Ok, this has gone too far....

[bookworm_020]

A ruling over the colour of pens used to mark kids work? Time to show him where he can shove his red pen!

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...-12377,00.html

[joegrundman]

I guess the next step is for the Aussie bureaucracy to stop using red tape.

boom boom tish

[joegrundman]

and Strine murder mysteries can no longer include red herrings!

thanks very much. I'll be here all week

[TarJak]

OFFS! Don't they have better things to do with their time? Oh of course not I forgot that they are bureaucrats and need something to do other than look out the window, mess with Facebook and read the papers

[Skybird]

I can't believe such absence of mind in humans.

I can't even laugh about such obvious displays of maximum human stupidity anymore. It is not to laugh - it is depressing, and leads you to wanting to commit suicide in despair. There is so much stuff like this being emerging everwhere nowadays. It makes you feel totally helpless in the face of all what is stupid and bad in man.

You can't argue over such silliness. Reasons and common sense must simply not be payed attention to. critical thoughts given about it must not be countered anymore, but just must not be believed. If you raise your voice over it, you get politically most correctly lectured and regulated. Whatever you say, gets relativised. The world's challenges are not dealt with anymore - they get being wished for the better, no matter how neurotic the wishes and methods are. One is leaving it to the fairy queen, and wishing for fairy tale miracels becomes the policy of the politically correct noblemen, prime examples of tolerance and wellä-meaningness, living in a magical world where stones and animals can speak and after the witch got burned everyboy lives peaceful and gentle. such infantility causes me physical pain.

Civilisational self-castration it is.

In old China, they had a very "civilised" painful way of execution. the victim was fixated until it could not move the head and limbs anymore, then, slowly, layer for layer, thin pieces of paper that were dunked into warm oil, were put on his face, just that, like snowflakes settling on your face. The vitim could not struggle, and could not move, while breathing air became rare. It was not much to be heared, since the oily paper silenced it's attempts to yell or to breath, just the chest you may have seen pumping in despair and agony, until it slowly died, and all the time it was an untroubled, silent affair for the observers, not disturbing the peace of the palace. - That's how it feels sometimes if hearing stories about such stupid bastards leading the world into ruin, and me not able to do anything about them.

All I can do is go to the toilet, sit down, and lay a warm, smelling egg, not too soft and not too hard, but just right.

[SteamWake]

This is old news

[Task Force]

God, there are some crazy peoples out there.

Ive gotten plenty of red marks on my papers, I dont see it as agressive.

So is this considered agressive. lol

Im your teacher im gona give you a F... HEHEHEHE!!!

[August]

I only grade my students papers in red because it is easily visible. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

[UnderseaLcpl]

As much as I hate to admit it, the U.S. faced something like this years ago, and there are localities which do not grade in red pen because of such studies.

The wording of the article strikes me as being obviously biased, but such a thing can be expected in a case like this.

Personally, I find the idea ridiculous, but, as always, my real question is why such a thing should even matter. Children of any nation should have access to a competitive (and preferably mostly-privatized) education system, where parents can decide whether silly things like this matter to them or not. As long as parents are given a choice of curriculums, there is no need to argue over trivial details like this. State intervention in the education system tends to favor equality rather than the discretion of educators in most Western nations. The result is a system that is unequal anyway, burdened with regulations that impair not only educational development but also society as a whole. I'm ashamed to say that my country is one of the free world's prime examples. Compariteively crappy education for everyone who can't afford private school.

I'm often told that that the solution is just to give more money to public education. If they had the money, they could do it.

Yeah, my a$$. The missing element isn't money, it's competition. While there are great number of middle-class parents who choose where they will live based on the school system in the area, the choice is not availiable to most. Most people have to live in an area they can afford, as well as the pertinent school district. The evidence is overwhelming. I doubt there is an American member here who has not lived in a city with a few "exceptional" public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, and middling-to-crappy school districts that seem to match land values in their areas. And even they must admit that the private schools put theirs childrens schools to shame. The reason is simple. Private schools are better, because they must compete for students. They don't have a teachers' union, and they cannot exsist in neighborhoods without the wealth to pay state school taxes and private tuition. The result is that only the rich enjoy such schools. In the name of equality, we have more inequaity!

One could always take the opposite tack and say that if everyone had to attend uniformly-funded public schools, all education would be equal. That's true. It would all be equally crappy. I could go on as to how this would come about, but the empirical evidence stares us in the faces everyday (at least those of us in nations which do not have socialist systems funded by natural resources entirely out of proportion to the size of said nation) Surely, any American can agree that all of our public departments function at a level that is only allowed because we have no choice. And all this is assuming that we could actually get equal funding for all localities, which is a fool's hope.

One of the great differences between the upper, middle, and lower classes, is the freedom of choice which exsists in each. The key is to afford such choice to all classes, and to mitigate the effects of such choice in government, because of its' fiat powers. There will never be a system in which all people have equal opportunity and equal chances, unless we subscribe to the most extreme definition of eugenics and have unlimited resources, but we can come close by offering people social mobility through choice and freedom.

