This comment from JunkkMale originally appeared on Geoff Chambers’ Moderation in Moderation thread. I’ve moved it here, with the comments it attracted, because I think that this is the kind of problem that seriously needs talking about.
The government talks about the importance of individual actions in the fight against climate change, and it is up to each and every one of us whether we buy an electric car, put a solar panel on the roof, or cancel a weekend flight to Rome. Children do not usually have a choice about what they are taught.
This thread has strayed into many areas beyond the main topic, and I for one have enjoyed the quality of debate on display.
One topic I noted was how certain issues are being shared with our kids. To be honest, it was passing interest… until last night.
The subject of ‘who tells, controls’…. especially in terms of authority figures, was rather brought home to me last night.
My kids are revising currently for some serious exams that do count.
One brought in this book, which forms part of the curriculum: AQA GCSE Science Core Higher Ed. Graham Hill. Pub: Hodder Murray
He wanted some advice on a question. From a series including sections such as 3.3, entitled ‘How do humans affect the environment?’ and 3.5 ‘Global Warming’ (other aspects of global warming and the greenhouse effect also covered in Section 6.4, Air Pollution), and 3.6 ‘What can be done to reduce human impact on the environment?. Here it is, as posed, under 6.4, p113:
21. Which of the following three do you think will actually happen? Write a paragraph to explain your answer.
a) We’ll worry and blame ourselves for climate change for thousands of years.
b) Fossil fuels will run out and renewable energy will save us.
c) The oceans will evaporate as the Earth heats up and humans will die.
His face, when I opined that ‘none are very coherent, accurate, or suggest definite answers that are sensible, at least as posed’, was a heartbreaking picture. He just wanted… needed to provide the ‘right’ one as the system demands it to be one of them. Sighing at the ‘will happen’, I therefore attempted to assist based on the hope that the paragraph of explanation would be rewarded if well argued and having a basis in fact and scientific interpretation.Forget a), which is facile and shows a poor grasp of even basic climate science terminology, though maybe does reflect the ‘worry’ mindset being churned out in some quarters.
If you have to choose, choose b) as fossil fuels will run out. They are finite. As to whether ‘renewable’ energy ‘will’ ‘save’ us, that rather depends on how many of ‘us’ there are, and from what we are being ‘saved’. It seems, currently, optimistic to presume renewable sources can meet all current and projected energy demands.
As for c), well, yes, as the sun goes supernova in a few billion years. But humans may be in a different place by then.
THIS… is what they are being served????!
More touching still was his further plea to me NOT to get in touch with the school with my now serious reservations about the way this information was laid out and the questions posed… as he just wanted to pass the unit and not get in trouble.
If this is the state of education, at least in this area (I now wonder about history, etc), I am seriously troubled not only by the course structures, but the mindsets prevalent in our educational establishment.
Are there any teachers out there who would be prepared to comment? anonymously if necessary.
There are some reasons to be hopeful on an individual basis, but overall, system-wide, it’s not encouraging..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8150524/Teacher-training-reform-is-vital-to-Michael-Goves-plans.html
I’ve just been directed here from a post on the comment on a Telegraph article about teacher training. I’ve read some but not all of the whole thread, so I apologise if I’m covering an area that has already been covered.
I work in education, I’m not a school teacher, I lecture at undergraduate level and level 3 students (A-level equivilent), I am also a trade union activist and could be defined as pretty left wing. (just to get my particular bias out there for everyone to see).
So, now you are expecting me to defend the questions in the original post, well, I’m not, I don’t think they are educationally useful – whatever you thinking on the climate science, which from my point of view is besides the point in this context – they do not help a student learn anything about the subject, they are almost completely useless in assessing the level of understanding the student has gained as part of the course and they do little to help them expand and develop their ability to learn.
From my experience in teaching courses set by other examination boards (Edexcel and QCA) I can say that generally, the content comes out of every single one of them is next to useless. I work in a more vocational area, and teach BTEC qualifications, or degree qualifications – both of these give significantly more class room freedom in terms of assessment and content, which means that you can look at the content given and taken the broad spirit of what they say, but actually change it into some thing which is actually relevant to the current situation (some of the areas I work in are changing constantly).
