Adieu
SS.org Regular
If American public education could EVER be anywhere near as efficient and useful as a fucking grocery store, though...
student loan forgiveness
- Thread starter sleewell
- Start date
If American public education could EVER be anywhere near as efficient and useful as a fucking grocery store, though...
Adieu
SS.org Regular
Nope
Despite popular opinion to the contrary, there ARE other ways to generate long-standing grudges that don't involve penises
StevenC
Javier Strat 7 2024
I don't know. Here we have no cashiers and the stores are inefficient, but we have plenty of teachers (literally too many, most go abroad) and a great education system.
Grindspine
likes pointy things
Grocery stores are hella ineffecient, especially post-covid. No stores around here seem to be able to fill vacant spots for cashiers, so all are being replaced by self-checkout kiosks. Like I said, that may be efficient for picking up a loaf of bread, but if you want to purchase alcohol, you still have to wait for the one human cashier to come over and interact. This ends up being quite inefficient, and yet another reason to skip the grocery store and go straight to the liquor store.
Anyway, student loans suck. My wife has hers paid off, but despite working for volunteer organizations, non-profit hospitals, and public service, I still owe many years' worth of payments on mine. As said previously, education benefits everyone in a society. Frankly, I call bullshit on SCOTUS allowing public education funds to go toward religious education while I am still paying my student loans. My education actually benefits society in some way. I cannot say the same for religious education degrees.
I think that's an area that bothers me most. I hear arguments from conservative family members that "well, you decided to go to school, that's your problem", but because of my education and experience, as well as my wife, we pay more annually in Federal and State income taxes than they do over the course of several years. Getting a degree (especially in the case of my medical professional wife) benefits society as a whole in many cases. The contribution to society is often overlooked, regardless of profession. If I was put in charge of making decisions, federal student loans should be automatically expunged after paying taxes for 10 years (talking for those that can work, not those that have become disabled or have similar extenuating circumstances). Employed individuals are paying back into the system, even if in a nominal way.
There are of course other serious problems with the higher education system in this country. I adjunct at a local top 100 university, and the cost to attend is obscene (and for the record, my pay for each course is less than the credit hours each student is paying to be in the class). But so is nearly every other 4 year university.
jaxadam
SS.org Regular
I said what I said!
wheresthefbomb
SS.org Regular
well ACKSHUALLY.....
...prescriptive grammar is seen as less and less valid these days, especially among linguists. Language is inherently in constant flux, and variations in usage are the absolute norm for as far back as we can see. Everything we now consider "proper" or "correct" was at one time "not."
Not to mention, presctiptivism very often ends up justify biases that run along class and ethnic lines. For example, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a perfectly valid language form. It has internally consistent grammatical rules that allow for the creation of new, intelligible (to other speakers of AAVE) forms. This is a very very basic overview of some pretty in depth concepts but the TL;DR here is:
Descriptive Grammar is in; Say as thou wilst shall be the whole of the law.
Drew
Forum MVP
Oh, THIS is a whole can o' worms...
I think descriptive grammar has its place and time. Dialogue, in fiction, for example, 100%. Capture speech patterns as accurately as you can.
In a more formal communication setting, though.... as you alude, there are some ingrained class biases present in prescriptive grammar in that it's taking a stance on elevating one grammatical norm over another, so there's some implicit filtering going on there in choosing which particular grammatical norms are "right" and which aren't. That IS absolutely something worth flagging as a concern. But, it's also not something that any one person, or even realistically any one very large group of people, can change overnight, so simply opting out and going 100% descriptive all the time isn't really all that viable an answer.
I think the best you can do is be aware of when you're choosing to be prescriptive and when you're choosing to be descriptive, to make it a conscious choice, and do so with a great degree of intent. I tend to lean towards prescriptive anyway, for reasons that probably do have a lot to do with race, class, educational attainment, and upbringing (and the fact I was a voracious reader as a kid), and my own personal hill to die on is proper grammar and sentence structure in text messages, but I absolutely relax my grammar in social situations, particularly those where I don't necessarily want to flag myself as someone who identifies with the sort of class and racial assumptions that are baked into prescriptive grammar, whereas in professional and more formal environments, I 100% lean into prescriptive grammatical norms.
This is doubly true in the internet - people, when they know nothing else about you, will tend to make certain assumptions about race, class, educational attainment, etc etc etc based on how you use language. If you think about it, that's actually incredibly powerful, with respect to how that shapes other people's impressions of you over the internet, where a lot of the other social cues that might come into play here are entirely lacking.
wheresthefbomb
SS.org Regular
Oh, THIS is a whole can o' worms...
I think descriptive grammar has its place and time. Dialogue, in fiction, for example, 100%. Capture speech patterns as accurately as you can.
In a more formal communication setting, though.... as you alude, there are some ingrained class biases present in prescriptive grammar in that it's taking a stance on elevating one grammatical norm over another, so there's some implicit filtering going on there in choosing which particular grammatical norms are "right" and which aren't. That IS absolutely something worth flagging as a concern. But, it's also not something that any one person, or even realistically any one very large group of people, can change overnight, so simply opting out and going 100% descriptive all the time isn't really all that viable an answer.
I think the best you can do is be aware of when you're choosing to be prescriptive and when you're choosing to be descriptive, to make it a conscious choice, and do so with a great degree of intent. I tend to lean towards prescriptive anyway, for reasons that probably do have a lot to do with race, class, educational attainment, and upbringing (and the fact I was a voracious reader as a kid), and my own personal hill to die on is proper grammar and sentence structure in text messages, but I absolutely relax my grammar in social situations, particularly those where I don't necessarily want to flag myself as someone who identifies with the sort of class and racial assumptions that are baked into prescriptive grammar, whereas in professional and more formal environments, I 100% lean into prescriptive grammatical norms.
