Minutes from Flight School: Alternative Education Systems

• How much control should communities have over children's education
• What impediments are there to alternative forms of education?
• What role can the government play in liberation education?

• "Do parents have the expertise necessary to really develop curriculum, or should specialists design curriculum?"

• Parents should maybe just approve or deny curriculum after the specialists have designed in.

• "In Canada university students walk out all the time. Even if their needs aren't met they are at least addressed"

• Need wide support to have walkouts.
• Parents don't even have a choice as to where their children go to school because of zoning, let alone a say so in curriculum
• Only parents who are the most knowledgeable and have a higher income are usually aware of charter school applications and such. How do you mobilize the very bottom?
• Parents should be systematically involved by maybe getting subsidies to go to school functions. Not like Mayor Bloomberg's plan to pay parents for being good parents,
  

  "but to make up for time lost during work, or by giving special waivers to their employers so that parents can be good parents"

• the only alternative is Cuba (Ian)

• "The government needs to think of education as preventative. Parallel it to health care."

  People who don't have health care make the total cost of health care much more expensive b/c they go to the emergency room instead of the cheaper doctor's visit. It's easier to detect and treat diseases at earlier stages, than to wait till their critical and then treat them. 80% of people in jail are high school drop outs, which costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. Education is cheaper

• Some schools are full service, they combine health care and education not only for the students but also the parents
• Is home schooling a form of privatization
• It's crazy how we refuse to invest in education b/c of social stigmas. simple Attitudinal Opposition. That's why a lot of prison degree programs were cut. The public was outraged that criminals could get degrees where their law abiding children couldn't afford higher education. But to me, that's ridiculous, rather than ceasing the prison degree programs, maybe they should further fund higher education for the general public.

• "This is a land of cheap traders they don't stress education. opportunity is inherited"

• How many people are actually going to move up the social ladder if they work hard?

• "The American dream is a farce"

  There is a fear of unification. Maybe due to WWII and Hitler's use of unification, but in America we're so individualistic. What does it mean to be American what do you get? It's really a suppression of unification

• "The most we have is a negative consensus. We agree that we don't like certain things, but we don't agree on things that the government or society should do"

• positive freedom (freedom to do what you want to do i.e. protesting) v. negative freedom (What you're not restricted from doing i.e. drinking).
• We can agree on negative freedoms but not necessarily positive ones
• Change takes time
• We need alternative value systems, not based on rewards and instant gratification.

Next Flight School. June 1st, 3pm NYU Kimmel:

• Alternatives to our education system?
• Liberation theology, how do we take control of our education?
• True education through dialogue, dialogue that creates change/ practice
• Charter schools, home-schooling
• Pricing incentives, paying teachers 6 digit salaries
• Bloomberg's money incentives for taking kids to get a check up, and fulfilling other parental duties