[speaker001:] um let's see so what's wrong with our public school system well I think uh I've been talked into that that one of the main problems is non directive education where you teach kids to basically have a good self image and assume that if they think good about themselves they will they will learn well for example if you deal with uh math scores uh US math scores are um um I don't know seventeenth out of twenty three industrialized nations we're really low I mean I'd be really even surprised if they were that high these are these are scores on standardized tests and yet if you uh give American students the question I am good at math they'll rank themselves much higher than will for example Korean students who do much better at math and um a number of educational theorists uh predominately predominately conservative or they're called conservative because they think this I suppose say that the problem is that we've gotten away too much from teaching the kids the material and too much into let them let letting them discover what they feel or what they want to learn for themselves and that can be seen in you know in math scores it can be seen in sex education where we've had twenty years of generally available sex education in this country at the same time we have a rising crisis of teenage pregnancy uh it can be seen in the fact that students cheat a lot more at least admit to cheating a lot more than they used to they're not told what's right and what's wrong and they're not taught what they needed to be taught the urge they're they're they're taught to discover their own values and their own interest and if you let a kid do that that's the way to get uh you know to get no progress or very little progress
[speaker002:] are those are are as you talk about that it reminds me of of one problem that I think is probably as far as my perception is the most glaring error
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] that is because I know a lot of school teachers I know a lot of particularly particularly girls who in like in their their thirties who teach school twenties and thirties and I'm appalled that we have that we pay our teachers so little
[speaker001:] um-hum um-hum um-hum um-hum
[speaker002:] and we give them so much so such a small budget to work with
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] and with you know with a virtually nonexistent budget they have to supply decoration you know things bulletin boards on the rooms things for the kids to practice on textbooks
[speaker001:] yeah yeah yeah
[speaker002:] and so so so the pathetic the teachers themselves get a pathetic salary and they end up almost across the board taking some of their own money which they don't have and buying school supplies so that they can they can teach their kids and their dedication astounds me
[speaker001:] that's true yeah um-hum
[speaker002:] and I
[speaker001:] right well
[speaker002:] I don't know I don't know if we're getting a quality education from teachers who are underpaid
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] but I'm sure I'm sure that it it's like uh I work at AT&T and now I I if I want to spend four hundred dollars um
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] I don't even have to I don't have to ask anybody I just go do it
[speaker001:] hum
[speaker002:] that's probably the teacher's entire budget for the year if they're lucky
[speaker001:] well I work at NC State University and I do the same thing I spend I spend my own money to buy things that the university you know doesn't provide and I think little things like like transparency pens their transparency pens are pitiful I buy my own um I pay my own way on trips because they don't have any travel budget since nineteen ninety now uh I mean some of it comes from grants but what doesn't come from grants I pay pay for myself and in fact my business deductions are thousands of dollars a year more than the two percent uh limit so so the the the same is true here but you know I I talked talked to one teacher about that at a wedding reception once and I said she said we need more pay I said yeah but but but what you need even more than that is you need more flexibility to do things the way you see that they should be done and she said yeah I agree with that entirely that the bureaucracy really hamstrings teachers um they they they in many places are just told what textbook to teach from whether or not they think it's a good one I mean the decision can be made from a central authority in the state to which is subject to lots of political pressure the teachers don't get to choose themselves what what book to teach uh teach from they go don't get to choose what order to cover things in and they really cannot adapt things to their teaching style in in into their kids uh that is a big problem and I think the large part of that problem is due to the educational bureaucracy here I go you know maligning some some uh uh amorphous much maligned entity but I really think that that's a serious problem that that there's so many layers of administration to make sure that everything's done right that everybody's rights are respected and so forth that there's no flexibility down at the at the at the bottom level and that's what the teachers have to deal with and and by the way that's another reason that their pay is so low because the administrators soak up so much of the budget
[speaker002:] yeah I think so I for example they will have a a million dollar building
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] but no no money for supplies
[speaker001:] yeah yeah well I think that that one way to solve the problem I mean I I you know if anything doesn't work right introduce competition and the the voucher approach approach to um to to to paying for