Comment on George Carlin - The American Dream | As accurate in 2023 as it was in 2008
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 6 months ago
He’s not wrong about education, but he slips immediately from “we need to spend money on education” straight to “we’ve lowered the standards so more kids graduate.”
I get that it’s a comedy bit, but those are diametrically opposed political positions. Increasing spending requires increasing standards, and lowering standards is a byproduct of lowering funding.
I love Carlin, and we need his voice as much today as we ever did. But he was always a comedian first. He makes leaps from one idea to another to draw the audience in and flip an idea on its head.
Education is the silver bullet. He ties it to lowered standards, when that’s the opposite of education.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The point that he’s trying to make is that just throwing more money at a problem doesn’t work, mostly because schools get their funding based on performance so it’s in the school’s best interest to pass as many failures as possible to look good and get money.
Plus where’s all that extra cash gonna go? The administrator that makes 200k a year? Probably not to the teachers that make 35k a year and have to purchase supplies for their own classrooms.
“Just fund education” is a populist talking point that relies on the goodwill of those in charge of that extra money. Unless you fix that problem the system won’t turn out higher educated individuals.
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“Throwing money at the problem” is something people say when they don’t want to spend money because they don’t care about the problem.
Nobody in the history of spending money fixing problems has ever suggested throwing money at the problem. Everyone who has ever had a plan to spend more money on education has had a specific plan on how to most effectively spend the money. Some plans might not have worked, and some would have worked better than others, but none of them planned to be careless with the money.
Funding schools based on performance is not a good idea at all. Teachers should make much more than $35k a year, and should never have to spend their own money on supplies. You just named three things that would all be fixed with additional spending on education. Institutional waste and corruption are certainly problems to be addressed, but that’s not a reason not to try.