Boston Marathon Explosion - Today's Topics: Public Schools

Burnem Wizfyre

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A lot of death happens every day, but I was really hoping that the silver lining in this incident was that all the misguided attention to Sunil would result in him being found. c'est la vie.
Appears he was found, just not in the manner you were hoping.
 

Loser Araysar

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There are opinion polls showing one out of five muslims who live in the west admitting sympathy with al Qaeda. A poll after the 2005 attacks in London where fifty two people died and ~700 got injured, showed that one in four muslims in the UK believed the bombings were justified. Think about that for a minute. We're talking 25% of the muslim population admitting acts of mass murder of random men, women and children in their own country is a good thing. Ask people in places like Palestine and it's more than four out of five supporting blowing up Americans.

Maybe a similar amount of people support guys like McVeigh, Rudolph or Breivik, but somehow I doubt it.
Sounds legit.

I once read a study that 97% of Christians admitted to molesting kids.
 

Loser Araysar

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No one asks Christians to condemn Christian extremists because they don't need to... they condemnation has already happened. Megachurches that take money from naive elderly? Condemned and ridiculed. Westboro Baptist? Condemned and ridiculed everywhere. Mormons? Condemned, ridiculed, and then condemned some more... and they aren't even dangerous!

50 years ago the KKK was tolerated in communities in the deep south, but that tolerance did not last long and by the 1970s you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would even think about looking the other way should a Klan rally happen. I am about as far from Christian as you can be, but the Christian faith has done an excellent job of policing their own. For every Christian nutjob who expresses ideas about death and oppression you have hundreds of other much louder voices drowning that person out. The message is active and the rejection of the crazy people is palpable.

The Troubles in Ireland was especially poignant and highlighted violent elements in both Catholicism and Anglican communities resulting in a great deal of violence and terrorism, and yet even in the worst of it the public face on both sides uncategorically and loudly denounced the violence and every other Christian community around the world was angered and upset by the events and made their distaste well known.

Islamic communities do not. You hear interviews conducted with common people who talk about the peace of Islam but only in small groups and only when pressed by a major tragedy. There is phenomenal wealth in the Arabic community and they aren't doing one damn thing to counterbalance or denounce the radical's who seek nothing but suffering and death.

Maybe if the Islamic community were to grow a pair and actually do something about their radical brothers then people would stop blaming islam...but I have yet to meet a single man of islamic faith that was willing to walk up to someone spouting evil filth and tell him to shut up.

The only violent nutjobs that quote christian beliefs as their impetus and justification for killing are the one's who assassinated abortion doctors and the christian right took it on the teeth for that and were called to task for even suggesting that such a thing was allowable.

Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev were not two crazies who just happened to be muslim, the younger one has given deposition that they did their act specifically because of their beliefs. Guess what? Exactly NO ONE IS SURPRISED.

Stop whining about how muslims are treated and start doing something about it.
My eyes rolled back up into my skull by the second paragraph. The Christian South still segregates schools in 2013, erects monuments to Nathaniel Bedford Forrest and flies the confederate flag over government buildings.
 

fanaskin

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My eyes rolled back up into my skull by the second paragraph. The Christian South still segregates schools in 2013, erects monuments to Nathaniel Bedford Forrest and flies the confederate flag over government buildings.
the north segregates schools too, fuck im in connecticut and I went to a highschool that had 1 black person in my class, 1 town away its 90% colored. you got on the racist glasses again to think it's a southern only thing. in a capitalist society people are segregated by income, guess what brackets most blacks sit in as a %.
 

ZyyzYzzy

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My town's schools in Connecticut growing up had exactly 0 African Americans, though my senior year of high school they bused one in. It wasn't due to segregation but due to the fact that it was a small town on the middle of no where.
 

hodj

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Its hard not to segregate based on socioeconomic status when private schools cost so much and are so much better at producing quality students than public schools.

When I was a kid they bussed all the poor kids from downtown to the middle schools in the suburbs. All that did was make every public school uniformly shit, fights were common, the school was overpopulated and the teachers could barely contain the chaos. Its not much wonder that I went from straight A's in 2-5th grade to dropping out by 9th grade after 3 years in the middle school I went to at the time in the early 90s, at the height of the "bus everyone around to different schools to see if that will help grades" national education fad.

The schools in the cities are shit. The schools in the rural areas are slightly better than shit. The schools in the suburbs are touch and go and most people who can afford it anymore just send their kids to private school instead.

US public school education is geared towards the lowest common denominator. It has to be to serve the broad community at large. You can only have a system as strong as its weakest link. So its not surprising that the entire system has become stratified based on socioeconomic status as people with money and children have fled the cities, which are dangerous and provide low quality education, for the suburbs and the best private schools their money can buy, leaving behind those who cannot afford to do the same.

Our entire educational system needs to be structured differently, from the ground up. It could be modeled on the Asian model, or the British/Germanic model, either one would work far better than what we have now, but the Asian model would require parents to actually and actively give a fuck, and most public school student's parents don't give a fuck.

