http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4265536.stm Read this article. It references teenagers who "sluff" (skip) school. The English Parliament is imprisoning parents of teenagers that skip school. I am in the education business, and I absolutely disagree with this. If the kid persistently skips school, IMPRISON THE KID NOT THE PARENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is teaching kids that they are not accountable for their mistakes! The child learns that he can do whatever he wants, and if its wrong, his parents will get in trouble. I can't even tell you how upset I am at this. Make the child accountable; doing so will only make the future better.
Well, I see that the American Education system and the NEA have finally got their message all the way to the UK. So what is new, we have a whole generatiion of "give me" young people growing up here as I write this note. Most never do a honest days work in their short lives, or plan on doing any as long as the Democrats keep handing out free this and free that! You name it and they give it out as a constitutional obligation (birth control, and abortion on demand from teen agers). Yes sir, they wil take care of you all the way from birth to the cemetary, if you will only vote for them at the next ellection.
It's just terrible isn't it? Why are we afraid of making people responsible for their own actions? If a kid skips school, punish the kid. I have taught plenty of high school before, and kids have the attitude "why? It won't affect me". They say that with homework, their grades, their appearance. Indeed, olddan, we have an upcoming generation that won't be able to handle adulthood. They will walk out the door when they turn 18 and they won't be able to support themselves until they're 50.
now the democrats are at fault for the problems of our countries youth? Dan, that is reaching a little far.
the only people who are at fault are the youth themselves. a teenager is mature enough to know right from wrong. they know skipping school is bad, thats why they do it. they know stealing is bad, thats why they do it. I am going to be a little brass here, but stop pussy-footing around and blame the youth for the problems they cause!!
Yes blame the offender, but also give them choices. Here in CA there is no work available. Our State Government has taxed the business out of the state, and the illegals will work for peanuts. They have all the start-up jobs our kids use to have. With NAFTRA, GAT and other Federal decisions the youths of today have a bleak future. That old ladder of working your way up is gone along with the factories and manufacturing jobs. Will we end up without a middle class? Who is going to pay the bills? Our boarders are wide open, and few care until it affects them. 50 years ago I could ride my bike from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other - Today I'm afraid to drive into most of it. WOW - Who pushed my button? I'll shut up now.
You know Rick, you could be right, but I would like to hear from you, just what the underlying problem might be and who the responsible party should be. I await your reply.
depends on the perspective. Education, in this case, is a priviledge. Those who gain from it are the ones who attend. If you mean to ask, who is at fault for the child cutting class, my answer is simply the child. Taking it a step further, however, the only one who loses out because of it is the kid who cut class - so he has made himself the only victim of this situation. If he (or she) is willing to accept that they live with their choices, there is no fault. I can't punch myself in the head, and take myself to court for damages, now can I?
Let’s look at it from a little different perspective. Education used to be more of a priviledge than it is now because “big brother” has gone and made it mandatory (usually up through the 8th grade or 16 years of age) for all children and assigned the responsibility to the parents for making sure the child receives this schooling. Faithful attendance does not assure a good education by any stretch of the imagination. i’ve seen young adults come out of school as dumb as fence posts and they all seem to have attitude problems, associated to the constant “Oh. don’t let Johnny fail” mode taken by most public schools here in America. i happen to believe most people graduating today could very easily come back and sue the hell out of their school for not doing the job of educating. That the current educators fault, not the student. You think the student is the only victim from this form of non-education, don’t be too sure. Just wait until they are of breading age and start having children of their own. Chances are you will be paying for it. Then you can feed and cloth them for the next 20 years. Oh yes, along the way you will also pay for another college education for someone who cant read or write to begin with and little hope of learning at college. Then it’s off to job training, paid again by you and again they can’t respond or won’t, for what ever reason. So it;s welfare for the next 75 years, ending up with Medicaid and good old Uncle Sam paying the bill and raising your taxes. You say there is no fault. My God man, there is so much that you couldn’t begin to distribute it with any success of doing any good. You cant punch your self and sue your self. Well, I’ve seen cases where children have caused harm to themselves and then told authorities that their parents did it in order to be allowed to move to another location where one of their friends lives. And the sob sisters and bleeding hearts let it happen. Now I’ll get of the tree stump!
