School vouchers - bad idea?

[The Dharma Bum]

[spacemonkey]

Schools are almost becoming day care.

[Divinity11]

[Divinity11]

[The Dharma Bum]

Correct me if I am wrong but you seemed to say that you want to militarize public education by exposing school children to military discipline as a matter of course and that up to 80% of the population ought to be raised in public institutions. This extreme view has to be due to a very narrow perspective. I suspect that because of your occupation you can't look at the issue objectively, if this is the kind of unrealistic solution you propose.

I'm sure you are a fine teacher, but the point of society is not to make your job easy by producing robotic, mechanized behavior in children. Drugs and operant conditioning will never create that level of regimentation anyway, which is why automation and software have the potential to do labor better than humans do it. Let's look at the big picture. The orderly, mechanized system you envision is suitable for machinery, but not people. Machines do not need discipline to sit still and do their work all day precisely because they do not have minds or consciousness. Humans do, which makes them unsuitable for the sort of drudgery that requires military discipline from schoolchildren.

I think a better solution would be a society where parents don't have to work two jobs to make it every month. By two jobs I mean apiece, not two people with jobs. The problem is people spend their lives in thrall to the profit making schemes that modern society is geared toward instead of with their families and communities.

The result is the atomized, anomie ridden mess we have.

Take the profit motive away and it also removes the incentive that leads to many of our problems.

[The Dharma Bum]

why do authoritarians think regimentation and uniforms will fix any problem?

[Divinity11]

[exploited]

[Winchester]

[merc4evr]

School vouchers - Good Idea!

It appears most people don't understand the basic idea of school vouchers. Most proposals give parents a voucher which is less money than it costs for each student enrolled in public school. Even though the student is no longer occupying a seat in a public school, the school still gets the remainder of the money the voucher doesn't cover. This increases the per student funds available for the public school and gives parents who actually care about their kids education an alternative. Oddly enough, even though the vouchers are less than the amount spent per student in public schools, it's enough to cover all or most of the tuition in better performing private schools. Spending more money isn't the solution.

In 1979, the year before the federal dept. of education began, the country's illiteracy rate was said to be 6/10's of a percent. Today, illiteracy is about 14-16%. It's obvious public education gets worse every year, so the solution is to turn it over to private enterprise. If all students vouchered out of the public schools, private schools would spring up by the thousands and they would be held accountable by parents, who would remove children from poorly performing schools and enroll them in schools which did a better job.

Most politicians who insist we need to spend more on pubic schools send their own children to private schools. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had that choice?