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Originally posted by Shakka Maybe something provocative to stir up some lively debate in this one-horse ghost town. It's not a subject or a position that will make a person popular, but I agree with Ron Paul here. Education is not a right. The government is constantly creeping further and further into managing our lives and taking away our individual freedoms based on an ever growing appetite for "free" shit (the free shit that someone ultimately has to pay for..shit that contributes to the bankrupting of our country). Flame on. And yes, I generally think Ron Paul is batshit crazy.

But that's part of his charm. Full on nutter 80% of the time and 20% down to earth practicality and confronting issues others don't want to come near. My respect for him after he had the balls to say that 9/11 might be a consequence of US foreign policy in the 2008 GOP primaries will take a lot of crazy talk to eleminate.

Is he making another run at the GOP this time? It seems like contenders are really worried about stepping up. Something I find a bit odd.

Watching the clip now.

Interesting ideas as always.

The first important topic that RP brings up is that Medicare and Education are not Rights.

This is a bit muddled though because he doesn't mean all education, he means post secondary education.

The second thing that is important to note is that he doesn't want to bar those without means from going to post secondary but feels that bank loans will fill the gap if the government steps back.

I think he's got some good points here. Although he doesn't explicitly say it there is some minimum amount of education which should be 100% state financed, which I agree with. High school seems like a good watershed point here, as it has been for decades. A high school education provides the literacy and numaracy required for communicating with one another and standardization across states, or ideally countries, expands the number of people who can communicate with each other. Without some measure of consistency norms of communication will diverge faster than they are already and vocabularies will shift and change until new dielects / languages are formed.

Sure this might take generations or even centuries but there are significant social and economic benifits to maintaining some amount of linguistic consistency. The same is true with math. Science does quite well with the established conventions, part of the reason international scientific work exists. But without training "=" might not mean the same thing in all areas. (I actually read an article about this recently, mentioning how some groups view an "=" sign meaning something other than what it actually means)

I'm thinking that a significant amount of this discussion is spured by the high levels of loan deliquency that are begining to be problematic. It's probably not all that far fetched to say that government money should not be going to people who enrol in 'for profit' post secondary schools. These are the people who tend to have the highest deliquency rates. This is probably because they didn't do any cost benifit analysis of education. Although good post secondary education helps people earn more, poor education doesn't. Unfortunately the conventional wisdom that "education" is good is about the most that vast sections of society can really hold on to.

On a higher level his clip begins a debate that is going to have to be had accross the western world as budgets and debts are strained.

What are a persons rights?

In Canada we have a charter of rights and freedoms (which I'm not exactly well read about). What really needs to be understood is how many of these things are utopian and how many are actually things that we, as members of advanced nations, can really guarantee for our populations.

Clean water, shelter, waste disposal, access to electricity, and political stability are pretty standard. Post secondary education and state of the art medical care are quite different.

Could we really afford to guarentee all people the chance to live in a vegitative state indefinately if life prolonging technology got to that point? It seems reasonable that imunizations and emergency medical care can be provided though.

This is a pretty difficult moral debate, especially as the demographics of countries with the highest levels of life prolonging medical technology shift.


PS. RP - Saying "inflation didn't exist" when he was young is on the batshit crazy 80% side. He was born, and has lived through, some of the most significant instances of inflation recorded (see my other thread for this). The facts show that inflation really began around the 16th century. This was a big motivation for Adam Smith's writing as he spent a large portion of "The Wealth of Nations" exploring the possibility that an absolute store of value existed (he tried to say labour was the base, unchanging measure of value).

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Originally posted by atbell I'm thinking that a significant amount of this discussion is spured by the high levels of loan deliquency that are begining to be problematic. It's probably not all that far fetched to say that government money should not be going to people who enrol in 'for profit' post secondary schools. These are the people who tend to have the highest deliquency rates. This is probably because they didn't do any cost benifit analysis of education. Although good post secondary education helps people earn more, poor education doesn't. Unfortunately the conventional wisdom that "education" is good is about the most that vast sections of society can really hold on to.

A-fucking-men. I view for-profit education as one of the worst industries that manages to consume billions in taxpayer funds every year for loans sporting 30-50% default rates. Is it reasonable for an industry that often gets upwards of 90% of its revenues from the government to sport such high profit margins? It is the poster-child of derived demand (i.e. if it wasn't so heavily subsidized, the industry would not exist in any form like it currently does). Is it reasonable to ask taxpayers to throw their money after programs that sport such high default rates? What a waste of our money!

And the ironic part of all of this debate? It is now REPUBLICANS who have decided to come out and go on a crusade to defend this industry saying that it's an issue of free-choice (again, the industry would not exist without heavy subsidies, so who are Republicans kidding???) while there are respectable DEMOCRATS who are going after the industry for its waste and fraud.

In a normal world I would think Republicans would not be so blind and put on those fiscal conservative/deficit hawk hats and see the easy layup to save a few billion here while I'd expect democrats to come out and defend an industry that provides an "education" to poor and underprivileged consumers. It makes my head spin! I guess it must be that the for profit industry grew out of Arizona where John RetardMcain is hard up for contributions and has to defend his crappy state's big employers. Unreal.

Education isn't a right? Then what is it? A privilege according to who can pay for it? Did the private sector make our society basically 100% literate, or was it the government mandating primary schooling for everyone free of charge?

