[extropy-chat] it's all understandable, except

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 12:04:14PM -0500, Ben Goertzel wrote:

> Home schooling is an option ... so, the parents' attitudes are the
> real issue, not just the school system....  If more parents recognized
> the relatively destructive nature of the US public school system,
> they'd just pull their kids out.. ;-)

Homeschooling is an excellent idea, in theory. In practice, there's
the problem of wingnuts, who tend to homeschool in order to protect
the poor young'n's from nefarious indoctrination (and fluoridization,
which corrupts their precious body fluids).

Paying decent wages tends to draw quality personnel, and gets rid
of the problem quite naturally. Education is about the most important
item there is, so there's no point in getting cheapskate on that.
Allright, I agree that current peer climate is poisonous, but it is
above practice that got it there where it is. Hiring private tutors
for everbody until the memetic pool eventually detoxes is not really 
an option. Also, most of the problems are in poor parenting, which 
is firmly an issue of the modern job market. Schools can't moderate toxic 
children dumped into the system by a slave-driving job market (which 
in no way takes away the burden of the parental units to actually make 
parenting a priority in their lives, of course).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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