That feels closer to what I was hoping to articulate. We shouldn’t be relying on the largesse of the voting homeowner class to fund our schools at a patchwork of levels, we should be dropping aircraft carrier money into schools and creating the most informed electorate in history.

They don’t want to be better. They want to be even worse.

They executed Louis XIV more than 200 years ago! Connect a few more dots and you’ll be into the thousands without too much effort.

You do you. Malls turn my brain into used coffee grounds, and parking lots are an affront to Thoreau’s god.

It’s kind of bad guy versus bad guy out there. Russia is simply picking its preferred winners.

What makes you prefer standardized curricula, rather than rigorous testing and well supported teachers?

Academic rigor, we will agree, is crucial - constraining how teachers work is, in my view, not.

I’m receptive to that. I’m the definition of a layperson, having read one “popular” book on the subject so I only have vague general notions a layer or so deeper than a completely naive person. In any case the main things I feel strongly about are paying teachers more (and paying very well qualified ones very well), giving them the leeway to dictate what they teach and how, and treating students as if they were innocent civilians deserving of respect and support, rather than… How we treat them now.

It sounds wacky if you’re on a mostly American or corporate media diet these last twenty years, but the Taliban has been fighting terrorists in their area of late. The situation in the middle east has failed to be as simple as GW Bush would have had us believe.

I don’t support them obviously, but I at least recognize that this isn’t really as zany and ironic as a typical “not the Onion” headline.

Nice of you to stand up for me and then casually say the craziest thing I’ve heard all week. Now how’s that supposed to make me feel?

Basing these takes on a book I read about schools a few years ago. The Smartest Kids in the World. Some of it may be outdated or misremembered, but the clear one was how inefficient it is to have this many school districts in America. Overall cost of adminstration has gone up while teacher pay has stagnated.

We should just nationalize the schools and their funding, ridding us of thousands of inefficient and expensive local and regional administrations, pay the most highly qualified teachers a higher salary, give teachers the freedom to craft and administer their own curricula, and give students more freedom in their spare time and at school.

Don’t worry, radical change is not even on the table with this or any viable administration. I’m just saying how things ought to be.

I’m not going to argue with you - living as we are car-free now in a walkable city it’s unthinkable for me. But when I was in America, with a car and a baby, it made perfect sense. There were fewer viable third spaces (aside from parks, which is harder for an infant on a rainy day), and just about every viable third space (where we were) was built around car infrastructure.

All that to say you’re not quite wrong, but there’s nuance and the solutions are necessarily political.

He’s saying what we’re all thinking

Egad. Why are my fellow Americans so slow on the uptake?

Lemmy: This is rhetorical. I know a lot of the reasons.

He was always very oddly into ethical consumption.

Very

I’ve been to this place, ages ago. It was the kind of place you would bring a baby to without a second thought. Crazy that it’s come to this.

(づᴗ _ᴗ)づ 𖦹

Nah fuck all that. The working class needs solidarity forever. Solidarity, forever. Literally the whole rest of human society is against us and they’ve been winning the whole time, but we’re bigger. The only thing they really fear is working class solidarity.

Thank you 🧦

I try. This kid is a force of nature though. You’re all fucked when he’s grown, no joke