From: keithl@klic.rain.com (Keith Lofstrom)
Newsgroups: or.politics
Subject: Re: educational system (was: Re: new initiative)
Date: 25 Jan 93 19:37:22 GMT
Article-I.D.: klic.1993Jan25.193722.16526
Organization: Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits

In article <11187@vice.ICO.TEK.COM> bobbe@vice.ICO.TEK.COM (Robert Beauchaine) writes:
>
>  Well now you've got my ire up, too.  
>
>  It ain't the schools that aren't teaching the three R's, bub.  It's
>  lazy, unmotivated children with equally lazy, unmotivated parents
>  setting a lazy, unmotivated example.

There are lazy parents.  And non lazy parents.  And rich parents.  And
both-parents-working-two-jobs-to-pay-the-highest-tax-burden-in-history
parents.  The problem is pretending that the population is uniform
enough that you can mainstream everybody.  What you get is a school
system that offends nobody and excels in nothing.  And schools that
teach that the three R's are "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" because the
old three R's are too much work for a noisy minority.

>  My wife has been an educator in this state for seven years now,
>  both in the private and public sector.  I was amazed at the lack
>  of parental involvement and concern for students.  One of the
>  single most common complaints coming from parents was that Johnny
>  was stuck with too much homework every night.  Evidentally,
>  Johnny is much more capable of setting an appropriate work load,
>  even though he's only in the fourth grade.

Who taught those parents to be that way?  A simplistic answer would
be to blame it all on the schools THEY went to - another simplistic
answer is to blame it on the rise of ( your favorite conspiracy here ).
My simplistic answer is to blame it on television and the lack of reading
- but then, I read a lot and don't have a TV.  Howsabout we sterilize
anyone who doesn't write two book reports a year? :-)

Okay, we all have our pet theories, and can argue until we turn blue that
we ought to suppress all those other stupid theories, take over the
educational system and implement our OWN theories, and blame any failures
on THEM (TM).  But there is no empirical way to test the results if you 
have nothing to compare to.

Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian-school economists describe (in the
economic realm) the "problem of socialist calculation".  It seems that
a socialist economy needs to observe a free-market economy to get the
behavioral data needed to run the socialist economy.  Well, in essence
we have a socialist school system - not that it teaches socialism, but
that it is chartered to provide for social needs, attempts to serve
everyone equally, and is controlled by the community.   

The problem is, there is NO OBJECTIVE WAY to determine what are social
needs, what constitutes equal service, and which part of the community
controls the schools and which part can be ignored.  For example, you
and I probably don't want to have the President of the Gypsy Joker
Motorcycle Club running the schools - but if he was, we might end up
in 20 years with better motorcycle mechanics and better beer  :-).
On the other hand, a Gypsy Joker might question the value of his
daughter getting a degree in English, then getting a minimum-wage
job at Powell's.  It cuts both ways.

I don't think you can make the socialist model work for schools.  If
they are all the same, they will all be inadequate by most measures.
The school system needs diversity.  The world needs motorcycle
mechanics and quantum mechanics, farmers and pharmacists, poets and
preachers, drag queens and celibates.  It is absurd to think that one
type of school is best suited to turning out all of these.

I am not arguing for "good" schools and "bad" schools, but I *AM*
arguing that what constitutes "good" for you is the epitome of "bad"
for someone else.  Only with a more diverse set of schools, and the
freedom to choose between them, will we learn the value of our pet
educational theories.  If little Jimmy's parents don't want Jimmy
to learn about evolution and sex, and send little Jimmy to Tammy
Faye Bakker Memorial High School, they may end up with a chaste,
hardworking, charitable young man.  Or they may end up with a dropout
working as a hamburger mechanic at McDonalds to support his pregnant
16 year old wife.

We can only find out experimentally.  We can't determine the outcome
through argumentation and logic - the world is too big and our brains
are too small.  And the theories we often argue from, like Marxism
and Fundamentalism, predate computers, television, and automobiles,
making their applicability marginal at best.

The windbags of the left and the right will tell us we don't need to
try out their ideas - just shut up and do it their way.  "Experimenting
on children is evil" - as if we weren't experimenting - badly - now.
"Standards?"  How about if no school is allowed to operate that is worse
than the worst public schools now?  We don't shut THOSE down, do we?
"What if somebody abuses the system?" begs the question of the abuses
going on now;  abuses whose bad results are diffused into the commons,
away from those who should feel the full impact of their own sloppy
choices.  If little Mary's parents want to reduce her academic challenge,
let them.  I don't want them to drag down the children I care about.
Right now, we are losing nearly all of them.  


Oh, and by the way - maim your television! :-)  Handy hint: try wiring
the horizontal and vertical deflection coils through impedance matching
audio transformers to your stereo.  You will probably need to leave an
inductive load on the H driver so the high voltage will still work.  You
get more interesting patterns if you add networks to suppress the common
mode signals.  But that's what I've been saying all along, isn't it?

Keith
-- 
Keith Lofstrom         keithl@klic.rain.com       Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Power ICs
Newsgroups: or.politics