I did not state "do not blame the GOP," not once. What I DID state is that the GOP does not bear the responsibility alone of a WILLFULLY IGNORANT society in which brainless mindrot is rewarded and the Trivium and Quadrivium are ridiculed, if not extinct. Here is Los Angeles, in 1978, public schools were gutted by something colloquially k…
I did not state "do not blame the GOP," not once. What I DID state is that the GOP does not bear the responsibility alone of a WILLFULLY IGNORANT society in which brainless mindrot is rewarded and the Trivium and Quadrivium are ridiculed, if not extinct. Here is Los Angeles, in 1978, public schools were gutted by something colloquially known as "The Jarvis Amendment" or more specifically Proposition 13 (13 being the lucky number it is, like the 13 colonies). To this day the schools have not recovered, in fact they have steadily declined. Since Jarvis was a Republican, it would be convenient to state that his political affiliation is the cause, and it may have been in part. However, the people, the masses, allowed it to happen; just as they have Donald Trump.
No one man, no one political party, no one entity is responsible for that: the whole of the society is culpably negligent, if not criminally so. To blame a single entity is not only intellectually dishonest and cowardly, it is inference that there is no democracy for democracy cannot be imperiled by a singular entity; that would be the antithesis of democracy, mate.
I was moved by your statement about "teachers having to buy school supplies so their students could have crayons, paper and pencils to write with." As a single parent that raised my daughter from birth alone, I have purchased many a school supplies for her classmates, the entire class, for the very reason you have stated. She is now a 25 year old graduate student and many of her elementary school classmates remain grateful to me as do her former teachers. Those were some of the most rewarding, though melancholy, days of my life.
I am sorry if I misstated your thoughts about the GOP, and I agree wholeheartedly with the "willfully ignorant society". However I think we both have to be careful of painting the specific onto the general. There are many people in society who are also appalled at the state we are in. We are talking about our collective children and if we care about them we need to fix this and not point fingers.
I, in turn, was moved by your story of purchasing supplies for your daughter's classmates, which brings about another issue I have that you might agree with.
First of all I am OLD....74 years old, but when I was in high school there were many state land-grant universities where the tuition was FREE for QUALIFIED IN-STATE STUDENTS. Pardon the capital letters, but when people talk about "free college" they frequently leave off those words. They also forget to mention that these state and federal universities can only take a certain number of students. When all the places are full, that is it. After that you could apply to universities in other states, private universities or try for a line of study that had openings (and transfer to a different course of study in your second year).
The University of Maryland, The University of New Hampshire and the University of California State University System schools were all examples of this.
If you were a high school student who studied hard, got good grades, did good on your entrance exams and wanted to one of these universities in your state, you could go tuition free if you were accepted.
For foreign students and out-of-state students tuition was charged. This was only fair since those student's parents did not pay state taxes.
Then, over the years, the state and federal funding was diminished. This was mentioned in Tom's letter. For a non-profit institution there is not much you can do. You can try to cut courses or have more students in each class to cut down on professorial salaries. If you are a research university you can try to attract research grants, but that is tricky.
Eventually you start charging tuition. Then to attract students whose families can pay the tuition you start building stadiums, student unions, etc. Often these facilities are donated, but upkeep costs money too. The tuition goes higher.
The University of California Berkeley, of which I am most familiar, held back from charging tuition until about ten years ago. Now they charge 15,000 dollars a year tuition. Many times scholarships are available, but many times they are not.
Put this together with a single parent making minimum wage....approximately 15,000 dollars a year. Hard to think about sending your children to college. Hard for them to believe they will go, or that they should study to go. You have to scrimp and save to get the tuition money that goes up every year. You can not buy other things like an occasional vacation or even go out to dinner once a month. Then after all this saving your child may decide they do not want to go to university....it happens.
I write this not knowing your situation. You and your daughter obviously worked hard and you both succeeded. Your story made me feel very good.
I am involved with a lot of countries in Latin America. Most of them have free of tuition state and federal universities for qualified students, but forty percent of the qualified students can not take advantage of this free university because their parents are too poor to pay for the room and board, Internet, computers, books, transportation, etc.
So I am working on a project to allow them to start their own part-time business (about 21 hours a week) to help them earn that money. The program will be free to the students and the universities. I hope to start in in full (after a couple of pilots) in 2025.
I am typing this from Valenca, Brazil. My husband and I normally live in the USA but we are visiting his family and friends during the holidays. My husband was one of those "qualified students" where there were no positions open for him in a state or federal university. Because of this he was able to qualify for a fully paid scholarship from the federal government to a very good private university, but without that scholarship his family would not have been able to send him to university.
