03-22-2022, 05:17 PM
(03-22-2022, 02:40 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:Quote:The other alternative was vastly worse: people trapped in marriages they couldn't escape. Some of those lead to suicide; others to homicide.
at the very least, we need standards that do much more to favor the father. current divorce laws screw them over royally
If he is beating her or abusing the children, then divorce laws should $crew him royally! It is best that he be so broke that he lacks even the funds for dating a potential victim.
Quote:Quote:The purpose of education is not to train you for a job. It's to make you a well-rounded individual and good citizen.
If they want to make you a well-rounded individual after they prepare you for a job, that's well and good if it can be done at low cost, but until then, this is a somewhat aristocratic take on what an education is supposed to be. Black children growing up in the ghetto, redneck children in Appalachia and poor children everywhere don't need to read The Iliad or listen to Verdi's Rigoletto. They need employable skills and skills that will help them survive and manage their lives and finances. In the case of millennials, where standards of living were dropping like a rock, this was pertinent for all of us except the most privileged (we can argue about what exactly to do about those dropping standards of living, but in either event, they were there, and education should have adapted).
I remember when a college education cost about as much as a hobby or tooling around in a car. Obviously one can't dedicate the time to a hobby not part of a college curriculum, let alone waste time tooling around with cars if one is to get a decent education. Back in the day I was able to listen to great music, watch foreign films, and read much that was not in my formal study. That made me much of what I am.
The purpose of the medieval university was to improve the student so that he (regrettably this was a very male world) would become a better priest, knight, tax collector, or even a physician or attorney. The educational content may have been as elementary as it was primitive... but the priests needed to know what the heresies were and how to refute them. Being able to explain that denial of the Trinity made one a non-Christian (unless of a Monophysite church) is far safer than having to burn confused people at the stake. The medieval university had to offer something better than wine, women and song.
Today the heresies are not so much religious (toying with Zen Buddhism is safe) as political. One heresy killed six million people for their religion or that of their ancestors, and that is intolerable. So is dispossessing everyone who has property and killing anyone who resists. If someone starts talking about white supremacy or spouts off overt Marxist claptrap without qualification I am wary. I have told a neo-Nazi that if I had to choose (I am a German-American with no known Jewish ancestry ) between being a Nazi or converting to Judaism I would be a Jew because such requires far fewer cultural or moral compromises.
As for kids in disadvantaged communities... they need more rigorous education just so that they can do what it takes to eventually make a living. Bare literacy is no longer enough.
Quote:Plenty of those children would probably be much more curious under better life circumstances, but it's just basic Maslow's Hierarchy of needs: "should I read Shakespeare or should I learn a skill that can help me get a job so I can eat?" Having some English major lecture them on the importance of Catcher in the Rye when they are worried if they are gonna get shot that night is incredibly condescending and, when combined with other factors like police brutality, contributes to higher crime rates and contempt for authority among black (specifically ghetto black) culture and various redneck cultures. When you are powerless and someone is forcing you to spend the equivalent of a full time job on activities that will do little to help you materially advance...you should feel contemptuous. No wonder so many of them wander around without direction.
But without a certain level of literacy, Shakespeare, Verdi, and Degas are completely out of reach. Kissing up to an exploitative boss so that one can keep earning a pittance and stave off starvation may take precedence over striking for better pay and conditions. Of course we have an economic and political order far more decrepit than we can excuse.
Quote:My other argument is that....it's much easier to acquire culture and erudition on your own time. It makes zero sense to take $1000 courses in history which can be had for $15 by purchasing a course from The Teaching Company on audible (they have entire curriculum lectures from renowned professors for pennies on the dollar). It's much more difficult to study by yourself to gain job skills without a teacher present. I've listened through well over a dozen of them.
The problem is that those courses cost $1000 each. The educational system has been hijacked by people who want education to be fiendishly expensive so that people must be in thrall to loan-sharks so that they will fork over the equivalent of the cost of a new-car loan just to pay off a student loan until they are at least in their thirties. Maybe we will find ways in which to incorporate those inexpensive courses into formal schooling that leads to degrees. There would still be the need for some formal teacher to answer questions and administer quizzes.
Quote:Nothing exceeds like excess. Going after the Nazis was bound to ensnare the innocent few. That doesn't make it right, just inevitable.it's true.
Quote:there is never an exactly 100% chance that someone is innocent, but in this instance, it was like 70-80 years after the fact. you don't revive an entire witch hunt in order to purge a...baggage carrier for the enemy army.
If the baggage handler was stealing foodstuffs from Jews going into the camps then he was a criminal against humanity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.