Ray,
I agree with most of what you say. However, Catholic schools in California
have a deserved reputation for producing good results. Side by side public
and Catholic schools here show a better result from the Catholic School
than from the public.
Also, the Catholic bureaucracy has one third the staff (proportionally) of
the Los Angeles School Board.
I was christened a Catholic in Brompton Oratory in London a lot of years
ago. It was the last time I was in a Catholic church and then I had to be
carried in!
So, I'm not pro-Catholic particularly. It's just that they have good schools.
Harry
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Ray E. Harrell wrote:
>Since I already answered your current post in one you supposedly
>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].
