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@Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @cjd Yeah I definitely wouldn't disagree with that. But I hope the point I'm making is also understood. Education is a very long wavelength type of thing that takes a long time to produce results, both negative or positive. Military is more in your face with selling something that is price gouged to the government by 100x. I'd argue its similar to healthcare more than education. Education I don't think is selling a pencil for $100 but hospitals will charge insurance $50 for a single Advil.

> Education I don't think is selling a pencil for $100

Right, it's a different form of corruption, but it's the same in the end. If you double the school budget, nobody gets any smarter but the democrats have almost twice the campaign budget. And all of their professional protestors and activists somehow have jobs...

Corruption in military stuff is also more subtle than you'd think. Everyone has heard about the $100 hammer, but that doesn't really exist. What does exist is maybe a $25 hammer, because every part of it must be made in the US by a defense certified company out of defense certified materials. But again, nobody is really making bank off of this because actually making a hammer yourself (can't buy it from China) is kind of difficult.

@cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta How are Democrats the only ones making money on their entire sector? I don't get it. I hate both parties with a passion. Making a hammer isn't that expensive though. It just becomes expensive when all manufacturing is abandoned for China (basically what you said). There is the manufacturing cost that is increased, but there really is a "just because we can" price gouging aspect. Military insiders have pointed that out more than a few times over the years.

@Sovereign @cjd I understand. I personally believe its dei mostly and failing education standards seconds. However you have to consider the fact that education in American/western countries rotted way before we might think it did. Also for American education specifically, as i understand it, they actually do "sell a pencil" for a hundred bucks in the sense that only the rich or people who will condemn themselves to half a lifetime of debt will get a "decent" degree worth anything.

> less for the military, maybe parents won't have to buy pencils for the kids

That's famous teacher's union bullshit. If it were true, then you would think that somewhere in the entire history of public schooling costs spiraling out of control, free pencils would have been fit in there.

But of course not, you can never give the schools enough money that they're not starving for more...

If you want free pencils, scrapping the military won't get you there, what will get you there is to scrap the public school system and give vouchers for private school, because that's PRECIPITOUSLY cheaper than public.

I'm not defending military spending, it's just that giving money to public education will not lead to absolutely anything except more communists.

@cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta I'm not a libertarian. I'm a socialist. I am not into privatizing health, education, military, or even certain resources. Does it mean public sectors can't do wrong or be corrupt? No, of course not. However I think certain things shouldn't be be given to vultures. So it is very possible we just might not agree on this. I say that while realizing the many pitfalls that can exist in public systems. One example include the brain-drain that exists in Canada for doctors. These things would be solved by more authoritarian means but capitalists are kind of adverse to that unless its private capital dictating the authority.

The dumbing down of the average American is intentional. The creation of compulsory state education was done specifically to make domesticated house pets out of free-range men. The government education system is not and never was meant to turn ignorant people into educated people. That's not why it was created and any gains it ever made in that effort were mostly unintentional.

So if you pumped a bunch of money into it, it would continue to not do the thing it isn't supposed to do, but with more grift and fraud.

@Sovereign @white_male @weknowwhygary @cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta In the public school system the "best" teachers aren't necessarily very good, either.

From my experience tutoring I'd get students in IB or AP struggling because the teachers teaching the material were just average at best themselves.

The schools start the programs because of extra funding and prestige. And these schools do have the advanced to gifted students to take the programs and benefit from them.

But you're still stuck with the teachers you have.

A lot of good teachers leave teaching because of the other ones.

TLDR, it's the lowest common denominator students and teachers that make public schools inadequate for good schooling for brilliant students.

I think many/most states do curriculum locally, and if not then it's state. That just tells them what subjects they have to teach, though, and that is usually Shakespeare vs maya angelo. Not often does it mean algebra vs george floyd. The fact that they can be all over the place on literature and history is largely meaningless as the industrial/tech/defense status of the nation doesn't care if you read Hoppe or not.

What will screw up your classroom and stop your genius student from achieving is the fact that he isn't segregated from the other students who are dumb. There are small efforts here and there, and sometimes you can get a real different outcome, but mostly it's nothing different.

I was in gifted classes from 5th grade on, in about 5 or so different schools. The other kids in my classes were not geniuses. Maybe one or two. Mostly it was just upper midwit tier students. The ones left behind in normal classes were below midwit, but not fully retarded. They struggled with basic material. These are all 90%+ White schools I'm talking about. Some of them in very wealthy places where the parents are doctors, lawyers, and pilots. There was no real class for really really genius students. You had to go to private school for that. The "gifted classes" moved at the same pace as the regular class, you just did more work. The pace of the regular class is set so that most of the mouth breathers can keep up. It is slow as pond water. A genius kid could do the year in a month if he wasn't being held back.

The biggest problem with public schools not being good enough to consistently output brilliant grads is that the brilliant students are shacked with all the others, and every sociopolitical norm says you are playing with fire by trying to separate them. What are you some kind of nazi? Every retarded nigger can be a rocket surgeon. It's just socioeconomic factors, biggot.

Teachers is easy. Education majors in college (future teachers) have pretty much always had the lowest standardized test scores of every college major. Maybe they go up one slot now and then, but they are consistently the dumbest group, so the White Rhino smart teacher isn't moving the needle at all. The genius kid in public school has a retard for a teacher, by comparison. He needs a genius teacher, and geniuses don't become public school teachers. The genius kid likely has another genius somewhere in his family, like maybe his dad, and 100 years ago that would have been his teacher.

@weknowwhygary @white_male @Sovereign @cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta Yeah. I'd probably be upper mid-wit level. Smart enough but nothing special.

Our high schools had three streams. Lower for kids just there to graduate. Mid level for practical college. Upper for university academic route. Nothing set in stone, kids could take what they want, but the courses were structured that way.

But even the upper level moved at the speed of the slowest students.

Everything changed in the last year of high school when those students cleared out and went early to the practical colleges and left the rest of us who intended to go to university academics - STEM, medicine, arts, history, etc. Teachers jacked up the pace and depth to match first year university. It was heaven and saved a lot of us the shock when we hit a real university program.

I was lucky. High schools don't seem to do that any more and universities have greatly lowered the expectations for incoming students.

@Sovereign @weknowwhygary @cjd @Kalogerosstilitis2RevengeoftheJunta @white_male Yes. I'm just throwing out a bit of my experience. Absolutely any extra you can offer a student who is capable and willing to learn is not wasted. A lot of us here experienced teaching our teachers something non-trivial about the class subject because we were intensely interested in that topic for years and had read as deeply as we could about it on our own.

I remember our final year high school calculus teacher commenting how there were students in the class smarter than he was. It wasn't pats on the back for us and it wasn't him feeling bad about it. He was just simply stating facts. We were lucky we had teachers that would make the effort to identify and challenge the advanced students instead of holding them back. Those were different times.