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Next on ESPN: This 8 year old girl was denied a wheelchair from her HMO, but now she can compete to win one! Heart-warming!
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“Capitalist”. Yes.
It’s not even capitalist any longer (if it ever really was). It’s reverted to a bizarrely-veneered version of feudalism.
It’s capitalist feudalism. There’s absolutely zero chance that the US isn’t capitalist.
The sheer volume of government intervention to keep afloat rotting organizations that are “too big to fail” says that it’s not capitalist. It’s a bizarre form of welfare state for billionaires.
To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes by the great Rev. King:
“Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the rest”
Can you think of a time when capitalism was not deeply feudalist? If you think the wave of laissez-faire over a century ago was any different, think again: the “miner towns” and other private cities where you boss is your landlord and mayor tells a different story. And don’t even get me started on colonial extractivism and how to massacre a culture/population then plant a corrupt overlord to extract another people’s resources.
Capital was always supported by a strong centralized State, and even the libertarian utopians of Silicon Valley have always lived on Pentagon “welfare” money.
In the small capitalism can be non-feudal.
Scale it past, say, 300 people and it’s a nightmare of feudalism and billionaire welfare state.
What you mean is not Capitalism, but a market economy. Even in small groups Capitalism will necessarily result in a concentration of capital in a few hands and the resulting effects via social stratification.
OK, that’s probably what I actually meant, yes.
Personally, I am mildly amused at how little I care about this problem.
I have two school-age children. They do not attend public school. I would alter my life drastically to make certain they never attended public school even if the laws were to change to demand that. Occasionally I am asked what I think of private schools, and my answer is simple enough… they are merely more expensive versions of the public school experience. They use the same books, they hire from the same pool of college-of-education-trained teachers, and the same sort of people administer those organizations so how could they be much different?
When a public school teacher complains that they should be paid more, I have to wonder why I am supposed to do this when I’ve already made it quite clear that they have nothing I could ever want.
Public schools exist solely as government-subsidized daycare for children 6-18. That is their purpose, which is easily discerned just by observing how they operate. They could not be redesigned to do anything else… mass education for a country the size of the US requires millions of teachers. Most of those will be bad at teaching. Some significant fraction will be plainly abusive. Paying this same pool of workers more will not magically increase the quality of teaching. Giving them more money for crayons will not magically increase the quality of teaching.
If some of them are humiliated in this fashion, that seems just to me. Truly, if they want to educate children… if it is the most important thing in the universe to them, if it is a calling and a vocation, then they should have their own children and educate those kids instead. Smaller class size, budget goes farther, and everyone keeps their noses out of everyone else’s business.
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TL;DR: These people are too crazy, don’t give a chance to them. I appreciate your comment! (Sorry, my English is the worst)
“Parça”, esses caras são tudo maluco, tão em todo lugar. Como já sabemos países como os deles só tende a ruir e ruir. Eles só querem atenção pra ter confirmação de algo que é impossível. Nem de atenção, no final quem estará certo somos nós. Enfim, acho que tu é BR né? Mals presumir isso, mas o “I live in a country where I don’t have to stop eating to pay medical bills” me pegou e fiquei “Hum, certeza que é BR” kkkjota.
People like you is what’s wrong with the US. But I’m OK with it, I live in a country where I don’t have to stop eating to pay medical bills.
I haven’t needed to stop eating to pay medical bills.
but your country is on its way to implod
It is an accident of geography that I was born here. The government of the United States holds no special place in my heart, anymore than the Roman Republic or the Kingdom of Wessex. If it implodes, it implodes. Nothing important will have been lost.
If you feel differently for your country, whereever that is, how can you even love your family? Your country has become some sort of emotional surrogate for them. It’s sort of fucked up.
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Yes, because you are lucky enough to be able to afford an insurance. Lose your job and see what happens.
Just took a new job. The insurance is far worse than at the last job (pay is better though). Decided to not get insurance during open enrollment. My wife and I analyzed the options, and we decided that we’d be better off just squirreling away the cash than to pay premiums for shit insurance that covered little.
We don’t have significant medical bills.
If you country implodes, you live in it.
It’s been imploding since I was born. The 1970s were a wild ride, even if I only vaguely remember the last few years of it. The 1980s were little better, we did drills in school to crawl under our desks in the event of nuclear bombardment.
Short of a shooting war, there’s very little the “implosion” can do to me that I haven’t seen. And if that happens, I plan on being somewhere else entirely about 12 months before the first bullet flies. Even have some gold stashed away to bribe whichever border guards need bribing. Fake passports are getting harder to come by though, that’s worrisome.
