Earn your Rights?

XBe02Drvr said:

Now if we only had more teachers who've served or at least have some clue what the service is about. In 20 years working at a local high school I was the only veteran on the property. We never even had an employee with a spouse or family member who's served! We had students with parents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and nobody knew how to deal with them. Our faculty was laden with anti-war pacifists who felt that no moral person would accept orders to participate in those wars.

Click to expand...

How things fade over time. As late as last year I volunteered to meet with students at a mega high school when they were studying the WWII period but did not receive a call. However, I recall my time in high school (1940 -43) and my primary interests were current events not WWI. Thanks for your service!

billrunnels said:

I recall my time in high school (1940 -43) and my primary interests were current events not WWI. Thanks for your service!

Click to expand...

And yours, SIR!

In school, my generation was educated by teachers who had served in WW II and Korea. The "Greatest Generation" were also the greatest teachers. Not like these panty wasted things that I see "teaching" now. Granted, we didn't have today's technology but we were better educated.

at6 said:

In school, my generation was educated by teachers who had served in WW II and Korea. The "Greatest Generation" were also the greatest teachers. Not like these panty wasted things that I see "teaching" now. Granted, we didn't have today's technology but we were better educated.

Click to expand...

DITTO!

AND, our teachers had an easier job; the "developmentally disabled", the juvenile delinquents, the terminally rebellious, and the deliberate failures were weeded out of their classes. They could concentrate on teaching, not social work and policing .
Private schools, "magnet" schools, charter schools, and prep schools outperform public schools BECAUSE they are allowed to be selective in their admissions.
Public schools have to take what comes in the door, and can't send any of them off to mental hospitals, "reform schools", schools for the deaf or blind, or juvenile court, until they commit a crime or present a health risk on campus. We didn't have any of these "problem children" in my school growing up. They were institutionalized and out of sight, out of mind.

at6 said:

In school, my generation was educated by teachers who had served in WW II and Korea. The "Greatest Generation" were also the greatest teachers. Not like these panty wasted things that I see "teaching" now. Granted, we didn't have today's technology but we were better educated.

Click to expand...

Same here. I can still remember my US History teacher served in the 82nd AB, my shop teacher was a Thunderbolt crew chief in the Pacific, my electronics teacher was US Army ETO and my Government or Civics as we called it was US Navy as a coxswain in the Pacific.

Sadly they've all flown West now.

Some of my teachers had served in WW2; some were too old. Some served in Korea.

As to curricula, they should bring grammar back, get the f***ing creationists away from the school boards, and teach the warts in national history.

I've always thought that the hatred directed towards returning Vietnam vets originated with Buffy Saint Marie's song Universal Soldier which became quite popular when Donovan also recorded

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned them at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,

mikewint said:

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned them at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

Click to expand...

And it didn't end with Viet Vets. Many of the faculty and staff at the school where I've been working feel that way today. That attitude is not built into the curriculum, so they have to sit on their prejudices, but it's never far from the surface. Their trope is that all of the threats we face today are blowback from bigotries and exploitations and economic and cultural imperialism we've committed in the past, and if we abandoned those practices and our military "fixes", all would be well in the world overnight.
Cheery thought, huh?
Wes

That's because the "educators" are uneducated themselves.

at6 said:

That's because the "educators" are uneducated themselves.

Click to expand...

"First, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then, he made boards of education."

I'm convinced one of the reasons that private and charter schools do better is that they are more isolated from school boards and the associated idiocy, although they still have to contend with textbook contents dictated by creationists, lost cause revisionists, and bowdlerizing jingoists.

at6 said:

That's because the "educators" are uneducated themselves.

Click to expand...

That's not the way I see it. Many of them are aging hippies (this is Vermont, after all) from the 1970s, who were taught by the same WWII vets you and I had, but escaped the Vietnam experience, and have done nothing since they got out of grad school but teach. The view from inside the ivory tower is a little different from where "the rubber hits the road". They need to spend at least three years out of every ten working in the private sector with no guarantee of returning to their original job and seniority when they go back to teaching. Inject a little reality into their lives.
Cheers,
Wes

Over a two decade period from 1975 to 1995, teaching grew from an underpaid, abused, tenuous job beholden to the community, to a cushy, lucrative, "fat cat" gravy train shielded from the fluctuations of the economy and beneficiary of one of the few remaining defined benefit retirement systems in our society. No wonder the cost of education is skyrocketing!!
How did this happen? Two reasons:
1) Credential inflation. Teachers used to graduate from four year low tuition state subsidized normal schools (state teachers colleges) and get hired without a state teaching license on a two year waiver for starvation wages. Now it's hard to get hired without a Master's Degree +30 hours and the normal schools have become state universities with tuition (and student debt) to match.
2) Teachers unions, specifically the NEA. Using the bludgeon of the picket line, they have been successful at bullying local school boards into ever greater generosity. They like to imagine professionally putting teachers on a par with doctors and lawyers socially and economically, forgetting that they're only hired help.
My dad was executive director of the Vermont Education Association and a trustee of NEA when they decided to become an actual labor union. He vehemently opposed that move, and resigned, predicting the situation we have now arrived at.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was a reluctant member of NEA at my last job; not by choice, it was a closed shop. I had pay and benefits that were a modest "living wage" for a single person, but way more than the starvation wages my actual job description was worth on the open market. I never felt the non-teaching staff belonged in the teachers union. We had administrative assistants (glorified secretaries) who were paid as much as a five year teacher with a Master's Degree.
Like the baggage smashers in IAM that torpedoed the attempt to save Eastern Airlines.
Cheers,
Wes

Failed attempt to delete a corrupted message. OOOPS!

swampyankee said:

"First, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then, he made boards of education."

I'm convinced one of the reasons that private and charter schools do better is that they are more isolated from school boards and the associated idiocy, although they still have to contend with textbook contents dictated by creationists, lost cause revisionists, and bowdlerizing jingoists.

Click to expand...

I don't know about your section of the country, but here school boards are democracy in action, all volunteer, and the last vestige of local control over the education juggernaut. They tend to reflect the interests of that segment of the population who have a coherent agenda and are willing to put in the time and effort to promote it. (Do I sound like a civics teacher yet?) Nothing runs on autopilot in a democracy. If you want an autopilot, go find a dictatorship. If you don't like the flight plan, get political and change it. Around here school boards tend to be dominated by "bleeding heart" liberals who wouldn't be tolerated elsewhere in America, but I don't have a problem with that. We're consistently rated one of the better states to live in.
Cheers,
Wes

PS: ADMINIISTRATORS, I realize this whole "education rant" series of posts of mine have overstepped the political line, but I had to get it off my chest. Delete as necessary.
Wes