From: rhs@world.std.com (Richard H Schwartz)
Newsgroups: rec.org.mensa
Subject: Re: Fermat's flunkeys (was Re: A Real Challenge)
Date: 17 Apr 92 02:32:36 GMT
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA

werme@alliant.com (Ric Werme) writes:

>In article <1992Apr16.160528.11486@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> jc@sppip7.lkg.dec.com (John Chambers) writes:
>>This free-market approach to education is very shortsighted.  Consider
>>a  bright  but very poor kid in the local ghetto of your choice.

>So why are several private schools popping up in Harlem at the expense
>of free public education?  

Because even in the poorest ghetto, there are a few optimists.  But a little
optimism won't do as much good for society as a whole as tax-supported
public education.

>Instead of forcing people to go to school,
>perhaps we could do better by teaching kids who respect education
>enough to want to learn.  

Every decision in life is an economic decision, and this is much more so
beneath the poverty line than above.  Respect doesn't put food in anyone's 
mouth.  Private-only education will result in denying schooling to kids 
who *would* respect education if they could afford it. 

>It's also a good way to select the parents
>who are interested in helping their kid's education.  And to encourage
>both. 

You assume that all kids have parents who are 1) present, 2) loving, 3)
physically and economically capable of participating in their children's
education to the extent that they would like to.  All are bad assumptions
a lot of the time.  

>A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but to force a mind
>that wants to learn to go to a public (government) school whose
>charter includes forcing kids to be there is probably a greater waste.

Now you're assuming that children are capable of making decisions about
their future.  Before this you were promoting parental involvement.  Which
do you want?  There's lots of traps in either direction.

To my mind, parental involvement can amount just as easily to parents 
forcing what they want upon their children.  This might mean keeping the
kids home from public school because the parents don't believe in it
even though the kids like it.  This might mean not paying for private-only
education because the parents want to go to Hawaii next year, or eat
dinner this year.

>>Early this century, America went to great lengths  to  deny  education
>>and  opportunity  to  the  large  influx  of people from Mediterranean
>>countries, and we paid a high price for it in the form  of  the  Mafia
>>and crime rates among the highest in the world.

>Gee, and I thought it was prohibition that brought out the best of
>the Mafia.  Any similarity with the current drug crime situation is
>probably valid.

You're only considering the product demand market.  The labor demand market
is a different matter.  Why is it that you don't see a lot of wealthy
WASP-types pushing drugs on street-corners?  There's good money in it, but
the risks are too high for someone who *has* other options.  The crime
labor market attracts those with no other options.

>>  Then and now, we have
>>denied education and opportunities to urban black kids;

>John Gotti is black!?   [Sorry, that's an uncalled for cheap shot.]

So why'd you leave it in?

>> we are  paying
>>a  high  price  for  it when they make it in the only way available to
>>them: crime and drugs.  The recent influx of immigrants from Southeast
>>Asia  has  produced  the same sort of denials in their inevitably poor
>>communities, and we are seeing a greater involvement  of  these  young
>>people in organized crime.

>You're being overly general here.  Note also that many of the SE Asian
>students are also at the top of their class.  Someone at work here
>says she has read stuff on the high degree of familial involvement in
>their kid's education.

Their kid's *public* education, for the most part.

>>When will we ever learn?

>As long as the government is doing the teaching, it can be a while.

As long as people question the merits of providing basic education to
everyone, it *will* be a while.

None of my teachers worked for the government.  They worked for the school
board, who were elected by senior citizens who showed up to out-vote the
working stiffs who couldn't take time away from their jobs.  Consequently
schools were under-funded at a time when enrolment (and hence percentage
of the voting population who were parents of school-kids) was at its peak. 
The problem wasn't the government at all -- the government was the force
behind every attempt to make schools better, which the taxpayers voted 
down every time.  I admit that this is a bad situation, but the cause is
the people, not the government.  Privatization is not the answer.  Rational
funding is.

-rich







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             Richard H. Schwartz, Scheduling Systems Inc.,
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