REMOTE LEARNING SUCCESS IS ASTOUNDING

my father when we got a microcomputer (thats what they called them then, beginning of the 80s) and i was a snotty little kid wanting to play video games on it : ‘you want to play games on this thing? okay. learn to program a game on it, and then play it’ . you could buy a lot of games in BASIC in those days printed in a paperback format, to be typed in , with commentary that would supposedly help you learn to program while doing so. and we did.
my father sometime around the second grade when algebra came up in some discussion: ‘well lets sit down and ill take the mystery out of that’ , and he taught me the basics right there.
my father when i was around 10 and broke one the legs on the sofa yanking it aside to sweep behind it: ‘you broke that? well, you know where the scrap wood and the saws and files are, make another one and fix it.’
my father when mowing neighborhood lawns didnt quite yield enough money to buy those sneakers i had to have and that ghetto blaster (remember those?) i wanted at 13: ‘okay, get a job. ‘ (and i did, been filing taxes ever since then!) .
kids these days? W T F already!
and , my father all those years: ‘the school system exists to keep people stupid and obedient’. and he was right on the money.
this tablet generation is totally hopeless.

I can’t support vouchers because it brings big government into private schools.
Churches need to open schools and take contributions to fund the poor students as they did in the past.

no, vouchers are not the way. that opens the door to the worst of both systems, government monopoly and unaccountability, and private corner cutting and selling the lowest possible quality crap for the highest price.
the moment you break the connection – and the feedback loop of accountability- directly between the people paying for something and the people selling it , that is the moment you throw the door wide open to corruption and unaccountability and the whole thing goes down the toilet.
vouchers were never the solution. the real solution is to get the government entirely out of the education business. No school taxes, no public schools, no scho0ol boards, no mandatory curricula, none of it. parents who give a damn will find ways to teach their kids. maybe that means doing it themselves at home. maybe that means getting together with other parents and working something out together. maybe in some community it means they pool together and hire a teacher. in fact thats how even _local_ public schools used to work long ago, the local community pitched in to pay a salary to a teacher. it got institutionalized though and went from chipping in tuition, to a tax. (the concept of mandatory public education as we know it today was largely developed in frederick’s prussia in the late 18th century, as he understood that military technologies of the day required massed infantry formations blasting away at each other 50 yards apart, and success was largely dependent on having as many troops as possible and having them disciplined enough to not just break and run, which is something no sane independent thinking human would be willing to do on account of some random distant king nobody’d ever even met – unless he was either very well paid, or brainwashed into doing it. frederick was very clear that the purpose of his mandatory public education was to provide disciplined troops for the army)

I know a woman who ended up raising her kid as a single mother. the father made himself scarece as soon as the pregnancy was discovered. she never took a cent of handouts, but worked her ass off to raise that kid. two jobs plus finishing uni all at once. when the time came for the kid to start elementary school, she went all around town (this is a midsized city halfway between the us east coast and the midwest) investigating all the various public schools in different neighborhoods, they were all crap. she went around town investigating all the private schools, even the ones she wasnt sure she coudl afford but shed find a way to pay if it was the right choice. none of them fit the bill. with a half dozen other parents , they got together and started their own school. the parents did a lot of the lessons, but they also hired teachers to come in and give some of the lessons they werent sure they were competent to do themselves. they got organized themselves. So much so that about another several dozen parents over the next 6 years also started bringing their kids (and paying into it to make it work), all sort of like a co-op. However it was that core of half a dozen who started it who really put their energy and giving-a-damn-ness into it. When my friend’s kid finished the 6th grade in this kind of co-op school , and the other original core of dedicated parents moved on, the thing kinda fell apart, but thats remained my gold standard for what parents can do if they actually gave a damn.