Devoss confirmed: what this really means

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

the new secretary of education is someone named Betsy Devoss…
she was confirmed on party line votes this morning…
her sole qualification for being secretary of education seems
to be that her wealthy family donated millions of dollars to
GOP senators…she wasn’t educated in public schools, none of
her children have been to a public school… she has no education
working experience… she wasn’t a teacher or anything…

she thinks that children in schools should have guns because of
possible grizzle bear attacks… her words at her nomination committee…
she believes in vouchers for people to use to go to private schools which
if implemented nationwide would destroy the public school system…taking
money away from public schools and divert them to private schools…

but once again she was nominated and confirmed due to one reason and
one reason only, the millions of dollars her family has given to the GOP
and its candidates… is this the new standard we use to put
people into cabinet… by how much money they donate to their
party?

Rome, who we resemble more and more, every single day, began to fail when
Emperors would sell senate seats and other important seats
of power to the highest bidder… the men who were do the very
important job within the empire would be busy trying to recoup their money
by raping the institutions they were in charge of… sounds familiar?

anyway, we now have the same situation where we put people who have
given millions of dollars to public officials being approved by those
same public officials… it seems to me to be a major conflict of interest…
approving of someone who just gave you hundreds of thousands of dollars
in bribes, oh sorry, campaign contributions… I can’t even begin to see
how that is in any way, shape, or form, ethical…
but of course defenders of the party, (not country because party is more
important then country as it was in Nazi Germany and mao’s china and
the soviet union) will justify it some way, because, PARTY TRUMPS ALL…
in the new Amerika of the GOP…

Kropotkin

2

I should have seen coming… right after devos was confirmed,
a GOP representative filed a bill to dismantle the department of education
by 2018… and we see what Devos job really is… to destroy the
department of education… to the joy and glad tidings of
republicans everywhere… why the hell would lower middle class
parents want to educate their kids anyway, all the GOP wants from those
kids are to be servants and maids and garbage workers and tend to the
wealthy gardens… they don’t need any more skills then to serve the wealthy…

Kropotkin

3

It means Trump is continuing to implement the agenda people voted for, that’s all.

4

What did they do before 1980 when the Department of Education was created? :evilfun:

5

Less than half the voters.

6

Giving children guns in school will save them from other children with guns. This is the basic mathematics of the situation.

7

Kind of reminds of the DNC, merely the other side of the coin.

8

K: so feel free to name one person who gave millions of dollars
to the DNC/and or dem’s senators and was later voted by the senate into a cabinet
post? Name one…I’ll wait…

Kropotkin

9

It’s not about the contributions.
She could have been rewarded with any number of other posts for which she is equally unqualified.
The reason she got the Education portfolio is that she’s a particularly fierce enemy of public education.
All the recent appointments are of people most likely to destroy the department they’re heading.
That’s not an accident: that’s a long-range plan.

10

K: all except department of defense because you gotta feed the
military/industrial complex that runs the country…

Kropotkin

11

K: given that the combine vote of dems vs GOP is staggering…
the dems received more then 6 million votes national then the GOP.
combine the house, senate and presidency and the dem’s received
far more votes then the GOP… by millions of votes…
gerrymandering the states will do that for ya…
the GOP is a minority party that has rigged the rules to
win… just as they rigged the senate vote on cabinet nominees
to win conformations…the changing of rules that got a vote in
committee even if the dem’s weren’t there which is illegal under
senate rules…

Kropotkin

12

:-k So, no actual reasoning for why the Department of Education should not be dismantled.

13

K: as I work shortly, I don’t have the time to get into it right now…
work is a four letter word…

I should have time tomorrow…

Kropotkin

14

If there were more educator then teachers in the system I would have respect for the system. When I went to school there were still educators that actually cared if their students learned but, they were dwindling even then. Now you have teachers that just want a paycheck and a safe job. They are worthless.
DeVos is different from any other , the system is already screwed up she can only improve it or finally break it so that it can become rebuilt.

15

The next piece you haven’t quite grasped is: Nothing will ever be rebuilt. Nothing will ever be repaired.
Whatever is currently, or has been for a long time, wrong with public services, however poorly they functioned - they existed and did serve at least some of the citizens some of the time; preserved some parts of the environment, helped out in emergencies; built infrastructure.
Once they’re broken down, nobody except the rich will be served, rescued, protected or helped.
The jackals will tear up the corpse and the vultures will pick the bones clean, and you will be left with the soiled rags of a government.

That’s what the self-designated “wethepeople” voted for: to destroy the country rather than share it.

16

The GOP controls the House, The Senate, The White House, and the majority of Governor ships, and they control each and every one of those things because of elections, and not just this past election, but 6 years worth. You can spin the numbers to create gold out of horseshit all you like. You’ll still be crying ‘GOP is a minority party’ when CA and NY are the only blue states left.

