Therefore, we have it in writing that Loren Pretchel is against investing in the K-12 education system. We have it on record that you are against investing in children's education.
Could your characterisation possibly be more dishonest?
He did not say he was against investing in K-12 education. He said the investment we have is the right amount.
Mostly the right amount. There are places that are lacking but it's mostly a matter of the students. Note that when the students don't care putting money into expensive equipment just gets it wrecked or stolen.
We do have a problem with not providing classroom supplies but the amount of money this entails is a pretty small percent of the overall budget.
That guy still hasn't figured out that I have him on ignore?
@Loren Pechtel Your views are still basically authoritarian. The reason why I accuse you so is that education, especially education in cognitive skills like critical thinking, is the single biggest threat in the world against authoritarian governments. Authoritarianism cannot survive in a world where most people are educated in the kinds of thinking skills that they need in order to solve their own problems in rational ways. When authoritarian politicians get into power, the first thing they do, under whatever pretense they choose to do so, is to attack the education system. Whether you are attacking attempts to invest more in the education system when it is struggling, which it still is in many parts of the United States, or attempting to directly raid the education system in the name of "cutting waste" just so as to throw your constituents a tax cut, I do not care. Ultimately, attacks on the education system invariably come from authoritarian quarters of our political sphere.
Whether you like it or not, then, you are a brainwashed authoritarian, and I do not care what pretenses you choose to paint over it. You are no more intent on "liberating" anybody than Russia was intent on "liberating" Ukraine by flattening any city that resisted them under their jack boot. Calling yourself "libertarian" really does not mean that you give a shit about liberty in any real sense. Calling yourself a liberator does not make you a liberator.
If you are really nothing more than a petulant fool that does not like the responsibility of paying taxes, then you are a petulant fool that does not like the responsibility of paying taxes, but that has nothing to do with liberty. If the decisions that you make to that end must inevitably lead to your society being vulnerable to an authoritarian autocrat, then you are not really defending anybody's liberty, but you are throwing away your people's liberty because you are a petulant fool that does not like the responsibility of paying taxes.
No matter how many justifications you attempt to build onto it, you know what the consequence is going to be, and I deny that you are really delusional enough or stupid enough that you do not understand those consequences. if you deliberately choose actions that lead to those consequences, then you own those consequences.
I therefore accuse you of really having authoritarian views.
And I would rather not hear you put the blame for the long-term symptoms of multi-generational neglect onto children again. Let me cut through your justifications, here, so everyone can understand what you are really doing.
@Loren Pechtel has chosen to blame children for the symptoms of poverty.
I grew up in a poor area with an absolutely shitty education system, and I was deprived, on top of that. When I punched a teacher for having the nerve to grab me and shake me, I was put into a group of trailers for students that had been branded as mentally unwell, and throughout three years of my education, I was deprived of even a shitty education except what I could scrape out of books on my own time.
The only reason that I did not turn out to be more ignorant than I did was that I was a little queer from a conservative evangelical background, and that gave me an intense motivation to seek out companionship that encouraged and empowered me to question the value-system that had oppressed me. That led to me embracing intellectualism with a vigor that otherwise would not have been particularly likely. I used intellectual swagger as a shield against spiritual abuse, but without that motivation behind me, I would have turned out to be functionally illiterate. I only embraced intellectualism because I needed to in order to protect myself from a very sick form of abuse that otherwise would have driven me to kill myself. While it was an effective motivation, it was ultimately not a healthy situation. I am still seeing psychiatrists because of the damage that was left behind by that motivation.
Nevertheless, that was really not a substitute for a really meaningful education, and it has taken me years to get my life organized to such a point that I can live with any appreciable degree of dignity whatsoever. The deprivation of my education really did nothing to make my life better, but it led to me spending costly years figuring out practical things about the world that I really ought to have been taught. There is only so much you can learn from books, wikis, and free thought message boards. As someone from a rural area that literally walked out of the woods barefoot (the topsiders fell apart on the way), I was not sure that something as simple as an urban parking deck did not imply the existence of a space port somewhere.
I only spent a very short increment of my adult life blaming black people for the defects in my education system, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my culture's very despair of those children had helped to contribute to their dysfunctional behavior. The very fact that their school was run like a prison led to them internalizing the belief that they should behave like prisoners. They were angry at the system because they knew that superintendent was robbing them blind. They saw the expensive cars and the yachts of the social elites. They knew that the children of the rich were going to private academies, not to the underfunded cesspool they were kept in. They were angry because they knew that their society had contempt for them. They would not buy in because they did not expect any justice to come of them buying in. Nothing was really being done to change their minds. Their experience only instilled what they already knew, which was that their society had contempt for them. It might not have helped them that they gave back the same contempt, but I also do not blame them. Not anymore.
I was going to a school where teachers were considered to have a right to grab and shake children for disobedience, and children that objected to being treated in this way were treated as inconvenient garbage that they could not throw away. I was put into a place that the administration of that school considered to be a waiting room for a place in prison.
I found out later that that school had gotten embroiled in multiple lawsuits by the families of children with developmental and psychiatric disorders, and I was apparently not the only child that had been treated like utter garbage by that school. The school system in that town has improved significantly since they were called to task by a group of parents of children with disabilities, but when I was attending there, that school was a hellhole.
I might have been wise to choose being an enlightened savage over embracing such a self-defeating concept of civilization, but you cannot fix an education system that broken without spending money on it. There is not an easy way to do it. It is much harder and more expensive to repair what is broken than it will ever be to polish and oil what is intact. It can take generations to repair a total loss of confidence.
It tells me everything that I think the world really needs to know about
@Loren Pechtel that he would blame the children.
When the children come from economically devastated backgrounds and the teachers do not care enough about them to or have adequate training to give them a chance, then it is wrong to blame the children for their failures. It takes truly inspired teachers to win over children that come from anti-intellectual cultural backgrounds. Teaching is as much of a skill of political persuasion as it is instruction. It is a hard thing to do. If you are not willing to invest in producing teachers that have been taught how to turn poor districts around, then you are a blind fool if you blame the children of those districts for the consequences.
You do not understand this the way that I do. I saw it in action. I saw what was going on in a poor district. I was embroiled in that dysfunction. The fact that I embraced intellectualism as a defense mechanism, out of a sense of desperation to give myself an excuse not to kill myself, does not really change the fact that the system that I came from cannot help but to produce dysfunctional people.
It is always the children's fault from the standpoint of people that have very weak character.
Well, whether you choose to be grateful for it or not, the education system is the best shield that our society has against authoritarianism. Our education system is best weapon we have for defending our liberty. Wherever anti-intellectualism has taken root in our culture, it is imperative, for the survival of liberty, to find allies in those places and to persuade them to stand up for a better way of life.
