On Fri, 27 Sep 1996, snow wrote:
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 20:09:36 -0500 (CDT) From: snow <snow@smoke.suba.com> To: jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com Subject: Re: Public Schools
James said:
I hate to burst any bubbles but, the school with the highest number of National Merit Finalists and highest number of 1600 SATs is a=20 Public High School (Jefferson High in Fairfax, VA) The same is true for Montreal (Royal Vale) using the equivalent scoring methods. But there are public schools at both extremes of the curve. While it is true that Private Schools would not survive due to market forces if
ronsimpson@unidial.com wrote: they did consistently poorly, it is also true that they filter their incoming student body in a manner that Public Schools can not. If you want to refuse those who are too stupid or anti-social from Public Schools in order to improve the social or intellectual climate, you better have a solution for the resulting cast-offs.
There is a solution. Trade Schools, and Parental Envolvement. It could very well be (and if I had the money I'd make the bet) that _many_ of the "troubled" youth of today are simply undisiplined. (Fortunately, most of them couldn't afford to bet against their parents in an AP world). It would also seem to follow that if parents were spending their own money (or perceived it as their own money) that they would take a greater interest in their childrens education.
For those that are truly not scholastically oreinted, there would be trade schools. I would also bet that you could teach a child everything they need to learn (other than a trade) to cope in this world in about 4 years.
But now we must make a disinction... I'm LD in writing, but can read very well (when I was in 6th grade I could read like a 10th grader), and do very well in Math and Computer classes (and non-biological/anatomical sciences). So should I be in trade school, because I plan on being a computer programmer, or go to college? Sure, I don't do well in language and (depending on the class) some history classes, which, IMHO, are weighted more heavily than they should be in both public _and_ private schools (and yes, I've been to both), but I don't think that should mean I can't go to college... Anyway, my point is that there is, at times, a very fine line... --Deviant When we write programs that "learn", it turns out we do and they don't.