>cars, etc. etc. - and no children.
>Taxes came up in the conversation, and A. (not me, andother
>A.) said she hated having to pay school tax. She didn't
>have children, why should she have to pay for other people's
>kids' education? My partner and I discussed how a good
>education for future generations benefits all of us, and
>other "liberal hoo-ha" (which I happen to believe in).
How did other-A respond to that, if at all? The "benefits
for all" argument, which I support too, seems not to speak
to quite a few people. I wonder why that's so.
In this posting you talk about public education, rather
public schools. Even if that was actually not a deliberate
choice, and even if there are ways in which the two things
are the same or nearly the same, still one indicates the
result (and the people affected) while the other indicates
the venue (and all that it implies), and I think you've
helped this part of the discussion.
Irrespective of the *how* and in *what* institutions, paid
for in *which* fashion, the focus on the result and on the
reasons for wanting that result seems very useful, to me.
Although I am not in favor of public funding of private
(especially religious) schools, those are really a separate
issues from what is taught and why it is taught.
As a matter of fact, in the two towns where I have spent all
but three years of my life, the Catholic high schools were
in nearly all *academic* regards *greatly* superior to the
best of the public high schools.
So far, the bulk of the discussion has been about funding
and parental control of schools. The latter issue has
subsumed quality and content issues, but mostly indirectly,
under the rubric of what parents are presumed to want.
What is chiefly of interest to me is why people think we
should educate people at all, and I don't mean that as a
supercilious question. In adult life, a lot of what you
need to know for doing your job is gained from doing your
job (or a series of jobs leading up to the one you have).
As the emphasis on certain traditional academic skills has
declined (to the point where the three R's are
unquestionably the weakest of all skills for typical
high-school graduates), schools have increasingly served
other roles than strictly educational ones.
It seems to me that citizenship is almost entirely secondary
now, and what real content there is masquerades as job
training. So I wonder what most people think they're buying
when they pay (however) for the educational enterprise?
And I wonder what they fancy as the reason for buying it?
Where is it factored in that education is worth having *in
and of itself*? I gather that for most people, it simply
isn't. And on the matter of job training, what is the
relevance, if any, to people who not only don't have jobs
but stand a very poor chance of ever having jobs or at best
entirely marginal, insecure jobs?
>I then stated I thought that if the cost of public education
>were left solely to those who had children, the quality of
>education would become even worse than it is now, because of
>a dramatic dip in funding, and that lower income and poor
>families would get the bulk of the burden (since they rely
>solely on public education for their children, and have few
>if any alternatives).
I agree with you on all that, of course. But let's look at
worst-case scenarios a minute. Suppose we didn't kick and
scream and drag our heels, trying to prevent the elimination
of the public school in the US? What would *really* be
changed? For that matter, what would we really have saved,
if by a miracle we managed to save it?
Because the predominant voices here so far don't seem too
concerned about saving the public school. I wonder what
they fancy they *are* saving? And why?
>At this point in the conversation, B. (the other member of
>the other couple - A. is her lover) shouted "Oh, I don't
>buy that for a minute!" - which effectively shut me up -
>which isn't necessarily a bad thing... Essentially, though,
>I was pissed off, I guess.
I would have been pissed too, from the sound of it. Did she
at least go on to say why she didn't "buy that?" (For
indeed, whatever it is, she'll be buying it, with a lot of
help from all our middle-class friends.)
>My question is, how prevalent is this idea amongst all of us
>that those without children (and the many gay and lesbian
>households are childless) feel we should not pay for public
>education? Is this outside of the realm of "our fair share"?
I don't think it's at all unfair. But then, there are
people, vocal ones, who don't want to pay any taxes, (though
they certainly don't want the military to go away, do they,
and they certainly want laws favorable to themselves, don't
they?) or pay for anyone's retirement or health care but
their own, too, so you can count on them to be against
paying for anyone else's education. They're the ones who
didn't learn in school (guess why?) that learning *is*
something; they think of it as facts; they see it as
utilitarian. They are, in fact, not even 19th-century
people, they're 18th-century people. They call it
libertarian, but they leave out the liberty part, because
it won't fit a PERT chart or a balance sheet.
In simple and very practical terms, paying taxes for
education gives you a voice (remember the Boston Tea Party)
in what might be in the brains of the people who will
administer our future, teach the coming generations, or even
(heaven forfend) foster more citizenship than the current
Melmac archetype evinces.
>>Out of curiosity, how do you free marketeers think
>>education should be handled in remote rural areas, where
>>there would be little economic incentive for the creation
>>of private schools? Let the parents do home schooling?
>For many today, it seems to be an increasingly attractive
>option, but it's also only open to those, I think, who can
>afford to have one parent work in the home. Again, how
>realistic is this for lower income families?
For a vivid picture of what that would be like, read up on
town life in 14th-century France. Apart from the scale of
things, which would only make it more horrible, it would be
about like that.
TMCC...@ua1vm.ua.edu
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> I will say that is on the same order of Mike Siemon's calling
>capitalism social darwinism. It utterly lacks any kind of
>insight or support. It's really not even worth spending time
>refuting. (As is almost any pseudo-science analogies between
>human societies and physics or biology -- the missing ingredient
>to all of these is man's volition).
>
>Property is a necessary pre-condition to life as surely as
>food and water are (which are in fact forms of property). A
>system which tries to divorce the two is trying to go against
>the grain of nature, a mighty precarious proposition I'd say.
>--
--Tracey McCartney
Cindy Tittle Moore
In <1992Oct21....@tc.cornell.edu> sh...@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) writes:
>You are what you own? I *love* it.
Yeah. Especially since most of what I own are BOOKS... ;-)
Page-turningly yours,
--Cindy
--
* I would rather that a bigot thought I was a lesbian than that a
* lesbian thought I was a bigot. -- Tovah Hollander
Penny Chase
(Michael A. Thomas) writes:
In article <PC.92Oct...@bacon.linus.mitre.org>,
p...@linus.mitre.org (Penny Chase) writes:
> In article <1992Oct20....@gordian.com> mi...@gordian.com
> (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>
> Actually, this does not jibe with my understanding. I have heard
> that the average Public school is about $5k and the average Private
> school is $2k.
