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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sr K who wrote (125796)	10/30/2012 9:57:11 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 149317

<<<Better schools have better professors, and they cost more. They have better facilities, and they cost more to have and maintain.>> I never can tell where you will come from. You seem a hybrid right/left winger. I would guess an elderly classical (uppercrust) liberal of sorts-lol? I have the unique life experience of being very ignorant and uneducated when young, and slowly learning the depth of my ignorance and working to rectify it. I have attended a community college and a top university. I saw no difference in the teaching skills from one college to another. Education, is education, is education. One just needs a lot of it. Some learn everything on their own by just reading. I had great teachers at all three colleges. <<You want diluted education. You want average professors. I want the best schools to get better.>. That is the big myth. Average professors, baloney. Most teachers are just fine. Where are these great excellent thinkers? Where are they hiding? I never found any. I just found normal educated people, or not. It is far more important (to individuals and society) to get the UNDEREDUCATED people educated, then get a few better educated. The problem with most peoples education has little to do with the school they go to and everything to do with the effort they put into it. Education begets education. Most people are simply not educated enough and don't know either the depth of their ignorance, or their own intellectual capacity. This is especially true of people who have been beaten down. <<You want mediocrity. I want excellence.>. No, I want an educated society. I would say roughly 86% of the people can get through college with little effort (one standard deviation below the mean of the Stanford Binet) . Brains are made not born.The only mediocrity comes from people who don't develop their minds, or are so indoctrinated they can't. Do you know why there are no right wing intellectuals? Because there is no viable right wing philosophy to support a right wing intellectual. <<I don't want free education. Education doesn't cost anything if you know what you're doing. Like almost anything else one buys, it has utility greater than or equal to what you pay for it. If it's not worth what they are charging, ask them to charge you (or your children) less, as you would with any other purchase.>. Well, I do; and not free, society must pick up the check. It is in societies best interest. Remember research shows for every dollar spent on head start society gets back $60 to $300 in increased productivity and lower crime. I watched huge numbers of ghetto kids evolve into thoughtful citizens by community colleges that require no entrance exams, grades and cost little and give kids a second chance after they mature. Most who try it succeed. And after they graduate from a community college they were able to move on to higher institutions of learning. And many do. Those kids I knew at the community college were just as capable intellectually as the kids I met at the University of Washington. They were mostly just poor, with uneducated parents. Once they got a chance they went on to great things. My first cousin whom I grew up with, had parents who didn't even want him to go to college. They wanted him to get a job. He went to the community college with me and then on to get a PHD in entomology and is a world famous spider expert they call spiderman. His sister got pregnant at 15, dropped out of high school and then went back to a community college and went on to get a masters of nursing and ended up a health supervisor for a county. There was no way to tell any of us was capable of any significant thinking except to give us a second chance when we grew up. I have a zillion friends like me and they are intellectually as competent as your "so called excellent thinkers"". I competed with them at the university of Washington. Nothing special that I saw and I always beat them at poker-lol. My kids competed with them at UC Berkeley and U of Oregon and had no trouble graduating with honors. If you can do it at those universities you can do it anywhere. The kids at UC Berkeley (public school) can compete with the kids at Harvard and Stanford with no trouble at all! Harder to get into UC Berkeley-lol. Dad can't get you in like he did with Bush. And Bush competed at Yale and Harvard, so how "excellent" can those schools be-lol? I doubt Bush would have survived Berkeley.

To: Sr K who wrote (125796)	10/31/2012 3:05:48 AM
From: denizen48	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

Sorry to disagree with you, cause I like your posts. Money is not the same as an education. It never will be. Maybe you're thinking of learning a trade so as to make money. But that isn't knowledge. It isn't Tolstoy, Kant, Aristoteles, Heidegger, Buddha, Newton, Mozart, Beethooven......you get the drift? There are no pockets in the suit you're buried in. Life is meant to be appreciated & understood, not a race to the top of the money heap.