{"id":467,"date":"2012-01-25T14:24:06","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T14:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/?p=467"},"modified":"2012-01-25T14:24:06","modified_gmt":"2012-01-25T14:24:06","slug":"more-educational-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/01\/25\/more-educational-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"More educational industrial complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ugly truth about “school choice”
\nThe Koch brothers want you to think the movement’s about racial justice and empowering parents. They’re lying
\nhttp:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/01\/24\/the_ugly_truth_about_school_choice\/singleton\/<\/a><\/p>\n

I have an early post on the educational industrial complex<\/a> that was converted from my early email ‘posts’ before I started this blog. Education is an important topic to me (see here<\/a> for more) and I have been trying for a long time to come up with some sort of generic method to produce not just a more highly educated population, but one that actually has critical thinking abilities (in other words, pretty much the exact opposite of the sheeple our current system produces today). I am not sure I have any really good ideas on how that could be done, though I favor the idea of having cohorts of students with wide ranges in education be responsible for teaching each other under the guidance of an instructor (one-room school house paradigm) and recently I tried to interest a friend in the teaching ‘biz to try to interest investors in the idea of a ‘flip school’ based on on-line teaching (something I might aggressively pursue myself if I didn’t already have a half dozen other projects I am really interested in (or already am) pursuing) that I think has a lot of potential. However, I have come to believe that the current push towards charter schools, vouchers, etc. are just attempts (that appear so far to be quite successful) to move education from the public sector into the private sector so rich people can siphon off even more tax dollars to get even richer. Perhaps there are some rich people that actually think they are doing the right thing, but it seems to me they do not have the greatest good for the greatest number in mind when they are making their plans and racism and\/or elitism is really the driving force.<\/p>\n

I have no love for bloated government, but in my experience when private enterprise takes over it does so via the oligarchical favoritism that leads to worse performance at a worse cost. As such, I am now favoring keeping the government in control over such things as the social safety net (social security, Medicare\/Medicaid (which I think should be default available for everyone), unemployment, etc.) despite its inherent inefficiencies. Perhaps if we were to block the oligarchical gimme of tax dollars to the already wealthy somehow while privatizing these sorts of things (I imagine going the way of non-profit co-ops would be a good approach, but only if they also remain regulated so executives can’t get million dollar salaries) then I could see shrinking the government’s involvement in things like education, social security (see http:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/2012\/01\/18\/retirement-insurance-or-what-social-security-ought-to-be\/<\/a>), etc. Until then, I strongly object to these efforts to extract tax dollars to further enrich the wealthy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ugly truth about “school choice” The Koch brothers want you to think the movement’s about racial justice and empowering parents. They’re lying http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2012\/01\/24\/the_ugly_truth_about_school_choice\/singleton\/ I have an early post on the educational industrial complex that was converted from my early email ‘posts’ before I started this blog. Education is an important topic to me (see … Continue reading “More educational industrial complex”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sol-biotech.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}