Quote Originally Posted by Husar View Post
Well, I'm not sure about the school system, education is a tough subject because one person's science is another person's indoctrination. In my case I was at a school that prides itself for it's humanism and we were even taught about some press photo changes to put politicians in a better light for example. So certainly not an evil government agenda, more of a think for yourself, consider the facts, be aware kind of education. But even that has been turned upside down by people who think that "think for yourself" means you have to question every fact or knowledge that is publicly available, as in medicine is a fraud, the entire press is fake, schools turn you into sheeple (some of them may actually do that nowadays) and the government consists of lizard people anyway.

In Germany we require a minimum of 10 years of education by a government-approved school, otherwise the police may drag a child to school. Not a perfect system either, but I guess fewer people fall through the cracks.
In the US it often sounds like the only way to get a good education is to have a lot of money to spend on it since the public schools are often underfunded and highly problematic, so I'm not sure if everybody really has a good chance.
Oh heavens, if only throwing money at the problem would work. THAT is something yanks know how to do.

One case in point is the District of Columbia. Of our 51 states (we seem to count DC, but not PR or AS or the American Pacific Islands for these lists), the District is 50th in quality of education but 3rd in spending per pupil (and that includes Alaska, which is #2, where they have to pay bonus money to get teachers to go or to stay). While there are some poorer states such as Louisiana wherein you could argue our schools are underfunded, that is mostly not the case.

I'm pretty sure a lot of them are MIS-funded and I am certain that what we are doing in many of our urban population centers is not the right mix of funding and doctrine. We are not doing a good job, on the whole, of encouraging education in some of those population groups.

Throwing more money at education will not matter until we are throwing it at the correct targets within that milieu.