At 1:35 PM -0500 9/27/96, jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:
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.
Believe me, I don't mean to be provocative (in a trolling sense), but "I have a solution." More students should, fairly early on, be "flunked out" of courses in the "academic/professional track" and moved into _trades_. For example, the way many European countries have outstanding vocational/trade schools. The usual trades: machinists, woodworkers, auto mechanics, technicians of all sorts, and so on. Few of these trades need, or even benefit from, courses in history, mathematics (beyond simple algebra and a tad of geometry, not the really neat stuff about proving Euclid's theorems in novel ways, the things people like me excelled in, but which left many other students shaking their heads and barely passing the class), etc. Most of the academic subjects in high school are neither needed nor remembered. (And I reject any of the common arguments that Americans need to learn history, the Constitution, etc. Few of them remember a single word they learned, and one might as well teach the basics in earlier grades and dispense with meaningless lectures about how and when the Senate may invoke cloture, how the Foreign Powers Act modified the 1877 Trade Act, and so on.) As I look around me, here in Santa Cruz, I see hundreds of "homeless persons.: We used to call them beggars, bums, panhandlers, winos, hobos, and drifters. The people unwilling to get up in the morning for a boring job, the people unwilling to take the donations they get and buy some new clothes at the Salvation Army (I know people of both sexes who buy their business clothes at thrift shops, at huge discounts, so I reject any of the usual arguments that this won't work.) When I see people working at Taco Bell, Burger King, gas stations, etc., and then I see the so-called "homeless," the situation is completely clear to me. And, like pigeons, if you begin feeding the beggars, you'll have more of them. There's a further point to consider. In times past, many of the "marginal" people had other kinds of jobs. Maids, gardeners, cooks, stable boys, butlers, etc. (I'm not saying they were all subnormal, neurotic, etc., just that many of them didn't fit into other sorts of jobs--like running the town store, raising sheep, shoeing horses, and other "professions," such as they were then--and working for others as maids and assistants of various sorts was a kind of sheltered, almost "familial," kind of employment. Shelter was often provided on-site, further aiding those who might find it hard to cope with the outside "market." These jobs have largely gone away. Partly because houses have gotten smaller (compared to manor houses, for example), partly because of automation and other technological advances (cars, refrigerators, etc.), partly because of "egalitarian" sentiments that tend to discourage people from either hiring maids or from seeing maid service as a longterm career. (Getting back to an earlier point, that dingbat studying "Sociology 101" and "History of Consciousness" at Valley Girl Community College is being _told_ she's headed for a professional career, despite her lack of interest in academic topics and her marginal abilities....there's no way someone like her will think seriously of such a "low-class" job as a maid! Better for her to cadge for spare change and deal some drugs on the side than do something that demeaning.) It has also become almost impossible to find good tradespeople. Stories of good gardeners, babysitters, maids, and even roofers being "hoarded" by Marin County or Beverly Hills millionaires are only partially exaggerated. This has a lot to do with the limited supply, and also with problems of work ethic, honesty, and such things, many of which have changed rather dramatically in recent decades. Where once a worker in one's house could mostly be trusted, despite the occasional reports of items of silverware missing, today's workers are seldom to be trusted alone in the house. Horror stories abound of "home alone" workers throwing parties, rooting through the personal papers of their employers, and of robbing the houses of whatever they could carry. And the "nanny tax" and related paperwork needed to hire a person for even a few hours worth of work has made much casual work (the "odd jobs" that drifters used to get to earn enough money to eat) almost impossible to arrange. (Every morning there are Mexicans lined up in the parking lot of a K-Mart in a nearby town, with contractors seeking to hire temporary laborers. The contractors know all the forms to fill out, if they bother. Casual employers like me know they risk heavy fines if caught hiring "undocumented workers," or failing to dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s, even for a 4-hour job. So much for liberty. For the last couple of weeks I've been hauling 70-pound stones to build a retaining wall (don't ask me about the permits I should've gotten), ripping up redwood deck boards, digging postholes for a new fence, and generally doing a couple of hours of manual labor every day. While it has its advantages, in earlier days I could've counted on providing some employment for someone who today is "a homeless person." No more. They're not psychologically prepared to do a solid (if unspectacular) job, as they've been taught for all of their lives that they went through high school and maybe a couple of years of college (and maybe more) so they could join the professional ranks....when they see they really won't be joining the professional ranks, and that they really don't want to make the sacrifices to, they have nothing to fall back on. So, in the "olden days," the social bargain was this: I'd spend some of the money I'd accumulated in whatever manner I had and exchange it with some of the tradespeople or laborers for their labor. A fair deal for both. Now, we've got trash littering our highways, but nobody thinks seriously of having prisoners pick it up (the "chain gangs" when I was a kid), or having "welfare mothers" out picking it up, or having day laborers do the work. Ditto for all sorts of other "infrastructure" work that's needed. (I knew someone married to a honcho in CalTrans, the California Department of Transportation, responsible for the freeways. He confirmed that "cheap labor" is barred, by various union contracts negotiated over the years, and that the starting pay for CalTrans workers is $30K a year...probably more by now. So, "homeless people" are sitting around begging for spare change and harassing passersby, welfare mothers are collecting welfare, AFDC, food stamps, and WIC money for doing nothing except their specialty (as someone noted, "welfare-powered bastard factories"), University of California "History of Consciousness" (yes, a real major) graduates are waitressing tables at local Santa Cruz restaurants (because they can't find employers who want a "HofC" graduate, as with so many worthless majors), all the while CalTrans is hiring "transportation engineers" for far-more-than-market prices to pick up trash on highways. Anybody still think things are not out of whack?) My conclusion is simple: Tell people if they don't work, they won't eat. If they do something others are willing to give them money to do, they won't get money. They won't get "entitlements" from the government (= taxpayers, = those who are working, = me and thee). Tell them that a college education should only be pursued if one has a "calling" to be an engineer, a programmer (and probably not even that, judging by what I see), a doctor, a lawyer (on second thought, don't ever suggest they become lawyers), and so on. And make it easier to hire people, instead of harder. (And if one hires a maid, and the maid steals, cut off her hand. We've lost sight of justice, and people think that ripping off the rich is their kind of justice. This needs to change.) Even liberals are beginning to understand the "game theory" aspects. Like pigeons, if you feed them, you'll have more bums, winos, addicts, drifters, and beggars. If you give people money when they have babies, whether they are working or married, they'll drift into having more babies. (Not as a carefullly-considered choice, but for a variety of systemic, psychological, game-theoretic, and "path of least resistance" reasons.) Psychologists and similar psychobabblers call it "tough love." If one always "enables" an addict, a layabout, a shiftless worker, with excuses and handouts, the behavior does not change. To save a person, sometimes harshness is needed. This is why crypto anarchy's starving of the tax system is good. It may "kill" some number of people, as nearly any new idea does, but ultimately it will put things back on track. --Tim May We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."