I'm probably gonna regret this - but what the .... I've thought about this issue since I was in high school - nuttin much has changed since then. Kids used to cut school then - they still do. In fact they always have - as far back as you can go. But why do some kids do it and not others ? Well I figure it's because of the kid - to a degree. Some of them are gonna cut school no matter what. But some of them could be convinced not to - by the right teacher. You see I believe the crux of the problem is the teachers. Yes I know our dear govt. also plays a part. But the govt. didn't really step in and start changing all the rules until we the people started complaining. Then they started changin the rules. First discipline was thrown out the window - then they started up with no kid is allowed to fail. They were putting bandaids on the problem instead of addressing the real issue - teachers. Yeah I know - it's been said a thousand times - if you want good teachers you have to pay them more. But nobody ever does - the old "where's the money gonna come from?" question always pops up and then they start lookin for another bandaid. But bandaids don't stop a hemorrhage - you need serious medical attention to do that. That means money. Think about it - what's the most important thing in the world to any parent ?? Their kids. No ifs - no maybes - their kids. But the parents won't devote the time or the money to the kids - at least not when it comes to education. But think about this - what do you pay your auto mechanic - $35 - $45 an hour ? How about a plumber ? Or anybody else for that provides you with a service for that matter. I guarantee you pay them all more than you pay the teachers - the people who watch, attend to and try to teach the most important things in the world to you - your kids. If you want good teachers - pay 'em - they'll come. They'll line up for the opportunity - and you'll get good ones. To be a good teacher - you have to want to be one, because you love kids and teaching. But most of 'em can't afford to be teachers - they have kids to support too. And auto mechanics to pay. Also - what's the easiest degree to get - a teacher's certificate. Doesn't matter what subject, except for maybe law or medical - get your BA or BS and you can be a teacher with little extra effort. Why is that ? The people we entrust our children to - expecting them to teach them everything we can't or don't have time to do ourselves - have the easiest requirements. Does that make sense to you ?? It doesn't me. For the most important thing in my life - I want the best. I for one am willing to pay for it as well. Change the requirements, pay 'em a decent wage - and I'll be the first in line to pay the additional taxes. No questions asked. And with good teachers - maybe they can capture the kid's attention - make them want to be in school, make them want to learn. Once we do that - then we can start rippin off the bandaids and fix the other problems with our schools.
olddan: I disagree with you when you say it is the educator's fault. It is not the teacher's fault if the student is in class in body but not in mind. When I taught high school, it was an art of repetition. At no time were there more than 20% of the kids paying attention. More often than not I had to tell them to shut up. Therefore, the kids that are graduating and can't read, its their fault and no one else's! Blame them, they wasted 12 years of education!! gdjmsp: I like your screen name by the way... Anyway I agree that educators need to be paid more. Teaching is highly rewarding and highly discouraging. I think with the right incentives teachers will be much more motivated. But like I've said, I think the biggest problem with education lies with the kids, and their unwillingness to learn. We have a society of nintendo, flashy advertisements, and 20 minute shows. We are a society of: "I want it now and I want it cheap". Education is the opposite, it takes time, patience, and money. If students aren't willing to invest, they will not see a return.
GDJMSP Your statement about under paid teachers and over priced auto mechanics and plumers is wrong. check these numbers out. CA students - 6,356,348 in 2002 Cost per student = $7,552.00 Students per class room = 30 avg. Taxes per class room = $226,560.00 Total cost to tax payer per hour = $157.00 Graduation rate - 68.8 % Yearly School Budget - $48 BILLION CA average teacher salery - $60,000.00 for 9 months work CA teachers are best paid in nation ANSWER THIS Taxes paid per year per class room -$226,560.00 Teachers average wage - $60,000.00 WHERE DID THE OTHER $166,560.00 PER CLASS ROOM GO??????
