Your stance says it. Objecting to using race as one of many criteria for admission in favor of a single test that clearly benefits your group ignores "all racial discrimination and racial obstacles except that single instance you can point to where it doesn't come out in your favor, then suddenly racism IS a problem that needs eradicating...."

Short sighted tribal reasoning was electing a lying cheeto with anger issues because it wore red.

Yes, but that score must, to be honest and have any value, include a measurement of the obstacles overcome to achieve that score. Taking financial, societal, opportunistic, familial, etc obstacles they've overcome doesn't seem to bother you, race is one more obstacle for many, one that's rightly taken into account when measuring a student's efforts required to achieve their current status, especially proper when diversity is part of the desired outcome of the computation.

Include a numerical modifier that takes overcoming those multiple obstructions into account and skin color might eventually be reasonably removed, but not before.

Lower scoring candidates should be chosen over higher scoring candidates based on other factors. Race is, right now, the best way to generalize those factors when trying to create a diverse student body, something we've determined is a benefit to all students. Of course, it would be better to examine all facets of performance on an individual basis, but schools don't seem to do that anymore, it's a Herculean task. Again, fund them better and they tend to do better.

I found a replacement in http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/usc-student-body-vice-president-overreacts-to-prank/80655723/ but its embed code failed.

The first point I think we can safely disagree on without needing to dig further. We can both think of examples of very irrational, angry feminists and we can both think of examples of rational and grounded feminists. I am sorry that your experience tends mostly toward the first, whereas mine tends mostly toward the second; so many people that I know personally or that I see in media are happy to call themselves feminist that to me it's starting to mean absolutely nothing.

Masters and associate masters (nicholas and his wife, respectively) have some kind of non-teaching support role in relation to the campus and the student body. They're not deans, but more sort of community and relations managers. Without excusing the rudeness in the video, I think it would a whole different principle if these were, for example, students shouting down a professor in one of their classes (which I'm sure has also happened). The master's role is different.

"The point being, you said white men don't need protection because they can just shrug it off or, to quote..." They don't need as much protection from inflammatory comments, but they need job protection, protection against threats, protection against libel, protection against violence, etc., like anybody else. What we see in the video is a PR guy (public relations between the university and the student body) being caught up in a PR shit storm. He's not getting this shit because he's male but because he's the face of student relations. His wife got a lot of shit as well. I don't think he deserves getting shouted down by anybody, but my point is that this isn't the same as a feminist making a generic blog post about how all men are shitty people; it's a specific shit storm playing out around racism at Yale, his role and his wife's role as responsible for student relations, and about what students believe they are entitled to from the school staff. It's a very specific, very different situation, where the students thought they had a right to expect something from him which maybe wasn't part of his role. (I would bet a reasonably large amount of money that he's more PC than you or I would ever care to be).

Finally, I don't know what you are asking if I would "say to a man who has been raped by a woman" Would I say to them that they should ignore shitty feminist blogs about how men are shit? Absolutely. Somebody who has suffered sexual violence should stay far away from that kind of toxic bullshit. But maybe that isn't the scenario you're presenting - let me mirror it and see if I understand what kind of scenario you want me to consider: if a friend of mine has been robbed by a black man, and then dismisses all black civil rights activists as criminals and thugs, would I try to argue with him? I hope I would, though it would be difficult as hell.

If I knew a man who had been raped by a woman, I would try to support him in getting through that, and not blame all feminists. If I knew a woman who had been raped by a man, I would try to support her in getting through that, and not blame all men's rights activists. Does that make sense? I hope it does.

insane, back when I was in highschool there was no cops/guards/etc

We even had a smoking section, and guns could be brought on campus.

For smoking section you just needed a letter from parents that they knew you smoked. and on recess the smokers all hung out there.

To bring gun to school, it was during any hunting season. You had to have note from parents that they know. The gun had to be visible, either gun rack in back window of truck or in passenger seat. Rifles and Shotguns only no pistols.

You had to have your Hunter's Safety Course card, Your Hunting License both on you to give copies at office.

You had to leave your vehicle keys with the front office and submit to random vehicle search of the hunter's vehicles only.

So while everyone could go to their cars at recess, or if you had extra empty elective, some of us juniors would drive up to Hardees before lunch and grab fast food then be back before 4th period started, but the hunters had to leave their keys with front office and they could not retrieve them until end of school.

So much more freedom.

Smoking was banned on campus for students only my 10th grade year, but Teachers had the smoking lounge in building. There was a teacher's lounge on each hall, the back hall F where weight lifting, welding, home ec, and vocational classes were was where the teacher's smoking lounge was. Most students friendly with teachers could sneak in there and smoke anyhow.

crazy times.