The freedom I am given in the classroom allows for me to choose a way which would meet the criteria which would be essentially an overly easy waste of my students time. I personally do not do this and I oppose it completely. I set assessments which stretch my students in a meaningful way, so that they learn what they need to know, wider knowledge and skills, and how to learn.
This is where my left wing bias kick in folks:
My personal opinion is, which is not backed up by any actual research that I am aware of, is that the marketisation of the sector (the move from govt. exam boards to companies providing the same service, and measuring schools through the efficiency of a narrowly defined outcomes – league tables) is part of the problem. This coupled with much of the responsibility of teaching as a whole being removed from individual teacher practitioners and given to managers to measure on very specific metrics which define the budget for the school or college.
The market attitude has killed the idea of education as an individual collaborative pact between student and teacher, rather than turning up and expecting to work, to get better, they have paid for the course and they deserve the qualification because of that (with HE students at the moment) markets and academic rigour are not good bedfellows, they are contradictory to each other.
When teachers and departments shifted from being given the content to teach to having a choice what to teach, they chose those which allowed them to hit their targets easiest. If they were a food retailer they would choose the product which would sell the most for the highest profit, when education is placed in the same situation, then people are bound to act in the same way. The exam providers work in the same way – the ones left (after many of the others were taken over by AQA/OCR/Edexcel) and the ones with the easiest content, the most wishy washy course materials and so on, because those were what ‘sold’ best.
Do I think the teaching profession needs to do something about this? Absolutely, I think it’s a real problem, and I think it is only set to get worse, as the same failed policy of a market in knowledge is being rolled out in Higher Education, the race to the bottom will gain more pace in that sector as well. This is something that those in the trade union of which I am a member are very concerned, and have been fighting against since the incorporation of FE colleges in the early 90’s at least (I’m not that old so I’m not sure how far back this goes).
[TonyN: Thanks for a very well informed and thoughtful comment. If you stick around, I think there will be some interesting responses. It may amaze you to learn that there are regular contributors to this blog who also lay claim to left wing views. Generally speaking I prefer people to leave labels at the door, but not of course the views that they may feel are associated with them. The more diverse those are the better so far as I am concerned.]
Thank you for your extensive, and considered contribution.
Whilst reassuring to discover yet another who ‘sees the problem’, it remains a concern that it still seems to exist, and evidently continues to present a bit of a dilemma to any parent (or supportive teaching professional) seeking simply to help kids score the best marks whilst also gaining a valid and valuable education. A schizophrenic demand not so fair on young minds already expected to retain a lot!
I have shared this on many forum pages, science to education, of various political/dogmatic hues, purely because these are where some fine, informed, and expressive minds congregate.
And I have tried to hew ruthlessly to the focussed issue of the nature of the question, what is taught to help a child generate an answer, and what may be expected by way of ‘marking’ it by the system, such that their thinking is rewarded properly.
My sense is that things are a tad awry. But I also sense that there is an awareness that they are… at least in some quarters.
That questions are being asked, and answers, or at least thoughtful replies, are being garnered, is welcome.. and encouraging.
But this cannot be left. To mock the all too easily trotted out phrase du jour: ‘Lessons have yet to be learned’.
The comment which brought Bokonon here from the Telegraph thread is no 76 by Junkkmale at 11.04am, which provoked just one sensible response. Most of the rest of the comments seem to turn on left / right clichés which I hope we can avoid here.
I believe one of the reasons this glaring problem seems to have attracted so little attention is that neither left nor right -wing ideologies come out of it well. A leftwing egalitarian bias can lead to concentrating on the feeble, to the detriment of the more motivated (I know, I’m guilty of it myself) and hence to “dumbing down”, while the system introduced by the Labour government and criticised by so many of the Telegraph commenters seems to be based on the kind of business management model one associates with private enterprise. The AQA website reads to me as if it were written by David Brent of “the Office”. No wonder both leftwing teachers and pushy parents are confused.