This is doubly true in the internet - people, when they know nothing else about you, will tend to make certain assumptions about race, class, educational attainment, etc etc etc based on how you use language. If you think about it, that's actually incredibly powerful, with respect to how that shapes other people's impressions of you over the internet, where a lot of the other social cues that might come into play here are entirely lacking.
Oh I totally agree with you, I see that as more of a sociology thing though.
There is no logical or factual basis for saying one way of speaking is more "correct" than another. We also have to be able to understand each other though, so there's a push and pull between prescriptivism and all-out linguistic anarchism. We have an infinitely malleable language, but we also have to have broad, mutually-established baseline understanding of which words mean what.
I will be the first to admit that I am regularly in knee-jerk mode to unnecessarily strict prescriptivism, and in this particular case was playing the foil to @jaxadam 's tongue in cheek 8th grade grammar teacher routine.
Meh, do your best with grammar and spelling, because it get's your point across better. Otherwise, don't sweat it. As long as you were understood the way you wanted to be understood, why waste more effort than necessary?
I had all of those grammar rules drilled into my head, and it tends to make me sound more like an unrelatable douche when I actually use the grammar I learned as a kid. I love words like "whence" and "whom" and conditional tense and all of those nifty things, but no one talks like that in the 21st century.
I had all of those grammar rules drilled into my head, and it tends to make me sound more like an unrelatable douche when I actually use the grammar I learned as a kid. I love words like "whence" and "whom" and conditional tense and all of those nifty things, but no one talks like that in the 21st century.
Drew
Forum MVP
Well, the natural postmodern conclusion here is, if there is a constructed structure in place, then it should be played with.
wheresthefbomb
SS.org Regular
Now you're speaking my language!
MFB
Banned
I don't know how to break it to you, but every one of Drew's posts have been in English for as long as I've been a member here; I think it's safe to say he's been speaking it
Drew
Forum MVP
MFB
Banned
You forgot to end your sentence with a period.
Real reply: it's a by-product of jumping between emails/Teams chats/shitposting on here for cheap jokes like the aforementioned, but I did indeed not actually end the sentence by missing the period.
Fake reply:
jaxadam
SS.org Regular
What in the fucking fuck just happened up in this motherfucking motherfucker?
Mathemagician
SS.org Regular
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Adieu is advocating for the privatization of education.
His logic is inherently flawed because it pretends to look at the “cost” of educating a population.
Elevating a society is the purpose of a functioning developed government. Education is one manner in which that happens. And almost no child learns from a computer screen better than in-person hands on questions and answers.
The logic is flawed from the get-go which makes it purposely hard to think about the bigger picture.
There’s two points: standardizing k-12 education topics? Makes sense citizens of a country should learn the same building blocks, not counting electives. For example Texas shouldn’t be able to write out the trail of tears from their history books. Americans should learn about the cool stuff and the not so cool stuff, etc.
However, reducing in-person learning and access to professionals due to a misguided lack of respect for their school/degree?
Ok so in that case only the richest out there would have access to in person education and coaching.
Which is actually a SUPER libertarian “destroy the government and all its programs” talking point.
The game plan is essentially “make education cheaper and worse, so my kid has a better shot against the poors.” And in the meantime privatize every aspect you can to get donations as you sell off the education system to for-profit fake schools backed by the Devos family. Currently under multiple lawsuits. They also take to shitting on teachers as a whole and trying to make them seem ungrateful/bad/awful any way possible - like his generic non answers on the topic.
Now there are many ways on how to improve education, but starting at “how do I make it cheaper” is not the approach. It’s not a for-profit business. It’s a public service, it costs what it costs.
The correct approach of “How do I make it better” typically involves investing MORE into a program. Which is the opposite of what most conservative/libertarian leaning people want to see. So they push “starve the beast” policy.
His logic is inherently flawed because it pretends to look at the “cost” of educating a population.
Elevating a society is the purpose of a functioning developed government. Education is one manner in which that happens. And almost no child learns from a computer screen better than in-person hands on questions and answers.
The logic is flawed from the get-go which makes it purposely hard to think about the bigger picture.
There’s two points: standardizing k-12 education topics? Makes sense citizens of a country should learn the same building blocks, not counting electives. For example Texas shouldn’t be able to write out the trail of tears from their history books. Americans should learn about the cool stuff and the not so cool stuff, etc.
However, reducing in-person learning and access to professionals due to a misguided lack of respect for their school/degree?
Ok so in that case only the richest out there would have access to in person education and coaching.
Which is actually a SUPER libertarian “destroy the government and all its programs” talking point.
The game plan is essentially “make education cheaper and worse, so my kid has a better shot against the poors.” And in the meantime privatize every aspect you can to get donations as you sell off the education system to for-profit fake schools backed by the Devos family. Currently under multiple lawsuits. They also take to shitting on teachers as a whole and trying to make them seem ungrateful/bad/awful any way possible - like his generic non answers on the topic.
Now there are many ways on how to improve education, but starting at “how do I make it cheaper” is not the approach. It’s not a for-profit business. It’s a public service, it costs what it costs.
The correct approach of “How do I make it better” typically involves investing MORE into a program. Which is the opposite of what most conservative/libertarian leaning people want to see. So they push “starve the beast” policy.
Last edited:
Grindspine
likes pointy things
Payment of taxes being applied toward student loan repayment is an idea with merit!
Or as my linguistics professor had stated, "Language is by consensus".
Away from the semantic side of the thread watching news reports earlier today has me very concerned for the nation as a whole. What the populace really needs currently is an education in critical thinking with a focus on choosing sources wisely.
nightflameauto
SS.org Regular
We've spent forty-plus years trying to STOP critical thinking. No reason to reverse course now.
