The middle class is already devasted and no amount of books and pencils will change that. The computer has replaced the need for bodies. Most people that graduate college are on their way to becoming unemployed or waiters. Why delay the inevitable? With all that is taught in the schools and universities, how many people know that Halliburton bought an oil clean up company about 8 days before the B.P. spill. Do they teach children about the Bilderberg, C.F.R., Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, British Roundtable and other groups that are really in control. I did not learn this in school. It would not have been allowed or even found out by the teachers of professors. Most of them have tunnel vision.

Why warehouse the young when they can be competing with offshore labor?

The above recipe will devastate what’s left of the middle class and turn this country into a nation no longer able to compete with countries dedicated to producing “knowledge” workers.

Exactly what kind of 21st century job, with which a young person can build a career, buy a house, send his or her OWN kids to college, can be achieved following KH’s recipe?

Many in my grandparents’ generation worked a fruit-cart so that my parents’ generation could go to college, so that my generation could go to college, if not grad school. And not so our kids could be happy with a high school diploma that isn’t worth the paper manufactured overseas that it’s printed on.

Sheesh.

You have had it hard; no doubt. I never said I was an expert. I am an observer. I also listen to the behavior (not names) of people with government jobs because I have known many C.P.A.s throughout my life and they would tell me which type of workers pad the bill and bill for overtime not needed or done. I also would see it first hand…..that is a long story of many.

The system is broken where you work and you prove my point. Many of the students that are in your chaotic and dangerous environment have turned you into a prison guard instead of a camp counselor or teacher. There is a need for teachers but most students belong in the work force full time once they are in their teens. Older people such as myself had many relatives that had to work at 14 to support the family. They knew how to read and write and most became self-sustaining and even successful. It sounds as if many of the students in your area are headed for prison or the maternity ward.

I don’t want to engage in persiflage with you or anyone else. I want people to open their eyes.
The people that complain the most about school taxes where I live have children themselves.
Despite having an education of 16 plus years. I have learned the most on my own without the interference of politically correct reading that has to be approved by committees so as not to offend all of the different types of people that exist in the world. I feel that education in a controlled environment should be reserved for students that have a direction in life. Schools are used too often as a place to warehouse the young.

Why do so many government workers believe that they guaranteed a lifetime of protection from the economic system? Why do so many have sinecures? I wish you the best and believe that you could probably do very well in many endeavors. You may have to consider moving to a different location or even teaching outside of the U.S. The third world needs people with your determination. The developed world needs discipline.

I don’t know quite how working one year in the public sector 30 years ago makes you an expert on all public sector jobs today and those who work in them, or your assumptions about what “most people know” constitute the truth, but let me back up my “truths” with the hard, cold facts of my public school teaching job:

70 hour work weeks, getting injured in my school due to a chaotic and dangerous environment, paying over $1000 a year (after taxes) to park my car so it doesn’t get towed (and then lost by the city, like a colleague of mine) or broken in to (like most of my colleagues), $2000 a year on basic supplies for my classroom, including appropriate books for my students so they can reach their reading benchmarks (or I’m blamed…or, under the new evaluation system, fired), an incompetent and abusive administration that constantly screws up schedules to the point of chaos, allows children to run wild in lunchrooms (and holds teachers accountable for what they learn immediately afterward), violates every union rule imaginable, and belittles and demeans the teachers like children and writes them up for insubordination if they do anything more than nod their heads meekly in response. I have also worked in the private sector, for several different companies, both large and small, and was never subjected to such poor treatment and working conditions. As for private sector accountability, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more worker incompetence and been subjected rude, unprofessional “service” from people who never seem to lose their jobs…from fast food workers to medical front office workers to doctors. Yes, it can happen more easily…but from what I see, it rarely does.

I’ve never met a teacher, especially at the point of choosing their career, who has been motivated, even in part, by “great benefits.” Most are college undergrads who have never had to worry about these things and wouldn’t even know it was a perk. Most really love kids and want to make a difference. Even when I chose teaching as a 2nd career at age 30 and went to grad school, the closest thing I had to a selfish motivation was wanting a job in a stable and supposedly growing field so I had a better chance of becoming employed. I could get health benefits at any job and a pension seemed so far off it didn’t even cross my mind. Tenure wasn’t an issue..I’d work hard, do my job, and hopefully be successful. In the chance I really stank, I wouldn’t be granted tenure or would leave on my own (a recent study actually showed that ineffective teachers are more likely to leave the profession by choice) because it actually isn’t very rewarding or much fun to do something day in and day out that you’re really not good at.

As for public emplyees being in the position to “serve,” yes, that’s true. However, I don’t serve the majority, or even everyone in the neighborhood, like your local garbage man…I serve the children assigned to me, and, to a degree, their families. I would like to think that providing them with a good education will ultimately benefit society, and all taxpayers, as a whole, but if you don’t have children in public school, no, I am not directly serving you. From your first post, I can see that the whole idea of public education being supported by all taxpayers is perhaps what really bothers you here…sorry, teachers didn’t create the way public education is funded.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/omb/downloads/pdf/sum5_10.pdf

This is the budget they are protesting against. Total Department of Education up $306 million. City taxpayer funding for the DOE up $833 million, offsetting state funding cuts. Pensions funding up $226 million, fringe benefits up $60 million, wages for DOE employees down $254 million due to cuts in staff. And next year’s budget, not this year’s budget, is when it really gets bad.

So why doesn’t Bloomberg say so? Because he was in on the 25/55 deal, along with the UFT, the state legislature and ex-Governor Spitzer.

Now, according to reports, NYC has one of the most underfunded teacher pension funds in the U.S. And they are out there protesting while total funding for the schools is going UP, but a rising share is going to the retired. That’s right, total education funding is proposed to go up again this year. All the cuts are do to a shift in where the money is going, as shift the UFT wanted. This protest is a fraud.

Most school teachers are just glorified camp counselors who teach idealistic and useless misinformation.  Most young people do not even know how WW1 started and know nothing about the industrialists, central bankers and corrupt politicians that pushed for that war.  Teachers just tell the children that the Germans started it.  The teachers should go back to Kindergarten. 

I did my 4 years in business school and started an M.B.A.  I left the graduate program for personal reasons and as I look back on the money saved, it would have been better spent on gold bullion.