[HoosierDaddy]

I think critical thinking IS taught in schools, it just takes a looooooong time to sink in. It's why most attitudes radically change in college: because they are out of the environment that fostered whichever biased thought they have.

I do know that the Common Core standards HAMMER critical thinking skills. Discerning critical information from a mass of material, but will it work? Probably not. It's the kind of thing that lasts lifelong for most people and is VERY hard to shake. It's nearly a religious belief anymore.

[Nicodimas]

From *my* standpoint over here..Common Core standards are going to be tough cause the kids get home and parent's are having a tough time implementing them..Maybe its different other places... I don't know how you fix that as the problem comes from the same source.

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 28 August 2014 - 09:58 PM

[Obdigore]

http://www.washingto...NpFXW_blog.html

Quote

In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Of course it's going to be tough to try to push education as a good, wanted, needed tool in the youth in America. It isn't valued by the vast majority of adults, why would it be valued by their children?

[amphibian]

Nicodimas, on 28 August 2014 - 09:07 AM, said:

Modern day terrorists really exist cause Britain/France wanted to divide up the ottoman fucking empire pre world war one. Lets make imaginary lines !

This is so wrong as to be laughable.

In other news, Obama is the best Democratic president in the last 50 years at addressing the problems of poverty: http://www.nytimes.c...d=tw-share&_r=0

Quote

Did Mr. Obama plan to spend more simply because he had more mouths to feed? No. Even after accounting for the higher numbers of poor people caught in the Great Recession, Mr. Obama’s record outshines his predecessors’. His proposed first-term spending per poor individual was $13,731 to Mr. Clinton’s $8,310 and Mr. Carter’s $4,431, in 2014 dollars.

Mr. Obama even exceeds Mr. Johnson, whose budget priorities amounted only to $111 per poor person. (Because Mr. Johnson was the first postwar president to tackle poverty issues with so many new programs, it is not surprising that his proposed funding levels were low at the start.) The same pattern shows up in spending per poor family. Mr. Obama allocated $67,132, Mr. Clinton $39,820, Mr. Carter $20,790, and Mr. Johnson $546, again using 2014 dollars.

[...]

A final test of priorities is how much a president proposes to spend compared with his immediate predecessor. By that yardstick, Mr. Obama does well too. The percent change in anti-poverty spending per poor individual is highest for Mr. Clinton relative to the first President Bush (27 percent), and lowest for Mr. Carter, who actually spent slightly less than Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Obama’s increase relative to George W. Bush was a respectable 17 percent. When it comes to the poor, Mr. Obama does not appear a failure, much less an epic one.

The opinion piece (substantiated by facts) goes on to talk about how Obama doesn't get credit for the good stuff he does do - because he doesn't talk about it the right way for the audience to get it. Here, relating to poverty-reducing efforts, he hates using the word "poverty" and people kind of lose that keyword and focus, so it's easier for them to get ticked off at him.

I'm fairly critical of his expansion of the drone warfare, the unwillingness to have the State Department firmly tell the Israelis to stop sending settlers to fuck up tenuous peaces time and again and majorly critical of the Administration's allowance of Wall Street criminals to walk away with money in hands.

But the Republican House of Representative is the worst in modern history in terms of getting anything done. Obstructionist isn't even the word to describe a bunch of people who criticize the government for not working and then go make sure it doesn't work to fulfill their prophecies. I have zero respect for these people who break the system instead of trying to improve it and they're being elected to run our country because they get people mad over stupid stuff and that gets out the vote somehow.

I would love, love a better alternative to the Democratic party, but the Republicans and Libertarians aren't them.

[Nicodimas]

@ amphibian.

I love this article taken from the Market ticker..good breakdown.

http://market-ticker...www?post=229346

This article breaks down a few of the problems that exist in America..I would like your particular viewpoints on these statements.

[amphibian]

The overall thrust of the article (to me) is a reasonable attitude of dissatisfaction with the American way of life being nearly completely misdirected by nonsense regarding how institutions in gov't and private life work and should work.

