Prickly City by Scott Stantis for March 20, 2014

Thank God I never went to public school…or deal with the bullies there, I had enough problems with the bullies in the private schools.

Oh, lordy, here comes the solution: Free enterprise corporate sweatshop educational meddling. First step is to bash the teachers, next step, explain how someone who hasn’t been in a classroom since graduation knows everything about education. Final step: McSchools to do for education what USAToday did for newspapers.

Oddly enough, children in well-funded districts seem to get a good education from teachers who are in the same union. Must be a coincidence.

Home school. If we weren’t tax slaves for so much of the year more people could.

And what’s with all these socialist child labor laws?

Wow, this strip is really racing for the bottom.

Failure? I’d say it was a success: the current education system was invented in Prussia in the late 19th Century, and it was deliberately designed to turn out barely-literate workers who knew only what was necessary for them to work in factories, and to keep them in line with whatever Daddy Government™ said.

It appears that since the collapse of SOTU, Prickly City has become the Troll Participating Mecca of the gocomic.com site (outside of the editorial cartoons) for those that need their daily requirement of politically motivated confrontations, frustrations and otherwise mindless, infantile insulting rudeness and immature name-calling. I find that the comments are similar to a bunch of preschoolers arguing “my dad can whip your dad” type scenarios. This is a gold-mine for stand-up comedians with a few serious observations that usually go right over the heads of many extremists.

Touching on several comments above, two interesting events have occurred lately here in Chicagoland: one school district wants to make reading an elective for its junior high schools, much to the outrage of the parents. This is not TEACHERS doing this; it’s the ADMINISTRATION. (My daughter-in-law is in charge of the remedial reading program at the college where she teaches, which is necessary because 70% of the applicants are not up to college reading level; job security for her.) On the other hand, a local junior college led the way in establishing a “manufacturing” program for those who want to work in the industrial fields, and was followed so far by one other j.c. One really execrable idea, one really REALLY great-idea-that’s-been-too-long-coming. It’s not the teachers. It’s educational administrators. But also, it’s a culture that values knowledge only as much as is required to make really big bucks. Which is to say, not at all.

As a teacher I agree with most of what fbjsr said. If we could avoid the social engineering, get back to teaching the fundamentals, and set up better vocational programs then the system would be better off. Additionally, we have to set up better programs and/or schools for those students with learning difficulties, not just throw them into a regular classroom and hope that they learn something while being included with their peers. Finally, Dogday88 is quite correct, most of the worst and some of the best ideas come primarily from administrative levels and governmental levels, usually produced by someone who has not actually taught in years.

“Public schools” are better understood as “government schools”, from the same people who brought you the DMV, the U.S. Mail, and the IRS. Let anyone who wants to run a school do so, just anyone except the social instrument of coercion.(Coercion is OK when it’s against the bad guys. Who those are is a topic for another time.)

In 100 years we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in College

It is always a safe bet that leftists will oppose any attempt to improve anything if it might change how their constituents do their jobs. Leftism is the anti-Schumpeter, the province of buggy-whip manufacturers.

Has anyone picked up on the racism?

Reich Wingers? Are you a NAZI or just insultingly rude? I guess another question would be are you naturally talented at being rude or is being insulting an acquired skill?

Holy crap, Night. eugenics was a huge left-wing thing. M Sanger much?

Oh, I’ve read plenty. That’s why I’m aware how popular eugenics was amongst the Progressives.

Here’s what’s particularly annoying about the Reich-Wing bs. You’re trying to imply that there are similarities between the right wing, small government advocates and the Nazi/Socialists who were fans of large, centralized government… their roots are leftist.

Suddenly I want to weep.