>
> I've always wondered about these per capita statistics for schools.
I will assume that the public school number is mearly a matter of
public record - and not very difficult to obtain at that.
I wasn't disputing the number, only suggesting that when talking about
averages, one really needs to think about what those averages mean.
One of the things that one must consider in claiming that public
schools must take everybody is that they are in fact providing
a decent education to people with special needs. I don't think
that this is necessarily so.
That may be. I was merely suggesting that if private schools had to
accept some number of special needs students that their costs might be
greater (especially if these students were mainstreamed, which has
benefits for the students, but makes it difficult for schools to
acheive economies of scale).
As far as fundy prefab schools go, what you are describing is
a far sight better than what is currently going on in the LA
Unified School District where children must stand in class for
lack of desks, with no books or other necessary materials, astronomical
student teacher ratios, and a disenfranchised set of teachers who
have just taken a 12% pay cut over two years.
Yes, from what you describe, the LA school system sounds horrible.
But having students read creationist trash instead of learning genuine
academic disciplines is hardly desirable.
[lots of stuff about flab in the public schools omitted]
I do agree that that school systems may be bloated and should put
their house in order and become leaner.
This is structural given the non-competitive nature of public education.
The only way to address this issue, which has proven to work in other
fields, is competition. Competition rewards efficiency, and punishes
graft and bloat.
This is not always true. The means used to acheive competiveness is
not always pretty. Think of sweatshops. Think of companies trying to
lower costs by cutting corners on safety. I bet you think that
airline deregulation was a good thing, yet we pay more to fly, spend
more time waiting to fly on crowded planes, etc.
mike.siemon
My last few notes could easily be read as a totally universal claim
that all libertarians are market-ideologues and twits. I have to
note that there is at least one correspondent I have had on the net
(not usually a reader of this group, I believe) who -- while he will
adopt a market policy far more often than I am comfortable with --
is not possessed by the demon of Property. At least one, that is,
who seems honestly interested in the liberties of real people in
real societies. He is a depressingly rare specimen.
--
Michael L. Siemon "Oh, stand, stand at the window,
As the tears scald and start;
m...@usl.com You shall love your crooked neighbor
standard disclaimer With your crooked heart."
mike.siemon
(Michael A. Thomas) writes:
> I will say that is on the same order of Mike Siemon's calling
> capitalism social darwinism. It utterly lacks any kind of
>insight or support.
Look, nincompoop; the sound-bite characterization of my comments
as calling libertarians "Social Darwinists" is YOURS, not mine.
As sound-bites go, it is fair to middling -- but it DOES NOT
address in any way my observations. Rather, it is a rhetorical
attempt to dodge the question by acting as if what I criticized
was a century-old and now-moribund ideology. I am enough of a
historian (and have enough respect, despite my opposing him, for
Herbert Spencer) not to confuse Milton Friedman (or his son)
with Spencer.
Since I hardly expected you to address the issue, this makes no
never-mind, as far as I am concerned.
>It's really not even worth spending time
>refuting. (As is almost any pseudo-science analogies between
>human societies and physics or biology -- the missing ingredient
>to all of these is man's volition).
What a load of crap. Since the tenor of my note was that biology
is NOT controlling in human systematics, you are here agreeing
with me (insofar as any meaning can be extracted from your drivel.)
Let me say it again, since you are hard of reading. Libertarians,
in my experience, feel that the ONLY legitimate argument is that
of market success. This argument assumes that all relevant know-
ledge is encoded in prices and that the optimal distribution of
priced resources is THE single criterion for policy. All larger
issues of public policy are read by libertarians in terms of the
property rights of *current* owners -- and these are *presumed* to
be amenable to market analysis.
I am asserting that the the "learning" that happens through market
price histories is only one, relatively minor, aspect to the human
learing that is the basis of human societies. Insofar as I am
indulging in biological analogy, the point is that the atomistic
mechanism of genetic inheritance *is* so far as can be determined
sufficient foundation for all the phenomena of evolution. In the
social context, the reduction to market pricing as the only vehicle
for learning [a patent bit of nonsense] would be necessary to any
claim that all social policy should be controlled by markets. In
short, I call upon biology to DENY that there is an analogy. For
all your surface agreement with this point, I doubt that you really
understand it.
Every once in a while, a libertarian will claim an actual interest
in human liberty. It is my sad experience that all such claims,
when followed up on, immediately reduce to Property, Property,
Property -- with nary a trace of understanding of the social bases
and conditioning of that which human beings appropriate to them-
selves.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct21....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
Since in a previous posting you made a certain effort to be
civil, I can make a comparable effort (in what ways
comparable I leave to your judgment).
Allow me not to enter into the debate that gave rise to
your remarks here. Rather, I think some of the serious
problems I have with much off what you say elsewhere
is as it were classically displayed here.
It has been my impression that you are much given to
statements of the sort you made here, statements that have a
certain ring of authority to them, but on more than casual
analysis seem confused, confusing, or just not supportable.
I say this not to insult you, but to point out what I think
are *highly* questionable assumptions in *these* statements.
Later, I will say what I think the implications are for
your other statements. I ask only that you consider the
evidence about to be adduced, and I would be gladder still
if you felt it worthwhile to respond. I'm offering my
observations here in the spirit of cooperation.
>Your mistake is that there is some sort of dichotomy between
>mind/body. Why should I believe that?
The trouble with this statement, I think, is that in an
important strain of metaphysical thought, the inseparability
of the mind and body aspects of human beings is a central
concept. As a matter of fact, for most purposes, I too think
mind and body are different ways of characterizing a single
entity. But this underlying truth does not render all
analyses expressed in terms of one or the other entirely
specious.
>Why should there be some sort of dichotomy between the ones
>mental capacities and the items necessary for ones
>continuance in life
In the everyday practical sense, if your body doesn't
continue in life, your mind is also out of the picture, so
you would seem to be on pretty solid ground about that part.
But there is major confusion here, I think. The necessaries
for physical life, by which I mean not just a meager
subsistance but a healthy life, are not adequate *by
themselves* to sustain a healthy and vigorous mind. There
is an enormous body of hard research to support my point,
although you may object that it has been performed with
primates other than human beings. I think the mental
nurture that humans require in order to flourish is actually
much *greater* than that required by rhesus monkeys. You
may not feel that nurture is a sufficient metaphor for
mental life, of course, in the context of this analysis.
In fact, where infants are concerned, there is a certain
primacy to this nurture: if it is not provided, no matter
what regime of nutritional support is provided, the infant
will not grow at the usual rate, it will very soon manifest
symptoms of severe emotional disturbance, and ultimately (in
a relatively short time) it will just die.
For obvious ethical reasons, comparable research has
not been conducted with human infants. But individual
cases have been studied, arising from various kinds
of severe deprivation. And something quite comparable
has been shown for older children, adults, and older
people.
To relate this to much of your argument, the
interrelationships between mind and body are quite a lot
more complex than your analysis suggests, I think. The
emphasis you place on property ...
>(aka property).
suggests a primacy for the material aspects of our lives
(especially our young lives, education, and so on) that runs
contrary to the best available evidence of what our
"natures" are.
Now let me switch sides a little. I do it for a good
reason. You've said, just now, that property is necessary to
continuing in life. In obvious practical ways, this is
clearly true. We had snow two nights ago and a temp in the
mid-20s. With no clothing and no shelter, this would have
been life-threatening.
But in a warm enough climate and in the presence of food and
skill, so little property is needed as to render the kind of
necessity you posit so categorically pretty questionable.
>Property is a necessary pre-condition to life as surely as
>food and water are (which are in fact forms of property).
Here is a major cultural flaw in your argument. The idea of
food and water as property is really quite new in human
history. As far as North America is concerned, less than 200
years old. No such property notions adhered to the general
worldview of the people living on this continent for the
preceding thousands of years. Food was food. Water was
water. They were resources like air, just *there*. Yes,
hunting (which required property like weapons) was a factor.
Yes, in my region, property in the form of hides used
for clothing and shelter was a survival factor.
But the view that food and water are property in the same
sense as *our* real and personal properties is a cultural
and historial artifact, and not at all natural in the sense
of your argument.
>A system which tries to divorce the two
Which two? Mind and body, or humans and property? In an
appeal made in terms like "the grain of nature," these are
not equivalent pairs, surely.
>is trying to go against the grain of nature, a mighty
>precarious proposition I'd say.
All of this, then, serves (*I* think) to show how glib, and
in some cases, basically unsupportable your arguments can
be. The sweeping scope of your various claims here as to
what is "natural" bases your arguments on what are at best
very shaky foundations, whether we examine them
biologically, culturally, or historically.
To try to collect all this together, Michael, there is in
addition a fundamentally materialistic bias in your
arguments. Your tenacious insistence on clear-cut, strictly
quantifiable distinctions (I don't *think* that's a
distortion) suggests again and again that you think
uncertainties and imponderables can safely and confidently
be ignored, on no better evidence than *your* convictions.
The reductive, so-called rational approach is not the only
reasonable or valid argument that is pertinent to the human
experiment. Indeed, I don't think strictly rational analysis
is anything like sufficient to the severe tasks of adjusting
our societies to the conditions around us. Irrespective of
the putative merits or demerits of libertarian politics, the
things I am speaking of here would apply to *all* analysis
and all argument in the course of reasoned discourse, quite
apart from rhetorical flash.
Michael A. Thomas
> Look, nincompoop; the sound-bite characterization of my comments
> as calling libertarians "Social Darwinists" is YOURS, not mine.
> As sound-bites go, it is fair to middling -- but it DOES NOT
> address in any way my observations. Rather, it is a rhetorical
> attempt to dodge the question by acting as if what I criticized
> was a century-old and now-moribund ideology. I am enough of a
> historian (and have enough respect, despite my opposing him, for
> Herbert Spencer) not to confuse Milton Friedman (or his son)
> with Spencer.
And I said that I don't feel like addressing your idiotic
characterization. That can be your little project as to why
I think that.
> Let me say it again, since you are hard of reading. Libertarians,
> in my experience, feel that the ONLY legitimate argument is that
> of market success. This argument assumes that all relevant know-
> ledge is encoded in prices and that the optimal distribution of
> priced resources is THE single criterion for policy. All larger
> issues of public policy are read by libertarians in terms of the
> property rights of *current* owners -- and these are *presumed* to
> be amenable to market analysis.
Wrong. This is mearly the effect not the reason. Try again.
Jess Anderson
>(Jess Anderson) writes:
>A lament on the state of the world,
I believe that I concentrated on the United States. I
mentioned a number of things quite worthy of lamenting, but
the article itself cannot not fairly be called a lament.
Finally, I did not include anything that supports your
grandiloquent "state of" phrase; in view of that, your
remark is a specific distortion.
>with the rich irony of not realizing that the portrait he
>paints is done with a mirror.
This is no argument at all. Are you saying that *I* am the
proximate cause of those conditions? That's quite odd.
What *are* you saying (or intending to say)?
>Sad, very sad.
>Pathetic even,
You use that phrase constantly. You use it exclusively
to signal your unwillingness to address issues; it has
become a telltale device in the armory of your style.
>if it weren't for the fact that this affects us all.
What does this mean? In what way, would you say? I
certainly agree that it affects us all, but I doubt that's
what you meant. Since it's evident I'm not alone in
thinking these things, do you mean to say that anyone who
shares those views is some sort of enemy of society, or
what? And particularly if the answer to that is yes, then I
think a reasoned and careful response would be virtually
mandatory.
Michael A. Thomas
Machiavelli? Would the gay equivalent be known at _The Queen_?
In article <mattm-211...@mcmelmon.apple.com>, ma...@apple.com (Matthew Melmon) writes:
> In summary:
>
> DO
>
> 1. Control the means of production
> 2. Control the means of destruction
> 3. Meet the basic needs of as many people as required
> 4. Hang a few intellectuals every couple of years
>
> DO NOT
>
> 1. Seek to control the media - waste of energy
> 2. Seek to destroy education - unnecessary and very counter
> productive
Michael A. Thomas
> I have far more interesting projects, thank you. There is a maxim
> in investing: "cut your losses." It most definitely applies to
> USENET threads, though many netters seem unable to avoid throwing
> bad words after good.
Oh, please do make your exit. And spare me your bad words.
> > Wrong. This is mearly the effect not the reason. Try again.
> ------
> [ A tone of overweening arrogance is immediately undercut
> by patently bad spelling. This is not a spelling flame;
> it is a rhetoric flame. ]
Well my dictionary has my spelling. (including /usr/dict,
thank you very much, don't you work for those guys?) So get over
it.
mike.siemon
> And I said that I don't feel like addressing your idiotic
> characterization. That can be your little project as to why
> I think that.
I have far more interesting projects, thank you. There is a maxim
in investing: "cut your losses." It most definitely applies to
USENET threads, though many netters seem unable to avoid throwing
bad words after good.
> > Let me say it again, since you are hard of reading. Libertarians,
> > in my experience, feel that the ONLY legitimate argument is that
> > of market success.
> Wrong. This is mearly the effect not the reason. Try again.
------
[ A tone of overweening arrogance is immediately undercut
by patently bad spelling. This is not a spelling flame;
it is a rhetoric flame. ]
Your own articles are sufficient evidence of my point. One more maxim
before I shake the dust off my sandals, a legal one this time, intended
to aid in the evaluation of deeds and testimony: _cui bono_?
Matthew Melmon
Let it never be said that a tired intellectual has not found the
only position in life to which he is well suited. Certainly,
as global conquerors, these fuckless puds do not compare to Atilla
the Truly Grand.
First step, they say: Control the Media.
HAH! The media: a blubbering mass of not-even intellectuals.
Complete waste of energy.
First step: Control the means of production.
Rather basic, really. This generates *money* Money is the root
of all Evil, and a wonderful way to *get* *what* *you* *want*
It also creates cold, hard goods. People want goods. They need
goods. They want you to make more goods that they can buy. They
respect you for it. You have credibility if you *make* things.
Much more credibility than a tired intellectual.
More important: the military needs goods. Thus,
Step Two: Control the means of destruction.
*Now* we're talkin' domination. The class which produces and the
class which destroys is the class that calls the shots. It then
comes down to maintaining power.
If the majority of your population is really pissed at you,
eventually you're going to fall. In 'democracies' - this
is somewhat more easily accomplished than in dictatorships.
In a democracy, you must make sure that The People really
don't hate you *that* much.
(For purposes of this discussion, the Republican and Democratic
parties are irrelevant. Both represent factions of the
ruling economic class.)
People get most upset when their basic needs are not met. So
meet them. Make sure that most of your populace is well fed,
and most of your populace is well housed, and well clothed.
This accomplished, the intellectuals can rage all they want,
you will not be overthrown.
Education has nothing to do with it. No level of education
will endanger a ruling class so long as the majority of those
ruled are content. Period.
In summary:
DO
1. Control the means of production
2. Control the means of destruction
3. Meet the basic needs of as many people as required
4. Hang a few intellectuals every couple of years
DO NOT
1. Seek to control the media - waste of energy
2. Seek to destroy education - unnecessary and very counter
productive
Melmothra, acc
(and slightly to the right of Atilla the Rad)
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct21....@osf.org> co...@osf.org
(Robert Coren) writes:
Me:
>>If more than two of our 40,000 readers gave any credence at
>>all to what you just said, I would be floored.
>I think you may be underestimating us a bit, Jess. Despite
>which voices are loudest, progressive thought is alive and
>well in soc.motss, I should think.
Well, I knew that, but in view of the nature of my remarks,
I thought it best not to presume. I spent quite some time
writing the piece, deciding what to include or exclude, and
ultimately whether to use the emotionally volatile names of
Hitler and his movement. I thought, as well, that it would
be best to underestimate the degree to which others might
echo the same or parallel views, for (especially in the
current environment) it was clear some people would at once
and in derisive terms reject the piece out of hand.
>I think Colburn and you have the right idea about what's
>happening in the country, and in the world; where I differ
>slightly is the degree to which you ascribe it to conscious
>conspiracy (more on this below).
I'll address your observations shortly. I am quite serious
about the essential thrust of the piece. I think further
that it's important to discuss *critically* the situation
and the terms and conditions it refers to.
I am not an historian by training (rather, a literary
scholar) or profession (rather, a network engineer) or
predeliction (rather, a musician). But I am an active
participant in politics as an elector, and I take being
informed as broadly and inclusively as one can be under the
circumstances as a serious social obligation. As many
readers know, in my friskier years, I was an ardent (and
I think effective) activist in the LGB rights struggle.
I give this background not to celebrate myself (besides, it
hurts to pat my own back just now :-), but to say that
whether I am right or wrong in my beliefs about the basic
realities of our present political life, I have done my best
to think about, study, and inform myself about the relevant
factors. I am not just tossing this stuff off in anything
like the same vein one might skewer the local buffoon.
I will say, too, that I as true-blue an American as anyone
could find, and could not in good conscience excuse myself
from any number of complicities in the defects and virtues
of our society. One of the larger defects, in my view, is
special-interest politics. I certainly do not disagree with
Ross Perot that our lobby-dominated legislative and
regulatory processes are fundamentally undemocratic.
Indeed, Colburn spoke of "one more thing" in the process of
destroying the Republic; there are many such things besides
those I mentioned in my piece.
Colburn:
>> >But, of course, it is only sheer fantasy.
>> Yeah, sure. Fantasy. Too bad about that, eh?
>All of this is happening, to be sure.
>But I think there might be an element of fantasy here too:
>the notion of an all-powerful cabal (!) that has
>deliberately set out to destroy the schools in order to
>control the population. It's not the malice that I
>question; it's the ability to cooperate on such a grand
>scale.
