Parents in teaching
During my radio show last Saturday, I mentioned the kind of education our children are receiving in the public school system in the United States. All over the country there are complaints that high schoolers are graduating with no skills in keeping a checkbook or filling out an employment application.
Civics classes are non-existent and students have an abdominal knowledge of geography. I remember how we had to draw the individual countries in each continent and to top it off, memorize the capital of each one.
History is probably the worst of all subjects because its teaching has been in decadence for dozens of years and lately it has been totally altered to teach only one aspect of it with a twist towards inducing hatred among the races.
The Epoch Times published an article stating that “In 1941, the average score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) exam was 500 points. In the 1990s, this average fell to 424. To hide this decrease, the College Board, makers of the SAT, recalibrated the scoring system so that a 424 was the new 500.
“While students’ academic aptitude is in decline, their curricula are being filled with Marxist ideologies like critical race theory.”
Parents are being told that they should not be involved in their children’s education and it should be left to educators. Well, see the results above. The system is adapting to the changes by dumbing them down.
All statistics indicate that the United States is way behind many other countries in education. The Secretary-General on Education Policy, Deputy Director for Education (OECD) ranks the United States:
- 14th in the world in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds with higher education (42%).
- The odds that a young person in the U.S. will be in higher education if his or her parents do not have an upper secondary education are just 29% — one of the lowest levels among OECD countries.
- The U.S ranks 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds in early childhood education, with a 69% enrollment rate.
- Across all OECD countries, 30% of the expenditure on higher education comes from private sources, while in the U.S., 62% does.
- Teachers in the U.S. spend between 1,050 and 1,100 hours a year teaching – much more than in almost every country.
Many families want to hold on to their children while they are young and register them only when they are ready to begin first grade, skipping kindergarten and pre-primary school. These classes are vital to teaching many social practices, methods of learning, and even skills that will be useful for the rest of their lives.
Parents hold the main responsibility for their children and they send them to school to formally learn what they cannot teach them. Each day that goes by, we see more families’ home-schooling their children if they cannot opt for private education once they discover their offspring is not learning the right subjects which will leave them behind.
While higher education is an expensive proposition for most people, let me tell you what a wise Secretary of Education told me around 1990: “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” And she was right! Adults returning to school are people to be admired. It’s a great sacrifice of time and money but very much worth it and there are many incentives around that make it attainable. Just look into it.
Electric vehicles
While EVs usually have higher upfront purchase prices, owners can save a lot on operating expenses. A 2020 Consumer Reports study found that EV owners, on average, spend 60% less on fuel compared to internal combustion engine vehicles.
That sounds good but before you go ahead and get into a bill of more than $40,000, you must calculate other expenses and inconveniences. A recent Consumer Reports study found that the average electric vehicle driver will spend 60 percent less to power the car, truck, or S.U.V. and half as much on repairs and maintenance — no oil changes needed — when compared with the average owner of a gas-powered vehicle.
Among the disadvantages of electric cars are that making electric cars creates more emissions the raw materials for making the car have to be mined, and the process of mining creates a lot of greenhouse gases. Then the raw materials have to be refined before they can be used, which again emits more greenhouse gas.
Electric cars are severely limited by several drawbacks, including a shortage of charging stations, high electricity costs, and disappointing battery capacity that limits the distance the cars can be driven between charges.
Home charging is much cheaper than gasoline, and most electric vehicles owners so far have been homeowners. But on road trips, the situation reverses if you stop for a fast charge. Gasoline usually wins out and remember that it may take hours to “fill up” your battery.
Before you buy, find out where are the filling stations in your community or install one in your home. Figure how far you travel daily and where they are located near your place of work.
Going “green” sounds logical but only if we do it slowly. Also, what good is it for this country to make all those changes if the rest of the world won’t abide by them?
Everybody hates the rich!
Notice how often people condemn the wealthy as if they are all corrupt and don’t deserve their way of life.
Right now, if Ukrainians have the use of the internet it’s because Elan Musk launched Starlink is a satellite-based internet constellation intended to blanket the planet in high-speed broadband and could potentially bring connectivity to billions of people who still lack reliable internet access – Free of Charge!
How many of us poor souls can make such a contribution to humanity?
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