[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

@ August,

If you base your view on the group of people you are teaching at that trade school, then you are basing on a very specialised audience that neither could surprise anyone with it'S attotude and interest for trade, nor is is a representative sample of the social structure of the american society.It is a highly specialised group.

So you're claiming that an interest in improving ones situation is not representative of the social structure of American society? If so you don't know us very well.

Is the lecturing for free or almost free (an equivalent to German Volkshochschulen), or do the courses cost money like at university? If more like the latter, then you already would have a specialisation of that group by the fact that these are exclusively people who can afford the costs of the education (which I would expect to make a difference since education in the US and Germany gets handled very differently). Which would be illusionary for a poor family where both parents have lost their jobs recently, work in three different low wage jobs both, and find their family financially floating just above the limit at the end of the month (not to mention time).

The tuition of well over half my students is paid via several worker retraining programs, so they pay little or nothing. The rest are there on student loans which are granted based on a persons future earnings potential rather than their present wealth. Call it illusionary if you want but if so it's an illusion that is personified in thousands of vocational schools like mine spread across the country.

I perfectly understand how the american model was supposed to work. But the important question is if the ideology adequately decribes the reality, and this I always have put in doubt: I see a huge contrast between the historic claim how america wants to be, and how it really is. the social polarisations seem to massively increases as well, since somewhere in the 70s.

That's because you get your information from rags like Speigel and the NYT who make their livings on spreading gloom and doom, or you read the crap the political parties are always slinging at each other and think that it is gospel. Like I've said twice so far. Folks have been prognosticating our imminent doom for over 200 years. They ain't been right yet.

And on that note let me end this with a few appropriate words from the immortal American Bard Charles Daniels, Esq.:

Well the eagles been flying slow,
and the flag's been flying low,
and a lotta people say that America's fixing to fall.
But speaking just for me,
and some people from Tennessee,
we got a thing or two to tell ya all.
This lady may have stumbled,
but she ain't ever fell.
And if our enemies don't believe that,
they can all go straight to hell.