Any time one enters into conspiracy theorizing, you're
almost certainly impaling yourself on side issues. However,
I think what we observe here has unfolded over the course of
a number of generations not by conspiracy, certainly not in
the sense of any conscious, articulated, directed
conspiracy, but rather according to a class dynamic, one
that was born in the rise of industrial capitalism of a
uniquely aggressive kind, nurtured in the period between the
world wars, and set firmly in control (both economic and
political) in the *enormous* expansion of wealth and
international influence that followed the second war.
>Remember that the people we're talking about -- the wealthy,
>the controllers of industry -- got where they are by looking
>out for themselves first and foremost, and are in
>competition with one another.
I agree that their primary loyalty is to themselves, that
is, to class. To a very considerable degree, the
competition between them shifts around blocs of capital and
influence that whatever else one may say, remain in the
family, so to speak (needless to say, not yours and mine).
The basis for the devolution of our democractic republic is
laid in a number of broad social and quasi-cultural
prerogatives accruing to these people as a unique class of
power brokers. To a remarkable extent, really, these people
are not so much above the law as outside it. The kind of
wealth they have makes its own rules. They are bound to one
another by a paradigm, albeit a fluid one, of privilege, of
class assumptions, of detachment from the concerns of the
daily life of the great mass of our fellow citizens.
>I don't see them sitting around in a room agreeing on a
>program for ensuring the ignorance of future generations of
>Americans. Nor do I see them taking the long view;
>everything about the way corporate America behaves suggests
>a tendency to go for short-term profit, and the hell with
>fifty years from now (which includes their own descendants).
The length of their view results from concerted efforts,
by whatever agency, to remain in control of their power,
to continue themselves in the job, so to speak. All of
their major instruments are designed with that objective
in mind, for their livelihood depends on it. As you say,
>I think it's more a matter of fostering trends that appear
>to be advantageous, and not doing anything to rock their own
>particular boat.
Change does not come easily or quickly in that echelon
(note the word). Among the trends ...
>Keeping their own taxes down is obviously one such, so they
>make a lot of noise to encourage people in the idea that all
>taxes are bad.
... they are most assidously attentive to the containment
of costs, to the control of marketing and associated media
perceptions, and to the propagation of mythologies consonant
with their own requirements, above all.
>The appalling state of inner-city education doesn't do them
>any harm,
On the contrary, it does them considerable good.
>so they see no reason to allow their resources to be
>diverted toward improving it.
They need to guarantee the existence of an underclass, as
part of a tacitly assumed shared value about the locus of
their primary resource for remaining in power. That's the
middle class and its (increasingly uneducated) fear of
social disequilibrium.
>When crime levels reach the stage where their property is
>directly threatened, they call for more police, more
>prisons, and more restrictions on civil liberties.
A naked law and order program cannot yet fly. But in time,
the people will insist, and the folks at the top will
manifest as reluctant but sincere deliverers.
>But I think it's a combination, largely fortuitous, of
>short-term "gains" that perpetuates the institutions of
>oppression and leads to the long-term effects that you
>describe so eloquently.
I would call it fortuitous only in the loosest sense. What
*we* see as short-term gain translates over time into the
accretion of the kind of power that corrupts absolutely, in
the ever more frighteningly real phrase of Lord Acton.
Jennifer S Broekman
ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
>> That misses the point. Parents can directly fund schools
>> now. Parents get consumer control already (really, "guinea
>> pigs" is below even your standard) by virtue of their vote
>> in federal, state, and local elections, for example for
>> boards of education. A portion of my local taxes directly
>> funds the local school system; indeed the funds are
>> specifically earmarked for that purpose and cannot be
>> diverted into general operating revenues of the
>> municipality.
>
> Voting is not direct control. Would you consider a vote on
>the color of your next car to be equivalent of direct control?
Shopping isn't direct control, either. Or have you never seen a
favorite store go out of business?
>> I agree that parent participation (why limit it to that,
>> actually? I'm not a parent, but I pay close attention to the
>> relevant issues in my community) is very useful and very
>> important. However, we must have gifted programs, special-ed
>> programs, remedial programs, and so on, *even* if
>> circumstances mitigate against optimum parent participation.
>> I'm not that keen on schools functioning _in loco parentis_,
>> but there are many cases in which a child's only option for
>> personal and social stability is the school. The community
>> at large should recognize this and provide for it, not
>> *just* through schools, of course.
>
> Which is exactly what privitizing schools can provide. Privatized
>schools do not have to (by mandate) cater to a broad spectrum of
>children, they can specialize. Colleges do this sort of thing
>already. Is there any reason to believe that privatized pre-college
>would be otherwise? If so why?
Ah, yes. The high school I attended can cater to middle class white
students. The district to the north can cater to rich students. And
we'll just shuffle the poor students to the south and forget about
them. BTW, private colleges admit students who can't pay the tuition
BECAUSE THEY'RE SHUT OFF FROM FEDERAL FUNDS IF THEY DON'T.
> If a parent defaults on this responsibility (as often
>they do), then all is lost. A privatized school system
>could easily overcome these problems since there is
If you admit that parents often default on this
responsibility, why do you keep insisting that they will
*not* default on their responsibility to choose a good
school for their children?
> I don't see how you read that into this statement. Parents
>who are not articulate have little chance of improving their
>childrens lot given the current system. This is not as it
>should be.
Even parents who are not articulate can instill in their
children the desire to learn and the will to speak up for
themselves. And even *one* child who has the guts to stand
up in a crowded PTA meeting and demand more than is being
offered can make a difference. Even if he/she isn't
extraordinarily eloquent.
> Choice is
>about empowering people, *all* people. It means that you
>trust them to take control over their own lives, not
>just be the chattel of some guilty, paternalistic government.
Choice in the terms you've described is about empowering those
with money in their wallets and leaving the rest of the
population to try and chase after them with insufficient resources.
> Nobody ever said that all changes are always toward the
>better. Without experimentation, there is NO CHANCE of anything
>getting any better than the status quo -- certainly not a
>very cheery thought. Stagnation is hardly an option in
>our current situation.
I did not propose stagnation. I proposed an even allocation
of starting resources. Surely you can see the difference
between "Here, you have twenty dollars, build a better
mousetrap." and "Here are your instructions. Don't you dare
deviate."