I like the model of two course education, where by middle school kids are being trained for technical work and learning the basics requiredfor university education, so that by the junior year of high school kids will have some idea where their interests and strengths lie, and they will graduate with some sort of technical training that they can rely on if they choose not to continue their education.

Added: Teach a kid a good, useful skill in middle school, like auto repair or computer software and hardware repair type stuff, whatever, and they will hold those skills through their life, and even if they continue in their education further, those skills will be relied on throughout their lives. Having serious technical training through middle and high school in computer technology is a boon for pretty much every profession in some aspect or another. Plus this will help them learn how to learn, why learning is beneficial in their lives, its more interesting than just sitting in a classroom listening to lectures all day so will engage them more. The benefits are just outstanding, I dunno why no one has tried this in the US yet.
 

Noodleface

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Yesterday was the first day I was back on campus since they shut it down for the weekend. Place is loaded with media but now they're segregated to one lot and the main campus road, it's the week before finals and people were complaining about harassment.

I was in physics class and this older woman student raised her hand and quietly said "professor I can't concentrate, they just sent out this email about what they found in his room". She panicked and said she couldn't take it and ran out of class.

I guess it affects people in different ways but this confuses me. Dude was caught and his room was cleared out.

Also, my senior project is a bunch of circuit boards and wires and shit and I carry it around campus quite a bit as I bring it home a lot. I get dirty and scared looks from people since the event. Counting down the days until some hero tackles me out a window or something.

Campus has a solemn atmosphere.
 

BrutulTM

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Give it up guys. Everyone in America is JUST AS BAD as a suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of children. JUST AS BAD. You can't judge. Everyone is the same, or worse. JUST AS BAD.
 

hodj

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Its not the existence of them, so much as the rapid proliferation of them, that can be seen as a form of "self segregation" by groups with money and groups without.

Its only natural human tendencies. You want the best opportunities for your children, if you can afford it, you're going to give it to them. If you feel you can no longer provide them security and a good upbringing/education, you're going to go where you can, if you can afford to.

People who look at the world through the, I guess you could say Marxist, critical theory framework, of course see access to quality education being tied directly to parental income as a "bad thing". As with anything, it can be, if allowed to go unchecked. Its not bad because the private schools offer a quality education alternative, mind, its bad because the public schools don't.
 

BrutulTM

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Public schools in decent neighborhoods are fine. Did you listen to theThis American Life episode at Harper High School in Chicago? Any remotely responsible parent would find a way to get their kids out of that place so after that happens all you have left is kids with shitty parents which means the school is going to suck and there's nothing that "the system" is going to do that is going to fix that.
 

Falstaff

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the north segregates schools too, fuck im in connecticut and I went to a highschool that had 1 black person in my class, 1 town away its 90% colored. you got on the racist glasses again to think it's a southern only thing. in a capitalist society people are segregated by income, guess what brackets most blacks sit in as a %.
My public high school of 1400 had like 25 black kids and we lived in a suburb that was adjacent to three others suburbs that were probably 85%+ black. You think that was all done on purpose?
 

Loser Araysar

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the north segregates schools too, fuck im in connecticut and I went to a highschool that had 1 black person in my class, 1 town away its 90% colored. you got on the racist glasses again to think it's a southern only thing. in a capitalist society people are segregated by income, guess what brackets most blacks sit in as a %.
This is stupid. We were talking about actual, real forced segregation in the context of racism (hence why KKK was brought up), not whatever faggotry you conjure up in that peroxide addled brain of yours.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3052985.html

Segregated Prom: NAACP Lobbies Wilcox County, Ga., School Board Over Racial Segregation
The Huffington Post | By Mark Hanrahan
Posted: 04/10/2013 12:45 pm EDT

Funny that you aren't even interested in a reasonable source. You really are incredibly stupid, aren't you?
Why didn't you provide us with a "reasonable source" then?
 

hodj

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Even in the best neighborhoods, kids with public school education are having to take quite a bit of remedial work just to get up to University/Community College standards before they can proceed further. Basic english and early math classes are required by large amounts of people entering these systems directly from high school. The entire system has problems when that's the case.

If 20% of high school educated students in a state who go on to a state community/technical school or a state university are forced into taking things like basic early grade and middle school level math and algebra classes, something has gone wrong. New York is just one case example, but its a good one of this fact

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/...nity-colleges/

They have like 25 million people in New York, one of the best funded, largest school systems in the nation. Yet the vast majority of their students graduating in New York City have to undergone remedial work that should have been mastered by 8th and 9th grades.
 

BrutulTM

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The average school has room for improvement for sure. The high school in my link is unusable and it's because of the kids that are in it and their home situation, not because of the system.
 

hodj

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Which came first, these kids, and these broken homes, or the broken system?

Its a debatable point but I also grasp your larger point.

The problem is how to fix so many broken homes, in a system that is a shell of its former self?

That's the crux of the problem. More money alone isn't the solution, we know that for a fact. Structural reform needs to occur, but the system is too bogged down in its own bureaucracy and inertia for that to happen organically.