commented on (see below) I won't say more about that. However,
I would suggest that those in love with the private school system
go teach in it for awhile. I have, as has my sister. She finally joined
the hierarchical Catholic School system because she was getting
older and needed a medical plan and a retirement with four kids
and her husband working three jobs. 19th century solutions are
as irrelevant to education as they are to the Information Era. As
for the farms, have you done it? My family has farmed, worked
in private business, as do I, taught in the schools, been anti-Union
city managers and business leaders. As my grandfather used to
say, liberal Democrats are those who are trying to make it while
Conservative Republicans are those who have and are trying to hold
the other's back. The startling history of the rise of African-Americans
in a single generation after the fall of segregation, certainly makes
a fool and a liar out of all of those who blamed them for their failure
in segregated society. Any group that has become so successful
in areas where they are truly allowed to compete would indicate superiority
rather than the reverse but logic and reason are not the tools here
although they are claimed by the descendants of those early slave
owners.
I'm a very practical man Harry. I'm only interested in what works
and what has happened in those places where people tried the theories.
Agitprop is nothing but annoying to me. Did it work and where
is
the data? America and European culture has done some very
fine things in the world, mostly for themselves and against others
but the Art of Europe is the one contribution to world life that has
no drawbacks. Everything else has been used to violate
other
peoples.
In each world group there have been things that they have done
that benefits us all. J.S. Bach needed German Paternalism
to
raise his 20 kids while he wrote his music and Palestrina's
patron murdered millions who didn't agree or who were old with a
bad case of acne, but the art didn't validate the patron anymore
than the art was an expression of the patron's murderous impulses.
I give credit for the art and I am grateful. Any system
held too
long or grown too big is ridiculous and serves as a dam that will
eventually be swept away by the environment. I believe
that
we must have the good sense and critical judgment to get beyond
the doctrinaire and to see as much of the whole of things as
is
possible while creating a humane and tolerant culture,
environment and future. I have little time for those who
explain
away the failures of their system and Messiahs, wherever they
have been tried, with the excuse that it was poorly executed
and
that trying harder is the answer.
For example, think we should accept that there were good things
that came from Stalin as well as murder. Today there is plenty
of murder and oppression in Russian prisons worse than under
Communism but blame is spread around with no one villain to
focus on. That doesn't make it right, just convenient and easy
to exploit by pathological individuals. It is not surprising
that those
who know the territory, i.e. former communists, are the best exploiters.
If State Communism had existed in a vacuum and lasted as long
as the other Western International Universalistic theories, they
would have lied about their past, just as America, the church
and all of the others have lied about theirs, pointed to their ideals
and become the "saviors" of the world. Doesn't mean it
was true
anymore than for the Christians, Moslems or the European version
of Democracy. Communism failed because it couldn't compete
with an older more advanced system existing in a more comfortable
ecological niche in an encreasingly technological age where they
couldn't hide behind their curtin of weapons.
America succeeded because it was more seperated age and the Brits
couldn't intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing here in the way that
Clinton
did in Kosovo and Bosnia. George Washington's name amongst the
Iroquois
means "Destroyer of Villages." The invention of the
murderous
Hunter/Gatherer pillager comes from Lewis Cass, Thomas Jefferson's
apologist and Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War. It is an invention
of his experience and a projection of his imagination. "They
may have
been great once but they are now degenerate and deserve to die."
A
sentiment echoed by "Wizard of Oz" author L. Frank Baum fifty
years later in his comment on his approval of the massacre at Wounded
Knee even as he lamented the loss of life amongst the soldiers who
murdered the women and children on Christmas.
All of which is to say once more. If you control the history and
define
the information that may enter the argument, then you can prove anything.
Ask President Bob Jones of Bob Jones University. His world is
complete.
But completely wrong.
REH
Harry Pollard wrote:
Ray,You are quite right, Ray. Government run American education is a mess. It
should be part of a private competitive system. Then things would improve.Harry
____________________________________________
Ray wrote:>Good point. I believe that Mike Hollinshead was the first to point
>this out to me. I think that it will take a correlation of all of the
>external factors with requisite comparisons before serious conclusions
>can be drawn. Of course if you define the parameters you can
>prove almost anything by virtue of what you leave out.
>
>One of the
>things that is often left out of the Com/Cap comparison between the
>U.S. and the old Soviet Empire is the weather. They didn't suffer for
>want of oil but it was a hell of a lot easier to get it out of almost any
>of our fields than it is out of Siberia.
>
>Agriculture is another point.
>lf your growing season is short you need tremendous amounts of
>land to compete with those who can plant many crops in a small
>amount of land. And on and on.
>
>My point is that in areas where
>we are roughly equivalent like education, we have gotten our behinds
>whipped.
>
>The Arts are another area even though the official dogma
>is that they were pampered, anyone who knows their refugees
>finds the opposite is true although they are magnificently trained and
>have far superior work experience since they did have work before
>the collapse of the Soviet.
>
>American graduates who paid for their
>own education have an average full time employment of 2%. They
>also lose out to the émigrés because of the superior work experience
>that they bring to America. That makes the competitive advantage
>overwhelming in their ability to be creative, improvise and invent
>new models.
>
>If you have no work experience, your creativity is
>profoundly impaired as most of America's performing artists have
>discovered. Those who have succeeded usually have European
>experience to replace America's cultural poverty.
>
>William Bradford Ward wrote:
>
> > HARRY: Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet
> Union and for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital
> doing, I suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to
> operate and save lives. I remember one comment from a US doctor. He
> couldn't believe that the Head of Cardiology at the Moscow hospital got a
> salary of $7 a week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure way to
> attract the best people into medicine.
> >
> > I couldn't let Harry's comment go unnoticed although I really am not
> interested in the communist/capitalist argument but do have problems with
> people who use irrelevant arguments to make their point.
> >
> > At a meeting of the American Heart Association one year a bunch of
> cardiovascular surgeons said that the reason that there had been a 30%
> drop in cardiovascular deaths in the previous ten years was that open
> heart surgery was up 30% in the same period. A biostatistician friend of
> mine got up after that and showed that beer consumption was up 30% in the
> same period and said that it was truly the increase in beer drinking.
> >
> > By the way, no one has ever been able to show any relationship between
> health services in the US [except for immunizations] and improvement in
> health [except for the health of health care workers].
> >