-jenneke, refraining from correcting grammatical errors.
My biggest budget problem is food:
My stomach wants four meals a day.
My budget wants two.
Chuck Fisher
>that the average Public school is about $5k and the average Private
>that there is a debate going on about a proposal in Ca going on
>in ca.politics (being gay, I'm not *that* interested about vouchers/credits
>to dive into the various facts and figures of every proposal).
I contacted the Mtn. View/Los Altos High School District (where my
progeny attend school) regarding annual pupil expenditures. I was told
that the amount is between $5800 and $6000. St. Francis, the local
parochial high school, charges $4500, but requires parents to
participate in additional fund raisers. Pinewood, a non-sectarian
private school, charges about $7000. So both public and private
schools have about the same annual pupil expenditures in the area which
I live. I could not ascertain what percentage of the children attend
public versus private schools. This is a fairly affluent area and the
public schools are also quite good.
Chuck
--
Chuck Fisher (800) 359-7997 Work
ncselxsi system administrator (415) 964-2819 Home
uucp: ...!netcom!ncselxsi!fisher
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct22....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>And I said that I don't feel like addressing your idiotic
>characterization. That can be your little project as to why
>I think that.
Any number of explanations pop right to mind. But his
characterization of mainstream libertarian ideas, which he
was careful not to announce as universals but only the
witness of his own experience, exactly matched mine and
indeed was better-informed than mine would have been.
You may disagree, as very likely you do, with his
characterization, but all you can possibly accomplish by
calling it idiotic is to diminish further your own
credibility. Michael Siemon is a learned man, entirely
literate and unusually deliberate in the way he expresses
himself. Agreeing with him or not has not bearing whatever
on that.
The kind of answer you made here conforms perfectly to the
kind you made in response to several of my postings on this
and other subjects. It's bogus from so many different
points of view that one is left to wonder what you think
you're actually accompishing.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct22.0...@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
The usual, embarrassingly.
>In article <1992Oct22.0...@cbnewsm.cb.att.com>,
>m...@cbnewsm.cb.att.com (mike.siemon) writes:
Cui bono hit the mark, but culo duro fits better,
Mike (S.).
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct22.0...@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>>>This is mearly the effect not the reason. Try again.
>> ------
>Well my dictionary has my spelling. (including /usr/dict,
>thank you very much,
Though of *course* I believe you, mine (including /usr/dict)
doesn't. But I'm sure I provided a correction for both you
and it just yesterday or the day before.
And you're very welcome.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct22....@gordian.com>
mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>Gad, is it me or does anybody else feel like they are reading
>Machiavelli? Would the gay equivalent be known at _The Queen_?
No. Machiavelli was an intellectual and knew what he
was talking about. Melmonabellow is not and does not.
Jess Anderson
In article <1992Oct22.0...@macc.wisc.edu>
ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
>one is left to wonder what you think
>you're actually accompishing.
Or even accomplishing! (It isn't Michael I had to fix that
for, it's Ellen!)
Jess Anderson
>No. Machiavelli was an intellectual and knew what he
>was talking about. Melmonabellow is not and does not.
[mall bowel omen]
,
Eamonn did it, not me; he sent that *evil* software over
here, and Satan *made* me use it. Honest!
Laura Creighton
>
>In article <1c2gam...@crcnis1.unl.edu>
>c...@unlinfo.unl.edu (Colburn Eigen) writes:
>
>>This is only a further evolution of the destruction of the
>>republic.
>
>If more than two of our 40,000 readers gave any credence at
>filter that line through a number of their insecurities and
>promptly discount it to zero. They will think: he's crazy.
>Some will think: old-line lefty. One of our most active
>recent participants will think: totalitarian Marxist. Our
>stupidest-ever participant won't think at all, and *that's*
>the point: he is the paradigm for everything else you say
>here: as a person he's next to nothing, as a symbol, he's
>very nearly the whole show.
Jess, this is me who proposed this. Remember me.
I'm the person who doesn't give a flying fuck where
you are a Whacko totalitarian pinko Commie Marxist asshole,
or whether you are a Whacko tolitarian libertarian capitalist
asshole. If it makes good sense I'll go with it, If it makes
bad sense I will argue with you about it, and if I can't
get the sense I will question you about it.
Sound fair?
]
>
>>For those schools that become "voucherized" or its
>>equivalent, the same erosion of quality will be seen as has
>>occurred with the public schools for all the plan does is
>>ignore the basic problem.
>
>Check! Not that the means make so much difference, of
>course.
Here is the questioning.
Why is the same erosion of quality about to happen?
>
>>The public schools have gone to
>>pot because parental (and other) America has not supported
>>the *idea* of education, has foisted on schools the tasks
>>properly those of parents (eeek! sounds like family
>>values), and has so resisted true evaluation of their
>>childrens' performance and abilities as to render the
>>grading and promotion system a farce. This too will happen
>>to the voucher schools. It is not only the inner city
>>schools that are producing know-nothing graduates.
Sure, but why is that an issue?
We have to build schools that take on the roles that parents used
to have, if only because there are too many kids who are
effectively parentless. It stinks. I don't like it. But it is
part of the world I live in. Wishing it were different does
piss-all.
>
>Of course, if you want to do something about that, our local
>far right calls you a commie. That alone ought to tell you
>the Ministry of Truth is doing its job.
This is truth proved because a bunch of jerks hate me?
In the world I live in there is no shortage of jerks to go
around, far right jerks, far left jerks, middle of the
road jerks. I'd like truth to be shown for something
stronger than the enemies it makes.
>
>>A year or two ago when this voucher (and the MA plan is
>>similar) plan was broached, either The Progressive or
>>Dollars and Sense predicted this outcome. It is nothing
>>more than a scheme to further the interest of the upper and
>>upper middle class.
>
>The proponents of such schemes want your soul. They're
>almost done with the task now. Watch in horror as your
>fellow citizens get with the program. The "program," in sad
>fact, is actually the deprogramming of the ability to think
>critically, just as you said.
