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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (64082)	10/30/2015 12:41:02 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 85487

Hi Tim, I don't think teachers unions are the big problem. I look at the whole educational problem much differently. The secret to education in my opinion, is to get the children started early. That takes precedent over everything else. E.g. the rich and the academic's make sure their kids are in preschool by 2 1/2, and even the academics with PhD degrees do not homeschool their kids, they send them to preschools, public or private. A recent study comparing rich kids to poor kids academically, that came out of Stanford University and Columbia ,and confirmed by MRIs, showed that by the time the rich kids were two years old, the poor kids were only operating at 18 months intellectually . By the time the rich kids were five years, old the poor kids were only operating at three years old. So then they went back and looked at the variable/s that seemed to be causing the differences, what they found was that in the rich kids homes millions of more words were being spoken than in the poor kids homes. This meant that the rich kids were getting a big head start in understanding concepts, context and abstract reasoning. What this also means is that kids need to get started early. The answer in my opinion is universal free preschool for all children with hot meals starting at 2 1/2. Research over the years shows that kids that go to preschool cause much less crime and are much more productive. So it is good for society to support such pre schools. In my own family, even though my daughter is a lawyer and my son-in-law is a PhD physics professor, and the grandparents all have PhD equivalencies, except for me and I have a Masters, we do not homeschool our two grandchildren, they are sent to preschool. And because my daughter a lawyer, is a stay-at-home mom they do not have a lot of money and have to scrape to send the kids to preschool. $700 a month. But that is how important we all think it is. So the entire family feels it is so important that they pitch in whenever necessary. One inlaw was the chairman of the statistics department at UC Berkeley, and two of them are University of Washington lawyers and another is an artist and I have my Masters in administration. Yet we do not homeschool them we sent them to preschool and now public schools. And that is true of most academics who are perfectly capable of homeschooling them, but all feel it is better to send them to public schools. When we have our clan meetings like over the holidays no one ever mentions either unions or teachers themselves as being a problem. And every one of us has spent many years in school attending or teaching. I think we all feel the teachers are just teachers and there's the good the bad and the ugly like everything else in life and the children have to learn to deal with it. In fact it prepares them for life. My point is, when we worry about things like unions, we are overlooking the 800 pound gorilla in the room and that is the necessity to get kids in school and start education early. And the best way to do that is to get children into school and started early. . One last thing to think about, is that if you were able to identify the IQ of a child at birth and had a rich kid with 100 IQ and a poor kid with a 130 IQ, but the rich kid went to preschool, and the poor kid didn't, by the time they reached kindergarten the rich kid would be so far ahead of the poor kid, that the poor kid would have an inferiority complex and feel he wasn't smart and would start withdrawing from school. While the rich kid would go on to be an academic success. Kids can't give up 2 1/2 years of education and be expected to do as well as kids of the been going to school for 2 1/2 years. That should be common sense. A great book on how the mind works is written by Robert Ornstein a research psychologist who is studied the mind for 40 years. In it he shows not only the children start learning while they're in the womb, but by the time they're 10 hours old they can identify a face. Kids are ready to start learning at a young much younger age than people used to think. I've seen it a million times. What's more, teachers naturally dote on the kids they think are smarter, so right there we lost a kid who had every capability to do whatever he wanted, but because he did not start school early got lost. I've seen it with my own eyes all my life. As mentioned, It is very hard to make up 2 1/2 years of lost education Nice to hear from you again Tim.