Health care should be much more of a public good than it is treated in the US. The same amount of people in Europe as there are in the US pay 60% less for medicine than the Americans do. The multitude of studies and articles show that the savings in treatment, in medicine and the numerous positive impacts upon the population are strong if health care is treated far more as a public good than the private market-based initiatives that the US treats it as.

It is absolutely idiotic that medical bankruptcy is a frequent thing here in the US and it's not happening to dead end junkies or alkies. It's happening to people with scoliosis who can't afford life-altering spinal fusions (one of my friends has it), it's happening to people who have freak injuries like a collapsed lung I suffered last year (nearly killed me and put me in the hospital for a solid week due to some bad treatment from a doctor) and so on.

The dissatisfaction with how much medical care costs and how much safety nets cost is strange because the costs of these is far less than not having them - and I'm talking in pure financial aspects. The poor on poor crime issue (far worse than black on black or white on white etc.) costs an enormous amount of time, money and resources through policing, documentation, medical costs and so on. It can be alleviated by having less poor people around. The amount of time and money it takes for a parent or parents to earn enough money to feed, house and clothe themselves and their families can be reduced to a point where people no longer have to basically abandon their kids at home (unsupervised kids) or spend 15% of their free time to get food (food desert issue). That free time doesn't go immediately to drugs or tv. It usually gets parted out in doing productive things.

The IRS issue is kind of quibbling over little to nothing. I've worked with large scale institutions and their financial records. It's actually pretty hard to push through prejudicial policy at big places like the IRS in regards to who gets audited, who does the auditing and what the result is. There's too much inertia and protocol to follow. Yeah, they could do better with information storage - but that's not anywhere near as critical as the boundless freedom given to the NSA and the incompetence/insanity of their usage of it. That's an initiative started under Bush 1 and those Congresses, built into rudimentary form as "Carnivore" by the Clinton years, greatly expanded in the Bush 2 years and brought to light now in the Obama years. This is 20 years of Congress being shitheaded enough to let the NSA spy on everyone and do very little with it.

Education is a huge can of worms - but not for the reasons stated in the Market Watch article. The FAFSA objections are lunatic fringe territory.

Law enforcement in the US is quasi-broken. Huge amounts of time, money and resources being put into enforcing stupid policies (drug laws, militarization of police, difficulty of domestic abuse victims, assault victims and more in getting help etc.), very little accountability for police and an attitude of being under attack by the populace at large instead of being the protector and server of the community. Ferguson publicly ripped off a scab on a wound that's been there for 400 years in different forms. The issues range from racially motivated murder, idiotic policing and local gov't, abrogation of human rights, people being overwhelmed by the occasion and situation and more. It remains a fascinating case study of America itself and the responses to it have been illuminative.

I dunno Federal Reserve stuff. It's above my pay grade and I avoid commenting on things I truly know little about.

The Wall Street criminals absolutely should have been prosecuted far more than they have. The Obama administration AND Congress flinched from that and the blame gets put on Obama far more than Congress or even Wall Street (should have been far more admissive of guilt).

Misunderstanding how Medicare and food stamps help the country by spending pennies to save dollars is emblematic of the misdirected anger of this article. That's not where the anger and dissatisfaction should be focused. There's actually little fraud in Medicare or food stamps in comparison to private bank loans or whatever craziness goes on in Wall Street. The fingers are being pointed by the scamsters and fraudsters and the right wing is falling for it.

[amphibian]

You know what? I went to a local Congressional (House of Representatives) campaign today and offered my services (10 to 15 hours a week) to them. They are taking me up on that, pending a background check.

Not everybody has the time/money luxury and energy to do this, but I do - so I am going to do what I've been talking about: get better representatives into Congress.

I am also extremely pissed at the Governor of New York for going back on several campaign promises - to reduce gerrymandering (huge issue plaguing politics here), to clean up corruption (made a dog and pony show of it and then got really mad when called out for the sham) and for basically refusing to do anything truly good for New York politics in general.

