[WikiEN-l] School struggle (was: Why is this an emergency?)

Mon Sep 26 13:24:18 UTC 2005

Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

> The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of 
> community that really does rely on common goals and 
> shared values.
> 
> It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that  
> factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed 
> to measure the relative strength of factions with precision.  
> Such structures rely on hierarchies, constitutions,  
> parliamentary procedure, and voting.
> 
> Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course,  
> or does it  represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of  
> consensus on important issues?

I think it represents an attempt to delineate a boundary. It's a search
for a way to define what is "encyclopedic", i.e., important enough to be
included in the encyclopedia.

Is your local high school notable? Maybe not to me, but to your
community it is. The school, its doings, its and so forth, might have
more impact on your community than city hall. The policies of the
principal and faculty, the coaching philosophy of the football team, can
have far reaching effects. 

I daresay a school would be more important than a rock band. In
Cambridge, Massachusetts, there are two public high schools. (For you
Britishers, this is "public" in the sense of being financed by the
government and subject to the rulings of an elected School Committee.
They don't charge tuition to residents.) Probably as many as half of the
Cambridge's 100,000 residents attend one of these two schools. 

So policy choices like having Zero Tolerance for drug abuse (or letting
kids sell drugs in the hall ways); abstinence education or "here's how
to have fun in bed"; civics classes that emphasize personal
responsibility and helping others vs. "here's how to make the gov't
serve you more"; etc., have far ranging consequences.

I would like to know a lot more about what's going on in my hometown
high schools. 

Ed Poor