Kevin:
“Don't know how having private schools affects guns in schools. “
I can’t either but I think I am correct that so far none of the gun incidents occurred in a private school. Also, my point was that the Courts by imposing rules that restrict the authority of the schools to search students and lockers were undermining the authority of our educators.
“Private schools in poorer sections would face the same tough environment. “
Well here is my experience. My parents were divorced and my mother had a mental illness, so that as a child I rarely saw her. I went to a school in a poor neighborhood and at least 1/2 of the kids came from an orphanage located across the street from the school. It was a Catholic School and the nuns were tough as nails. No child was permitted to use poverty, or family circumstances as an excuse. They just demanded the best from us This was a poor school. The text books had been around for years. At the end of each year we had to repair the text books. We would tape pages that had been ripped and sand the edges of the books. We had to sand our desks so that any graffitti would be removed. Of course there wasn’t any for obvious reasons. Corporal punishment was the order of the day. By the way although there were only about 15 kids in my eighth grade class, the 7th and 8th grade were taught in the same classroom by one nun.
I lived in Baltimore City at the time. There was a very fine public school called Baltimore Polytechnic. To get into this school, required the passing of an examination. If you scored high enough you qualified for the A course. It was a boys only school at that time. If you passed but did not score high enough you qualified for the B course. Out of our class of 15, 3 passed the exam with grades high enough to qualify for the A course.
So much for the idea that you can’t educate kids who have it tough.
To complete the story, my family moved away and in the tenth grade, I went to a public school in our new neighborhood. It was the first time I realized that teacher’s prepared their lessons. This was because about 1/2 of the teachers simply were not prepared to teach the class. A problem that has gotten worse since then.
“2) Again, the risk of excluding 'harder to educate' students is to create a class system. But I understand the counter argument; why should other students suffer? Equal opportunity at education means that there will be some suffering as the cost; we can't get around that.”
If I understand your argument, you are saying that despite the difficulties such students cause we should allow them to remain in school. My view is that education is an opportunity and if you come to school and make no effort, disrupt the class and miss classes all the time, you just lose your opportunity. Anything else is not fair to the other students. Then we have students who are never going to be educated. e.g. Due to Federal laws we have to educate and even try to “mainstream” autistic children, as an example. The plain fact is that the public school system is not equipped to teach these children and the attempt to mainstream them just hurts other students. This does not mean that we should ignore these kid’s needs. It means we need to find a better way to address them.
Little joe |
