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bokonist | 11 years ago
Notice your slippery phrasing. Most Americans don't have enough literacy ability to benefit from the best free online education. Well, yeah, if you define the best as the advanced stuff then that is true by definition. There is plenty of free basic education material out there too. The core of math literacy is just lots of drilling on multiplication tables and such, which does not cost money at all.
I don't see you addressing my central point. For the Americans without basic abilities, is lack of money the bottleneck? Every American already gets many, many years of quite expensive schooling trying to teach the basics. Reading and textbook material for teaching the basics is not, and need not be, expensive. So either a) schools are grossly incompetent at actually teaching or b) schools are being asked to do the impossible, and are hitting up on innate cognitive limits in the average person (or maybe a bit of both).
Alex3917|11 years ago
Sometimes, but not always. It also depends on your definitions. E.g. when kids aren't able to learn because they show up at school having not eaten anything for two days, is the problem that parents don't have enough money to feed their kids, or is it that schools don't have enough money to feed the kids? And this example is actually a significant issue -- right now if schools are running up against the cognitive limits of Americans, it's in large part because a huge percentage of Americans have had their cognitive limits artificially lowered by external societal dysfunction. E.g. in addition to malnutrition, look at all the kids with high lead exposure, premature birth, health problems caused by poverty and shitty parenting, etc.
bokonist|11 years ago
If the bottleneck to learning is nutrition or lead exposure, then one should advocate directly for policies that would fix nutrition or mitigate lead exposure, rather than generically advocating for more school funding.