If education isn't a right, then how do you expect this country to remain competitive with the rest of the world? We've already fallen behind in both science and math, two essential subjects in this technologically driven economy. All the spending cuts we're making on higher education is going to cost us more in the long run. The baby boomer generation isn't going to be running things much longer, most of them are in retirement age already. So how exactly do you expect the future generations of America to run things when we're making it harder and harder on the youth to receive a premium education? And don't tell me the successors of the wealthy 1% is going to run the whole show. I suppose you can control the wealth, securities, derivatives, and get a bailout whenever you fuck up, but if you don't produce anything and yet continue to get rewarded for it, then I shudder to think where we're going to be headed in the next 10 years. The economy needs more homegrown products and investments in future technologies. But we're not going to get there on a shoddy educational system that favors the wealthy. Congressman Paul loses my respect in that statement. I guess he worships Aqua Budda as well.

i am always fascinated with the US' obsession with "rights" (never responsibilities).

even if education is not a right it just makes sense in practice to have a standardised norm for basic competency in things like reading and writing. even if its not unfair to prevent some people from accessing higher learning it makes sense to have that availability as wide as possible, as it maximises the chances for good little cogs to come out ready to be placed into the wheel. if you minimise that availability all that will happen is that somewhere down the line standards in commerce and industry would have to be lowered due to a shortage of qualified workers coming off the assembly line.

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I'm sorry but I don't agree at all. I think that the citizens of each country should have free education readily available to them. They can choose if they want to educate themselves or not, but no one should be deprived of an education because it is a 'privilege' for those who can acquire it. I don't care about the money, what's more important is having a well educated society that can be progressive in all aspects of life that concerns us (science, politics, engineering, etc). There should be no monetary value on education. Education, just as knowledge, is power. We could make up all education expenses with advancements in every field, which would bring profit & make us innovators again. How can we compete with other nations & be prosperous when we have a nation of uneducated people?

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Posted by Omega_Blue that's it, fuck it i'm quitting ta forever. fuck if i'm gonna get trolled by fucking yukii. dammit!

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN i am always fascinated with the US' obsession with "rights" (never responsibilities). even if education is not a right it just makes sense in practice to have a standardised norm for basic competency in things like reading and writing. even if its not unfair to prevent some people from accessing higher learning it makes sense to have that availability as wide as possible, as it maximises the chances for good little cogs to come out ready to be placed into the wheel. if you minimise that availability all that will happen is that somewhere down the line standards in commerce and industry would have to be lowered due to a shortage of qualified workers coming off the assembly line.

this.

I have mixed feeling about education, with there being two main problems with it:

1. Its too specialized, when times change, certain skills that were so rigorously trained become obsolete, hence the person needs to either go back to school again to learn something new, or end up in the gutter.

2. It behaves alot like a business, i have no problem in a school earning funds for keeping the school alive or erecting new structures or classes or equipment, but it certainly is a problem when education becomes a sort of commodity - a high demand for this and that in the future, and alot of the time the quality of it is cut to speed up the process for people to get jobs. In Canada it takes about 4 years to become a nurse (which is i suppose alot, but theres also shorter programs as well, that go to 1 year) - more or less the service provided becomes malnourished because they cant keep up with the demand.


so while it might lead to drastic consequences in government funding education down the road, i cant help but feel there is some responsibility to be held onto these establishments of education that the quality is slowly going down the drain. Opting for the more "earn your diploma in six months" kind of thing, and miss out on some major aspects of the subject.


also, i think a school on mental health and civilized discussion is necessary. I cant tell you how many times ive read through physics and science forums only to find people calling names and acting like little children when someone presents or challenges an idea. Then as a final resort wave their phd's around claiming they are an authoritative figure on the subject and know whats right and wrong (without having to test the idea first). Kind of funny to read, but also kind of sad knowing that these supposed great minds are leading us into the future - and they cant properly discuss ideas with each other (let alone actually test them and scrutinize them)

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Originally posted by yukii I'm sorry but I don't agree at all. I think that the citizens of each country should have free education readily available to them. They can choose if they want to educate themselves or not, but no one should be deprived of an education because it is a 'privilege' for those who can acquire it. I don't care about the money, what's more important is having a well educated society that can be progressive in all aspects of life that concerns us (science, politics, engineering, etc). There should be no monetary value on education. Education, just as knowledge, is power. We could make up all education expenses with advancements in every field, which would bring profit & make us innovators again. How can we compete with other nations & be prosperous when we have a nation of uneducated people?

At a time when there is a general consensus among experts and leading CEO's that America's economy is in part suffering because of a lack of investment in skills and education, I am flabbergasted with the attacks on teachers. Surely, if you are looking to increase the quality of teachers, the best graduates need to be lured by at least semi-attactive salaries. Also, the McKinsey report shows that in the best-performing countries, teaching is a highly respected and valued profession, which attracts a certain calibre of graduates. At the moment, in certain quarters of the US, teachers are being denigrated as overpaid, lazy and benefit-hungry leeches. I know budgets have to be balanced, but you don't do it by first targeting one of the key drivers of a successful economy. Surely, the return on investment is greater for every dollar spent on creating a more educated and flexible workforce, compared with a dollar spent on reducing the taxes for the wealthiest 2%. Also, what's with denying collective bargaining rights? Is the ability to freely associate not a fundamental right? If corporations can collectively lobby governments, then why can't teachers?

http://www.suite101.com/content/how...systems-a309913

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/4134...e-world-top-ten

http://www.mckinsey.com/App_Media/R...stems_Final.pdf

Yeah, only in America, would teachers be considered a drain of society.