Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 65
Nov. 1st, 2022 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
As we proceed through the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before:
1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.
2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here.
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue.
4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religious, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules.
With that said, the floor is open for discussion.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-01 09:49 pm (UTC)To repeat - she was rallying her vaccinated fan base to reach out to all those unvaccinated family and friends they've shunned and allow them back in to events and family gatherings.
If you thought it was the Atlantic saying they were wrong about vaccine mandates, etc. HA HA HA HA no. Hell has not frozen over yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-01 10:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-01 10:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 01:37 am (UTC)I forgive you for not following the rules. THIS TIME.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 01:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 03:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 06:17 pm (UTC)This whole tack ignores the fact that most of the worst stuff happened much more recently, and that some of it just stopped or hasn't stopped at all. Vaccine mandates, with few people sympathetic to resistors, had just started a year ago. Disinvitations from Thanksgiving were last Thanksgiving. People whose loved ones are hurt or gone--whatever the actual cause, and whatever cause they attribute it to--are likely going to need something more than a plea for blanket "amnesty."
This plea also ignores the fact that being "in the dark" about whether these things were okay or not is more than a question of access to good information. The kind of ill some people have willed is a personal choice, no matter how dark it is.
I'm reading this article as part of whatever the strategy is that has mainstream voices recently and suddenly acknowledging that school closures, and lockdowns to a degree, were a mistake. They're testing out "No one could have known what we know now, we were moving at the speed of science, once the science told us more we changed our approach, that's what experts do" on issues that are further in the past and less charged, and they floated this headline to see how it's going. It's hard to imagine it's that facile, but I think that's the most likely explanation. The fact that people are rejecting it so forcefully and going right to the issues that do matter (like grandparents dying alone, the origin of the virus, the inefficacy of the vaccines, the safety of the vaccines, the mandates, and the lying-all-along that's becoming obvious to more and more people) pretty much means it's failed. Not sure I'm looking forward to seeing what they've got for Plan L, or whatever letter they're up to now, though.
Jonathan.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 10:34 pm (UTC)Murmuration
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-03 09:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-03 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-06 10:45 pm (UTC)If this topic is allowed, let me begin by asking for factual information. Does anyone know where to find exact figures on the amount of Federal tax money that goes to the States for primary and secondary education? I am not interested in colleges here, just insuring that most kids get an adequate basic education at the best price.
Here are the issues I am examining and consider a problem for which a solution needs to be worked out with others who are better informed.
1) Centralized schooling and constant bond issues to build new school buildings.
2) Use of schools as baby-sitting and socialization pressure cookers for creating conformity
3) Abysmal pay for teachers
4) Disparity between resources in rich urban areas vs inner city and rural areas
My position on the first two issues is that centralized, Prussian-style graded schools are currently a total mess and they need to be defunded.
I know this cannot happen instantly, and understand that the poorest and middle class parents rely on the schools to provide day care while the parents have to work at two or more jobs per family to stay solvent.
Nevertheless, I think it is not the business of the State or the nation to ‘integrate’ children into society. The use of the schools to break the spine of Jim Crow laws was, I think, justified in the long run. But it has served its purpose and now we should be considering ways to ‘integrate’ children into the workforce instead.
If wages are going to be kept low and lower –as they will– and jobs are going to be fewer and fewer –as they will– then women who are single, even more underpaid than they are now, and cannot afford to homeschool will need day care at their places of employment.
Daycare should be available as a benefit, or as wages paid in kind. Employers also need to stop discriminating against having children on site and excluding them from the places where people learn HOW TO WORK at jobs that matter.
Work needs to be a significant component in every child’s education. It is past time to try to herd every child off to college just because that is where the clerisy dump their non-barracuda offspring, like the British aristocrats dumped their younger sons into the clergy 200 years ago.
Centralized schooling is also long past its pull date. I think the truancy laws need to be substantially revised so that the States and the Feds do not have the power to force children to be herded into a quasi-concentration camp situation. Forcing all children to congregate in compounds like we do know is the best possible way to ensure that disease vectors will have the quickest and more complete access to the whole population.
It is, in my opinion, slightly crazy to compact people into schools and hospitals for the sake of industrial ‘efficiency’ instead of having hundreds of widely dispersed clinics and scores of neighborhood locales for classroom activities.
