Thank you for your apology. Cheers.

Nor would I want to leave the impression that it's all rosy with our system. We were lucky to encounter a really good (but unpopular among many parents) principal with vision and drive in Primary School. Unfortunately he left too early to be replaced by someone clearly more concerned with working their way up the hierarchy.

However the Academically Selective High Schools* (which offer far too few places imho) do provide very good value for those who can't afford the ca. $35,000p.a. needed to attend a decent private grammar school. Again these are very controversial, I guess it depends on how one's socialism runs. ;) Some people are against a subset of children in the public system being given this advantage. I think that children should be given the resources required for them to reach their full potential no matter what their parents earn.

[*this being Australia we also have separate Sports Selective High Schools]

Kids aren't widgets and we can't just stamp them out.

It's this isn't it? So long as we only have one child we can flatter ourselves that their development is down to our awesome parenting (which is not to say our awesome parenting is anything but vitally important), but when the next one comes along, it becomes clear there's a little person in their own right insisting that they come out. And they need to be met on their own terms and their specific strengths and weaknesses need to be addressed.

My feeling the reason the 'whole word' and 'phonics' groups both steadfastly believe they have the answer is because both have seen their methods work, (which, given variance among children, will have happened on many occasions).

the general "No Child Gets Ahead" principle

That may indeed have been a principle informing the teacher in K and 1.

putting your children into the public school system today is blatant child abuse

The principal responded, mainly to our and another child's situation (his parents were not shy claiming he was gifted (they turned up with psychologists reports etc.) by creating a special needs class, called the 'research group' and he happened (in a 5 teacher school) to have a teacher handy who had studied a unit on teaching intellectually advanced kids. This was, it must be said, a cause for anger and resentment among many of the school's parents.

He was then accepted into an academically selective public high school (the best of which invariably outperform the best private schools, for obvious reasons), smashed his HSC out of the park and has been accepted into the University of Sydney (again a top-tier public institution).

"[B]latant child abuse?" I'm not so sure.

you "fixed" this for your second by deliberately holding him back until he entered kindergarten

Which is the very opposite of what I actually wrote.

probably at no small cost to him

If you regard being STEM rather than Humanities oriented, then yes.

My first son taught himself to read before he could walk. I remember carrying him as a babe-in-arms as we walked past at the post office, and at the sight of the sign he proudly announced "POST!" (He had a toy post truck with the same POST logo used by AustraliaPost). Even earlier he'd announced the, admittedly easy word, 'Bobo' which was the name of a chimp in the English language book he had, when I opened the box with his first Bobo Siebenschläfer (a squirrel?) book.

By the time he went to school, he was, for a 5 year old, an advanced reader. After 2 years of phonics (and the dis-challenging books he had to bring home to read, thus blocking him reading more advanced books) his reading, far from advancing had, if anything, retarded. We complained and fortunately the principle of our very small school saw the problem and responded accordingly.

My second son, perhaps because of our experience with the first, we could not teach to read for love or money. He went to Kindergarten able to read very little. After 2 years of phonics, and the self-same books, his reading skills grew significantly.

I can only speak anecdotally, of course, but I'm left with the distinct impression that there exists individual variation among human children in this regard. If that be true, then the approach taken should be responsive to the individual needs of the child, rather than to ideological squabbles between the 'whole word' or 'phonics' camps.

I suspect they meant to oppose "unchecked and unregulated capitalism" to the more common type of regulated capitalism found in modern liberal democracies* organised by rule of law.

By 'capitalism' I would understand a system where profit is generated for private owners (of land, industry, raw materials and other inputs of production), employing wage labour to fashion commodities for sale on a market. These features don't simply vanish once state intervention, which after all is made to shore the system up, are applied. Capitalism would still be capitalism if for instance (insofar as it is technically possible) all coal power were replaced by nuclear power.

This is not to claim that capitalism is the mode of production best suited to protect environmental goods. I'm really only objecting to the suggestion that anything other than an absolutely laissez-faire capitalism qualifies as capitalism, and that consequently such state interventions which may, from time to time, be necessary to prevent capitalism from imploding, thereby bring into being some alternative non-capitalist (much less a socialist) system.

[*Note to our Americans readers that, whatever "liberal democrat" might mean to you, in speaking of "liberal democracies"the liberal refers to market-based distribution of goods and services and the democracy refers to the use of elections in constituting the government.]

:)

But note the same kind of thing just happened to you: "Boronx converted "in general" to "any" without so much as blinking.

We, as a society, still have some knowledge that we consider to be basic. IMHO, knowing that a computer can store files for later use

It hurts no one to know that a spinning wheel can be used for spinning wool and a hand-loom can be used for making cloth, or similarly that they used, in the not-too-distant past, to store files on a (personal) computer (and before that on 5" floppy drives) for later use ... but why would knowledge of obsolete/obsolescent technology be socially "basic knowledge?"

People will either have sufficient knowledge to navigate the available technology that the ordinary non-specialist is required to use, or they will fail the requirements of everyday living. That has not changed, nor will it change.

You're essentially using the system as a blacklist/whitelist. While this again isn't perhaps 'social media' as I was describing the term, it approaches it: inasmuch as the network of your 'social' relationship shapes your experience of the site. You are, clearly, being more deliberate in applying the filters.

I don't think the problem is social media. Newsgroups are social media.

I do agree that the Eternal September effect (which is just our old guard's slang for the greater post-AOL democratisation of the the net) is massively a factor, but I feel you may be flattening the difference between Usenet Newsgroups and what people generally understand by social media, ie. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc., a difference which plays directly into said democratisation.

'Social media' (like every term) can take on a variety of different meanings of course, however the attribute i that sets it apart from news sites (n the common understanding of SocMed) is precisely the social (as opposed to the purer informational) aspect of it. Originally this attribute may indeed have been the idea of maintaining one's social networks (early FB), but now the aim of the game for the significant block of participants, as encouraged (only sometimes deliberately) by the technology, is to garner social approval: followers, likes, retweets etc.. Even groups of users dedicated to promulgating particular ideological positions are bound together by follower networks which binding then amplifies the group's reinforcement of allies and pile-ons against enemies over and above the more access neutral comment pages on news sources (a fortiori oldskool newsgroups). It's rare for comments on news sites to number in the thousands, or 10s of thousands, something Twitter achieves every day.

Although Slashdot introduced a friend system, it's functional irrelevance (at least that's how it seems to me YMMV), testifies to the fact that this site is not, dramatically contrasted with Instagram for instance, a (successful) 'social media' site.

Python is great only if you've been subjected to something worse.

Python is the worst programming language, apart from all the others I've had to work in from time to time (with apologies to Churchill).