Education reformers have long called for U.S. kids to log more time in the classroom so they can catch up with their peers elsewhere in the world, but resistance from leisure-loving teenagers isn't the only reason there is no mass movement to keep schoolchildren in their seats.
Such a change could cost cash-strapped state governments and local school districts billions of dollars, strip teachers of a time-honored perk of their profession, and irk officials in states that already bridle at federal intrusion into their traditional control over education.
Texas already forbids school from starting before the fourth Monday of August, a provision designed to save money on utility bills and increase business for tourist destinations and other summer attractions.
"Ultimately the states, not the federal government, should have the final word on this and other public school decisions," said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry.
In Kansas, sporadic efforts by local districts to extend the school year at even a few schools have been met by parental resistance, said state education commissioner Diane DeBacker.
. But the captains of industry
by applying squatter doctrines to the evolution of American
industrial society, have made the process so clear that
he who runs may read.
it seemed
not impossible that the outcome of free competition under
individualism was to be monopoly of the most important natural
resources and processes by a limited group of men whose
vast fortunes were so invested in allied and dependent industries
that they constituted the dominating force in the industrial
life of the nation
Unregulated turn of events, the people were turned loose and made the best of it. What is wrong with this? They set the standards, and there is no room for competition.
According to Adam Smith and the free market economy theory, the people are the best regulators. This sounds like socialism...
The Granger and the Populist were
prophets of this reform movement. Mr. Bryan's Democracy,
Mr. Debs' Socialism, and Mr. Roosevelt's Republicanism all
had in common the emphasis upon the need of governmental
regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of the common
man
"the
State University and the public school system which it crowns
would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could
offer."
"general system of education ascending in
regular gradations from township schools to a State University,
wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all,"
expresses the Middle Western conception born in the days of
pioneer society and doubtless deeply influenced by Jeffersonian
democracy.
It is hardly too
much to say that the best hope of intelligent and principled
progress in economic and social legislation and administration
lies in the increasing influence of American universities.
able to
think for themselves, governed Dot by ignorance, by prejudice
or by impulse, but by knowledge and reason and high-mindedness,
The learning of the few
is despotism; the learning of the many is liberty.
At first pioneer democracy had scant respect for the
expert.
That they may perform their work they must be left free, as
the pioneer was free, to explore new regions and to report
what they find; for like the pioneers they have the ideal of
investigation, they seek new horizons.
There, Hall objected vehemently to the emphasis on teaching traditional subjects, e.g., Latin, mathematics, science and history, in high school, arguing instead that high school should focus more on the education of adolescents than on preparing students for college.
Hall believed that humans are by nature non-reasoning and instinct driven, requiring a charismatic leader to manipulate their herd instincts for the well-being of society. He predicted that the American emphasis on individual human right and dignity would lead to a fall that he analogized to the sinking of Atlantis.
Hall coined the phrase "storm and stress" with reference to adolescence, taken from the German Sturm und Drang movement. Its three key aspects are conflict with parents, mood disruptions, and risky behavior.
If the company could monitor sales of ice cream - or bottled water or sun tan cream - on hot days like this one and then gauge future demand, he said, it could alter the way the company behaved
Real-time - the act of responding to events as they happen - is changing the way that the world behaves.
The software has also been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis. Computer programmes automatically sold stocks as fear spread in the markets, because their algorithms have built-in "sell" orders.
SAP's software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously high.
Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats.
"It's difficult to think of an industry that isn't affected by real-time," Mr Palmer says.
The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship
For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement
companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or p
urchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator
Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace.
Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well.