Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 65

[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.    

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

On your numbered points:

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.