Tag Archives: students

Solving the School “Costs” Problem

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star-wars-darth-vader-senseRecently, President Obama push forward the idea of making community colleges “free” to students. This, supposedly, will give downtrodden students an opportunity to get an education and improve their lot in life.

A nice thought. A nice idea. But again, it does too little and in the wrong place.

First off, I think it’s great that our president is talking about cutting the costs of education and in a roundabout way, talking about cutting down on student loans. But this is another one of those attempts to create savings in an area that is actually not the problem. Community colleges are generally pretty cheap, and if you’re living a normal life, there’s no way that you really can’t pay your way through a community college program. Where the real problem exists is in higher level institutions and in the student loan fiasco that exists in that realm. But as I’m sure you realize, no one is doing anything about the fact that so many people who have student loans are basically screwed for the rest of their lives.

And that’s really the problem they need to address and never will. Instead, what seems to happen is you mention the student debt problems, and you get a sort of Mitt Romney response of “you shouldn’t have taken out the debt if you weren’t planning to pay it back.” Yeah, that’s true, but people took out so much debt to pay for college based on this fantasy that jobs would be prevalent after graduation. And that hasn’t been the case.

So, what should government do?

Well, for one, forgive student loan debt AND then work on making colleges affordable so that people don’t need to take out so much debt. But we’re not doing either one of these. Focusing on community colleges for savings in tuition is like going to a random soda machine and making everything half priced in one place at one time where few people are going to even know it’s happening. If you wanted to make a difference, you go to the original distributor, put all the sodas on an inexpensive rate and then notice as everyone pays less money for soda. Discounting a discounted tuition (which is what community colleges basically are) doesn’t solve anything as no new people are going to be able to pursue education because they’ve already scraped the bottom of the barrel by making those school affordable to anyone who actually has time. If someone can’t afford a community college now, their problems are probably much worse off, meaning they’re focusing on whether or not they should pay the heat bill or the electricity rather than whether or not college is affordable.

What caused the problems of today was that bankers decided that college debt should not be forgiveable, and they made Congress back that up with law. Meanwhile, they allowed themselves to declare bankruptcy if they make stupid financial decisions and had Congress back that up as well. In other words, if you make a stupid mistake like try to get an education, you will never be forgiven for that mistake. If you take billions of dollars of money that you don’t actually own and invest it in blow and hookers, you can declare bankruptcy and five years later you can do it all again. As long as that mindset is part of our dynamic, we’re NEVER going to solve the problems inherent in our system. Mainly because the people who can solve it are benefiting from the problem in the first place. In the end, it all gets paid for by the people who can’t afford to get a good job because their educational goals have stifled any future economic advancement.

So, when I hear a president say he’s REALLY going to solve the student college problem, I need to hear a lot more than “we’re going to trim a few leaves off a tree in hopes of growing a forest.”

And this is coming from someone who actually likes our president. That doesn’t mean he gets a free pass every time he does something like this.

They’re Trying Really Hard to Discredit the Anti-Wall Street Movement

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I’m really not all that surprised that the people who have the most to fear are doing everything possible to target anyone who has anything to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement. At first, it was an attempt to paint the movement as extreme, something that no one is interested in. Then it became popular, so they had to try other tactics, like attempting to fool listeners into believing OWS was filled with hypocrisy (“OMG! They have Ipads and they’re complaining about big businesses that might make technology stuff!”). That didn’t work because unlike previous movements of the past, the people attracted to the movement aren’t generally stupid. The movement has been appealing to a pretty educated crowd. It’s hard to derail that when those derailing it aren’t that much smarter than the people they hope to discredit.

So, the anti-protest movement, which I define as “people who have an incentive to keep things as the status quo”, is now targeting specific individuals as an attempt to destroy the entire movement. One obvious target has been Michael Moore, who likes to see himself as the everyman complainer, but according to Fox News (not exactly the most objective source, as it was the voice of the Republican Party during the entire Bush Administration), because Michael Moore has an expensive house, he’s really one of the one percenters, rather than one of the many included in the 99%. Here’s where that math doesn’t add up: Yeah, he’s rich, but just because someone is rich does not make them automatically a part of the problem.

Much of Michael Moore’s success has come on the coattails of debunking the myths of the rich, and empowering those without any power. As a result, he has become very wealthy for his actions. That should be seen as a good thing, not something to somehow force his followers to throw him to the wolves. Just because he made a success at pulling the veil back from the hidden excesses doesn’t somehow make him part of the hidden excesses.

The movement is about the fact that there are some really greedy, bad people out there who are trying to pull shell games on the rest of us. For way too long now, corporate entities have cloaked themselves in the shadows while doing all sorts of crappy things to the rest of us, like poison our water supplies, sell us damaged goods, sell wars for profit (not our profit, but theirs only), and allowed the changing of money that served to devalue the work of those who handle the actual work but benefit those who control how the money gets spent. When you have businesses built up with the sole purpose of generating more money from money, there’s seriously something wrong. When scientists are pulled off the assembly line of science and told its a lot more profit to be a businessman instead, there’s seriously something wrong.

