Jim Charter wrote:
> The private schools, especially on the HS level, are able to
> be exclusive both in the sphere of money, and in the sphere of academic 
> ability. What is not so clear to me is to what extent racial exclusion 
> is masked by these criteria.  Common cynicism would lead me to expect 
> that it is to a great extent but I just do not know.  But I am quite 
> sure that ideology is off the table.  The other point I want to stress 
> again is that it is not only money.  Students for elite private schools 
> must compete in standardized aptitude tests, just as they do to get into 
> elite public schools.

Yeah. That is definitely *helping* the wackos to undermine it too. Just 
read something on a school planning to help the "underprivileged" with 
more remedial course, in high school, by... canceling **labs** and 
letting go the teachers for those classes. Yep, that'il fix it. Now 
everyone at the school can impress management by being able to count 
change, instead of only some of them, when they all get those high tech 
jobs working in the "burger lab" at McDonald's. Nothing like "improving" 
education by sacrificing the top students, while elevating the worst, 
for what ever reason they are the worst, to the same level of mediocrity 
and failure. But, heh.. No problem. Its my understanding that more and 
more colleges are responding to this by teaching "remedial" classes too. 
Who needs 4 years of college for people that actually *arrive* knowing 
what they need to start, and pay professors to teach complex subjects, 
if you can give former high school teachers, who can't get decent pay, 
to teach remedial work the first 2 years of college, then charge the 
students for 5-6 more, from the few actual professors you still have 
working there? Isn't 8 years about right, if you want to become a 
computer programmer (which currently takes 3-4, to get a BA in it)? And, 
if it takes 8 more, for the same stupid reason, to get a doctorate.. 
Heck, they can just pay for it on credit cards and loans, from the 
people that brought us the housing collapse, right?

Sigh.. We need to fix things *before* private schools, never mind high 
schools and/or colleges get involved, and that means fixing it starting 
at pre-school. When I was going, someone brought their kid in with a 
diaper bag, a bottle, and a passifier, and got told, "Bring him back 
when he is *ready*." Some place, some where, there is some bozo 
pre-school with 2 nannies, whose job is to change diapers, because a 
bunch of clueless idiots got a few judges to say, "You need to provide 
them with a way to have their kids in school, even if the parents are 
idiots.", and they are using those plastic "self stick" sticker, for 
"art", instead of crayons, because the stickers are *cheaper*, and they 
can't afford to have both nannies and crayons.

Sometimes I despair at the US' ability to survive another 50 years, 
never mind 100, or 200, given that we *actually* seem to think that the 
opinion of some slouch that spend 80% of their time on a couch watching 
Oprah or Nascar (or both), is more important than *funding* schools, 
fixing what doesn't work in them for real, instead of just testing the 
bad ones, and chopping funding, and **keeping the morons fingers out of 
the soup**, while doing so. The same people that *want* us to drag 
people out of a line at the airport, and strip search them, to make sure 
they are not *insane* or *stupid* enough to be trying to blow up a 
plane, think that its irrelevant if someone is insane and/or stupid, 
when telling the school, "I don't want Ezekial to have to learn that 
Evilution stuff!", or imagine that the way to gauge how good a school 
is, should be base not on how many of the kids move on to something 
better later, but a) how many Football stars it produces, and b) how 
many of the kids got them a proper education on farm animals, or 
roofing, or sewage treatment, so they chose the *family* profession, 
over something high falootin and useless, like physics. And, for now at 
least, with the exceptions of "big cities", which are too "librul", most 
of the country seems to be trying to cater to making things dumber and 
dumberer.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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