Just for background, I speak as an accredited adult education instructor who has made his living teaching. Teachers are woefully underpaid for an astoundingly complex job. My experience pales by comparison to that of a schoolteacher - my students were voluntary and motivated because they were paying for what I taught them, and were already mature adults who were aware of the context of why they were in school. Even still, my workload, done right, was beyond any possible imagined scenario generated by anyone who had never been in my shoes. They only way to do it right was to combine the stated requirements of the course with individual tailoring to each student's needs, because every human being is completely different in terms of outlook, learning curve, and best approach to ensure full digestion of the curriculum. Not only do schoolteachers have that much to cope with, they need to do it in a production-line environment, with huge classes, mandatory testing requirements and strict curriculum guidelines allowing for very little variance from what someone decided was the "right" way to do it. And the majority of their students have very little concept of just how important that process is to their future happiness, productivity and economic outlook. It is fatuously unrealistic to heap the entire load of responsibility for student behavior upon their teachers, and narrowminded to blame the students themselves. No one among us is born with a completed set of behaviors - we're all blank slates as children, and our future behavior is merely a reflection of how we have been raised to behave. Although a good teacher can have a greatly beneficial effect upon the attitude and outlook of their students, where instruction differs from home environment, only a very few students will actually abandon the lessons of the home in favor of the teachings of someone who is not their parent. You cannot expect a student to abandon the years of nurturing (however defective) of their home environment - by the time a child reaches school age, much of their future outlook has been imprinted upon them by their subconscious absorption of the behaviors of their parents. It is stunningly difficult to reverse this process. The responsibility, IMO, for student behavior starts and ends in the home. Parents start with a blank slate, and what they write on their childrens' blackboards never actually erases - the only difference between us as students is our ability to see what has been overwritten on top of our early lessons. It is also fatuous to believe that teachers, in the artificial environment of a school, can completely reverse the hard and realistic lessons of the environments their students live in. It's possible in some cases, depending on the resilience of the individual student (some of us are fighters by genetic nature, some not), but if what I tell you in class about some pipedream, perfect world differs from the poverty and hardship you see on the way home, you're unlikely to give me credit for being real. The solution to the problem is manifold: 1) Teachers must be compensated sufficiently to attract the very best among us to take up the vocation. I know the additional conditions I enumerate below are unreachable, so I advocate the recruitment of the finest possible candidates to help to alter the course of the lives of their charges. 2) We must make a concerted attempt to improve the living conditions of a large percentage of our children. Every child has the basic right to grow up in a safe and nurturing environment, yet our have/have not social system ensures that an ever-increasing proportion of children will lack the fundamental support during their early years which forms the basis of a positive learning process. 2a) I know this is radical, but I contend that it must be mandatory that perspective parents undergo training to be parents. It should be just as important as proper medical attenttion during pregnancy. It's bad enough that we're losing the students from "poor" backgrounds, but we're also losing the middle- and upper-class kids who should reasonably be expected to go on to college and become productive members of society. 2b) We simply have to throw more money at the problem the of inner-city and rural poverty-stricken sectors of our society. It's unrealistic to expect that students from such a background will maximize their learning experience. I speak strictly from the heart, from personal experience, here. I grew up dirt-poor in a broken household, and thirty years' hindsight shows me clearly what the difference back then would have made for me now. The only way to solve the problem of poverty is to make it possible for people to work their way out of poverty. The overwhelming percentage of the poor would gladly bootstrap themselves out of poverty if they could. This is an unrealistic goal if we believe that it is the sole responsibility of government to provide the means - the only way the government could acquire enough money to make it happen is for it to become huge and invasive in our lives, directly contradicting the tenets of the Declaration fo Independance and our Constitution. Therefore...... 3) We must fundamentally alter the outlook of big business in our society. I do not mean become a socialist society where the "people" own industry and profit isn't allowed. I mean, let us cease seeing profit as the overwhelming paradigm of successful business. It would be easy for me to point out corporate greed as the basic problem, but much of this greed begins with the average stockholder. In our desire to maximize our own personal earning and retirement potential, we, the average American, provide the incentive and impetus for business to use the price of their stock as the sole metric by which they evaluate their success. We expect profits to set new records every quarter, at least with those companies whose stock we hold. We desire to buy now at $10.00 and sell next year at $50.00. The only way to accomplish that goal is focus wholly on profit, while ignoring the broader responsibilities any business holds within our society. I now work for a company which employs something over 300,000 people. I would imagine, counting dependants, well over a million people directly depend on this company for their livelihoods. The motivation and goal of pure profit, the setting of new records for profit, is leading my employer away from their responsibility to provide a viable income for their employees. In the interest of streamlining operations and cutting costs, raises no longer even keep up with inflation. Starting wages are no longer sufficient to attract capable people. Although my employer, by the nature of its' business, spends more and is more visible helping in the public sector, they could become a much larger force for the improvement of society as a whole by the simple expedient of no longer having to answer to a ravenous, profit-oriented set of stockholders. That's us, guys. Directly, through the stock we hold, and indirectly, through the stock our retirement plans and other investments hold, we're driving the machine. So how, do you ask, does my rant-within-a-rant relate to the original topic of wayward students? It is in the fact that the problem with problem students does not exist in a vaccuum, nor does the solution. We cannot ever expect to successfully address the problem if we address it as a standalone situation. Nor can we solve it without solving some much larger problems in our society. As long as we see misbehaving students as the topic of a directed thread in an internet forum, we're just missing the problem, much less the solution.
