US FIscal Policy

GothicGothicness said:

How do you fix parents though ?

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There needs to be a much more thorough integration of parents within the educational culture. I don't know how often parents and educators correspond, but I'd guess that it's not that often. Having educators and parents engaging each other on a weekly basis will give both of them a better indication of where the kids may be falling behind. Parents need to stop treating schools as taxpayer-funded day care, and schools need to work harder to be more transparent and accessible by the communities they serve.

There needs to be a concerted effort to reduce the hypersexualization and delayed emotional maturation of our children, and a renewed focus in educating them in what it means to be a socially responsible adult. Our culture is inundated by themes of individualism, self-gratification, and irresponsibility- both social and sexual - and we actively reward people who are the worst possible examples for our kids, i.e.; the entire cast of the Jersey Shore. Particularly in the US, they grow up with an inadequate education on sex, due to our misguided belief that openly discussing sex and sexuality with our kids is somehow going to dramatically raise the frequency of teen pregnancy, or turn them all into gays. So, now you have egocentric, hard-partying, hyper-consumers, obsessed only with their own wants and the next piece of ass they can get, and eventually the odds catch up with them and they're forced to deal with the reality that they might be parents pretty soon. Only, not only is their emotional growth stunted; they're woefully unprepared for parenthood by a culture that has effectively taught them that children mean the end of fun, individuality, and irresponsibility. And we, as a culture, sit back and lament the lack of engagement, single parent birth-rates, and slumping education scores.

^
yes, we need to socially engineer the smelly peasants into being decent ppl and not reproduce so much

SAGO said:

^
yes, we need to socially engineer the smelly peasants into being decent ppl and not reproduce so much

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I'm not so sure I'd be that coarse...

Let me totally endorse what Buzz said 2 posts up!!

Corwin said:

I actually believe there should be free courses offered on effective parenting for newlyweds.

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Completely misses the non-wed parents, unfortunantly. It also completely misses the parents that needs these courses, since most of the attendants to these courses will be the pepole who would have done a good job without them.

Free courses in parenting isn't a bad idea, but don't count on it to shake society at it's core.

Übereil

There's a difference between newlyweds and new parents. Both need courses, but I'd make unmarried parents pay!!

A free course won't help at all as Ubereil said the parents who needed the course would not attend it.... and the ones that would attend would have been good parents anyway. Also do we really get "better" children..... in a country like South Korea where they spend 99% of their teenage year studying like crazy... ruining their eyes.. and not enjoying what could be some of the best parts of life. I doubt it.

I think other experiences could be at least as valuable as studies both for the country and for the individual......

Corwin said:

There's a difference between newlyweds and new parents. Both need courses, but I'd make unmarried parents pay!!

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Why? Are wed parents worse suited for parenting so they need more help than non-wed parents?

Übereil

SAGO said:

money is awesome

the motivation for getting rich is to gloat over those stupid poor ppl who think having morals makes them better people

i burn money in front of a homeless hobo

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I realise you're being sarcastic, but leaving that aside why is wealth incompatible with morality?

There's plenty of rich people who are rich because of effort and ability and who make material contributions to society and plenty of poor people who are poor because of sloth and ineptitude whose constant sponging off the state is far from moral.

Difficult to know what to do on the parent issue, I think the best one can do is to make sure that the state thoroughly backs teachers in standing up to unreasonable parents.

Possibly one could even allow schools the power to force parents to attend (at their own cost) appropriate parenting courses where they are behaving unreasonably, backed up either by fines for parents or the right to exclude children

Benedict said:

I realise you're being sarcastic, but leaving that aside why is wealth incompatible with morality?

There's plenty of rich people who are rich because of effort and ability and who make material contributions to society and plenty of poor people who are poor because of sloth and ineptitude whose constant sponging off the state is far from moral.

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morality does not exist, if you think it exists then youre just a sheep. its an abstract. gunna rage at this revelation?

btw, i wasnt being sarcastic, i really do burn money in front of hobos.

Benedict said:

I realise you're being sarcastic, but leaving that aside why is wealth incompatible with morality?

There's plenty of rich people who are rich because of effort and ability and who make material contributions to society and plenty of poor people who are poor because of sloth and ineptitude whose constant sponging off the state is far from moral.

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The problem comes when we focus our attention on the rich that earned their wealth unethically, and the poor who are utilizing the system while avoiding an attempt to work and better themselves, and then making those examples stereotypes.

Wealth is not incompatible with morality, but it gets a worse rap because you don't see a lot of poor people rolling in Bentleys, with unlimited access to legislators and power players in our culture. It's nothing more than basic human envy, or a sense of impropriety in flaunting wealth when there are people who are struggling to find enough food, or a safe, warm place to sleep.