17

K: as I have been working the last couple of days, now I have time to work this out…

as I am a research person, I of course did research on education plus with my own personal
experiences which I noted in my thread on space time…plus my daughter’s experience
in school…

first of all, I want to get a sense of what are the leading educational countries in the
world and what they have… I got my research here from a educational group
call the Pearson group… I admit I know nothing about them…

so the first listing is from 2012

  1. Finland. 2. south korea. 3. hong kong. 4. japan. 5. Singapore. 6. UK. 7. Netherlands.
  2. New Zealand. 9. Switzerland. 10. Canada. 11. Ireland. 12. Denmark. 13. Australia 14. Poland
    and where is the U.S in this group… 17…

this is the list from Pearson group in 2015-2016…

  1. South Korea. 2. Japan. 3. Singapore. 4. Hong kong. 5. finland. 6. UK. 7. Canada.
  2. neatherlands. 9. Ireland. 10. Poland. 11. Denmark. 12. Germany. 13. Russia. 14 US…

So once again, I did research in each country educational system…
for example, South Korea in the 1960’s and 1970’s had the educational
system moved over to the national side… this lead to a major increase in
the progress of students learning… By all examples, this federal takeover
of the school lead to a remarkable increase in grades and ability to learn
and increase in test results…

Next was Japan and this too is run by a federal Ministry of education…

Singapore has it ministry of education which also runs the educational system…

fifth was Finland which had been the world’s leader in educational systems…
Finland is locally run with some small help by the federal government unlike
the previous 4 educational systems… Finland has a saying about the earlier
grades, pre-school and above… you are not taught, you learn…
the Finnish system succeeds because it is driven by the idea of
quality in education instead of quantity… this system also requires
at least 2 foreign languages plus Finish… usually English and Swedish…
I find that very interesting…

SO of the top 5 educational systems in the world, the top 4 are run on a federal
level and one is local level with help…this idea of quality over quantity
is very interesting in education…this is one idea to import to the US…

now in the last 4 years, the US has gone from 17 in the world to 14…

now comes the part where we try to understand what this all means…

Kropotkin

18

ok, after some thought… the educational systems that are better are
better because the countries involved made a commitment to make them
better… education is a priority to these countries… it is not just a local
commitment but a national commitment to education… I think that
makes all the difference in the world… to educate children takes a commitment
from the local level to the national level…the US has failed in a couple of
different ways in education… one. it is not a national commitment and to succeed
education must be everyone’s business, not just the parents currently in school…
so education must become a national effort and a national commitment…
two. we decided that education is to train for a job instead of education because
it creates better people…in conjunction to this, we have accepted quantity
over quality in education and that is a major failure on our part… we teach education
like it is a factory and we have to pump out as many graduates as possible…
vocational training is great but we need to classically educate people because the fact
of the matter is, we are trying to create better people and not necessarily better
plumbers or gardeners…given that the US is a patchwork of various different
systems with some in better shape then others (and that is primarily due to economics
as wealthier school districts are mostly better school districts)

now some here will claim it is all the teachers fault and if it weren’t for
that dam teachers union my kids would have learned something…
rather short sided statement to make as education is not just the school’s problem
as American’s seem to think, education is everyone’s problem, we have just dump
into the laps of the schools the job of education without bothering to become
involved ourselves… we pay our taxes isn’t that enough? NO… it is not enough…
the reason wealthier families succeed is because they can place enough resources
in the child’s hand to allow them to succeed… success is the product of everyone
working together from the schools to the families to the cities and the nation…
just to dump it in the laps of the schools and expect results when you haven’t worked
to help create that success… so I believe that department of education can succeed
on a national level because it can the bottom level of success needed to help a child
succeed… but a bottom line of success means that by a certain grade, a child should
have certain basic knowledge of math or English or science and that is only possible
by having a national understanding of that bottom line of knowledge…
go from California to say Mississippi and you will see that the standard of
that knowledge is less in Mississippi then in California and in the Midwest states
like Illinois or Minnesota those standards are higher then California…
we have very uneven set of standards of what a child should know by a certain age
and certainly economics play a major role in this and therein again, the national
department of education can come in a play a major role by funding school districts that
need funding which can’t be done on a local level…

by making education a priority in this country and then funding it like a priority
you improve education in this country… now here comes the problem
right wing types want education to be cost effective which means they want
education to be about dollars and cents instead of education. they complain
vigorously on how much is spent on education in their taxes instead of
working toward improving schools… education takes time, effort and as
wealthier schools districts prove, money… a wealthier school district
will have better educated students and that is not a mistake…
you have to invest in education before education becomes effective…

well, we have spend plenty on those dam schools and nothing happens because
of those dam teachers unions… and again failing to accept responsibility
for what happens in those schools…

you want schools to succeed then you have to make a commitment and
that commitment must be from the local level to the national level and
that commitment on the national level must have some organization that
helps coordinate and help cooperates with the local level and
that organization is called the department of education… the very same
one you want to destroy and 45 wants to destroy and devoss wants to destroy
and if we let them, we will have failed our children and our future, for
our future depends on educated populace and that is only possible
with a national effort to educate our children…

Kropotkin

19

The Department of Education has existed since 1980. If the US educational system is still crappy, maybe it’s because the DoE is not effective. Maybe it ought to be eliminated and replaced by something that “works”.

20

K: and missing just about every single point I made… make education a priority…
but education today is driven by dollars and cents… that is part of the failure…
education is more then just dollars and cents, a conservative will never believe that,
but it is…it is about a commitment to education that we don’t have in this country
it is about making education more then just a training facility for jobs… make it a
about education and not about a monetary payoff because education is not about
a monetary payoff which conservatives want, it is about something more which is to
create better human beings… those who are engage in the higher level of being human
and not the instinctual level or the emotional level like anger and hate…

we are educating to make better people, not to improve the GNP which is how
conservatives rate everything… quality over quantity which take time, money and effort,
none of which an conservative is willing to invest in America’s education…and
education is an investment… and part of that investment is in a national program
which helps the state and local districts and that national program is called
the department of education… maybe instead of worrying about how much
money everything cost, try to make things better REGARDLESS of how much it cost…

you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing…

learn to value instead of counting pennies…

Kropotkin