I found the Telegraph thread at least spirited. Parents and teachers care enough to disagree vigorously , even if 90% stick to pointless left-right sparring. The TES threads on the other hand are depressing to read; teachers seem concerned only to find the system or course which will “work best” for their pupils, with a huge interest in software and gadgets, and relatively little in the subject itself. (I know that in language teaching the software is almost all rubbish, just as the first books off the press in the Gutenberg revolution were nearly all rubbish).
As a part-time teacher and one of the blog’s resident lefty troublemakers, I’m sorry I can’t be more help to Junkkmale. I’d like to see private enterprise pseudo-charities like AQA abolished and replaced by State exam boards outside the control of Government ministers, with a national curriculum devised with a hefty input from professional bodies. But that would involve dismantling entirely the present system based apparently on the pseudo expertise of politically correct educational psychologists. (Now I’m sounding like the typical Telegraph reader, so I’d better stop).
Geoffchambers,
I think you are confusing things with your ideas of “A leftwing egalitarian bias can lead to….. a “dumbing down”” The other accusation is that discipline is lax and too many excuses are made for underachievement. There may be something in that as far as modern schooling is concerned but it doesn’t have anything to do with a left wing or socialist bias.
Whatever the faults of countries like the old DDR their education systems were, by and large, just as good, if not better than their equivalents in the west. There was no dumbing down of any part of the curriculum. The pupils may have referred to their teachers as “Comrade Teacher” but at the same time they would have stopped talking and stood up when the teacher entered the room and got on with their work when told to.
What’s wrong with that?
tempterrain #327
The kind of leftwing egalitarianism I was talking about was not the Soviet kind, but the politically correct “black lesbian poetry “ kind which was being mocked on the Daily Telegraph thread linked by Junkkmale at #324. It was a bit of a confession on my part, in expectation of a rightwing critique which never came.
I teach English and art history in a small French university, and my first tendency was to simplify my lessons so no-one felt left out. The French policy of almost free university education for almost everyone means many of my students are wasting their time, vainly hoping for a degree to better their job prospects. My ideas were overturned by the arrival of large numbers of Chinese students. Their parents have invested their life savings in their childrens’ education, and the students are motivated to learn, since they know there’s an interesting job waiting for them in a society with an economy expanding at 10% a year. I teach for them now, plus the Africans who have the same motivation (without the backing of a giant economy waiting to absorb them) plus the minority of French students who want to learn, who are almost certainly the kids of the intellectual élite.
The distortions of the British education system which Junkkmale and Bokonon are struggling with seem to me to be the results of a well-meaning left-wing desire to make education more relevant and less élitist. The result seems to be that, if you chuck out Shakespeare and formulae because they’re unfairly difficult for the culturally disadvantaged majority, the space gets filled with any old thing which happens to be around – hence the black lesbian poetry jibes at the Telegraph and the sustainable development science which Junkkmale’s kids are faced with.
The mess is difficult to unravel because the “dumbing down” isn’t being applied by the Stalinist commissars of Telegraph readers fantasies, but by bright well-meaning educationalists mired in managerspeak and pop sociology, and operating via private companies masquerading as charities like AQA. Their operations are totally opaque, and covered by a political agenda which is based on shallow pseudo-democratic slogans like “parental choice” and “relevance”. I don’t have any solutions, but suggest we all listen carefully to Bokonon and others with experience of the system.
geoffchambers
Your excellent analysis (329) of the “dumbing down” problem seems to be pertinent for the Swiss school system, as well.
I am not directly involved as you are, but have a close friend who is (at the 15-year old level) and who is frustrated by what is going on here.
Well-meaning educationalists are trying to create an egalitarian system to cover all pupils (unfortunately essentially no ambitious Chinese or Vietnamese here, but a good percentage of immigrants from Turkey or ex-Yugoslavia). At the same time these education system bureaucrats are interjecting “politically correct” socio-political concepts, at the expense of the actual subject matter being taught. On top of this, many pupils have no motivation whatsoever to learn anything outside their own “in” pop culture.
My friend – a very dedicated and determined lady who has been teaching in a public school near Zurich for 20 years or so – keeps hammering away, but admits that teaching has become much more frustrating and less rewarding than it once was.
So it appears that this is not simply a UK trend.
