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Originally Posted by mattj  If I'm in the top 25%, then why would I care that Canada and Australia may be nicer? Nicer to you, or someone else maybe, but I wouldn't trade where I am for anything. And the fact is, I could. I, and millions of others, have the opportunity and money to do so. But we like it here. Is that the case for Mexico, or India, or Pakistan, or 75+% of the countries out there? No. They want to flee those hellholes for us. Whoopdeedee, one country has a better education system, too bad they have restrictive laws concerning freedoms, or another country has a more productive economy, that's nice, too bad they have a broken judicial system. You cannot make the blanket statement that Canada or Australia have every single thing perfect and that America is some hellhole. We are an excellent country where we are free, and wealthy, and well taken care of. |
This isn't even logical; the argument is "Is America worse off than other developed countries?" Quit using dishonest debate tactics; it's doing you no favors. And I never said Canada or Australia were perfect, only that they were better in terms of education, and the state that the education system is in in a particular country determines it's success. The US does do certain things better than they do, but does that fix the US's problems? No. We can't simply ignore the destructive patterns and problems, claiming that 'well, we aren't good in X, but at least we've got Y!" Especially while many other countries have both X and Y. The US isn't going to stay a world power forever if we continue with that mentality.
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No way! Our huge, diverse country of 300+million people spread across countless thousands of square miles has a lower average than a handful of tiny homogenous countries? I would never have suspected
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Once again, a dishonest debate tactic. I would like to point out that Canada's certainly not tiny or homogenous, and the population changes little. It's merely a matter of how the entire thing is structured.
Outlier for the Detroit link. Besides, that program isn't an actual education program; it's a job program. Designed to help people get jobs, not a proper education. A job program should not be used as a substitute for an education just because the place you were born into has a crappy education system and low funding. As for the other link, wow. Just wow. Nowhere in that article is evidence that the US is on the right path for education as a whole. It only gives a few examples of innovative teachers or helping programs. That doesn't change the fact that we're using a system designed for the 1950s, and school districts' funding is grossly unequal.
That school system is overpopulated and filled with sub par teachers, along with the total lack of proper funding. I have a neighbor who teaches there (in a high school), and she says it's not uncommon to see teachers texting in class. Most don't get out because they're born into poverty. Even if they do everything right, how are they supposed to afford college? One can't rise up if they've got a hundred pound weight tied to each of their ankles. If you deny this, then I don't see the point in having a debate with you. To say that the US's school system is 'good enough, so why fix it?' is beyond ridiculous and contrary to the very nature of progress.
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Because, if you haven't noticed, our nation as a whole does not worship guns. I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't own a gun. I might at some point in the future. The only people that I know that do own guns have them to hunt. I live in the rural Midwest, and yet I don't know a single person who owns a gun just to own a gun.
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I know several, sadly. Aside from that, can you seriously deny the prevalence of guns in our society? In most other developed nations, gun laws are much stricter, and unsurprisingly, they have lower violence rates.
Gun violence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia