To Beerhats avatar: Beasty Boys Rocks Your Socks. I was in high school during Herbert Bush and it was the same bullshit.
Its really not the money that's fuckin up our school system, its the policy. When I was in school I was afraid of not only getting the hell beat outa my ass my my 250 pound principle but also my 350 pound father that was a power lifter.
I stayed on the straight and narrow because I knew that was what was expected of me. I knew that if I fucked up..that I would have consequences.
Today the kids dont give a fuck. Their parent dont give a fuck. They were raised on playstation and cable TV. The government can't fix the problem. It can only be fixed by the parents.
Agreed that parents often don't give a fuck, and kids today get away with a lot more than when I was younger. But then kids are also growing up quicker. I'm 30 in a couple of months and my friend's 10 year old is a hell of a lot more mature than I was at 10, and it was the same with my parents generation who seemed to be seen as children up to their late teens.
The parents aren't entirely to blame for whatever the kids do, most of them are just average sheeple, happily soaking in what they are fed without even thinking about it and passing it on to their offspring. The same shit gets passed from generation to generation, I bet more sheeple parents think, "it didn't do me any harm..." than try to learn from their parents' mistakes.
I'm not sure about in The States, but here politicians and the media love to demonise young people, who are often hanging around in public places cos there's just fuck all for kids to do a lot of the time. I used to work at a youth centre that got closed down due to lack of cash, that's fairly typical.
A local skate park always seems to be fighting to stay open and my friend does some great work with kids excluded from school for behaviour problems, she's had books published on it and really does make a difference, yet they are always fighting for funding. Parents do need to take responsibility for their kids, but they need to be educated themselves, Governments and the media need to take their share of the blame and do something about it, more money isn't the complete answer but it's part of it, but then I doubt they really want all the sheep to start thinking.
Schools should focus more on teaching children to think for themselves, rather than just how to pass exams. One good thing that might come out of the Iraq fiasco is the thousands of schoolchildren that got involved in making their voices heard and thinking about shit that affects them.
Beating ya kids or even the threat of violence isn't the answer at all, shit loads of research has found that rewarding good behaviour will always be more effective than the threat of punishment for bad behaviour. (What motivates you? The rewards success brings, or the fear of failure?)
I (fortunately for now) don't have kids, but I would think these days removing the XBox or PC would be more effective than threatening to beat them when you both know you wouldn't do it, or if you did people would be asking questions.
You also get kids growing up confusing fear with respect. An adult demanding a child respects them through fear and intimidation is a great way to either lose the child's respect very quickly or for the average unthinking sheeple, fuck them up so they never distinguish between the two and pass it on to their kids and so on and so on.
Sorry for the fuckin long post...
:love-smiley-085
No offence to the thoughtful non-sheeple parents here!)