Max
Geoffchambers,
It seems to be that a tactic, by some contributors to this blog, to conflate what should be the separate issues of “dumbing down”, by falsely equating it to an idea of leftism, and climate science, and which you consider be a part of the the left’s agenda too.
Certainly, there is a dumbing down phenomenon occurring in our society, and certainly the left isn’t immune from that, but it is a mistake to think of this in entirely political terms. It just doesn’t fit the facts for one thing. The ABC is probably considered to be the most ‘left’ of the Australian TV channels but also the least ‘dumbed down’. Of course, then, the charge from many who oppose the concept of public broadcasting is that it is ‘elitist’.
At the risk of sounding anti-American much of this anti-intellectualism which we see increasingly paraded, does come from over there. I don’t mind a well reasoned right wing argument, but what makes me cringe is a certain politician making a virtue out of the fact she knows nothing. And you know who I mean!
Hope springs eternal.
I think it optimistic to believe that certain doctrinaire mindsets will not be invoked in the course of this journey, and to an extent that is fine if relevant to the topic. But they should not be allowed to spin things away… again.. from the point(s) at hand.
I am of course going to have to accept some responsibility for this, as I have decided to keep the flickering flame of this debate (and the substantive fact(s) of what exist(s) out there in the very real world of our kids’ syllabuses, teaching and examination) alive wherever and whenever I can.
I have ceased to expect ‘the answer’ I originally pushed for, as I frankly doubt it can exist sensibly. No contribution I have had to date, has seen any merit in the question as posed… or the thinking behind it. Often more than graciously acknowledged by those who might be expected to retreat into a defensive huddle and make excuses through professional solidarity more than anything else.
However, the fact remains that ‘that question’ was posed, and it seems not to have been unique in confusing fact with agenda, and leaving our kids to pick up the pieces left by a bunch of folk who should know better… and remain to be held to account (total silence thus far from AQA/publishers, my having responded to their brushoffs as being inadequate… a rather too prevalent official – if I may homage the word, curiously misapplied to individuals when perhaps more appropriate as a critique of multi-level strategic entities – ‘tactic’ when a complaint moves up the chain beyond expected levels).
Maybe as a spotlight to provoke discussion on broader issues of educational curriculum it is not ideal, but it’s what I was handed, and have to hand, and seems to be proving effective at focussing minds from all quarters on the substantive point, irrespective of political tribal affiliations.
I have been pleasantly surprised how open and lacking in dogma some responses have been, and am very grateful to those who have put their rosettes to one side to appreciate just how crucial it is to educate our kids on the basics first… and leave them with all the arrows in the quiver necessary to make their own minds up.. and come to their own conclusions… when the time is right.
Hence I am citing this thread (a beacon of civilised debate, with few exceptions) far and wide, where any opportunity presents.
Here’s something I found a little earlier and which may be of interest (apologies it’s already come up in this thread)..
Speakgreen appears to be a joint project between The Mighty Creatives (who are part funded by the Arts Council) and Cape Farewell, according to this site. Twitter feeds from these organisations yields these:
MightyCreatives (6 days ago): “our Lincolnshire team will be introducing schools to our Speakgreen eco project at the special launch in Skegness today”
capefarewell (4 days ago)?: “with speakgreen students need to understand that they can step forward and act and teachers that they need to step back and let them! CI”
capefarewell? (4 days ago): “speakgreen is about school students believing they can have opinions about climate change and act on them. Voice,leadership & creativity! CI”
Only available in the East Midlands and Lincolnshire for now, but one to watch, perhaps. Cape Farewell are interesting in their own right, for several reasons including their link to the £500,000 Arts Council-funded Nowhere Island project.
I have written before that characterising any of the arguments or discussions here on Harmless Sky as between left and Right is to miss the point entirely. Characterising support for Labour as being of a left-wing bent or conversely anyone supporting the Tories as being right-wing, only in my opinion, betrays either that persons beliefs or their lack of intellectual understanding of the subject.
We often dismiss arguments or proposals from certain individuals just because we make a judgement on where we pensive their political allegiance may fall. Until we are able to discuss subjects based solely on the subject matter we will continue to make excruciatingly slow progress to resolving some of the world’s problems.