I really, really wish Eliot Spitzer hadn't done the stupid thing and gotten a call girl across state lines. He was/is a jerk, but he really was interested in cleaning up NY politics and modernizing legislature - particularly enforcement laws regarding Wall Street and drug laws. I theorize he'd have been a two termer with an ineffective second term due to an obstructionist legislature, but it would have been so much better than the shit we got from Paterson and the shit we're getting from Diet Mario here.

[Gust Hubb]

Is anyone with the money to campaign really worth the trouble though?

[amphibian]

Sometimes, yes.

Being rich or upper middle class like the Bidens doesn't always connote "jerk who will break the country".

[Gust Hubb]

amphibian, on 31 August 2014 - 04:21 AM, said:

Sometimes, yes.

Being rich or upper middle class like the Bidens doesn't always connote "jerk who will break the country".

Name one.

This post has been edited by Gust Hubb: 31 August 2014 - 07:07 PM

[amphibian]

Mark Pattison, Eliot Spitzer, Cory Booker, Barack Obama, Al Franken, Daniel Moynihan and hundreds more.

I had high hopes for Rahm Emanuel, but he turned out to be a despot and wrong about many things.

[Gust Hubb]

But that's my worry. Rahm Emanuel being corrupt, how much more so on those mentioned that we don't know all that well... I guess I've been burned just 1 too many times.

[amphibian]

Know what helps people not be jerks? Being around people who aren't jerks.

If we abandon our representatives to the crooks, well, they're often going to turn into crooks.

[Nicodimas]

Obama announces free education!! I feel this is like watching those Obama free student loan ad-clickers. Is Obama just trolling us the people now..lol

http://money.cnn.com...lege/index.html

I am liking this free stuff though !!..we should definitely find a way to make Free Government. Work on that Obama!

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 09 January 2015 - 12:20 AM

[worry]

Sounds like a great idea. Lifting CC (and trade school) participation in tandem with 4-year colleges was definitely something he ran on, and Tennessee Promise did seem pretty sensible in terms of its requirements (it's fairly new too, so it's not like results are in yet). Seems like he's doing exactly what he said he always would -- take ideas from either party that he thought would benefit the populace, and doing his best to see them succeed (not that this isn't in early stages, and will probably get savaged by opponents).

[Tsundoku]

Pffft, Obama could put forth the GOPs own policies and they'd still savage them because he proposed them.

[Nicodimas]

I am somewhat certain Worry is just yanking my chain..your so funny Worry. They should also give away loans to these kids too and tie their parents to them <wait!!>..and monthly allowances per govt!!! its only fair.

I had a really long rant...but not worth it.

If you wanted to really do good..actually improve the current government school system. The government already fails too many children on current education standards.

The sheer fact of this ideology is STATING loud and clear that the government is an abject failure in fixing and finding a way to do it K-12.

If they can't compete against the rest of the world and have kids already have this long.. why would you want the government to mess with CC years too. Channel that money somewhere more useful.

[amphibian]

I can tell you that the private schools (that don't have oodles of money floating around and are of somewhat comparable demographics) are mostly worse than government schools are at educating children.

There are many studies out there on this.

Furthermore, the nations that are head and shoulders ahead of the others in educating children do so almost entirely through government schools.

It's not the schools being run by state or federal governments that is the problem. It's the standards, the demographics and the broken politics.

[HoosierDaddy]

amphibian, on 09 January 2015 - 06:15 AM, said:

I can tell you that the private schools (that don't have oodles of money floating around and are of somewhat comparable demographics) are mostly worse than government schools are at educating children.

There are many studies out there on this.

Furthermore, the nations that are head and shoulders ahead of the others in educating children do so almost entirely through government schools.

It's not the schools being run by state or federal governments that is the problem. It's the standards, the demographics and the broken politics (and the pay).

Needed fixed.

[Terez]

Sombra, on 09 January 2015 - 03:01 AM, said:

Pffft, Obama could put forth the GOPs own policies and they'd still savage them because he proposed them.

What do you think Obamacare was?

This post has been edited by Terez: 09 January 2015 - 10:21 AM