A Usenet persona calling itself KMAN wrote:


Ah. So you start holding a child accountable for their own future
starting
with infancy.

No, I hold the parents accountable.

But the child suffers.

Then perhaps the state should take custody of the child, award custody to
someone better able to raise the child, and garnish the parent's wages to
pay for the child's care...after eliminating any welfare payments to the
parents to stimulate them to get a job.

Born to parents who could not afford to send you to school?
Tough titties for you, this ain't the land of opportunity.

You confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.

No, I don't, actually.

There is no equality of opportunity for a child born into a poor family who
cannot access education or health care.

Wrong. In this country, opportunities are abundant. There are millions uponn
millions of success stories of poor people who have persevered and
succeeded. That's WHY a million people a month illegally enter this country.

In the Sudan, there are no opportunities for education or health care, but
in North America there are opportunities everywhere. All a parent has to do
is go and seek it out and resolve to be successful.

America is indeed the "Land of
Opportunity,"
but the opportunities are not all positive opportunities. You have an
equal
opportunity to FAIL as well as succeed. That's what causes people to
strive
to excel and advance.

As Linda Seebach said once, "The only way to make everyone equal is to
squash everyone flat."

You can't have an equal opportunity to anything if you are hungry,
uneducated, and without access to health care.

Sure you can. Go to a shelter, get a meal, go find a Catholic hospital and
seek medical care and go find a job to pay for your education.

Parents are not stimulated to encourage, assist, stimulate, enlighten,
browbeat, badger, threaten and otherwise require scholarship on the part
of
their children if they see no future for them because the dole is all they
know. Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he
can feed the world.

How ironic, to use the "teach him to fish" analogy while saying that poor
people should not have access to education.

I didn't say they shouldn't have access to education, I said that public
education is a dismal failure and that nobody should *expect* a free public
education as a "right" to be paid for by somebody else.

There are nearly unlimited educational opportunities out there, even for the
very poor, that either cost them nothing (charitable institutions) or merely
require some nominal input to qualify. There are vocational programs
sponsored by industry specifically targeted at the disadvantaged explicitly
to teach them a valuable skill that will be of use to the industry.

The opportunities are everywhere. All one needs to do is reach out and grab
one.

If you want to learn to fish, go to the dock and demonstrate to a ship
captain that you are eager and willing to work hard in exchange for his
teaching you how to fish. Quid pro quo. As simple as that.

The worst thing about a liberal arts degree is that some of the graduates
might be capable of thinking.

True, but sadly, almost universally, they fail to realize that potential,
largely thanks to the pervasive leftist/liberal apologetics of failure and
muddled thinking taught to them on most of our college campuses.

Rare indeed is the student who is able to rise above the leftist
propaganda
and demagogary to reach a state of enlightenment and understanding, and
every one who does is universally a conservative thinker.

In your fantasy world.

Is George W. Bush one of your elightened right-wing graduates? LOL.

His college grades were much higher than Kerry's, and slightly more than
half the voting population of the country find him to be sufficiently
intelligent to be President of the United States.

Pity we can't say the same about you.

--
Regards,
Scott Weiser

"I love the Internet, I no longer have to depend on
friends, family and co-workers, I can annoy people WORLDWIDE!" TM

© 2005 Scott Weiser