As a parent with 4 Children I have been disgusted with the education system. However it’s not politically correct to criticise teachers, or to demand better performance from them, and more competition amongst pupils. I don’t think that the way our children are taught is left-wing and that anything a right winger (whatever that may be) would suggest is the magic fix, but assuredly it is currently wrong.
The current crop of educationalists have had their chance, they need to go, and others with new ideas (possibly with some traditional ideas that have stood the test of time) given a chance. We cannot turn the clock back, that would be wrong, but neither should we discard all from the past. The only point I would insist upon was that the State keeps politics the hell out of school until the children are old enough to study the subject (17/18)
Sorry, this is long, I did try and cut it back, and did chop loads out (down from 2000 words to 800), but here it is.
The one thing to be very clear about in terms of examining the problems within the education system is that they are almost completely ingrained in the educations process and systems. When Mr Gove talks about GCSE’s being too “bitesize”, he is 100% correct, I’m not sure I agree with it being a final exam, but that is to some extent an improvement. The reality is however, that the “bite sizing” is the same thing as dumbing down.
At GCSE level, the amount of learning that is expected to pass each small element of the qualifications is far too small and does not allow for in depth learning to take place, the ‘narrative arc of learning’ is so short that some useful stuff doesn’t fit in. A-levels are the same and in fact OFSTED require the same for teachers to get the highest grades for their teaching. The reality is that it’s like this all the way up and down, everything is bite sized and broken down for everyone.
At the lesson level, it is expected that every student will have learned the aims for that session and you have checked that learning has taken place within that 1 hour of observation. If you can’t teach it in 1 hour, then you can’t get the highest grade. This pushes people towards a way of thinking which decimates big, important, difficult topics down into little chunks, losing the interconnected nature of them.
The problem is that breaking things down is a legitimate learning technique, the operative word there is however ‘learning’. The process of learning how to break things down for yourself is as important as the doing it to learn a particular big subject. Having this done for you makes you lazy, means you don’t learn to learn and you are not used to tackling a big complex subject for yourself.
The method of assessment for the quality of everything in the system is something which is at fault here. Everything throughout the education system is judged on a simplified basis, which leads to the teaching being undertaken on a simplified basis and content grouped together on a simplified basis to ensure that it meets the requirements set out by the overall assessment strategy.
The simplified basis is a result of people who do not live and breath education, managing education. This is the managerialist, reductionist agenda, which places the reins in the hands of anyone who has the ability to manage, not in the hands of professional educators who can manage, I suppose this comes down to a widening of the labour pool and a lowering of costs based on that.
As a related note the ‘skills’ agenda which the current government is pushing is more of the same, it focuses on being able to do small measureable things not learning big, broad knowledge concepts which would help in a variety of circumstances – that is not to say that skills are useless, they just need other things with them to make a balanced educational diet.
In order for the quality to be easily judged by an inexperienced party (either the student, parent or a manager) which is a requirement where the user has a choice of some sort to exercise, if they are going to choose, how are they going to make that choice? On what basis – here have some meaningless numbers which don’t really mean much to you. Many people will assume an educational institution is good because it’s got an Ofsted 1 (of 4) but quite seriously, how can you make any judgement on such a complex thing on the basis of 1 of 4 numbers? or a place on a legue table for that matter.
Allowing total freedom for student choice ignores the level of complexity which exists within education. The dumbing down of education starts with the opening up of a personal individual choice for everyone. The path needs to be very flexible, the barriers to entry to the system *as a whole* should not exist, but, and it’s a big but, that does not mean that everyone should be able to get onto any course or class just because they want to, or have the money to.
A qualification which is good, and which is not bitesize and significantly enhances a students education is the International Baccalaureate – http://www.ibo.org/ which has different levels of qualification which do not make things easy to understand for the sake of it, and do not simplify things in order to measure them easily, if you look at the UCAS tariff and the points which they attract, you can see that they are highly prized in that area, and they actively encourage critical thinking and learning to learn along side useful skills and theories.
