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

To: epicure who wrote (115998)	7/21/2009 11:13:35 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541863

We have a different culture than the countries you cite and a lot of people in this country view the summer off as a constitutional right. Until the culture catches up to your views---ain't gonna happen. Best thing I think is to nurse along the dual system and to have it gradually gain acceptance. Worse thing would be to tell people they are going to have to go to school year around and boy would you see a quick change in the District school Boards come election time.

To: epicure who wrote (115998)	7/21/2009 11:23:18 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541863

PS. One last observation here, if I may, we lead he world in innovation and I submit, though I'm not going to be able to prove it, is that national characteristic is tied to the right to roam and explore which is nourished in extended summer vacations.

To: epicure who wrote (115998)	7/21/2009 11:29:04 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541863

If it were up to me, U.S. children would be in school year round. The following piece was originally referenced in a blog posted by LB on the PfP board: The underworked American Jun 11th 2009 From The Economist print edition Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder? There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day. But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year. American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese. Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance. The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad. A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones. These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession. Learning the lesson A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests. Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces. One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home. Economist story link

To: epicure who wrote (115998)	7/21/2009 11:54:15 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541863

In the US, education is a business involving the State, unions and administrators. In countries like India and China, education is an obligation as well as a pride of society. Let us look at where the money is going and instead funnel them towards education and re training "If reading and writing were education, then brick and stone would be architecture." ================================ Can we stop being a superpower, please? Deepak Chopra Monday, July 20, 2009 It's been roughly twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, which means that the U.S. has experienced two decades of being the world's sole superpower. The experience hasn't been positive. Under the sway of neocon ambitions, in particular, the Bush era was marked by a failed attempt to dominate the globe militarily. Mired in Afghanistan and scarred by Iraq, those ambitions proved to be shameful and foolish. A group of misguided gunslingers created a catastrophe. Have we come to the point where disillusion will lead us where we need to go, to the end of playing the superpower role? This is a relevant question in the aftermath of President Obama's visit to Russia, a country that yearns to return to its former status and does everything it can to posture as its old superpower self. Yet other than a bloated nuclear arsenal and swaggering oil production, present-day Russia doesn't fit the bill and never will again. Its diminished threat is the first reason why the U.S. should abandon the thankless task of policing the world. The second is the enormous waste of resources involved in being a superpower. Sheer inertia keeps fueling the production of new armaments to replace outworn ones that were useless to begin with. Has the Stealth bomber justified its staggering cost, or the nuclear submarine, Polaris missiles, Titan missiles, not to mention Star Wars? Most of these weapons haven't seen the slightest use. Billions of dollars have been spent on a defense system that is protecting us from a foe who long ago neutralized its threat. The third reason to stop being a superpower is that Nixon's specter of the U.S. as a pitiful helpless giant hasn't decreased since Vietnam but only become worse. Crude terrorism lurking in the shadows of side streets is a match for advanced weapons systems if you are measuring in terms of psychological threat, anxiety, and a creeping sense that the enemy can strike at will. Atomic arsenals, a massive standing army, and space-age technology aren't justified when a single dirty bomb can sneak in under the fence. It's time to accept what every insurgency expert tells us, that asymmetrical warfare is here to stay and must be fought on a smaller, smarter scale that is closer to neighborhood policing than conventional, World War II style combat. That's only the beginning of the list. There's the need during this crippling recession to spend money on productive jobs and rebuilding infrastructure, not more arms. There's the moral question of the fear we inspire internationally by our aggressive militancy, which is tragically at odds with our pronounced aim of world peace. Peace is achieved by being peaceful, no matter what the military-industrial complex claims to the contrary. Other factors center on the ideals of a functioning democracy. Is it fair for a few senior congressmen to hold the power to fund massive, largely secret arms programs without check? Should the arms lobby be able to write its own ticket, year after year? It's deeply wrong that a tiny portion of our populace should fight wars abroad, bearing the full burden of suffering, while reactionary politicians promise tax cuts and no consequences for the enormous harm we do by invading other countries. America leads the world in arms dealing, starting wars, and developing new methods of mechanized death. Even if you leave aside the basic insanity of the Cold War and its stockpiling of nuclear weapons on a scale that can potentially decimate life on earth, all the reasons listed above should be enough to make anyone think twice. We may be accustomed to feeling like a superpower, but that isn't the same as feeling safe and secure. Having tried militarism for the past sixty years, perhaps we can give peace a chance and see if genuine safety and security lies there instead. sfgate.com