I had a 84 Camaro and kept a flare gun under seat my dad owned a boat and had couple extra flare guns. So I had that for some crazy reason thinking if someone attacked me, at point blank range I'd put on a huge firework show


Then there was the stereotypes that were proven right not wrong.

The jocks hung out together, the headbangers/smokers hung out together, the nerds, the band folks like me as my senior year I was drum major
and the blacks stayed together all in separate cliques at lunch and recess and before/after school.

stereotypes even went further.

the only highschool girls with babies (during time I was there I stress) were black girls, they had to build a daycare from the old mechanic shop behind the highschool for them. And even though this was the early 90s in the south, you'd hear over the Intercom every 6 months "All Black female students to gym at this time please" where they'd get lectured on abstinence, or condom use, and std's and such.

the only time rest of the student body went through that was in 10th grade they'd take the boys one day, and girls the next day.

We had a blast though as the guys, the protection/std talk was given by one of the football coaches, and during the talk with the guys and showing various "shock images" of std's on penis on the TV, when he got to the "sex ed" portion, he flipped in a Nina Hartley porn intro where a nude Nina Hartley showed the correct way to place a condom on. haha was hilarious looking back before "political correctness" went out of control.

I loved highschool and college.

Graduated high school in 94, got associates in 96, took year off then got bachelors in computer science in 99.

But 89-94 (our highschool here in the deep south is 8th through 12th) most are 9-12, but not here. It's still 8-12th here. So it's nothing seeing 12th graders dating 8th graders. Freaky yea, but not unusual.


If you got into a fight, if a coach was around he'd let the fight finish, unless it got a bit too over the top then they'd break it up. You didn't get suspended, you lost recess privileges usually 3 days plus the starter of the fight got 10 licks of the paddle in principle office, the other only got 1 to 3, or if person was just dominated and got ass kicked you just got detention.


Kids didn't act up at all most times. And the reason was Corporal Punishment. Not private paddling either.


Once I was having a bad day, me and "highschool" sweetheart were having a bit of a spat. We sat next to each other so we were bickering a bit during class. Teacher had yelled at me to shut up and do the work. I sighed "Leave me the fuck alone"

bad move.

She called me to front of class and I got 5 licks of paddle in front of everyone. They'd stick finger in your belt loop and yank it up tight to put that extra sting on it. Embarrassing as hell! Even female older teachers who didn't paddle hard, it was just too embarrassing to get paddled, so kids behaved.


And of course if you refused paddling which you could but you'd take a zero for the day's work. few of those in a semester and no matter how hard you worked you were flunking that semester.


But the system worked.

It wasn't until they went crazy insane on political correctness, stopping corporal punishment, and putting cops/rent a cops/guards in schools and after the No Child Left Behind was signed into law, they severely dumbed down kids forcing the smartest to learn at the slowest kids pace. Doc's prescribing SSRI's like candy to kids in MASSIVE quantities, that schools in today's culture are crazy.

In California we have a JR/community college system that transfers credits to 4 year colleges. You can take your first 2 years at a DRASTICALLY reduced expense, < $50 a credit the last time I went. You can also go there without a major or plan, just to learn. That's what I did for years and years, building up credits towards a degree without declaring one. It's really sad that that's not the norm, it seems like a great system. Not only does it make entry into 4 year colleges easier and cheaper, it also makes the 2/3 of students that drop out in the first 2 years have FAR less debt (if any) when they decide school is no longer the right option. It also opens higher education up to high school students with aptitude and older people who simply want to learn something new without breaking the bank to do so. This also makes for a better, more diverse student body.
Before someone who doesn't know makes the assumption that the level of education is lower than 4 year schools, you should know that many have been awarded 'best college' and 'best teacher' for the state repeatedly. True enough, there is an upper limit to the classes offered, but advanced molecular organic chemistry, offered and taken at Foothill college, was fairly advanced, as was advanced marine biology, taught by the repeated winner of 'best teacher' in the state. Each class cost about $250. WHAT A DEAL!

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

There's plenty of intentionally blurred faces in the ones I've taken part in (elementary and middle school)-Once kids figured out that when they shook their heads back and forth rapidly that they would look like paranormal ghouls everyone was twitching and wiggling the next year!

There used to be good money in these student body long-exposure pans. Analog kicks ASS!

Think you hit the nail on the head there man. They want consumers here in America not innovators. Innovators are dangerous they might change the system for the greater good.

>> ^Asmo:

>> ^Auger8:
Ya I totally agree here I'm from Texas and sports get all the attention whatever money is left over goes to standardized testing which is a crock in and of itself. And people wonder why un-employment is so high in America.
It's because public schools teach absolutely nothing of value to kids whatsoever!
>> ^Boise_Lib:
>> ^Porksandwich:

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

I agree.
We've made our school system (including college) a farm team for the NBA, NFL.


