re credentials, I couldnt agree more. There are so many people here where I live who would love to substitute teach, fill in for programs, or teach daily, who have excellent and proven expertise in business, arts, engineering, and degrees often as well … but not a teaching certificate which takes time and money to gain. When I was a trustee on two university boards, and we dealt with registration numbers and mid-career populations… it wasnt that time is money, but its more like time invested with no further real-time-real-use learning, that' seems the sticking point about going back to school to gain teacher cert for mid-career profs.

dr.e

It is absolutely essential that we teach moral values in every school. I also believe that religion is an inherent attribute of human nature and should be taught in public schools. A religious text book would include chapters about each major religion and chapters about all the rest. A true story about the history of religion in human civilization. The stories should be written from the perspective of the religions, not some watered down secular description.

My big complaint about education is this obsession with credentials that our society is adopting. I think education is vital, and the credentials are a great measuring system, but requiring people to have credential to work at certain jobs is oppressive and harmful to human civilization. Schools do not and should not have a monopoly on education. I do not do so well in school, but I like to read. I have a first class education that does not come from school. I do not have any credentials and when I try to talk to people who do, they are usually pretty snobbish about their credentials.

During the 1770s America kind of abolished the concept of a ruling class. We believe in government of the people, by the people and for the people, we don't really want a class of experts telling us what we want and need. You have an equal right to speak, but you have no right to impose your view on anyone. We need to organize our schools and our other social organizations to protect us from these doctors, lawyers and teachers who have appointed themselves to lord it over the people. We do not accept that. We believe in and serve God, the Central Orb of the universe, not any artificial class of human beings.

I believe teaching is one of the most important activities that we all do. We need to insure that we are lifting people up and not pushing them down because they have a different understanding of the truth. There is only one reality.

Which reminds me, we need to teach our children global citizenship. “Earth is but one country, and all mankind are its citizens. (Baha'u'llah) The United Nations is the greatest civilization the has ever existed on earth, it is the next generation of human civilization. The human race is coming together. The diverse assortment of ancient and more recent civilizations are converging into one universal and divine civilization. Ya Baha'u'l Abha

dr.e

dr.e

2012 could be a possibility . . . i can see the headlines, marxist/feminist black female teacher wins the US Presidency!

dr.e

Additionally, there was a lot of talk about the rising cost of college, but what about the many structural issues that intervene that make school, not just college, but high school, an unlikely option for youth of color. I am deeply saddened by the number of black children killed here in Chicago. Just recently four boys were shot on their way from school and a ten year old black girl committed suicide. Last year, at 30 youth from the Chicago Public School System was killed. Something is going on here that moves us beyond discussions of “tax payers’ money” to discussions of structural violence and injustices committed against marginal groups in the US.

Just throwing money at schools or providing vouchers is not the answer. Specifically, vouchers and charter schools take money away from public schools that are already struggling to meet budget deadlines. This is not to say that I do not believe in small schools, because I do, but it is to say that the answer to fixing American schools is complex and requires a serious commitment to justice.

What I would have liked for President Obama to say in his speech is this, “We have failed inner city youth. We have pushed you to meet testing standards without the proper resources to make your achievement possible. We have failed you because we always blame your parents without looking at how we continuously under develop your communities and criminalize you. We have failed you. And as your president, not just the president of the middle class or the “responsible” class or the “hardworking” class, but your president I am going to work with educators, scholars, parents, policy makers and YOU to make sure your schools are safe and that you have equal access to resources—human capital, physical capital, and most important social capital. I make this commitment to you because we will be judged not by what we achieve, but by striving to end injustice. We have failed you, dear ones . . . but this failure will stop with me.”

thanks sweetwilliam, the flower that your name copies, is sweet indeed. This American talks, or rather speaks, “that way.” In your personal lingua, I think you can say it however you wish. Teachers too can teach to the test sweetwilliam, but I believe for most students who hunger to learn, there needs to be more than the rote.

nice to see you again superdestroyer. I think the BA might, as you point out, already have little value. I think it depends on what the degree is in. And I can agree with you about the test of 'does this increase academic learning?' being central. I'd only add, what balance will it give to being able to move through the world we live in now… not ten years ago, not fifty years ago. And, for the record, I dont support quotas or passing people in coursework, who didnt really pass. There are, in my experience, some interesting civil rights. free speech apps that require a teacher to pass a student even though the student did not take in the content of the work, but completed the process. But that's a story for another time.

CStanley, nice to see you again too. I think vouchers are a good idea: For all. Yet, I do know the dark. Meaning, how money given from our pockets to the state and feds, which turns around and 'gives' it in some part to ed institutions, sometimes disappears down a black hole and does not reach the intended persons. The well-dressed who are corrupt, are, well, amazingly bold. That is something that is rampant re 'taxpayer funded' anything… and I am very interested to see what Obama will do re his assertion to 'watch closely.' In this piece I was wanting to think of a world that would not cause pain or harm to anyone, but extinct the bottomfeeders, of which there are way to many to maintain a healthy ecology in ed across the board, and to, you know me, with my daft humor, try to say something useful. I am complimented to be called a person with Republican potential by you CStanley. I am smiling.

dr.e

1. Most of the state mandated tests are exceedingly easy. The upper middle class white kids usually act such tests because they are so simple. Yet, there teachers complain about having to teach to them. Any 11th graders that cannot do 7th grade math should never have been promoted to the 11th grade in the first. If students will held in their grade until they master the material, then all students would easily pass such simplistic tests.

I guess making up things and giving functional illiterates A's for trying makes teaching easier but punishes the children for the rest of their lives. Any school that teaches children at grade level would not have to spent one minute teaching to the test. Schools that promote uneducated children and place social engineering ahead of academic education will always have to teach to the test but the students were not taugtht the first time.

If you make college free, you give up the ability to have an excellant education. Colleges, even easy admission directional state universities benefit from being able to flunk students out and having students decide college is not for them. If you make public universities free, then the value of those degrees goes down while the value of a private university education where academic learning is more important that social engineering will go up.

If you want to destroy the bachelors degree, then make it free.

And last, education will only improve when the impulse to put social engineering ahead of learning is overcome. If you want the public schools to be good, make them more like private schools. Students from kindergarten on should be told that it is a privledge to have a seat in a school and that if they do not want to learn, they will be shown the door. When schools are organized for the student who want to learn instead of organize to force non-learners to pretend that they are learning, education will improve.

the quesiton to ask for every educational proposal is whether it increases the academic learning of the students. If the proposal does not, then there is no need to implement it.

So what if teachers teach to the test, also? It shows they learned something if they then pass the test, you betcha!

My fear is that there, nestled in my arms, she would forget her request to be called a commie and recoil at being in the arms of one, and there she would revert, transform into something darker, individualistic, and self interested. Suddenly she would pull out of my arms and Race back past the square fountains, back to another financial system, into the arms of another, even though she knows that all financial systems have their weaknesses and a perfect storm can bring them all down. She need only find that loose thread and pull on it, before in no time at all we unravel.

The group in the bubble got bigger and bigger and the bubble outlasted all predictions, and the greed was supplanted with even greater greed, until the greedy feed off each other, until finally there was nothing left…..except the greed, the unsatisfied type, the type that thinks everyone was in on it.

Could it be that the communists care more about education than the capitalists?