Any attempt to emotionally take me hostage and attempt to fix the unfixable is going to fail. They’re all monkeys here, and you just have to accept that monkeys fling shit. It’s even kind of funny to watch, if you learn to duck the turds.
US individualism is killing its people
Possibly. But it’s not killing me and mine. In fact, it’s saving me and mine, when the non-individualism has so many whining about how their welfare checks are too small and flipping burgers isn’t a salary career with living wages. I’ve got a better deal, and you’re trying to talk me into taking the worse one.
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Then why do you still live in such a country?
I have to live somewhere. I don’t know of any that are better, just different kinds of “bad”. You seem to believe “living better” is an objective thing, but it is subjective of course. And you and I don’t want to live the same way. If you bothered to see things from my perspective, you’d understand how silly your question is.
You have the wrong idea of what having a public welfare service means. I don’t need welfare checks to live here
You have lived so long in the system that it’s invisible to you. The welfare no longer looks like welfare. It’s just an entitlement to you. You deserve it. You’ve earned it. Just by being there. They owe it to you. Once you’ve adopted that mindset, how can it ever be welfare again? But from the other end, how can your government even engage in charity? For them, you have become livestock they have a duty to keep fed.
And my children will be able to study in any university even if I don’t earn enough money to pay for it
It used to be the case in the US. But somewhere the politicians got the idea that sending 100% of the population to university was not just an ideal or even a goal, but an absolute requirement.
Opportunity costs being what they are, the price skyrocketed. It actually costs more than twice as much to send twice as many kids to college. And so the price rose. And colleges became more competitive for those dollars, but to stay competitive they have to be nicer colleges with nicer dorms and nicer campuses and nicer amenities. But those things cost more, so the costs were passed on to the students who were indoctrinated to believe that if they didn’t go they’d be losers. And then bankruptcy for student loans was rescinded, and grants turned into loans that can’t ever be defaulted.
Perverse incentives are a removed.
I can’t tell which European country you’re from, and you don’t have to tell me, but all students don’t go to university there either. We can be honest, can’t we?
The problem with public Education is not just that teacher’s pay is too low. Sure, it’s a drama when teachers in one of the richest countries on Earth live in their cars and don’t get medical assistance because they can’t afford it. But such is the condition of many more workers throughout the world.
The problem is public schools were never designed either as places of Education nor, as you say, as daycare centers for older children. They are centers of indoctrination where precarious workers under a lot of pressure/control prepare the next generation of cannon fodder for the military and the big industries. There’s contrary pressure for the teachers: on the one hand they’re told and explicitly asked to form the next generation of citizens asking questions and learning new things, on the other hand they’re given the conditions to do the exact opposite, and if a teacher starts to teach a little critical thinking they’re going to be put on the side or otherwise reprimanded.
They don’t have resources: it’s ok, just give them time and space and you’ll have some teaching done. But no there’s no time and they’ve got to teach 40 kids at a time. It’s literally impossible to teach anything in those conditions and the best you can do is “teaching” to recite by heart, which is the opposite of Education.
I don’t know too much about the history of public schools in the US (although i did read Teaching to transgress by bell hooks which was really interesting) but in France there is a complex history of Education:
- during the revolution (1789), different factions had different views about Education: of course those who advocated for actual education were hunted down during the terror and soon the first republic collapsed and let me tell you Napoléon cared little about popular education (he has other plans for using young people to try and colonize all of Europe) ; during that time “public instruction” is a branch of the ministry of interior
- free, secular and mandatory school (1881) was setup by Jules Ferry, a racist and colonial warmonger who was on paper mayor of Paris during the Commune (1871) and went to great lengths to ensure the Commune would be crushed in blood; to this day he is revered by French imperialist propaganda as a progressive, but his schools have in fact been used as a tool in the colonial enterprises of France (kids who would speak their own language in schools would get beaten by the teachers)
And mandatory primary education in Prussia (which seems to be the more commonly referenced origin of public schools), was largely a reaction to the French revolution and subsequent changes in inter-state warfare.
But I think solely analyzing today’s schools under these historical terms falls short, and the description of day-care centers for older kids seems to ring true. I think especially the reaction about school closures during the current pandemic drives the point home that it has become a day-care center mostly (with negative psychological effects on the children being stuck at home being a distant second argument against school closures).
But the position the OP takes is incredibly privileged (probably a well educated significant other staying at home full time taking care and educating the children?) and also not a good way of how the important labor of education should be distributed in a society.
I am happy to be “privileged”. My children benefit from that, whatever it is. If you or others hope to shame me into feeling bad about it… the joke’s on you. I was the kid on welfare his entire childhood, mercilessly bullied and the public school didn’t give a shit about that.