If you can dodge a ball, you can fix global warming?
Srsly, I don't see how any American (or indeed anyone else on the bloody planet) can look at a system like this and not want to use it, unless they have an agenda where keeping people poor and stupid and without opportunity is the goal... \= |

>> ^Auger8:

Ya I totally agree here I'm from Texas and sports get all the attention whatever money is left over goes to standardized testing which is a crock in and of itself. And people wonder why un-employment is so high in America.
It's because public schools teach absolutely nothing of value to kids whatsoever!
>> ^Boise_Lib:
>> ^Porksandwich:

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

I agree.
We've made our school system (including college) a farm team for the NBA, NFL.



If you can dodge a ball, you can fix global warming?

Srsly, I don't see how any American (or indeed anyone else on the bloody planet) can look at a system like this and not want to use it, unless they have an agenda where keeping people poor and stupid and without opportunity is the goal... \= |

>> ^Auger8:

Ya I totally agree here I'm from Texas and sports get all the attention whatever money is left over goes to standardized testing which is a crock in and of itself. And people wonder why un-employment is so high in America.
It's because public schools teach absolutely nothing of value to kids whatsoever!
>> ^Boise_Lib:
>> ^Porksandwich:

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

I agree.
We've made our school system (including college) a farm team for the NBA, NFL.



But I'd argue, it's the system that those in power want and corporations want. Because it allows them the excuse to ship high school level jobs out to other countries. You see it all the time "We can't find any qualified candidates!" and then they need H1B visa restrictions lifted so they can bring people in or the job goes to another country after they milk the taxpayers for "tax breaks" on a building promising some jobs and conveniently forget to deliver on the jobs.

It's a systematic breakdown of all counters and checks to their ability to solely profit since no one can compete against them if they make consumers as dumb as possible in general, ship the jobs overseas, and bring all the products back at reduced prices until they kill any possible competition ....then jack the prices up. And now there's been a huge lull in jobs in manufacturing, etc...so the schools aren't preparing people for those jobs or training schools have went under and the general population education level has dropped to prevent it from easily being fixed.

And.......since they control lots of money (and therefore power), they can now keep it that way because they are "too big" to be told no. And now they are trying to privatize stuff to get even more cash out of people, and then they completely control the whole process and you will be just as educated as they'll let you be.

Ya I totally agree here I'm from Texas and sports get all the attention whatever money is left over goes to standardized testing which is a crock in and of itself. And people wonder why un-employment is so high in America.

It's because public schools teach absolutely nothing of value to kids whatsoever!

>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^Porksandwich:

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

I agree.
We've made our school system (including college) a farm team for the NBA, NFL.

>> ^Porksandwich:

Does Finland schooling system provide anything but education and the facilities and meals related to keeping a large group of people for hours on end?
Do they do tutoring?
How do they handle discipline?
Do they offer sports teams and fields, etc as part of the school budget?
Uniforms?
Field trips?
Music/band?
Im hoping to hear from @CreamK on this.
Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.


There's tutoring for students that are falling behind, it's personal one-on-one and there's a multiple programs to help students who have problems, like specail ed or for troubled teens. I actually went on one these troubled youth programs. I never had any learning problems in school, in fact i was always so much ahead in classes that i got bored and started to get in to problems and skipping A LOT.. But when they finally managed to get me in to this special class, i've never enjoyed school that much.. I did two years of math in half a year and got free choice of what to do instead of math.. I either got a free hour or i picked up another subject like literacy and the best part of it was that i choosed what to do..

Discipline is there, you got many levels of it. Mostly it's handled in conjunction with parents. Detention, personal tutoring or changing to a smaller group, workshops where you can fix bikes and learn sciences with more hands on approaches etc. Mostly it's not a punishment as such but personalized programs to tailored to fit for the needs. Expulsions are very rare, in my school years i heard of two incidences and both were changed to smaller group where they both stopped skipping school in two weeks time. Those smaller groups consists of one teacher per 5 students or even less..

No sport teams are provided by schools, they are handled by sport teams junior programs. There is of course 1-2 hour classes per week for sports but it's more to do with learning to enjoy excercise than competing.

No uniforms or mandatory dressing codes. There is the basic decency expected when it comes to dressing and one peculiar code is that you are not allowed to wear a hat in class... Those baseball caps can hide your eyes... I know, it's a bit strange..

Field trips: yes, there are both provided by the school and then longer ones where the students do bake sales etc to gather money and those are voluntary.