I'm guilty of embracing the stereotype myself.

SAGO said:

morality does not exist, if you think it exists then youre just a sheep. its an abstract. gunna rage at this revelation?

btw, i wasnt being sarcastic, i really do burn money in front of hobos.

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Morality is a mutable social construct. It exists as much as society desires it. Existential proselytizing is for wimps who can't commit.

Benedict said:

Difficult to know what to do on the parent issue, I think the best one can do is to make sure that the state thoroughly backs teachers in standing up to unreasonable parents.

Possibly one could even allow schools the power to force parents to attend (at their own cost) appropriate parenting courses where they are behaving unreasonably, backed up either by fines for parents or the right to exclude children

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I think we have to stop thinking about it in terms of Parents vs Teachers (Us vs Them). We have to work harder to integrate our society and the various components within it. Our individualism and pride leads to a high degree of fractiousness that's unhealthy.

Benedict said:

There's plenty of rich people who are rich because of effort and ability and who make material contributions to society and plenty of poor people who are poor because of sloth and ineptitude whose constant sponging off the state is far from moral.

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Blaming pepole for ineptitude? When did they ever activly choose to be inept? Or lazy, for that matter.

Übereil

Ubereil said:

Blaming pepole for ineptitude? When did they ever activly choose to be inept? Or lazy, for that matter.

Übereil

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I think everyone chooses to be lazy, and most people can display a reasonable level of ability if they put in some effort.

If someone is so developmentally retarded that they can't muster any skills then I'm fine with society supporting them as genuinely disabled people, but I think there's an awful lot of people whose lack of application is the main issue.

Captain Buzzkill said:

I think we have to stop thinking about it in terms of Parents vs Teachers (Us vs Them). We have to work harder to integrate our society and the various components within it. Our individualism and pride leads to a high degree of fractiousness that's unhealthy.

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A lovely idea, how would you make that happen though?

I don't think it's individualism and pride that are the issue anyway, I think it's a sense of entitlement and an abdication of responsibility that drive most of these problems. The teachers should be putting up with the children's shit. The teachers should take responsibility for the children learning regardless of the home environment the children experience.

I don't know what people experience elsewhere, but it's interesting in the UK with our various different streams of immigrants. Children of Oriental, Polish, West African and Asian / Middle Eastern immigrants tend to try hard and do really well. Most other immigrants and the poor indigenous tend to do badly. Overall cultural background is a significantly stronger indicator of educational effort and success than location or affluence.

Benedict said:

I think everyone chooses to be lazy, and most people can display a reasonable level of ability if they put in some effort.

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But why don't they put in effort? I've come to believe pepole who call unmotivated pepole lazy do so because they don't know the answer to that question and never bothered to try and answer it.

I'd try and answer it for you but because of my flu I'm too unmotivated. Instead it woud be interesting to see why you think they don't put in the effort. Learning to understand different points of views and all that.

Übereil

Benedict said:

A lovely idea, how would you make that happen though?

I don't think it's individualism and pride that are the issue anyway, I think it's a sense of entitlement and an abdication of responsibility that drive most of these problems. The teachers should be putting up with the children's shit. The teachers should take responsibility for the children learning regardless of the home environment the children experience.

I don't know what people experience elsewhere, but it's interesting in the UK with our various different streams of immigrants. Children of Oriental, Polish, West African and Asian / Middle Eastern immigrants tend to try hard and do really well. Most other immigrants and the poor indigenous tend to do badly. Overall cultural background is a significantly stronger indicator of educational effort and success than location or affluence.

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Those immigrant populations tend to do well in school because they generally come from poorer backgrounds, in countries that have less personal freedom. The norm for those who exist in a low socioeconomic class is to respect and fear authority, and value education and hard work. In countries like our own, respect for authority isn't valued, and neither is education, at least not to any degree that is seen in other nations.

Placing the onus of responsibility solely on teachers is not only wrong, but it allows parents to abdicate their responsibility to raise their children to value education and respect the authority of teachers. Teachers shouldn't have to "put up with" childrens' shit; they should be able to discipline chilldren within the school environment, and they should be able to alert parents to their childrens' misbehavior, with the expectation that parents will do their part to correct said behavior, instead of launching some kind of crusade to have the teacher fired, or filling a lawsuit against the school district. If you think that teachers should be able to teach, no matter what the kids life is like outside of school, then you obviously haven't studied any inner city statistics, which conclude time and time again, that students under-perform, no matter how much money is thrown into the school district, no matter what the teacher quality is in school. It's because of how dangerous and chaotic their lives are, the lack of positive social structure and role models, absent or neglectful parents, and a host of other issues that have nothing to do with the school or the teachers.

Amen bro...Preach it!!