Charlie Rose

NeilMacCallister  10/06/2010 01:56 AM Report

President Obama has a "Domestic Policy Advisor" named Melody Barnes?? ..I thought his entire domestic policy was "Get me elected again", ..a campaign being run once again by David Axelrod and David Plouffe???

Where does Ms. Barnes fit in to that????? ..Is it her job to come on talk shows and testify to the wonders of Big Government welfare?? ..and those floor-to-ceiling bullet-proof glass windows we now see at all government offices???

You respect education, Ms. Barnes??? ..How about telling American children the truth, that our government cares not one whit about any American's health or job, ..only whether or not they can get a large enough "huddled mass" to vote for them in the next government-job election cycle, under any pretext, ..so that those elected government paycheck-drawers will not have to go out and work again at any time in the near future.

That realization, ..would be the first step toward a truly classical education for our children!

REMant  09/28/2010 11:34 AM Report

This country has never paid its public school teachers well, and fell early into hiring young women prior to marriage for the job, partially out of necessity, as well as to save money, but, then, if that were not bad enough, justifying this by the idea that education required their maternal, sentimental instinct. Schools in this country have ever since been a battleground in the war between the sexes, which women have dominated, in personality, if not always in person. And it was early decided that the schools should be transformative agencies for deficient families. Besides the moral, it had a professional component. This followed the pattern set in the Middle Ages, when the educational institutions were largely run by the Church to turn out future clergy. In the case of our public school system the latter was translated into occupational training, which formed the other pillar of their support. This is in part why science and technology were late entering the curriculum and still receive little emphasis. Ironically, it was the destruction of the liberal arts curriculum which also set science back, and the difference can be seen in comparison with more strictly "Protestant" countries such as Germany and Japan and, at one time, the Islamic world, as well as in some Jesuit-run schools, as much as in the disparity in the distribution by gender of graduate degrees in this country.

The idea that we have the greatest higher education system in the world, is as I've written several times here, a myth. Our colleges and universities have the same problems as primary and secondary institutions, and many of them follow from the pattern set in higher ed: ever increasing bureaucracy and professionalization, a retreat from teaching, and a push for job security. Colleges have only added to the problem by trying to push more of the burden onto the schools. The worse the situation has gotten the more educators shrink from confronting it. At this point more funding only sustains the downward spiral.

There is a significant political issue arising from the way American schools have evolved that must be addressed in any meaningful reform: the idea of the schools as gate-keepers, going back as far as Jefferson, and are thus justified in using grades as a means of discipline. This went out with the idea of divine right most everywhere else, but this country has never really adopted republican ideas and our public institutions merely took them over from the religious, in the same way that our business institutions retain them. While we might want to assess teachers according to how well their students do on standardized tests, to prevent abuse the teaching has to be separated from the assessment as they do in almost all the other advanced nations. Schools are not factories and professional qualifications, if there are to be such - Adam Smith would have none of that either - should be the province of the professions.