Category Archives: Education

AMERICANS: Bad w/$, Not At Fault

“Scottish children are raised to neither a borrower nor a lender be. The reason being that incremental percentile inflation can and does outstrip fundamental reality’s ability to settle accounts.” Christophe Romanet

In America, we are actually told (and it is true) that “credit is necessary” for employment–background checks for even the most meaningless jobs, to rent or buy a house–credit check/good credit required, to rent a car, to get a cell phone plan, et c. Participation in our economy is largely necessitated by the coercive use of credit.

“No credit is worse than bad credit” (also true). And the credit you get, comes with interest rates which essentially amount to extortion, and folks are made to pay their debt in installments.

Higher education comes at exorbitant cost in the United States, and five & six figure debt loads are not uncommon twenty/thirty-somethings. Is the debt-holder to blame in what appears to be a financial services shakedown?

My Common Core Criticisms

stop_common_core_rotten_to_the_core_poster-r5b1ed5648bc64059ad8ab6f0498fd5db_a4ndz_8byvr_512The collection of data from pre-school to career is an affront to personal privacy. I also find the ‘standards’-based test consortiums responsible for stunting learning in schools, and driving costs in new books, materials and programs to mitigate their damage.

Our state needs it’s share of returns from the federal government for the purposes of public education, but not with this program as the mandate. It is the Constitutional privilege of the state to set it’s own education standards, and it should abandon the top down effort offered by trade organizations to make policy, in favor of crafting it’s own rigorous standards and curriculum, absent their presence. And the government should return it’s share to the state for that purpose.

I would support an alternative to Common Core which returns the classics to the classroom.

I favor a delay in implementation, and an accessible time period for public comment.

Instead, the implement and spin to get parents to accept Common Core, post facto.