Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital

Besides all the monopolies and industrialization of school, it further more costs future employers’ drastically due to all the training they have to account for.  Since our school system isn’t giving us hands-on training, our employers are forced to do it.  Even many college classes are still related to book smarts, industrialization and a money maker, but very little hands-on, real-life training actually occurs.

What is the real purpose for all the testing they give our high school students?  Is it to really see how much knowledge they know or to produce more money for the school district?  Many can sit down and take a test, but have no idea how the concepts really work in real job scenarios.  These standardized testing standards are a false assessment of where an individual stands.  It has been proven time and time again, that even if you pass these tests, you fail in real life, as well as those who don’t pass the testing my come out and excel above the rest.

This NCLB act, just allowed the government to take even more control over our school system by the amount of school forced to restructure from lack of APY scores.  Most schools that failed the APY scores had few options for restructuring, but choose to relinquish control of the school over to the state, thus more government power.

Then you still have the issue of money.  Where is all this money going that these institutions or school districts are raising?  Many school have completely cut out extracurricular activities completely.  I know that one of the High Schools here in Richmond, Kentucky only require two semesters of P.E. (Physical Education).  When I was much younger and in school, that was a 3x’s a week requirement.  There were always kids out on our streets playing football, tag, basketball or any other physical activity that they have learned in school.  That is obsolete, we just don’t see that anymore.

Art is another class that has vanished from many American schools.  Art may not be seen as important, but it can lead to a whole new area of communication as it has for thousands of years.  Art can also be useful in breeding hobbies, that so many of us Americans don’t have anymore, its either video games, watching television or eating.  Art class can be so much more than learning how to draw or paint, sewing, cross-stitching, candle making, etc. were all forms of hobbies that are currently obsolete.

In a nut shell, there news to be an intense look at our school system in all regions of America.  The future work force doesn’t even stand a chance in todays’ society as it is, however if they converted to community training, hands-on activities, and classes meshed together teaching my science interacts with math, and why history intermingles with economy, etc. we have a good chance at becoming the number one nation again.  Money should never been the reason why a child doesn’t get the proper education, or why big business are industrializing our institutions. This has got to change.

Foster, John B. "Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital." Monthly Review. N.p., 22 Aug. 2011. Web. 14 Sept. 2011.

Proposal - Simple Benefits of Water

Lindsey Petersen

Proposal

English 102

Simple benefits of water

            According to the “Get America Fit Foundation”, “Obesity is the #2 cause of preventable death in the United States. 60 million Americans, 20 years and older are obese and 9 million children and teens ages 6-19 are overweight.  There is one simple and very inexpensive way to change these statistics and that is to drink just regular tap or well water.  I’d like to discuss tap drinking water in this paper.  I can go on forever on the benefits, but I have just chosen a few.

            Magnesium is a known mineral in tap water, but what many don’t know is that Magnesium is a great way to boost ones’ metabolism.   The national institute of health reports, “Tap water can be a source of magnesium, but the amount varies according to the water supply. Water that naturally contains more minerals is described as "hard". "Hard" water contains more magnesium than "soft" water.”  We aren’t going to get much in the way of minerals through “bottled water”

            Which brings me to my next topic is bottled water bad?  The Water Project reports that, “Every year over $100 Billion dollars is spent on bottled water world-wide.”  Bottled water is not regulated like normal tap city water.  Many studies have been done on bottled water and they all come back about the same.  Here is one I like best - Altogether, the analyses conducted by the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory of these 10 brands of bottled water revealed a wide range of pollutants, including not only disinfection byproducts, but also common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals (Tylenol); heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes; fertilizer residue (nitrate and ammonia); and a broad range of other, tentatively identified industrial chemicals used as solvents, plasticizers, viscosity decreasing agents, and propellants.”  We drink bottled water because we are led to believe that it is cleaner, but “the federal standards for tap water are higher than those for bottled water(Blomenfeld)”.  All studies done on bottled water have shown that most are nothing more than filtered tap water, so how are we getting the magnesium we need?

            There is another reason to drink tap water that we all know but decide to ignore and that is, what is it doing to our environment?  We all know that our landfills are being flooded with plastics so I will not touch on this, but how about other environmental factors.  Just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, according to the Container Recycling Institute.”

            So next time you think you need to grab a case of bottled water at the grocery store, just know that you are doing it well informed.  Try to save the bottled water for occasions that you may need it, for example camping, or sporting events.

Blomenfeld, Jared, and Susan Leal. "The real cost of bottled water." Common Dreams. Org. San Francisco Chronicle , 18 Feb. 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0218-05.htm>.

"Bottled Water - Making a Clear Choice." The Water Project. N.p., 2011. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water.asp?gclid=CPq3rsWj46oCFRAE2godB3Az8A>.

Global Viewpoints. "Garbage and Recycling." Greenhaven Press. Global Viewpoints. Farmington Hills: Christine Nasso, 2011. 138-53. Print.

"Magnesium." National Institute of Health. N.p., 13 July 2009. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/magnesium/>.

Naidenko, Olga. "Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 pollutants." Environmental Working Group. N.p., Oct. 2008. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.ewg.org/reports/BottledWater/Bottled-Water-Quality-Investigation>.

"Obesity Related Statistics in America." Get America Fit Foundation. National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kid, 2007. Web. 22 Aug. 2011. <http://www.getamericafit.org/statistics-obesity-in-america.html>.

Royte, Elizabeth. Bottlemania. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008. 1-229. Print.

Another Education is Happening

Response 4 

            Remember when you were young and there was a school field trip?  It didn’t matter where you were going, but you anticipated the day with much excitement to go into the community and learn something valuable.  That is what this article is all about.

            To form education through real life experiences in the real world, would give kids a real fundamental outlook on life and how it works.  To many of us were made to sit at a desk and listen to lecture after lecture and read boring text books, while having no clue what was going on outside of our schools’ institution. 

            Even simple things like cleaning the highways’, or roads would give children the sense of what littering is, rather than just being told, “Don’t throw that on the ground its littering”.  To a child this makes no sense, what is littering?  So what, what does littering have to do with me?  Or going to watch a production line of some sort, would give them a whole new outlook on how things were made, the people and machines that were involved to make these things. 

            I agree that we do need to spend some time in the classroom for writing or mathematics, however if much time was spent in the community we would have things to write about, and better understand math.

            To allow children to maintain the streets, plant gardens, recycle waste, refurbish buildings, etc., would give them a desire to be more environmentally sounds too.  The gardens would give them a respect for their vegetables, which we all know kids don’t have as of now.

            Is all this testing the government wants from their school kids really productive when these same kids have no idea what it means outside of their schools’ institution.  I also think if there were more “school field trips” planned, kids would want to go to school to learn.  Parents and teachers would have a much easier time dealing with the so-called ADHD, and other learning issues that are related to steady boredom.  Through the years the government has talked about increasing the length of school to go until five o’clock at night and on Saturdays.  I believe this would be easy to accomplish if kids enjoyed school, were out in society learning about real life and their community.

            There is so much we don’t know when we leave our parents house and finish high school.  I don’t know about others, but for myself I was completely lost on what I was suppose to do.  There was little support for me from people around me.  I was told, “you should have learned all that at school”, we’ll “no I didn’t”.  I’m now 31 years old, and still learning about things that would have been very handy had I learned in school.

            I understand there is a conflict between what the school thinks we should learn from our parents and what our parents think we should learn from school.  When are we going to pull together and operate as a community instead of segregated groups?