(Salt Lake City) – Dave Buhler will find it difficult to disavow his record of support for private school vouchers, mayoral candidate Ralph Becker said today, after Mr. Buhler held a press conference this morning on the topic of education.As a member of the Utah Senate, Buhler voted for a bill that would have paid to send at-risk students to private school using public taxpayer dollars (Sub. S.B. 58, 1995; S.B. 22, 1996). He also voted in favor of a tax credit for private school tuition (Sub. S.B. 61, 1997; S.B. 155, 1998). Buhler does not dispute that he cast these votes, but instead denies that either piece of legislation involved “vouchers.” But since both bills proposed to use public tax dollars to subsidize private schools, Becker believes they were in fact vouchers, or at least functionally indistinguishable from them.
“A voucher by any other name is still a voucher, and still harms public education,” said Becker, a longtime opponent of vouchers.
Shakespeare references aside, Becker said that he prefers to focus on his Education Blueprint, which has been a centerpiece of his campaign from early on. “I want to be Salt Lake City’s first Education Mayor, and I’ve developed a detailed blueprint to make that a reality over the next four year,” Becker said.
Highlights of Becker’s education plan include:
6 comments:
Supporting second-language proficiency
What language?
How many administrative positions can this guy come up with? What is this, the New Deal? How much more of a bureacracy do we really need in this already inefficient city? Jobs for the sake of jobs, positions for the sake of positions, money and citizen tax dollars squandered.
Becker's mind is a Tabula Rasa.
Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.
Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favor the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behavior, and intelligence.
In Western philosophy, traces of the idea that came to be called the tabula rasa appear as early as the writings of Aristotle:
What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet (grammateion) which bears no actual writing (grammenon); this is just what happens in the case of the mind. (Aristotle, On the Soul, 3.4.430a1).
Aristotle writes of the unscribed tablet in what is probably the first textbook of psychology in the Western canon, his treatise Περι Ψυχης (De Anima or On the Soul). However, besides some arguments by the Stoics and Peripatetics, the Aristotelian notion of the mind as a blank slate went much unnoticed for nearly 1800 years.
But the human intellect, which is the lowest in the order of intellects and the most removed from the perfection of the Divine intellect, is in potency with regard to things intelligible, and is at first "like a clean tablet on which nothing is written", as the Philosopher [Aristotle] says. (Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.79.2).
In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas brought the Aristotelian notion back to the forefront of modern thought. This notion sharply contrasted with the previously held Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, before being sent down to join a body here on Earth (see Plato's Phaedo and Apology, as well as others). St. Bonaventure (also 13th century) was one of Aquinas' fiercest intellectual opponents, offering some of the strongest arguments towards the Platonic idea of the mind.
Aquinas's writings on the tabula rasa theory stood untested and unprogressed for several centuries. In fact, our modern idea of the theory is mostly attributed to John Locke's expression of the idea in the 17th century. In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that the (human) mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. The notion is central to Lockean empiricism. As understood by Locke, tabula rasa meant that the mind of the individual was born "blank", and it also emphasized the individual's freedom to author his or her own soul. Each individual was free to define the content of his or her character - but his or her basic identity as a member of the human species cannot be so altered. It is from this presumption of a free, self-authored mind combined with an immutable human nature that the Lockean doctrine of "natural" rights derives.
Tabula Rasa is also featured in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. Freud depicted personality traits as being formed by family dynamics (see Oedipus complex, etc.). Freud's theories show that one can downplay genetic and congenital influences on human personality without advocating free will. In psychosanalysis, one is largely determined by one's upbringing.
The tabula rasa concept became popular in social sciences in the 20th century. Eugenics (mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) came to be seen not as a sound policy but as a crime. The idea that genes (or simply "blood") determined character took on racist overtones. By the 70s, some scientists had come to see gender identity as socially constructed rather than rooted in genetics (see John Money), a concept still current (see Anne Fausto-Sterling). This swing of the pendulum accompanied suspicion of innate differences in general (see racism) and a propensity to "manage" society, where the real power must be if people are born blank.[original research?]
In the last few decades, twin studies, studies of adopted children, and the David Reimer case have demonstrated genetic influence on (if not strict determination of) personal characteristics, such as IQ, alcoholism, gender identity, and other traits.[1]
Steven - this is the one position that Ralph has proposed, and it won't necessarily cost anything extra but will most likely be reallocated from the existing staffers in the mayor's office.
Go Ralph Becker, your our man. I'm an Ogden Mormon Cop. We love S L C.
We need a good man like you to keep frowing on Rocky's Successes.
No dount you'll jump in and get the work done.
P S take care of your Cops and the cops will take care of the voters.
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