In a contracting economy as gang activity and warlordism go on the rise, centralized schools make a poor defensive position for people to permit. It is tailor-made for some gangland kingpin to hold a lot of children hostage in a semi-fortress, semi-prison to obtain anything he wants: money drugs, releasing his good buddies from jail, etc.
The constant tax and bond pressure to build more and more school buildings is simply another scam imposed on the public to benefit the corrupt and Mafia-riddled construction industries. Classes can be held perfectly well in existing structures which can be made even more habitable by the children themselves taking part in upgrades and renovation. Learning the trades as part of a basic education is long overdue. In my opinion.
Employers and employees can both contribute to the wages of well-staffed, on-site day care centers. Teachers in a day care center instruct kids in the most basic skills: how to read, write, cypher, draw, play music, use tools, grow plants, survive in a crisis outside in nature.
Older children who need more than the basics can be given some choice in their own education. If a voucher system is approved for the disbursement of public tax money, the children and their single parent can choose either a tutor who specializes in a topic, or a general ed class where many teachers and assistants work in a one-room schoolhouse manner, without grading and school sports and other costly add-ons.
Neighborhoods, churches, groups of employees, granges, lodge, and any other type of organization can club together to hire teachers and provide class rooms.
If truancy becomes a real problem for teens, it becomes a police matter, with a whole battery of psyche team/social workers employed by the police to process juveniles.
If a problem kid refuses to either stay put and learn or show up for a job and work all day, then actual jail and ankle-bracelet tracking devices can be an alternative to the systems we have now.
I would appreciate practical-minded experienced people‘s feedback on this preliminary outline of ways to restructure and lower the costs of public education.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-07 01:52 pm (UTC)But, I think it makes sense to look back on the earlier history of schooling in the US, back when we were the most intensely literate nation on earth. What did school look like then? Some things I've picked up just from random historical biographies and things:
1. School wasn't compulsory.
2. Outside cities, schools were run as co-ops-- think about the Little House on the Prarie books, if you've read them: there you have a picture of rural farming towns where all the families in the community would get together, donate labor, build a schoolhouse, and then everybody would pony up some of the money to hire a teacher. The "school board" was simply the parents in that group who had the time and resources to interview potential teachers and take point on any problems that developed with the building or the teacher. Depending on how poor the district was, the teacher might have his/her own living space near the school, or might split up the school year sleeping at the different families' houses, or might even have a room rented for them in a boarding house.
3. Teachers didn't hold a college degree, and were paid very little. To become a licensed teacher, you had to pass a teacher exam (usually). Teachers were often not-yet-married girls in their late teens or early twenties, or young men picking up a little extra money between high school and a decent job or college-- being a teacher for a couple years was a great way for a young man to leave home and see new faraway places. Weirdly, this meant that the pool of available teachers tended to be much higher-quality than it is now-- parents complained it was very hard to keep a teacher for more than a year, because the ladies would get married, and the young men would go on to better careers. This was irritating for school admins, but students benefited from a labor pool heavily seeded with young, intelligent, talented, and enthusiastic teachers destined to move on and become engineers, inventors, politicians, lawyers, doctors, etc.
4. Students, at least in the smaller more rural schools, were not rigorously segregated by age. They were more likely to be grouped by what they'd already learned.
5. Students attended school for fewer hours a day, fewer days each year, and most of them for fewer years. Kindergarten for five-year-olds wasn't a thing, and not many went past eighth grade. And they were still more literate/numerate than most kids in high school now.
There are probably some other valuable things to be gleaned from the pre-industrial-schooling era here-- I'd love to see what others have noted.
But also, we lived outside the US briefly, and it was interesting to see how other people tackle this problem. The South American country where we lived does not have a public school system. Just doesn't exist. There's a legal requirement to educate your children, and the vast majority of parents meet that by sending their kids to private schools, which are everywhere, and exist at many levels of affordability-- from elite private academies to your neighborhood Catholic schools all the way down to charity schools run for the desperately poor. And from what I heard (knew someone who taught in one of the expensive schools), the quality of education... wasn't necessarily better in the expensive schools. The benefit of going there was to have your kids hang out with other rich kids, not get a better education.
There were definitely good things and worse things about this, many of them specific to the country and its culture and geography-- it's just really hard to get in and set up a school, and get kids to attend it, when they live in a jungle village accessible only by boat, and the whole village picks up and moves every year. It's hard to have a school serving isolated mountain farmer families. The children of the rich were often poorly served by their schools, because teachers learned to give good grades to keep parents happy, even if the students performed poorly and didn't learn anything. Because a couple of disgruntled rich parents would get you fired, as a teacher.