Whatever connections to other people that most have, that they find so important that they’ll do anything (hell, in the Middle East they’ll murder their own daughters in “honor killings”), well, I don’t have those connections. You and I are a different species. I have no connection to you, and I only feel low-intensity satisfaction when you try to shame me.
and also not a good way of how the important labor of education should be distributed in a society.
Definitely! Your children should definitely be herded into a locked room with 25 other same-calendar-age children and a college-of-education flunky so that they can be force-fed indoctrination and the educational equivalent of junk food. Something like 70% of them will get a mediocre education, and the other 30 percent will be on one side of the curve or the other and ruined. Those are good odds.
If education was so important to you, you’d do like I do. Not try to figure out how to get out of personally and to foist it off on a minimum-wage government bureaucrat.
I am not into shaming others, that was simply a neutral observation that many, maybe most, can not afford to educate their children at home (or are even able to do so due to lacking education of their own).
About the second point… yes I agree with you (and I think others in this thead too)… the status quo of public education is atrocious. But there is a wide range of other options between the two extremes you offer here. And monopolizing the education labor on your own children is not a very efficient way to do education in a society.
Honest question: have you considered inviting some less fortunate children to your home to be educated together with your children? Up to a smaller number (5?) that should only marginally effect the educational outcome for your children, while probably massively improve that of the others.
Honest question: have you considered inviting some less fortunate children to your home to be educated together with your children?
No. While I would consider the children of family (I teach my children that their cousins might as well be brothers and sisters) and close family, none of them are significantly less fortunate. I give when it puts me at no disadvantage, and seeing even the children of strangers do well might make provide some minor satisfaction, the risk that their presence would interfere with my own children’s education far outweighs that.
If I have to choose between my children, and some strangers’ kid, I will choose my own and not give it a second thought. You’re all expendable compared to them.
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I know of many systems. Systems are inhuman things, created by engineers to manipulate things.
Humans are not things, and belong in no systems. Saying “but this other system is better” just misses the point.
Most if not all the other developed countries have good quality public services
No, they have just succeeded in convincing their populations that these are good. That’s not the same thing. I don’t need my children in a “better public school” where better just means “they do the same things, but more successfully”. I need them far away from such things, distances measured in astronomical terms.
Europe is dead. It does not know it yet, it will keep limping along for another century at most. What’s the fertility rate again? Everything about its culture is killing it, and it can’t escape that fate.
The opinions of dying people don’t do much to sway me. My descendants will tell spooky stories about the place that whined itself to death.
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mean… we’re a social species. We’ve evolved to live in systems called societies.
Sure, if you want to stretch the definition to meaningless. I named my house “society” therefor I live in one too!
Why do you consider you live better in the us then? And with such hate towards other people
I don’t. There are things I have to work around even in the US, if I moved, there would be different thins to work around. The US has fewer of these than some places, but not substantially more than other places.
I don’t hate anyone. Hatred is a peculiar emotion that I have felt in the past, directed towards specific individuals (low count). I hold no hatred towards any group of people, whatever the manner of grouping.
I mostly have indifference for humans in general. I make exceptions for people I like. As for public school teachers, even the ones who were cruel or didn’t give a shit to me personally… how can I blame them? My mother didn’t do anything about it, kept sending me back. If someone should have done something, surely it was her don’t you think? But public school teachers continue to behave stupidly, continue to make poor life choices (their career, in case that’s obvious), and will even scuttle around on the ground picking up dollar bills like an over-aged stripper at the nudie bar.
If they are humiliated, how is it anything other than they doing this to themselves?
About Europe, the fertility rate is not very different from the US.
Anything below replacement is eventual extinction. And it’s so far below that that it’s absurd. Children growing up seeing everyone around them have one child, or none at all… they internalize it, think it’s normal. Then they grow up to have one or none themselves. Which math says means it goes even lower since the ceiling was set but not the floor. Sure, you can pretend that some day 80 years from now one of those little girls will wake up and say “I want to grow up and have 2.1 children!”… but it really has to be all little girls who say that. If it’s just one in 10, then those girls have to say “I want to grow up and have 21 children!”. Neither of those is plausible.
Dead. The US might be too. Certainly heading that way. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
you’re as dead as
I don’t identify as my country though, unlike yourself. You see yourself as a citizen of X, one of many, collectively acting like some gigantic robot made out of people. One that can die even if some of the individuals survive. Me? I’m just me. My existence in this country is an accident of geography.
Lets not call each other insane, please.
I think the view expressed here is incredibly cynical and with such a cynical view the negative outcome for a society is a forgone conclusion, but I don’t think it is worth imposing my more optimistic view on other people (and it would not convince them anyways).
