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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (67970)	9/8/2004 11:31:25 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793928

if our objective is to give everyone an education that would be sufficient for brick layers, we would not need 12 years of public education plus kindergarten and pre school. I think this is our basic area of disagreement. I do think that takes twelve years or close to it. If the objective is to produce people who can earn a living laying bricks, they probably could get by with no school at all. There have been people throughout history who built their homes out of brick without a bit of education. You don't even have to be able to read to lay bricks, although counting probably helps. If the objective were to lay bricks, we could apprentice five year olds and skip the schooling. Just think how much money we could save... I reason we need twelve years of schooling, I think, is that we're trying to produce citizens. And parents. Citizens and parents need to know some stuff. At least I think they do. But how much mathematicss does anyone really need (btw I was okay with math). I've never used my math, either, except for statistics, which a brick layer wouldn't need. Well, not absolutely never. I made some valences about twenty years ago that were semicircular and trimmed with lace. I was glad I knew how to calculate the circumference of a circle so I knew how much lace to buy. Seriously. Much of the point of studying math is not it's utility in daily life but to teach you how to think. Remember when people used to study Latin for that purpose? It's very useful in life to have the experience of computing "if train A left X station at ten o'clock going 50 MPH and train B..." If you've gotten good at that, then you have a chance of being able to reason out a political issue. Do we really want our brick layers falling for the populist garbage spouted by our politicians? I'm assuming that the standards are set for some minimal citizenship level, not for brick laying. But I don't know that.