Education
The video is just the standard whine--give teachers more money--but the comment's worth reading. When Ds throw more money at the schools, "administrative costs" eat up more and teachers may be actually earning less than they were fifty years ago. This is still not necessarily all bad; teachers have an inflated view of their influence on students' learning. What might work is paying the students. Seriously. Simple rewards without cash payouts--finish the assignments, get the afternoon off--work with most students (those who don't have serious learning disabilities or emotional issues. But it'd be worth trying giving the "administrative" tasks to volunteer parents, having ONE office manager paid for full-time work and ALL other non-teachers paid by the hour only for actual work that can't be done by any parent who volunteers, and giving the serious money, instead, to students who complete actual learning tasks, pass tests, and demonstrate the ability to use and build on what they've learned.
Why has this not been tried? Because expanding "basic education" from eight grades to twelve grades plus tax-funded play groups was not done to make Americans more knowledgeable; it was done to keep teenagers out of the workforce and, theoretically, out of premature parenthood. Individual teachers might sincerely want to see more teenagers who've completed the requirements for grade twelve, in grade seven, using their school time for independent study projects and basic college requirements that could cut their college residency time by half, but those who've planned the industrial-model school system want to avoid that kind at any cost. They love it when gifted students spend twelve years learning bad learning habits that may prevent them from finishing college degrees and even adversely affect their experiences of employment--or even parenthood. Those who plan the industrial-model school system always resented those gifted students anyway. They couldn't enjoy competing with us so they just flat-out hate us.
Anyway, here in a snarky video is the reason why Angry Abbylab Spambucket's first known positive campaign idea--throwing more money at the public schools--will not work. Not, at least, for any purpose other than keeping more of Spambucket's supporters' in-laws employed in jobs that sound legitimate, even respectable--however meretricious they are.
Poetry
It's hard to write serious tributes to great people, which was one of the main subjects of classical poetry, without sounding a bit fulsome, a tad fannish...even in prose. Studying our models won't help; to modern tastes the classical poets sounded fulsome and fannish, though they might have had more excuse, having fewer examples to compare their hosts and patrons with. Brian Yapko finds it helps a little bit to put his tribute to Mark Twain and Helen Keller into the mouth of a contemporary who would have minded sounding fulsome and fannish less than a modern speaker. But was their friendship really so surprising? Highly Sensory-Perceptive people tend to recognize each other, with a thrill of "We be of one blood, thou and I!", within minutes.
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