The question I have for the USA, both parties, all of our businesses and our society, if Latin American and European countries (even Cuba) can have free of tuition universities for qualified students, why can't the richest country on the face of the earth? Why do Elon Musk and other titans of industry need to, year after year, get H-1B visas to bring foreign-trained immigrants to our country?
Believe me, after traveling to over 100 countries over the past 50+ years, and being married to a Brazilian, I do not have any issues with any legal foreign born workers. But as a former university professor I have REAL HARD TIME with not funding our schools and universities properly and not encouraging EVERY student to do their best.
"The question I have for the USA, both parties, all of our businesses and our society, if Latin American and European countries (even Cuba) can have free of tuition universities for qualified students, why can't the richest country on the face of the earth?"
Please let me know when you have uncovered the answer as when you do it will probably point to the same reason(s) the United States is the only so-called "developed" country on planet Earth that does not provide healthcare for all of its citizens, throws away more food than most countries combined while many of its citizens go hungry (including children) and espouses a "right" to guns so that those same children can become maniacal murderous maniacs that shoot up schools, churches, grocery stores and movie theaters on a daily basis. But what do I know, I just work here.
My daughter attended a well-known private university (that is also where she is finishing up her postgraduate/intern work). Her tuition was about $55,000 per year from 2018-2022. I told her that, no matter what, we would make that happen but grad school was quite the different story and she would have to finance that. Due to her academic performance and course of study, the school offered her an internship in which they pay for her grad school as she works for the university. As for the undergraduate tuition, I'll be in debt until the day I die on that.
Your comment was worth reading and I am honored by it.
I have no answers for your questions. There are many more similar questions that could be asked, but the OP was about education, so I tended to stick to that.
For full disclosure I am a fan of Bernie Sanders and only wished that more people actually read and thought about his plans.
Imagine a life where you did not have to worry about Health insurance, college tuition for your kids, daycare for your young children so you could work and a dozen other things that make sense.
I may be out in Pasadena in March for a conference. We could meet and talk about other questions.
I understand the gist of the OpEd, the point of my liberally applied rhetorical queries is that the pathologies pursuant to the issues are likely the same.
Rohn what did you mean “The GOP is not responsible for the fact that most of us cannot remember the phone numbers b…” You are a GOP but not a MAGA zombie?
I did not state "do not blame the GOP," not once. What I DID state is that the GOP does not bear the responsibility alone of a WILLFULLY IGNORANT society in which brainless mindrot is rewarded and the Trivium and Quadrivium are ridiculed, if not extinct. Here is Los Angeles, in 1978, public schools were gutted by something colloquially known as "The Jarvis Amendment" or more specifically Proposition 13 (13 being the lucky number it is, like the 13 colonies). To this day the schools have not recovered, in fact they have steadily declined. Since Jarvis was a Republican, it would be convenient to state that his political affiliation is the cause, and it may have been in part. However, the people, the masses, allowed it to happen; just as they have Donald Trump.
No one man, no one political party, no one entity is responsible for that: the whole of the society is culpably negligent, if not criminally so. To blame a single entity is not only intellectually dishonest and cowardly, it is inference that there is no democracy for democracy cannot be imperiled by a singular entity; that would be the antithesis of democracy, mate.
I was moved by your statement about "teachers having to buy school supplies so their students could have crayons, paper and pencils to write with." As a single parent that raised my daughter from birth alone, I have purchased many a school supplies for her classmates, the entire class, for the very reason you have stated. She is now a 25 year old graduate student and many of her elementary school classmates remain grateful to me as do her former teachers. Those were some of the most rewarding, though melancholy, days of my life.
I am sorry if I misstated your thoughts about the GOP, and I agree wholeheartedly with the "willfully ignorant society". However I think we both have to be careful of painting the specific onto the general. There are many people in society who are also appalled at the state we are in. We are talking about our collective children and if we care about them we need to fix this and not point fingers.
I, in turn, was moved by your story of purchasing supplies for your daughter's classmates, which brings about another issue I have that you might agree with.
First of all I am OLD....74 years old, but when I was in high school there were many state land-grant universities where the tuition was FREE for QUALIFIED IN-STATE STUDENTS. Pardon the capital letters, but when people talk about "free college" they frequently leave off those words. They also forget to mention that these state and federal universities can only take a certain number of students. When all the places are full, that is it. After that you could apply to universities in other states, private universities or try for a line of study that had openings (and transfer to a different course of study in your second year).
The University of Maryland, The University of New Hampshire and the University of California State University System schools were all examples of this.
