A few proposals that are going over like a flight of bird dogs: how about if we close the grocery stores, too? Also, why not outlaw homeschooling? My favorite rationale from that one is "to ensure the proper role of government" in our kids' lives. It's been keeping me up nights for sure. A heartbreaking number of kids have too little government in their lives.
Another good rationale is "with homeschooling we have no way of knowing if kids are learning anything." Apparently we lack data about how homeschooled kids blow the doors off public-school kids. Yes, I know the sample is skewed, but that's irrelevant if the proposal is to outlaw the homeschooling that's actually occurring. It matters only if you want to argue about closing the public schools instead, and replace them with 100% homeschooling.
I used to wish I'd been able to afford Harvard. I don't wish that any more.
7 comments:
I read the CNN story on closing grocery stores. The problem this is designed to solve is that dozens of grocery store workers have died from COVID-19. But there's no context. Is that a lot more than in the general population? Are they mostly in the NY area? I certainly agree their deaths are tragic but are they uniquely at risk? I can't tell from the story.
Plus, if the problem is unsafe customers, fix that. Don't let customers in without masks if that's what's needed. If a customer violates social distancing, call the customer on it. Individual stores can increase prices to cover costs of safety equipment, hall monitors, cleaning more often. And, of course, the individual stores can always close if they feel their employees are not safe. Or, if grocery stores are essential then maybe State and local governments need to step in to help with funding, testing for employees, safety equipment - pretend they're hospitals.
I have to assume framing this as "close the stores" rather than providing some context and suggesting alternative ways of addressing the problem is about wanting to stir controversy rather than wanting to actually address any problems that exist.
There’s a good argument for protecting front line workers, either by taking on their healthcare expenses for a while or in some other fashion. There’s not a good argument for closing grocery stores.
The attitudes on homeschooling are troubling for two different reasons. One is the picture of how education works that they must have, as you mention. If they don't believe the tests, what alternative method of measuring educational success do they propose, and do they know that homeschoolers are failing by that metric? We know the answers.
Yet equally troubling is that these arguments are old and have been answered many times. I recall hearing these objections in the 1980s, and at the time, agreed they could be a problem. Why, how would we know that a child was being educated if they weren't being supervised by a real teacher?
It may have been a fair question, but now it has been answered for two generations. How have professional educators not absorbed this information and at least come up with new objections?
I used to wish I'd been able to afford Harvard. I don't wish that any more.
I do still wish I'd been able to afford Harvard. I have use for today's value of that kind of money. A Spider, a Velocity twin, come to mind. Along with some other goodies with what would be left over--there's buying opportunities in the market.
Eric Hines
I enjoy watching America's public indoctrination system collapse along with other institutions. In order to get anything new, the old must be destroyed or killed.
If it wasn't done this way, something more interesting would happen (a world fire storm as seen in Australia).
AVI, they probably think the old objections are serving them quite well, so why bother coming up with new ones? Did they ever care whether they actually held water, or was the point to protect the unionized jobs?
Unionized jobs and state control over what children are taught to believe.
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