Thread: Rand Paul Absolutely Schools Letterman

Originally Posted by Dragontalk

I don't know what you mean by "in their current form." If we didn't have publicly-funded teachers, then for most children we would not have teachers, period. Public education exists so that education will not be limited to the children of the rich. If there are flaws in the current educational system then they should be fixed. But the fact that teachers are publicly paid is NOT a flaw. It's a necessity.

We need to force kids to waste their time in school instead of working?

Originally Posted by Dick Martin

That is your idea of complex instructions?

I'm sure you'll find more complex food preparation guides online. For free. Why do we need to pay teachers for it?

Originally Posted by Jason Marcel

The part of your brain where critical thinking lurks is what benefits from learning things in school that may not apply in real life.

Developing critical thinking skills is key to learning. It's not always about every single thing you learn, it's how your mind can open up and evolve from those things.

So critical thinking is unavailable in other forms, like work? Where you make money instead of waste time and lose it? There are software-based courses and plenty of stuff that can challenge people to think critically. School is hardly the most efficient of them.

Your posts on this thread leave little question as to why the math and science skills among Americans are horrid.

And what's that supposed to mean?

Originally Posted by Slon

We need to force kids to waste their time in school instead of working?

Better to make school not a "waste of time," but so modified, yes.

I see no point in responding to the rest of what you said. I'm sure you hate hearing this (I did at your age), but grow up a little, get some experience in life, and you'll find that a lot of these silly ideas are self-correcting. In the meantime, the adults will continue to run the show, and I'll grant you the running is far from perfect, but it's obvious that we come a lot closer to knowing what we're doing than you do. Not that that's your fault, of course.

Originally Posted by Dragontalk

Better to make school not a "waste of time," but so modified, yes.

I see no point in responding to the rest of what you said. I'm sure you hate hearing this (I did at your age), but grow up a little, get some experience in life, and you'll find that a lot of these silly ideas are self-correcting. In the meantime, the adults will continue to run the show, and I'll grant you the running is far from perfect, but it's obvious that we come a lot closer to knowing what we're doing than you do. Not that that's your fault, of course.

Not sure WTF you're talking about. I have experience with both public schooling and private working environments. Do I have to be 90 years old or something before you stop rejecting my opinion due to my not meeting your odd prerequisites?

Originally Posted by Slon

Not sure WTF you're talking about.

Of course not. If you did, you wouldn't credit such absurd ideas as you are expressing here for one second.

I have experience with both public schooling and private working environments.

You need more, though. Obviously.

Do I have to be 90 years old or something before you stop rejecting my opinion due to my not meeting your odd prerequisites?

Actually, Slon, I don't know how old you are. You could BE 90 years old for all I know. In a way, I'm providing you with an excuse, though. You're saying things that are so off the wall, so utterly stupid and absurd, that anyone with any significant amount of life experience who believed things like that would have to have an IQ in single digits or else be seriously mentally ill. I've seized instead on the assumption that you believe this crap honesty but do so because you're still very young.

I mean in all seriousness, while everyone knows there are problems with our educational system and we have differences of opinion regarding exactly what the problem is and how to fix it, when I hear someone saying that we should just get rid of the whole thing and not have teachers at all, I am reminded of a Pink Floyd lyric -- which may be before you're time, so I'll present said lyric below:

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone

Now I remember when that song came out. It was in 1979, just a few years after I graduated from high school, and I remember that the kids still in school thought it was great. But it appealed to no one else, because everyone else knows that it's juvenile garbage.

And that's what I'm saying. In a few more years, you are going to recognize what you're saying now as juvenile garbage. So I really don't see the point in spending a lot of time trying to change your mind now, when your abandonment of this silliness is inevitable anyway and only a matter of time.