I don't know what we will do with our future children. My husband attended private schools in Lebanon because NO ONE, with any means whatsoever, would send their child to a public school there. That's a similar mentality to what I've seen in the UK, Thailand, plenty of other countries. Now in Iceland, there are no private schools. Only public. Imagine what that does to the quality... people actually have no choice other than to send their kids to public school. All the money goes to those schools. I think it's a grand way to go, but that will never happen in the US, sadly.
Personally, I loved the public schools I attended, from kindergarten through graduation. But our district had all kinds of programs for different groups of kids... I got lucky and was placed in a gifted program, and for good or ill, we also had honors classes and the like (which kept me on my toes). The great thing I remember was that my best friend and I wanted to start a whole new course in Advanced Chemistry our senior year, and we did it. It wasn't offered previously, but we found a teacher, decided on a curriculum, and we got enough of our peers to sign up. This was your run-of-the-mill public high school (granted, in a semi-suburban area), but we were able to really push boundaries and explore what we wanted to learn. I know that doesn't happen in a LOT of public schools, for some very complicated reasons, but my experience of public schools was still a good one. I went back to teach 11th grade in the same district and had a similar experience... those kids had it good. They were also 99% white and upper-middle class. And there's your class reproduction...
I agree with pretty much everything roachboy said. And I've seen the same thing with the undergrads I taught at a public university.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
you arbitrarily narrow the pool of folk whose abilities are encouraged and allowed to develop and you fuck yourself in the longer run.
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We are fucking ourselves. People are not "getting dumber," it is not a passive thing, as roachboy pointed out. We are just getting more and more short-sighted and entrenched in our class, as a nation... and I didn't think that was possible!