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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (5342)	11/15/2005 9:00:01 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 542019

Yes. What ARE we doing there? I was against that from the beginning- so don't ask me what we're doing there. If a country is invaded, we should be there with the rest of the world, as I have said REPEATEDLY. Thus I would have stopped Hitler much earlier than he was, actually, stopped. Desert Storm- fine - intervention. But counties that haven't attacked anyone? No. Not unless the UN decides to go to prevent atrocities- and further than that, I wouldn't want the US shouldering most of the cost, and most of the troop commitment. Russia, India and China need to step up to the plate- and if they aren't willing to, then the US should not try to go it alone. As for preemptive war, the concept was ridiculous from the beginning and I have always said so. You can't blow your neighbor away because you "imagine" he might be plotting something, and you can't/shouldn't do it to countries either (you can't even do it if the other neighbors imagine the same thing). My take on American history is that it is handled as well as it can be in a nation where parents care more about sports than school. In other countries families, and society, put much more emphasis on education- and it shows. I think teaching is actually much better now than it ever was. We understand more about disabilities, we teach to children in ways they understand, but we don't have children for as long as their parents do (but really, in most cases, I should say "for as long as their day care providers do, or for as long as they are in front of the TV." This nation has a severe problem with anti-intellectualism, and as long as that persists, I don't care how good the teachers are, if they are not valued, forget about it. Most people like their own child's teachers, but there is still this reservoir of resentment about the teachers union, or about school administrators, or about school in general, but imo the real problem is our society with its screwed up values, where we worship TV stars and sports figures, and suspect teachers and education. It's bizarre. As for your specific question about books, I don't know why she was weeding. What you say it too general. Many books have been written with glaring errors, especially older books. It's possible no one was checking out the books (very few kids read anymore to begin with, and a miniscule percentage are reading history.) If their shelf space is limited, as ours is in this disctrict (the schools generally have fairly small libraries)- the shelf space needs to be allocated to book the kids actually read, or materials that link to the classes, and that teachers can expect their students to be able to read. There is no point in having books on the shelves that are at or beyond a students frustration level. You wouldn't want Silas Marner or the Dialogs of Plato in an elementary library, for example. It would be a waste of space. If you ever get the genius that can read those works in the 4th grade, his or her mom can take him to the public library. The shelf space is needed for Bears on Wheels, and The Indian in the Cupboard.