Tempterrain #331 I think we can all agree that dumbing down is not a simple left v. right issue, in the sense of one “wing” causing it, and the other “wing” resisting. On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that our “wing” does bear some responsibility for encouraging a kind of “prizes for all” mentality. The libertarian right also bears some responsibility, with their “I’m alright Jack” attitude, which I think can be seen in the comments of Maurizio and Luke, and – bizarrely – in the educational proposals of DorisLessing. As I said back at #71, all the movements for parent power, home education, etc. favour the children of educated parents, so reversing the egalitarian tendencies of 150 years of universal education. Fine for those of us who care about our children’s education (which includes a lot of lefties, of course); not so good for society at large, which loses the talents of the undereducated.
What you see as American-inspired anti-intellectualism the French see as an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy for world cultural domination. It springs from the fact that the English-speaking world undoubtedly has a more vibrant democratic popular culture which is emulated by the rest of the world and detested by non-Anglophone élites. It’s given the world jazz and science fiction, as well as gangsta rap and the black lesbian poetry which so obsesses the Telegraph commenters.
“Exam system ‘diseased’, claims former education adviser. Mick Waters says exam boards ‘almost corrupt’ and make profits through textbooks that hint at exam questions”
see article at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/17/exam-system-boards-mick-waters
plus the very interesting comments. You can follow up individual commenters by clicking on their names, which leads you to their comments on other articles.
PeterM
Yes. I’d agree with you (331) that there are separate issues from scaremongering kids with disaster predictions to PC socio-political claptrap taking precedence over real science, math, literature, etc. to well-meant “egalitarian” approaches that have gone too far, etc. – all of which could be referred to as individual parts leading to the “dumbing down” process.
And I guess I’d have to agree with you that this is not primarily a “left-right” political problem.
These are separate issues, as you say.
But I am personally convinced that these individual pieces are interconnected at the top.
I also believe they are not confined to the UK (even if they may have reached a higher alarm level there than elsewhere).
The comments on this thread by those who feel directly frustrated as parents or teachers tell me that these problems are deeper and more serious than outsiders (as I am) may have been aware.
Max
Brute
This thread has covered the problem of “dumbing down” (plus PC socio-political indoctrination and AGW fear mongering) primarily in UK schools, but it appears that there are concerns in the USA, as well.
http://www.akdart.com/edu11.html
Except for early comments on the influence of the teachers’ unions and on the Soros-funded “Story of Stuff” brainwashing film for small school children, you have been pretty quiet on this thread.
Any comments?
Max
Geoffchambers,
Yes you’re right, there has been a mentality of ‘prizes for all’, and that everyone is talented at everything. Its just amazing how some kids enter talent shows genuinely, but usually mistakenly, thinking they have some sort of singing ability. You could be right that teachers have something to do with it but often their parents are more of an influence.
Egalitarianism is fine but it doesn’t mean that everyone is equally talented or equally able or equally qualified at everything. Yes, everyone can have an opinion but is everyone’s opinion equally valid? I don’t think so. But yet that seems to be the assumption behind the climate science debate and to say otherwise brings charges of ‘elitism’ from certain contributors on this forum.
Those who are calling for “real science” are generally not interested in real science themselves. Those who want Shakespeare taught in schools usually watch soaps and banal reality shows on the TV. That’s the culture of our society and it does seem largely to be driven by commercial (and therefore capitalist!) TV. The BBC and Australian ABC used to be different, and at one time believe they had a duty to educate as well as entertain, but looking at some of their programming recently makes me wonder if they haven’t given up at least in the Arts. Actually that’s not true on political matters. The ABC is the only channel where politicians can expect to be asked difficult questions and where there is anything like a serious approach to the subject.
So, its not surprising that educators do have a difficult time gaining the interest of children in what must seem to them to be quite an alien culture.
Just to balance things up – I might say there is plenty of good stuff which comes out of America too.
For instance many universities there are putting out their lectures on the net so, for instance, we can all educate ourselves on climate change by watching and listening to Prof John Seinfeld from Caltech University. (although I might just say incidentally that Jerry is good too)
http://today.caltech.edu/theater/item?story_id=19922
So if you are genuinely concerned about educational standards, you might want to watch this and make sure that when the subject is taught in schools those lefty teachers do get it right.