If you were a high school student who studied hard, got good grades, did good on your entrance exams and wanted to one of these universities in your state, you could go tuition free if you were accepted.
For foreign students and out-of-state students tuition was charged. This was only fair since those student's parents did not pay state taxes.
Then, over the years, the state and federal funding was diminished. This was mentioned in Tom's letter. For a non-profit institution there is not much you can do. You can try to cut courses or have more students in each class to cut down on professorial salaries. If you are a research university you can try to attract research grants, but that is tricky.
Eventually you start charging tuition. Then to attract students whose families can pay the tuition you start building stadiums, student unions, etc. Often these facilities are donated, but upkeep costs money too. The tuition goes higher.
The University of California Berkeley, of which I am most familiar, held back from charging tuition until about ten years ago. Now they charge 15,000 dollars a year tuition. Many times scholarships are available, but many times they are not.
Put this together with a single parent making minimum wage....approximately 15,000 dollars a year. Hard to think about sending your children to college. Hard for them to believe they will go, or that they should study to go. You have to scrimp and save to get the tuition money that goes up every year. You can not buy other things like an occasional vacation or even go out to dinner once a month. Then after all this saving your child may decide they do not want to go to university....it happens.
I write this not knowing your situation. You and your daughter obviously worked hard and you both succeeded. Your story made me feel very good.
I am involved with a lot of countries in Latin America. Most of them have free of tuition state and federal universities for qualified students, but forty percent of the qualified students can not take advantage of this free university because their parents are too poor to pay for the room and board, Internet, computers, books, transportation, etc.
So I am working on a project to allow them to start their own part-time business (about 21 hours a week) to help them earn that money. The program will be free to the students and the universities. I hope to start in in full (after a couple of pilots) in 2025.
I am typing this from Valenca, Brazil. My husband and I normally live in the USA but we are visiting his family and friends during the holidays. My husband was one of those "qualified students" where there were no positions open for him in a state or federal university. Because of this he was able to qualify for a fully paid scholarship from the federal government to a very good private university, but without that scholarship his family would not have been able to send him to university.
The question I have for the USA, both parties, all of our businesses and our society, if Latin American and European countries (even Cuba) can have free of tuition universities for qualified students, why can't the richest country on the face of the earth? Why do Elon Musk and other titans of industry need to, year after year, get H-1B visas to bring foreign-trained immigrants to our country?
Believe me, after traveling to over 100 countries over the past 50+ years, and being married to a Brazilian, I do not have any issues with any legal foreign born workers. But as a former university professor I have REAL HARD TIME with not funding our schools and universities properly and not encouraging EVERY student to do their best.
A long post, but I appreciate you reading it.
Pax Vobiscum
"The question I have for the USA, both parties, all of our businesses and our society, if Latin American and European countries (even Cuba) can have free of tuition universities for qualified students, why can't the richest country on the face of the earth?"
Please let me know when you have uncovered the answer as when you do it will probably point to the same reason(s) the United States is the only so-called "developed" country on planet Earth that does not provide healthcare for all of its citizens, throws away more food than most countries combined while many of its citizens go hungry (including children) and espouses a "right" to guns so that those same children can become maniacal murderous maniacs that shoot up schools, churches, grocery stores and movie theaters on a daily basis. But what do I know, I just work here.
My daughter attended a well-known private university (that is also where she is finishing up her postgraduate/intern work). Her tuition was about $55,000 per year from 2018-2022. I told her that, no matter what, we would make that happen but grad school was quite the different story and she would have to finance that. Due to her academic performance and course of study, the school offered her an internship in which they pay for her grad school as she works for the university. As for the undergraduate tuition, I'll be in debt until the day I die on that.
Your comment was worth reading and I am honored by it.
Carpe diem.
I have no answers for your questions. There are many more similar questions that could be asked, but the OP was about education, so I tended to stick to that.
For full disclosure I am a fan of Bernie Sanders and only wished that more people actually read and thought about his plans.
Imagine a life where you did not have to worry about Health insurance, college tuition for your kids, daycare for your young children so you could work and a dozen other things that make sense.
I may be out in Pasadena in March for a conference. We could meet and talk about other questions.
I understand the gist of the OpEd, the point of my liberally applied rhetorical queries is that the pathologies pursuant to the issues are likely the same.
As for Mr. Sanders...
https://rohnkenyatta.substack.com/p/bernie-sanders-what-if?utm_source=publication-search
Rohn what did you mean “The GOP is not responsible for the fact that most of us cannot remember the phone numbers b…” You are a GOP but not a MAGA zombie?