Still, even without *any* tax funding, most kids at least had *access* to a formal elementary education. Church-affiliated schools were extremely common but not the only game going, and the most impressive thing seemed to be how *many* schools there were. Nobody was obliged to ride a bus to get to school, in the city, because it seemed like there was a little school every few blocks! They all walked. There was a school right next to our apartment-- never once saw a pileup of cars waiting to pick up or drop off kids. Hooray for decentralization.
Here, right now, in the US... I don't know how to find out how much overall the fedgov spends on schooling, but it is very easy to find the numbers for what various school districts spend *per student*-- including admin and buildings and lunches and curricula and lawn maintenance-- the whole shebang. And when you compare that to the tuition at most private schools, the difference is hair-curling. NY state famously spends over $20k per student per year, in the public schools (with famously bad results, particularly in the big city). In my state the average (as of 2018?) was around $10k per child (it's gone up a bit since)--but I just looked up my old church school and its current tuition, and it is still outperforming its neighboring public schools for only $8k/yr.
When I was in school, we also had access to a great pool of unlicensed non-career-track teachers, that included fresh-out-of-college trainee pastors (history, theology), the church accountant (algebra), a retired engineer (trigonometry), an RN (biology), the church's music director (band), and some talented volunteer moms (home ec). In my state, private schools are not obligated to hire licensed teachers, but they are extremely motivated to hire competent people.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-07 02:45 pm (UTC)1) Schooling doesn't need to be centralized. We waste a tremendous amount of money bussing kids around and paying for giant buildings, when it'd probably be more efficient and less traumatic to simply have schools in every neighborhood.
2) Oi. Smaller schools *might* mitigate some of this problem. I recall from my own schooling... the pressure to conform was on a gradient with the size of the school. In the public schools I went to, it was intense. In the tiny church middle school I attended (12 students in the combined 7th-8th grade, from very different backgrounds) it was nonexistent-- I think because with such a small group we simply dealt with each other as fellow human individuals, and not as groups. The atmosphere was almost family, and from the classmates I've been in touch with as an adult-- we all remember the place with sweet nostalgia (from what I hear, middle school in the US is horrible for most people-- we lucked out). Maybe when you have 1000 students in a school, that's just more than our primate brains can handle and you're *forced* to split everybody up into subgroups just to function socially.
3)As I pointed out in my last overlong post, abysmal pay isn't *necessarily* a bad thing. It's a disaster when you combine it with a four-year degree plus a master's in education, and student loans. Then what you get is a large pool of professional teachers made up largely of people who aren't intelligent, ambitious, or talented enough to get into a more lucrative profession, enthusiastic young people who think they love kids until they're in loads of debt, 2nd year in a classroom, and realize that actually... no, they hate kids. But now they're stuck because they've got loans to pay off and they can't afford to go back to college for a different degree... and fourth graders at their school are going to suffer for it for the next thirty years until they retire, because they're NEA members and can't be fired.
What if the problem isn't pay, but rather credentialism? What if pay remained modest, but the employment process could be re-worked so that suddenly, teaching is a great and accessible job for people who've just retired from good careers, or bright young folks destined for better things? Bring back teacher exams! We should have *more* temporary teachers. More people who have either racked up a lot of useful career experience in other fields already, or are on their way to other careers. I mean, yeah, there are some awesome career teachers out there-- but think about your own schooling. They're a minority. Make more room for people who *aren't* going to make a career of it. I mean-- there used to be people in the US who could say that John Adams or Louisa May Alcott or Robert Frost (or even Roberta Flack!) had been their schoolteacher. The job used to be a stepping-stone. Let's make it that way again.
4) Given the difference between what the public schools spend per child, and how much it costs to send children to a modest private school (substantially less)-- a lot of this disparity might be resolved by whacking out a ton of admin and shrinking campuses (how much does it cost to maintain that football stadium? That bus fleet?), and perhaps by making "school board" a volunteer post again-- each board in charge of just one school. This would also make individual schools far more accountable to parents.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 06:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 04:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 01:47 pm (UTC)And I assume we are supposed to feel grateful for their magnanimous largesse?
Thank you, but no.
Your clarification is useful, and the article still leaves a bad taste.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-02 10:15 pm (UTC)