A good education lays the foundation for a person's life in this post industrial age. The ability to read, write, and reason are just modern counterparts to the plow, ax, and horse. A good educational foundation gives individuals choices. The more options a individual has, the less likely an individual will be to become a social burden though crime or inactivity.
As long as the education system works, I do not care how it is done. If a totally centralized education with no parent\student choice works....And works well. I am all for it. Of course, I do not believe that organization structure would work as well as others, but that is my personal opinion.
Fixing the education system is a long process because we are coming into the middle of the problem and we have to start at the beginning. That is one thing I like about NCLB. It starts young and adds requirements as the children progress, you cannot get much fairer than that. While fixing the current system is important, it is also worthy to note that we have a educational backlog that must be filled. Fortunately most of the people in most need of education help are in one place (jail). Unfortunately, they are also shunned by society.
I think lowest level offenders or ones who have proven their selves to be good inmates could be offered a form of work credit with private companies. Those companies could get free labor, while the prisoners got free training. The companies could be required to give the criminal a job after he gets out, and the criminal could be required to work there a certain length of time after his debt is paid. This problem would face many issues, such as unions and possibly upsetting the legal job market.
Another idea, that would work similar to the idea above, but would have a different set of issues to overcome, is allowing inmates to serve in the military. An idea that I have never thought of until I read a liberal's blog, odd.
cube
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Prisons in our country are a huge mess. The violence that goes on inside them in my opinion is unacceptable and hurts our system. If we lock people up we have a responsibility to protect them, even if they are very bad people.
I don't think violent criminals in our military is a good idea at all. It might be acceptable if we were expecting missions where the goal is to destroy everything in sight but with any sort of nation building mission I don't think we want violent criminals. Abu Ghraib was largely purpetrated by civilian Prison Guards, I expect had they been inmates it would have been even worse.
prisons are good at keeping people locked up, but not good at keeping them from coming back to prison.
while you want to lock up the viloent ones, there plenty in jail for reasons that are non viloent that could use a second chance
Post a Comment