Sunday, March 01, 2009

A Little Perspective

This video's been making the rounds, but if you haven't seen it, here is Louis CK bringing a little perspective on our world on Conan O'Brien's show. Enjoy!

"Everything is so Amazing and Nobody is Happy . . ."



So, I looked this guy up and found the following little gem about public schools on his website:

"Public school is, to me, the most important thing in the whole world that actually exists. I seriously mean that. I think it's the solution to almost everything. Obviously, public school is in big trouble all over the country and in "this economy" it's about to get much worse.
I am a product of Public school. It's all I am a product of because I didn't go to college. My school had rich kids and poor kids. Mostly white kids though some black. Some of the teachers were incredible. Some weren't. There were good schools and bad, good years and bad. Kind of like everything else.
When I lived in Los Angeles, the public school system seemed terrible. I left before my daughter started Kindergarten so I didn't really experience it, but we had started to look for an alternative. Private schools, charter schools, Public schools in other districts that we'd have to finagle the system to move her to. There's this feeling when your local public school is not an option, that you are cast adrift. You start trying to find the perfect place. When you do, it's all filled up. you try to balance finances with education ideals, try to have just the right timing at just the right place.
When public schools are working, it's very simple. EVerybody that lives in that part of town goes to that school. That's just where everyone goes. And everyone has a stake in that school being good. If it's not good, people complain or get invovled. Sometimes they do that when it is good and the good school has to fight them off. But in any case, it's kind of a great self-cleaning system. It's a place where you have to put in a personal effort to get an above-average education. you have to be patient with the slow gears of beurocracy. There are many lumpy layers of paint on the walls. many generations of people from your area went there too. Some of them are teaching you. you can't avoid all kinds of people. Your parents can't mix the perfect coctail of diversity and political correctness that they can at private schools. Every part of society has to deal with every other part. And no one that teaches or works in a public school can be accused of doing it to get rich or for status or really anything else selfish. Firemen, policemen, public school teachers. Nuff said."

2 comments:

Laura said...

Freak! That guy is hilarious. I've never even heard of him before. And he's totally right- about flying and cell phones... and probably about public school. (Should I be ashamed that I'm thinking of moving to the "best" school district in LA or looking into private school for my little one? I would think the cognitive dissonance would be crippling, but I'm only mildly embarrassed.)

Mike Owens said...

Yeah, we're going to see what other material he's got. As for your mildly embarrassing condition, we feel ya. One of the reasons we moved to this city was because we had read that it is home to one of the "best" public school districts in Michigan (Mike looked up the data and everything! The only other comparable district was out of our price range). What do you do? It's not like you can hit a do-over button years later when you find out that your kid did not get the skills he needs. Grr. No matter what we decide, Mike's going to be on the teachers like white on rice. Poor Landon!