High School Dropouts Cost $192 Billion

[General of Darkness]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5-1vdHLLGw&feature=g-all-u&context=G27a474fFAAAAAAAAUAA

[Hatha Sunahara]

I'm not sure what the agenda is in this video. They want to let students or parents choose which schools they will attend because they claim that some kids will get a better education if they can choose which school they go to? And fewer kids will be dropouts. I'm trying to deconstruct this argument to get to the truth.

First of all, all the public schools have adopted curriculums that strangle critical thinking skills. They dumb down the kids. What they want are willing, obedient slaves. They make some effort to teach kids how to learn a skill, and in some areas expose the kids to situations where some skill is needed to identify and solve problems. But for the most part, all the kids going to school will learn the skills they will use to make a living from training they will get from their employers. It is the job of the public schools to weed out those kids whose spirit or intelligence or character is not compatible with the American slave work standards. Some kids don't want to be slaves, and they are bright enough to see that they are heading in that direction while they are in high schools, so they drop out. Being a high school dropout is no indication of potential for success, Many of these dropouts rebel against the mindlessness of the public schools--the regimentation, the thought control, the mind numbing conformity, the requirement for cheerful obedience, and the promotion of respect for authority. Only a real zombie would succeed in such a system. But that zombie--this piece of propaganda claims would be more productive than the kids who dropped out--and all that added productivity amounts to $192 billion over some mysterious number of years.

I had a boss once who conveyed to me his attitude about the company suggestion program. The company paid out bonuses for money saving ideas. My boss got one of these bonuses--a very big one for an idea that saved the company a lot of money. But his attitude was that he would not do it again, because 'some other damn fool would figure out how to waste all the money he saved them.' And this perception colors all my views about money saving claims today. If the nation would be richer by $192 billion from reducing its dropouts, then we would have that much more money from taxes and productivity to waste on wars and entitlements and 'homeland security'. I think the dropouts are doing us a big favor. There is no dishonor in dropping out from the sheeple factory.

I suspect however that the real agenda in the video is to bash the public unions that protect the teachers from the predation of the school boards. They blame the unions for protecting 'bad' teachers. And the parents buy this crap. Nobody points the finger at the bad administrators and the bad school board members who have a bad agenda to exploit our kids, by helping them to be 'successful'. The whole education system in the US needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up and so it won't be a political football like we are watching in this video.

For people who want some enlightenment on this issue, there is a documentary movie called Waiting for Superman that describes all the insane politics that affect public education.


Hatha

[vacuum]

A lot of things in the video don't make any sense. First of all, we aren't losing $192 billion in taxes, and all those other stats don't apply either. The reason is that the high school dropouts just happen to come from the low income, high crime portion portion of society, generally. They're going to behave that way whether they learn algebra or not.

Second, by taking the smart kids out of the bad schools, those bad schools will be even worse.

For the smart kids with poor parents, I can see a benefit in going to a better school and I do feel sympathy for them. But I feel that this solution is kind of trying to fix the symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

The problem is that you've got students who don't want to be there, primarily because it doesn't apply to their life from their point of view. Since their parents are dependents on the government, they learn that they make more money and have more free time if they collect welfare and do illegal side work than if they take a minimum wage job and lose their benefits, only to end up with a few dollars more and 40 hrs/week of work.

By having such high tax rates and funneling that money down to the poor, it becomes very hard to break out of the welfare lifestyle into a highly taxed producer, because of the high jump in income required before it actually pays off.

Another thing that factors into this is the humiliation that comes along with being a dependent and not providing for your own needs. That psychologically damages a whole class of people and imo helps crush students' desire to learn.

[Shami-Amourae]

Why the Hell do you what the State (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime) to educate your kids in the first place?

[osoab]

Is the cost of "educating" them before dropping out included in the 192 billion?