Quote:
Originally Posted by GreyWolf
A lot of the problem lies with our education systems. We simply are not raising our children to think critically, to examine evidence, to decide for themselves. Two of my kids were approached by their schools' debating teams, even though neither had any interest in doing so. They all are prepared to ask questions about what they are being taught and not to blindly accept something because it is in print/on the internet. As an aside, I had an issue with a math teacher who called my son at home to complain her substitute teacher felt uncomfortable because my son was asking questions the supply teacher couldn't answer. I explained to the teacher and principal in a meeting that it was not to happen again. If the any teacher had an issue with him, they were to go to him at school, the principal, then me. The most ridiculous part of the whole thing was that none of the questions were considered out of line by either the regular teacher or the principal.
In any case, for democracy to work well, we need the people to be able to think for themselves.
A second requirement is that there be a reliable source of sound information. Without a media that can get to the core of a subject, that can provide an unbiased overview of a topic, then even the smartest population can be fooled. Look at any country with a high literacy rate, but strict government control of the media. You will find the support for the government's policies to be unreasonably high. Given the number of people in the US who rely on the laughable output of the FOX news network (according to the ratings anyway), it's not surprising that anti-Obama positions are so well received.
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I wrote a book as an original reply agreeing with you for the most part, but lost it in cyber space. I'll just bullet my highlights:
- I agree on education but to improve would require more monies in to the systems, via grants and scholarships (tax free or somehow incentive driven privatized by companies), loans, tuition and book fee frezes (if you want tax payer monies keep college affordable to all or face the fact that no federally or state aided student will be going there, nor will the incentive driven grants and scholarship monies go to those schools). Also, fewer PA's and more professors truly involved in classes.
- Raise the bar on teacher requirements and licensing. Increase pay and benefits to get the creme de la creme into the profession.
- I am sorry to read you and your son went through that. It's unfortunately a snapshot of our educational system today where the students are smarter than the teachers.
- Increase funding for extracurricular activities in colleges and high schools. Make some things like a Chess club, Drama, Foreign language clubs mandatory (if a student wants to go to college they must have participated in either sports and or a club every year in high school).
- I agree that in order to continue our type of government the need is to have individuality, Unfortunately, society dictates that those who think outside the box and for themselves have to be nuts or anti-social.... when the opposite is usually the case.
- I agree with the media, however there are few outlets News Corp, Viacom/CBS, Disney, NBC/Universal, Sirius/XM, Clear Channel (which is privately owned so they don't have to publicly list ownership), ComCast, Westwood One, Gannett, E W Scripps, Reuters and so on. If you dig deeper and look into the ownerships you'll find that ALL of them are owned in part by the same institutional holders, such as State Street, Vanguard, Blackrock, Chase, Bank of America, PNC, Bank of NY/Mellon and so on. Is it coincidental that these same holding companies OWN the financial industry? I don't think so. So as long as we keep allowing this the media will continue to put the same bias on the air as news, literature, movies, tv shows etc. They control almost every aspect of media and financial institutions. The board members most of whom sit on supposed competitors boards also. We cannot allow this to continue if we are to remain a free society and wanting to promote individuality. BUT what can we do? If the government intervenes on behalf of the people these entities just put media out there and brainwash the people to distrust government and follow them. Plus those entities would cry 1st amendment violations of freedom of the press. As long as our news media is a for profit organization,run in part by the same people owning our banks, we will have this problem. The media has proven they can at anytime make us believe that times are good/bad economically. So what would prevent them from doing the same over government, education, health, every aspect of our life.
I am somewhat a conspiracist and paranoidal over government and multinational conglomerates. But as I dug deeper looking into all the ownerships it became apparent what most know to be true. Everything is owned by pretty much the same people, the oil companies, media, clothing, banks, etc. On the other side of the coin lies the arguments so what Institutional holders are just that, they don't have any say, and they invest money into everything they can that will give them a return. But why would Chase own a piece of Bank of America, their competitor? That would be like Henry Ford owning a piece of GM or Chrysler. It boils down to the same things we saw over 100 years ago, anti trust violations and monopolies. only this time, over the past 100 years they own the government and the media (every aspect of it, including the internet providers, websites and so on). If you look deep enough you'll find that these same institutional holders and mutual fund owners pretty much OWN majorities in just about every publicly traded industry. Why?