Max,
We don’t have any kids and I’ll be dead in 40 years.
I sort of figure that they’ve made their bed so they can sleep in it. I’ve got mine………I’m secure. Let them earn theirs.
People have to learn the hard way (kids included)………that’s the only way the lesson really sticks.
There is a saying: “When I was 20 I thought my father was an idiot. Now that I’m forty I’m amazed at how much he’s learned in 20 years”.
The problem with the current generation and the “greens” is that they’ve never grown up……they’ve never faced harsh treatment or conditions and have always had someone to pick them up, wipe their nose and pay their bills.
They expect something for nothing and are unwilling to take responsibility for themselves.
The real world doesn’t work that way and once the well runs dry, it’ll be very messy.
Why should they take responsibility? The government will fulfill all of their needs wants and desires………but it’ll never be enough and they’ll continue to take until there is nothing left.
Look at Ireland, Greece, France, Portugal, England and the “green economic powerhouse” of Spain.
All are teetering on the brink and the spoiled brats are rioting in streets because they want more handouts.
The US isn’t far behind, it’s just that the US is larger and it’ll take a little longer for this Ponzi scheme to collapse.
I was thinking about my brother and his wife on my way home from work today……neither one has a job, both collect unemployment plus social security on behalf of my niece because her mother died. Both are young. They have a rather large house with a swimming pool, brand new vehicles and premium cable television, cell phones……………the works.
Why should they work?
All of the pie in the sky, utopian dreams of the Left will come crashing down.
It’s inevitable.
Max,
On a more optimistic note………most Americans don’t know who the vice president of their own country is but they do know who the finalists are on Dancing With The Stars and that Prince Henry/Harry (whatever his name is) is engaged to be married next August………………
Brute
Regarding the average US citizen not knowing who VP Biden is, I am not shocked.
In Switzerland we have not 1 elected President with a VP, but a 7-member “Federal Council” (Executive Branch) picked by the Parliament from the largest political parties (4), with one member acting as titular “President” on a year-by-year rotating basis.
So no one here knows (or cares) who the current “President” is (or even who the 7 council members are).
But, yeah, they all know about Prince William’s upcoming wedding.
And quite a few of these same guys think man-made global warming is probably going to destroy the planet some day (the “melting glaciers” prove it, right?). But they don’t think it’s likely to happen before the “royal wedding”.
Max
My apologies to “The Prince” for butchering his name……….(I wasn’t even close!)
Is there a Prince Henry or Harry?
Brute,
You seem to have rather a harsh view of the world. You say “People have to learn the hard way (kids included)………that’s the only way the lesson really sticks. “.
I can only say, and from my own experience, that it certainly is not the only way. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. My father worked in a factory I had other brothers and sisters so there wasn’t a lot to go around materially. We didn’t have overseas holidays. We did have a car but not until I was about 12 or 13.
On the other hand I did get a good education. I didn’t learn the hard way – I learned because I was generally interested in what I was being taught. Which was all free. I was fit and healthy and could play cricket and football too. That didn’t cost me anything either. If I was occasionally sick there were no medical bills. Uni was free too. In fact the government paid living expenses and tuition fees. I topped that up with jobs during the holidays, so didn’t leave uni with any debts.
You tell that to the kids of today and they just don’t believe you :-)
By the way, how much Carbon Dioxide does a “Royal wedding” emit?
Brute
You asked about the carbon footprint of “Royal Wedding”
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/the-sceptic-tank-blog/1898251/royal-wedding-blues
This “green” site writes:
This report tells us:
http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/lifestyle-news/go-green/go-green-news/2010/11/23/how-to-have-a-dream-green-wedding-92746-27697954/
The report also informs us:
One estimate puts the cost of the upcoming royal wedding at “upwards of £50m”.
http://www.easier.com/80529-royal-marriage-wedding-costs.html
OK. Let’s say the carbon footprint is proportional to the cost.
We have: 15 * 50,000,000 / 21,000 = 35,700 tons of CO2
If the “average person’s annual carbon footprint” is 5 tons, that would keep a town of 7,100 inhabitants going all year.
Max
PS But it’s still peanuts compared to the carbon footprint of President Obama’s campaign.