Music is a subject and schools can provide the means to do them more in your own free time. The bands are not a part of schools but usually every city has one or to schools that concentrate more for those programs. It means a few extra hours but provide a good base for secondary musical education institutes where you can enroll at young age. Those institutions are publicly funded too and work in conjuction with all levels schools and they continue seamlessly to provide education for music teachers and professionals up to master degrees. You can go to those schools when you're grown up too and they have a tuitions, in the range of 100-200€ per class. So once again, money is not a hurdle for education.

It's been a years when i was in basic school, i graduated in 1989 and went to secondary school in 1991. That was about the time when the education reform was moving to that state too so i had to mixed field of teachers. Some were not up to job and some were just wonderful personalities. Now adays it's up to standards too and in fact, i'm enrolling in one next fall to finish up my graduation..

The downside of Finnish system is that you can not even get a job as a cleaner without finishing some sort of courses for it.. So even for basic shitty jobs you need a basic education in that field... But since those are basically free of charge (some require a 100-200€ fee, not a problem...) everyone has a chance. Also when you get a better job the companies often provide the follow-up studies that fit to that job description. The cost of those are divided by the goverment and the companies.

>> ^Porksandwich:


Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.


I agree.
We've made our school system (including college) a farm team for the NBA, NFL.

Does Finland schooling system provide anything but education and the facilities and meals related to keeping a large group of people for hours on end?

Do they do tutoring?

How do they handle discipline?

Do they offer sports teams and fields, etc as part of the school budget?

Uniforms?

Field trips?

Music/band?

Im hoping to hear from @CreamK on this.

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

>> ^chilaxe:

@Porksandwich
I'm talking about north-east Asians (Chinese/Hongkongese/Chinese-Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese). Other Asians don't have the same significantly consistent high performance.
Increases in school spending don't significantly correlate with increases in student performance. You can't change someone's nature to make them like to read, and bad teachers & old textbooks can't turn a driven person with a good attitude into someone who doesn't like to read.


Praising athletics while scorning academics is a common trend in the US. It is most definitely disheartening to see the programs that only a small fraction of the student body participate in getting the lion's share of the budget. And increases in school spending also tend to get funneled away from the absolute educational needs and maintenance of the buildings to large projects such as a new school being built or new sports complex. It happens time and time again that the money ends up being spent on things that fall under the umbrella of "school budget" but are not directly related to education.

And I would agree that you can't change someone's nature, but you could spend time trying to identify their interests and fostering those. Math and Science are great, we need more but as you said you can't change their natural inclinations. Bad teachers are notorious for forcing material by the standard means rather than try to find out what would best suite them. Perhaps you need to see things written to retain knowledge, but you write slowly....and the teacher continues to throw a lot of information at you faster than you can write. That is not serving the purpose of education, and it is no big inconvenience or time sink to the class for the teacher to hand out a basic packet to follow along and add additional information to allow people to keep up. Hell I had college professors do this, so you could make your own notes on the subject but still have an organized list of topics pertinent to the lesson.

So short version: School spending does not mean spending toward education. Bad teachers can stunt progress of students through a number of means. Hell a person with a heavy foreign accent can make it hell on earth trying to follow along or do the required homework if they never write it down. A person who can learn in spite of all of this, probably has parents who've given them the time and means to do so or may even know much on the subjects themselves. An immigrant with uneducated parents who may only speak but not read or write English is going to find this much more difficult.

If my parents had taken me out of the US and into Mexico where very little was taught in English, and my parents spoke rough Spanish and couldn't read or write in Spanish....I'd find myself struggling as well. Especially if there was no time to tutor after school because I had to be home for chores or an after school job to make ends meet. Only an extremely exceptional person could prevail through that, and I refuse to believe that all Asians of the categories you mention have no additional help outside of school. And that may be where the focus should lie immigrants not of those categories, helping establish this foundation for their cultural groups and filling it with people who are familiar with their common backgrounds and beliefs to help them adapt. If they are naturalized, you are stuck with them now.....and just throwing them under the bus because they aren't the Asians types you hoped for as immigrants is not going to solve it. If they are willing to work and not undermining society through malice...they can be worked with to find a place for them. This goes for both natural born citizens and former immigrants.....ignoring huge swathes of your population is not a good idea.

Anyway, I don't view immigration as a national problem. Sure it has some influence on the overall problems the country faces, especially illegals. But the core of our problems are related to greed as has been stated, but policies that ignore the people and favor the profit machines whether they be individuals or corporations in spite of the people. And that's where the favor towards Socialism is springing up in the young, Capitalism may have worked but it is no longer allowing the young to establish a life that would even come close to that of their parents. They are reducing the opportunity chance as time goes on for each new generation by these choices. So I don't blame anyone for wanting to throw out what these decision makers cling to as sacred in favor of trying something else that may restore a little sanity into the system. After all, your citizenry needs a way to support itself without being a member of the armed forces, born wealthy, or just plain lucky.