What the hell is this?
Major League misunderstanding.
Laura
--
Since Ryan White was buried in April 1990, his grave has been vandalized
*more than* four times.
(this news courtesy Phil Paxton ipw...@indycms.bitnet)
Laura Creighton
to...@toad.com
hoptoad!laura
cbe
>(Jess Anderson) writes:
> A lament on the state of the world, with the rich irony of
>not realizing that the portrait he paints is done with a
>mirror.
> Sad, very sad. Pathetic even, if it weren't for the fact
>that this affects us all.
>--
> Michael Thomas (mi...@gordian.com)
> "I don't think Bambi Eyes will get you that flame thrower..."
> -- Hobbes to Calvin
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
An adequate display of comic book thought from a cartoon.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Colburn Eigen H|u> = E|u>
Jess Anderson
In article <1c6ioq...@crcnis1.unl.edu>
c...@unlinfo.unl.edu (cbe) writes:
>>Melmothra, acc
>>(and slightly to the right of Atilla the Rad)
>You do Attila (assuming you meant that 5th century notable) a disservice.
>When it came to caring for his own tribe, and within the context of his
>society, he had much more of a sense of obligation to community than you,
>apparently, will ever be able to manifest.
Colburn, you adorable but naive puppy, you, how *could* you
forget that for Matthew, there simply *is* no history prior
to His Own Appearance. His social and intellectual calendar
starts with i AM and regards anything earlier as BM.
Jess Anderson
In article <BwJ14...@queernet.org> rog...@QueerNet.ORG
(Roger B.A. Klorese) writes:
>In article <1992Oct18....@gordian.com>,
>mi...@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>>[SOS -- of course, I mean "same old stuff," but it does mean
>> other things. Michael so loves exercises left to the reader
>> that what exactly, other than "save our ship," we leave to
>> his fertile (what's it covered up with, you wonder?)
>> imagination.]
Very good piece, Roger. Thank you.
>How many around here remember the days of Kennedy?
>Johnson? Nixon, even?
I was just thinking about Nixon, in light of several threads
active around here lately. When Watergate broke, I just
couldn't *wait* to get rid of Nixon, and I shamelessly and
gleefully gloated when he stepped into the helicopter and
dared to give his perversion of the Wolrd War II victory
symbol. "How typical," I thought.
Had I known then, of course, what I know now, I probably
would have moved heaven and earth, to the extent I could, to
retain the man in office and in public life after his
presidency. Not because of any sympathy for his regressive
political philosophy nor because of any tolerance for his
incredible disregard for such niceties as the Constitution
or the law, but because I could not in my wildest dreams
have imagined the utter imbecility and corruption of what
would eventually follow: Reagan and Bush. On the scale of
criminals, Nixon stands to Reagan/Bush approximately as a
pursesnatcher stands to a rapist.
And if anything, this impression is magnified by being able
to remember the days of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower in
addition to the others you mention.
>How many believe we are financially and socially better off now?
Financially, probably 500 people, worldwide. Socially,
probably at least 100,000,000 in this country alone. That's
the scary part. That so many queer people seem not to
realize the full extent of the problem (and in at least one
notable case in soc.motss, not even to care), indeed, scares
me right where I live.
cbe
>In article <1992Oct21....@macc.wisc.edu>, ande...@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson) writes:
>>
>> In article <1c2gam...@crcnis1.unl.edu>
>> c...@unlinfo.unl.edu (Colburn Eigen) writes:
>>
>> >This is only a further evolution of the destruction of the
>> >republic.
>>
>> If more than two of our 40,000 readers gave any credence at
>> all to what you just said, I would be floored.
>I think you may be underestimating us a bit, Jess. Despite which
>voices are loudest, progressive thought is alive and well in
>soc.motss, I should think. I think Colburn and you have the right idea
>about what's happening in the country, and in the world; where I
>differ slightly is the degree to which you ascribe it to conscious
>conspiracy (more on this below).
>>
>> >A year or two ago when this voucher (and the MA plan is
>> >similar) plan was broached, either The Progressive or
>> >Dollars and Sense predicted this outcome. It is nothing
>> >more than a scheme to further the interest of the upper and
>> >upper middle class.
>Yes. But note something that I might not have made clear: the MA
>"choice" law applies only to *public* schools. They have not quite
>reached the point of mandating transfers of funds from the public
>schools in one community to the private schools in another. Instead
>they are taking a step toward the "privatization" of the public
>schools, by fostering "economic competition" among them -- which
>pretends to ignore various obvious facts, such as the fact that
>public schools are not businesses, are not intended to be run as such,
>and have no mechanism for generating revenue (nor should they).
But in that state which is a model for progressive political action,
Colorado, there is yet another proposition which I am lead to believe
will also allow vouchers for private schools. I did not mean to
confine my comment to the MA situation alone. I apologize for not
being more explicit in this regard.
>> >I bring up a scenario that I have wondered about before:
>> >Consider what would have to be done to control a country
>> >such as this.
>> [...]
>> >So what is a good plutocracy to do? First, control the
>> >media. But that is of little use unless you have a citizenry
>> >who can be taught not to think....
>> >How do you accomplish such a task? Destroy the educational
>> >system. Naturally, you are careful so that you will properly
>> >educate those of your class but be certain that only the
>> >ignorant are produced in other school systems.
>> >... you will be certain that the great majority are so
>> >poorly educated that you can do your will with their lost
>> >capacity for critical evaluation.
>[...]
>> >But, of course, it is only sheer fantasy.
>>
>> Yeah, sure. Fantasy. Too bad about that, eh?
>All of this is happening, to be sure. But I think there might be an
>element of fantasy here too: the notion of an all-powerful cabal (!)
>that has deliberately set out to destroy the schools in order to
>control the population. It's not the malice that I question; it's the
>ability to cooperate on such a grand scale.
For effect, it seemed useful to mirror the conspiracy theory so
beloved of the new state socialists. {I must confess to a dislike of
smilies to indicate irony. After all, such devices are usually
unnecessary in traditional print media which may be presenting the
satiric or ironic view.} To further the idea that there was no one
motivator, I referred to a class, the plutocracy. Of course, I agree
there is no *active*, planned conspiracy. However, the result appears
that it will be the same. And if a model makes a valid predicition,
it is still worth consideration.