I apologize for the length and non-topicality of this post, but the subject of education is of great concern to me and like-minded individuals. The red pen issue is just the tip of the iceberg. The idea that such control is given to the state is the real problem.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. In a social race like that of humanity, that statement carries a lot of truth. I am not a parent, but I am a son, and I learned what the state taught me. It wasn't until I followed the beliefs I was taught that I listened to the advice of my father, who cautioned me against such things. When I was young, I thought him a fool, for not realizing that if only we had the right leaders, elected by democratic process, we would have a machine that produced free people. But I was wrong. I have seen what the state does with people in this age. I have seen how it turns patriots into revolutionaries and back again. The state can never be trusted, not ever. Not even when the leaders are right and just, because they only forge a trust that can be later exploited. The power of the state must be limited, to the maximum extent possible, so that people can be free to live their lives, without the freedom to harm or defraud others.

The power of the state must be limited not only by law, but by force, by giving arms and direct representation in all legislative decisions, to the people. All should be free to make their own decisions, to their detriment or benefit, because any alternative leads to tyranny.

I realize that the question of pre-adults remains, how can we best educate them and give them the greatest measure of freedom and autonomy without subjecting them to the spoon-fed plutocracy offered by the state. The answer is simple. Their parents. Yes, there are good parents and unfit parents, but all will benefit from a choice-based system that will allow them the greatest degree of freedom. Yes, there will be those who succeed and those who fail,but all have a better chance than they would in a system which obliterates meritocracy in favor a federal bureaucracy that punishes eveyone, save the plutocratic elite, equally.

Every person, in every society, has struggled with the problem of an inept elite ruling over a disadvantaged poor. Is the solution not obvious? Each of us must decide who is worthy to educate our children, and they in turn must decide who is worthy of their skills, and whom to employ in their endeavors. To give the power of education to the state is to ensure the rise of liars and dissembling fools who know nothing other than how to tell people what they want to hear. In truth, it has never been much different. Whether the source of authority has been a democratically (more or less) elected stae, or a theocracy, or a totalitarian state, there is one consistent theme; Lawmakers who know what is best, or rather, people who know best how to convince others that they know what is best.

And one of their first initiatives, every time, is to adapt the educational system in the guise of doing what is best for the children. After all, everyone wants what is best for the children.

If this seems like a conspiracy theory, it isn't. It is simply the natural progression of human social dynamics. People who promise a bunch of crap get elected, and then they expect people below them to get it done, whether or not it is possible. People who are employed under state employment laws have little to no reason to get anything done, because they benefit little if it is done and suffer little if it is not done. The result, at least in the U.S., is a policy determined by beureaucrats that essentially never gets implemented because of a workforce that has little motivation, and only succeeds because said beureaucrats were obtained from the population of the electorate concerned, hence the prominent division of "Blue" and "Red" states.

Knowing this, why would we ever trust the education of our children to such a political machine? Such a thing can only breed irrational divisiveness, and in the worst case, unity, in political beliefs. Couple this with a media that was principally educated in the heretofore (1953-onwards) liberal university envoronment, and the results are quite predictable. (In the U.S. anyway.)

I have rambled a bit here, and I apologize for that, but I must repeat my firm belief that entrusting a nation's youth to any form of state education that is not competing either with itself or with private entities is a recipe for disaster. History has shown us as much, so why do we persist in the naive belief that some fool who promised us everything has a better solution than we, the people, do?

[August]

While I share your views on quality to some extend Lcpl, I think without state education a great majority of our citizens would soon be totally illiterate, just like in the days before public schools.

[TarJak]

I think his point was not that state education is bad in a situation where it is in competition with an alternative supplier but when left to its own devices comes up with some ridiculous "rules". As does any bureacracy that has too many people looking for justifications for their employment rather than focussing on what they really should be doing for the community that is paying for them to be there.

[HunterICX]

Use a black pen then!

Ow wait...thats Racism!

this is just nuts...cant believe anyone even bothers about this.

HunterICX

[XabbaRus]

So can I sue my bosses for emotional distress when they use red pen to mark up my drawings?

[Biggles]

Somewhere, Joseph Heller is laughing his head off right now....

[kurtz]

Whilst I agree with the majority of your post. I do have the urge to add my tuppence worth...

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

The evidence is overwhelming. I doubt there is an American member here who has not lived in a city with a few "exceptional" public schools in wealthy neighborhoods, and middling-to-crappy school districts that seem to match land values in their areas.

I wholeheartedly agree in the UK we have state schools which push up property prices, or vice versa.(in the UK a public school is a private school a state school is what you would call a public school)
However cause and effect here are blurred and underachieving parents tend to have under achieving children (q.v. Darwin). So what tends to happen is that the govenrment tries to push children from these families (such as they have them) into the better quality schools to try and make everybody outside the ruling elite in their public (private) schools, of an equally poor standard of education.

The point I'm trying to make is that these schools aren't neccesarily bad because of their teachers, but more likeky because of their pupils.

How protecting them from the red pen helps in anyway I fail to see, except perhaps they won't feel so upset about being stupid.