‘Stupid In America’
I ran across an ABC story titled “Stupid In America” which echos many negative things about our public school system which I’ve been saying for some years. Many of which can be summed up by crying, “Competition, please!”
I like one of the final points brought up in this article in particular. In response to a teacher claiming competition is bad for human beings, children and education, the author makes a nice free-market reply quoted below in context for your humor:
“To say that competition is going to improve education? It’s just not gonna work. You know competition is not for children. It’s not for human beings. It’s not for public education. It never has been, it never will be,” [Ruth Holmes Cameron, a Florida teacher] said.
Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that served you a bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the government assigned you to “your” grocery store. The store wouldn’t have to compete for your business, and it would soon sell spoiled milk or stock only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell houses advertising “neighborhood with a good grocery store.” That’s insane, and yet that’s what America does with public schools.
At any rate, I hope this article proves fairly influential since, of course, it’s preaching a viewpoint I favor. Feel free to post your own comments in reply to this post, of course.
On an unrelated note, this journalist doesn’t know the difference between a yard and an inch whilst reporting about a Japanese rat snake befriending its meal…
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Dude, that is one fat-bottomed rodent. The snake probably won’t eat it because even he can’t get his mouth around that hamster, it’s so fat.
Otherwise, I like that quote. Spoken like a true Communist; everyone knows that competition is a smoke screen for the bourgeios to steal from the proletariat, and that’s why it’s not fit for human beings. *rolls eyes* He should have thrown “civil rights” or “torture” into that statement though. How disappointing.
For what it’s worth, they got the snake’s size right in the photo text (120cm long, or approximately 1 yard).
I don’t even want to meet a 120 yard long snake…
Yeah. That guy was on FoxNews all last week promoting the story.
This piece was a miserable, slanted, despicable hatchet job by the king of bad “journalism,” John Stossel. A neo-con pseudo-libertarian who will say anything or do anything for self-promotion and grinding his personal axe. Almost to the last, the quotes, “statistics,” and stated “facts” have been shown to be biased, false, or editorialzed by Stossel.
As for the specific quote, we don’t know the context [big surprise]. At a basic level, this woman is correct. Competition means win/lose. That is not a good paradigm for childrens’ education. Teaching it, learning about competing is valuable, but making education a win/lose proposition will end up as lose/lose. A better choice is finding a win/win. Like keeping reactionary zealots from completing their destruction of what used to be the best education system in the world.
The current system which strongly avoids competition is already lose/lose for most males. Win/lose is certainly a better option.
You might find Christina Hoff Summers’ recent book, “The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men” (Simon & Schuster, 2000), to be an interesting alternative point of view on the subject. Summers makes the case that current educational practices here in the United States and in Britain have their sex focus backward. As I’m seeing here at my university, men are rapidly being outnumbered and outclassed by women. More boys than girls are suspended from school or held back. More drop out. Girls get better grades on average and outnumber boys in just about every extracurricular activity. There’s a problem.
In my experience, competition for grades is the one thing that drives most males to excel (and most girls respond to competition well, too). Deliberate avoidance of competition is problematic.