>Remember that the people we're talking about -- the wealthy, the
>controllers of industry -- got where they are by looking out for
>themselves first and foremost, and are in competition with one
>another. I don't see them sitting around in a room agreeing on a
>program for ensuring the ignorance of future generations of Americans.
Of this I am not entirely convinced. Perhaps it is not that they
have an agenda and sit about a table discussing it, but I have been
to enough shindigs of the powerful to realize they certainly are not
fools and ideas such as this do not go unremarked. They are a class
every bit as imbued with self-interest and feelings of being "chosen" by
virtue of their wealth as was any aristocrat of the ancien regime.
The hilarious thing is that they are able to convince many, so well
exemplified recently on soc.motts, to be their lap dogs and stalking
horses. The mirth arises from knowledge of the contempt and disdain
they hold for these surrogates since they know that these benighted
souls will rarely, if ever, join the plutocracy. These dupes are simply
the new samurai retainers who will commit societal and political
suicide for their masters.
>Nor do I see them taking the long view; everything about the way
>corporate America behaves suggests a tendency to go for short-term
>profit, and the hell with fifty years from now (which includes their
>own descendants).
Again I take some exception. As far as the engines of production of
society are concerned they take the short term view because it is to
their advantage. I know well enough that the children of the
plutocrats are well tended (I am trustee of several quite munificent
trusts) and that these same people who will drive their corporation
into Chapter 11 or into a LBO with lucrative golden parachutes,
do take a much more long term view when it comes to *their own* wealth.
When wealth is theirs, it is cautiously husbanded and invested for quite
long term stability. In essence, they or their surrogates have, again
as shown by recent postings to motss, concern for themselves alone.
It is this commonality of supreme selfishness that drives their action
as a group.
>I think it's more a matter of fostering trends that appear to be
>advantageous, and not doing anything to rock their own particular
>boat. Keeping their own taxes down is obviously one such, so they make
>a lot of noise to encourage people in the idea that all taxes are bad.
>The appalling state of inner-city education doesn't do them any harm,
>so they see no reason to allow their resources to be diverted toward
>improving it. When crime levels reach the stage where their property
>is directly threatened, they call for more police, more prisons, and
>more restrictions on civil liberties. But I think it's a combination,
>largely fortuitous, of short-term "gains" that perpetuates the
>institutions of oppression and leads to the long-term effects that you
>describe so eloquently.
I really doubt it is *that* fortuitous. The likes of William Buckley
have been working for years on the "conservative agenda" which, of
course, is not conservative at all, but a form of statism for the
wealthy. It is no coincidence that the work of this viper and those
of his ilk have provided rich soil for the Robertsons, the Milikans,
and the list goes on....
The people are about to lose their country. Perot promises to not
only buy it for them but from them. It may not happen this time but
it is inevitable. My model for the takeover of a democracy is
particularly alarming because it presents an irreversible situation.
Once you "diseducate" the citizenry and reduce them to media
dependents, you need not worry about them turning to reverse the process.
Unlike the world in the Year of Our Ford, surveillance or constant harangue
will be unnecessary for you will have a convinced society of believers.
Any study of history shows that democracies do not survive for any
appreciable time on the scale of empires. In some sense, their
failure may be found to map rather consistently on the scenario I
presented. The fundamental source of failure seems to be the
seemingly inevitable loss of sense of commonality of all, a propensity
to exercise personal rather than civic interest, and the
stratification of the society into classes wherein a large number are
effectively disenfranchised to the gain of an elite dedicated to
cupidity.
Roger B.A. Klorese
Thomas) writes:
|> In article <BwH74...@queernet.org>, rog...@QueerNet.ORG (Roger B.A.
|> Klorese) writes:
|> > In article <1992Oct20....@gordian.com>, mi...@gordian.com (Michael
|> A.
|> > Thomas) writes:
|> > |> Just look at the
|> > |> BS that school districts have to go through to purchace
|> > |> textbooks. What they end up getting is the most milquetoast
|> > |> and diluted books possible, so as not to "offend" anyone.
|> >
|> > ...which, of course, is caused by increased interference by yahoo parents
|> > with the professional education process, such as you advocate.
|>
|> Which is to imply that you think that parental involvement in their
|> childrens education is a Bad Thing?
No. Learn to read for comprehension.
When parents assisted teachers, providing mild influence and major support
to public school instruction, and left the professional educators to implement
the detailed content of curriculum, thoughtful and effective public education
often ensued. When parents think they get a direct vote on every text used and
every lesson plan developed, nonsense like "scientific creationism" and texts
which attempt to return to woman's-place-is-in-the home-ism have followed.
There is a big difference between involvement and control; I would no more
expect to be able to dictate every word my child's teacher speaks than I
would expect to be able to tell my dentist which drill bit to use.
|> Wow. Not even I would have the
|> audacity to claim the other side would think such a thing. Do
|> the words State Sponsored Mind Control bother you at all?
Do the words "license to teach popular lies" bother you at all? Or are you
still keeping your Flat Earth Society membership dues up-to-date?
--
ROGER B.A. KLORESE +1 415 ALL-ARFF
rog...@unpc.QueerNet.ORG {ames,decwrl,pyramid}!mips!unpc!rogerk
"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."
-- J. Foster
Roger B.A. Klorese
|> however, that a good deal of special education programs were mandated
|> by state or federal laws. The public schools did not willing go
|> into this endeavor.
The "public school system" is as much those Federal and state laws which
direct the behavior of the schools as the sachools themselves. Why do you
offer a case for government intervention in education as an argument
against it?
|> Yes sweetheart, I certainly am old enough. Governor Reagan
|> had nothing to do with proposition 13 either. It was old
|> Guvnor Moonbeam's administration which witnessed that magnificent
|> event (who did an amazing 180 about face on support once it
|> passed).
..And Reagan's soon-to-be-constituents who rammed it down his throat.