Bin Laden Dead

[Vampyr]

Originally Posted by Professor S

You are both thinking about this from the prism that education must be centrally controlled.

The internet has allowed amazing things to be done with home schooling and community schooling. Giant schools that treat students like cattle are part of the issue.

Part of the solution also needs to be removing the stigma that surround vocational school. College really isn't for everyone. Actually, since most people go to college and treat it like a vocational school, I'd say its not for MOST people.

Our entire educational system is locked in old thinking and idealistic fantasy, not pragmatism or results.

I'm not saying it must be centrally controlled, I'm just having trouble with the logistics of making sure every child is able to get to school. Right now having a government funded and controlled school system means they can track who is and who isn't coming to school, and go after parents who aren't sending their kids to school. Requiring kids to go to the district that they live in means every kid is guaranteed to have transportation.

If you let parents and kids choose which school to go to, the good schools would be crowded and children with parents who didn't care or don't have the means to send them to the better school would be unfairly left out.

I don't think home schooling is really a great option. School is as much about the social growth of people as it is the academic growth, and if home schooling was too acceptable and a lot of people were doing it I think you would also see a lot of slacker parents who don't teach their kids everything they need to know.

As for vocational schools, yeah. College isn't for everyone. Personally I think college is scam that we all pay too much money for. Most degrees aren't worth anything. Teens are indoctrinated into the mindset that they should major in something they "love" with no regard for their future.

You're paying a crap ton of money to a University so that you can ultimately get a degree that is supposed to help you get a decent job. Instead people pay Universities a crap ton of money to get a degree that won't help them with much of anything, and once they graduate they don't really know what to do with themselves because the only thing they've done their whole lives is go back to school. So what do they do? "Eh, I guess I'll just go for my Masters." This decision is made with seemingly no forethought put into what good that masters degree will actually do them in the long run. Instead they sink further and further into debt because of how easy it is to get loans to pay for something so expensive you'll be working for decades to pay it off.

College has me pretty jaded. I feel extremely fortunate that I got a scholarship and majored in something that allowed me to get a good job. I have a friend who was majoring in the same thing I was, dropped out after 2 years in, and is now making as much money as I do doing the same job I do. If I had actually payed for my college I'd be even more annoyed than I am at the idea I potentially wasted 4 years doing homework.

I think we should tell teens and future college students to major in something they -like-, not necessarily love, that has real world applications.

If you absolutely adore philosophy and can't imagine a life where you don't "do" philosophy, that's fine. Go to the library and check out books on philosophy. Read and study philosophy to your hearts desire. You don't need to pay a University an insane amount of money so that you can be bored in a classroom while a professor who doesn't really care about teaching drones on word-for-word on the same things you could have just read yourself.

[Typhoid]

Originally Posted by Professor S

America could cure cancer and we'd see posts about how unfair America is to malignant tumors.

Then I guess that just depends on if they waterboarded the cancer out of the patients, and what your definition of 'patient' is.




Anyways - seriously - I was obviously pretty excited that he's dead. Now, i didn't shout any type of 'hooray', or show any type of outward excitement like that. But internally, it's good to know that he isn't breathing anymore.

I put this on par with the death of Hitler. Obviously they did very different things, in a relatively similar manner - but the death of each is sort of the nail in the coffin.

I personally don't feel right celebrating the death of another human being, because I personally feel that nomatter what someone has done, nomatter how bad - they should have to live with the consequences, not die with them. I'd personally have rather seen Osama (And Saddam, for that matter), live the rest of their lives in jail. Solitary confinement, even. Death is what they expect. Death is what they prepare for. They know if they get captured, they will most likely die. They prepare for this. They warp their idea of their faith to reflect this. Keeping them alive would defy them of what they believe in. That is what I would have wished for him. Personally.


Anyways, to all the people who are creaming their pants with the "Why was he buried so fast" etc. Obviously his body was dumped so fast and anonymously so that nobody could recover the body and construct some type of shrine. What would you rather they do with the body? Put it in the Smithsonian as "The person who was held accountable for the death of thousands of people, and a global war"?


Anyways. Rot. I hope Osama Bin Laden's afterlife is nothing like he imagined.

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Vampyr

I'm not saying it must be centrally controlled, I'm just having trouble with the logistics of making sure every child is able to get to school. Right now having a government funded and controlled school system means they can track who is and who isn't coming to school, and go after parents who aren't sending their kids to school. Requiring kids to go to the district that they live in means every kid is guaranteed to have transportation.

If you let parents and kids choose which school to go to, the good schools would be crowded and children with parents who didn't care or don't have the means to send them to the better school would be unfairly left out.

I don't think home schooling is really a great option. School is as much about the social growth of people as it is the academic growth, and if home schooling was too acceptable and a lot of people were doing it I think you would also see a lot of slacker parents who don't teach their kids everything they need to know.

All of your concerns are absolutely valid, but that doesn't mean they are insurmountable. This is a case where regulation is preferable to control. Students can be tracked without having to "check in" on a daily basis. Testing currently monitors students' progress when they attend a centrally controlled school, and testing can track the same for home schooled students.

I'd urge you to look a little more deeply into modern home schooling. There are a lot of great things going on right now, and the internet has been a huge benefit.

Also, after seeing how charter schools basically saved education in New Orleans after Katrina, I'm a big fan of them as well. They are private institutions that use public funds and add a lot of choice and get great results.