Oh Yea I forgot - the average CA wage is $41,000.00 per 12 month year. While our Teachers make $60,000.00 for 9 months per year. Thats equal to $80,000.00 for a 12 month per year job. With only 68.8 percent graduating - They should hang their heads in shame.
Ron you also need to note the cost of living in CA is so much higher than everywhere else. So although a CA teacher may get paid X, a UT teacher getting paid X-$20,000 is actually more because the cost of living is so much less. However, you did make many good points.
to address the 'where does it go?' question, you aren't thinking of administration fees - everything surrounding: the principle, the superintendant, the office staff, the heat, the groundskeeper, the text books, the bus systems, the building maintenance, the library, the computers, the copy machines - you get the picture. That said, looked at some stats that said the teachers in my state, as of 2002 and forward, earned well above the professional average. Is that enough? Don't know - but I think some of the expectations people say they are under have been removed to a great degree... I think the problem is in the design - backward expectations. The ACLU doesn't help the situation in the slightest. Doug's right, some kids cut class - always have, always will. I say, you can't punish the parents and possibly expect that will help to solve anything. Beyond silly, it's immoral. You can't blanketly say kids do bad things because of bad parents... sometimes it's true - usually it ain't.
And I say, as long as parents have available copouts which allow them to blame something other than themselves for how their children turn out, the problem will continue. These children start with nothing. They're blank. We, the parents, teach and, worse yet, show them through our actions what is and is not acceptable behavior. Do we work in a vaccuum? Absolutely not. It's a nasty world out there, and it would be wrong for us to either shelter our children from these nasty bits, or to claim that they're unimportant or lacking in influence. But it boils down to us, the parents, to contextualize the bad parts, to explain their long-term relationship to our children's adult happiness. I know darn well we'll never make the problem go away completely, but we're so far from maximizing our chances as parents to get it right that it's ludicrous to try and solve any other aspects of the problem first.
People are responsible for how they, themselves, turn out. Good people can come from bad surroundings just as easily as bad people can come from good surroundings... it all boils down to the character of the individual at hand. And there are way too many variables to lock down one single factor... but society likes easy answers, and locking up the parents, and pointing the finger at them - it reminds me of the Simpson episode, which resulted with this line: 'let the bears pay the bear tax. I'll pay the homer tax.' Where you claim to remove one copout for parents, all you've really suggested is to create another copout for young adults who are the ones making the poor choices. You're right, kids - young children - start out as blanks. But there is no meaningful research which has provided an answer key of 'this will stick', and 'this will not'. By the time these kids have reached the stages of young adults - nothing else matters. They are their own person. Make them answer for themselves, and hold their feet to the fire... give the schools the ability to do this, and trust it to the right people, so it isn't taken advantage of. Hard to contemplate how we could get there, isn't it? Well, it's a complex problem, so it deserves a little more than a simple solution. Because we can all go to therapy and tell people about how our life was so hard growing up - and so all the mistakes we make result from something our parents did that we didn't like - but the fact is: none of it matters. If you don't like who you are, you are responsible for changing it. If you don't like where you ended up, you are responsible for making it better. Strength of Character - you want it, or you don't.
I could not agree with you more rick, but you didn’t go far enough with the statement. You should have also said that we as individuals within this society, have responsibilities for more than just ourselves This would include those we bring into this world as our children. Right again, but this would also include the point your trying to make on the childs responsibility. It’s only one factor, and not the solution. This time you are wrong rick. Universities and Educational Colleges spend up to two years teaching classes in just this subject. Organized education has been going on for several hundred years now, so you can’t say schools haven’t been given a chance. By the way, just WHO ARE THESE “RIGHT PEOPLE”. that you speak of? Again, a very true statement, and one that I would agree with. Now start thinking of ways of “fixing” the problem. I know you can do it!