There are a lot of pissed off people right now mainly because our education system has been teaching us that the American Way is the best course for the future. But we’re now starting to realize that those who make it rich in this country aren’t the ones who bought into the American Way (work hard and build a great country) but profited off of those who did. The ranks of the 1% should be filled with educators, scientists and innovators, not speculators, bankers, politicians and lawyers. THAT is why so many people are upset.

A lot of those people out on the streets right now are the ones who stood behind Obama when he was running for office in 2008, because his campaign promised a bright, brilliant future. Instead, we got a term of exactly what we had before, No more, no less. Hope and change yielded absolutely nothing but false promises. And the people who put Obama into power are smart enough to realize that no matter who they put into office next (Obama again, or a generic Republican), the promises are still going to be made with the reality that the next four years are going to be exactly what came before.

That’s why people are complaining. And discrediting Michael Moore isn’t going to change that.

The Struggles of Teaching Political Science to College Students

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My role as a teacher

Every semester that I teach a new batch of students in political science, I find myself less and less confident in the future of America. Every now and then, a semester will throw off this natural trend, but more often than not, I find myself wondering what kind of future we’re leading to when so many students seem to have little to no grasp of the events happening around them.

I’m not talking about obscure political knowledge here. I’m talking about answers to simple questions like: “What’s going on the country today?” or “What are the important events happening in the world today?” I can understand the concept of being put on the spot to think of something. It used to happen to me when I first started my undergraduate days at West Point and an upperclassman would jump in front of your face and demand answers to “Tell me what’s on the front of the New York Times, New Cadet!” and you’d draw a blank more because you were scared to death of failing rather than actually not remembering what you read in the paper that morning. But this is different. When we finally end up with some story of current events in the discussion, like Obama’s “big speech on Thursday” I look around the class, and I’m met with completely blank stares, like they have no idea what was just mentioned. And when this continues over EVERY subject that gets brought up, you really start to feel scared when it comes to young people understanding what’s going on around them.

At one point in the past, I completely figured this was inconsequential because I started thinking, “who cares who knows anything about current events?” I figured it wasn’t all that important anyway. But it is important because significant decisions are being made each and every day in our governments, and quite often the people who influence public opinion and the decisions of leaders are completely clueless about what’s going on anyway. As Mussolini pointed out, when you have a population that is so blind to what’s going on around them, you can so easily influence them into doing anything you desire.

When we look at the last presidential administration and the atrocities that may have been carried out in our name, I look at the people of this country who don’t seem to care, and I immediately understand why so many bad things can happen at the hands of our leaders because no one will ever hold them accountable if no one has a clue what’s actually going on. When a presidential election occurs and the only reason someone votes for a leader is because of what partisan letter they registered for at one point in their life, we have a real problem. The country is divided into two camps of partisan designations, which means that the people who make up the party leadership of those two parties can practically do anything they want to do, and they’re still going to get the support of blind, oblivious constituents.

This is why someone like former Detroit mayor Kilpatrick can commit outright crimes against his own constituents, and he’d probably get reelected by the same people he cheated because their loyalties are to a mindset rather than to an individual. It’s why we have so much corruption in our governments these days. It happens so often that leaders rarely even hide it because they realize that they’re still going to get reelected because they’re not “the other guy”. This sort of thing stems from the fact that it takes a simple majority to put someone into office, and the majority of the population is filled with people who have no clue what’s going on in their government, and more importantly, don’t care.

The usual response to this argument is that “education” is the solution, but as one of those educators, I practically give up myself because no matter how much energy, how much struggle or how much entertainment I add to a class, students are generally only interested in rote memorization that will lead them to the answers for a test that they generally don’t understand. I’ve had students tell me a correct answer, but when I try to analyze the answer to see if there’s an understanding of the nature of that concept, they stare at me as if I just asked them the question in Klingon, meaning a) they don’t understand it, and b) as Klingon is from Star Trek, they figure it’s not important for them to give a rat’s ass about it anyway.

Yet, each semester I teach, I’ll receive a random email from a former student who thanks me for opening his or her eyes to knowledge he or she never realized existed, so I feel that I got through to someone. But when you have a classroom of 30-50 students, reaching two of them each semester leaves you with a sense that it’s not a successful achievement on a cost benefit analysis. You start to wonder if they would have come to this knowledge regardless, and you’re just surfing the wave that was heading towards the shore anyway. Or did you cause the wave to form? And if so, was it worth the costs of creating the wave in the first place.

I fear that not enough people are “getting it” to make a difference because when only 0.4% of the people who vote understand the process well enough to cast an enlightened vote, do the 99.6% doom us to bad choices, a doomed future and inevitable Mussolinis?