Quote:
Originally Posted by Aramike
(Post 1384573)
I have to agree with Neal on this one. Perhaps its the public's job to pay for educating our youth - but it is NOT the public's job to provide a forum for students to express themselves freely.
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Education shouldn't be the public's job, period. If it were a real job, they'd have been fired a long time ago. Of course, I don't see the American public making the leap of faith into completely privatized education anytime soon, even if poorer families were eligible for subsidies to help pay for it, though I do think as private a system as possible would be best.
If I had a kid, and I had an actual choice of schools (not "pay for these schools, and then pay for the one you choose as well") I'd probably send him or her to a uniformed school, assuming I could find one with a snappy uniform and a good rep for a reasonable price; and I would, too, because schools would be like supermarkets. They'd be all over the place in every variety you can imagine.
Whether or not uniforms are a good thing is not the issue. The issue is that if my child is forced to attend a particular school with a particular curriculum and student/staff populace, then I will not tolerate uniforms, or any other enforced choices. Uniforms? No. School lunch only? No. Mandatory extracurriculars or electives? No. Mandatory non-academic activies? No. Forced busing? No. No No no no no no no no!
Obviously, my hypothetical child would have to be home schooled, since I wouldn't send them to a parochial school, but even home-schooled children tend to do a lot better than publicly-educated children, or even privately-schooled children, and all for around 16% of the cost of public school spending per pupil. The only thing that sucks about it is that they don't get to learn amongst peers in a social environment. That's an easy fix if you're a good home-teacher. You could always persuade neighbors or friends or family to let you home-school their children along with your own.... oh wait, no you can't, because you'd need a license and a degree and all the required minutiae and licensed staff and approval from everybody under the sun. By the time you get done with that, you'd be running a private school that no one has the money to pay tuition for.
The public school system has been consolidating its grip on education and taxpayer dollars for decades now, and it has only ever gotten worse. Who here assumes that uniforms will magically change that?
This is the straw that fixed the camel's back? This is the level of control needed? The one that has been missing all these years? <"wanking" motion>:roll:
They
always say that if only they had this or that the system would work, and it never does. Not in public schooling, not in public housing, not in public healthcare, not in public anything. Even in the GD
military nothing ever seems to work and it costs bazillions!
<sigh> I better stop myself now, before this turns into another Great Wall of English, but I encourage everyone to look at the bigger picture, here. Uniforms will not fix anything, and incidents like this PC flag rage will only happen more often as time goes on. That's what happens when you try to cram all the squares and triangles and octagons and whatnot into the hole made for the circle.