I'm starting to see the advantage of starting kids to school at age 4. Maybe he was talking about children growig up in crack houses. I just am not .aware of the living conditions of four years old in Chicago.
The four year old growing up on a farm riding around with day with dad obviously it would be a healthy environment more likely.
In the correct unsupervised environment children will learn many things on their own naturally because their one objective is to become like adults.
I really do see the advantage to this in the typical urban environment where a sadly high number of single mothers are trying to raise kids, and often find it difficult if not impossible to get a job and raise little kids, particularly if she has kids with health or learning problems.
Which quite frankly applies to all moms, no matter where we live.
So....if we get the kids into a protected and learning environment a year or two earlier, and Mom can now get a job and get off assistance, there
seems to be some logic here. But would it work? I think you have to try. And perhaps kids with learning disabilities get diagnosed a year earlier and get helped earlier.
I grew up in a town of 1800 with a senior graduating class of 53 in a combined junior/senior high school.
I had classes on the stage. And sometimes in the hallway. It was all before the big new construction came in, mandated by
the State, or we would lose our local high school forever and be bussed an hour away.
Our school didn't have a swimming pool. It didn't have a football team. The basketball team lost every game for two and half years, a school worst record I believe. It was small town USA in a fairly highly educated area that was quickly becoming a suburb of Philadelphia.
And despite this "substandard", in the State's eyes, little junior senior high school of 360 kids, we did just as well as other surrounding
schools and sometimes better in sending kids off to college. My brother's wife was the head of the English Dept there and I can vouch that the kids who came out of that high school could enunciate and remember their grammar. Even if they seemed to talk in code to their peers...
And just about everyone went home to two parents. And the few single parents there were, in a small community, often folk reached out to them and helped out.
Because of my birthdate in March, I was able to go to Kindergarten a year earlier than others. Always wondered if that extra year, or a little less, helped me in any way. Pure conjecture, but since I started off in a small Quaker school, and only stayed there one year before going off to public school the rest of the way, a Quaker kindergarten is frankly not quite like what I envision as the norm for inner city daycare. I was lucky, and privileged. So many kids aren't, and maybe Obama is trying to help them, and maybe get a longer term secondary benefit. We won't know until we try, but whether this is the best way, well, we all have a lot of opinions on that.
My points were(1) "arms" and "weapons" are synonyms,(2) Either word has a wide range of meanings, some of which were likely not the meaning intended in the Bill of Rights, (3) There is nothing sacred about the word "arms" could be a right arm and a left arm, (4) the intended meaning by the founders has been long debated and is not clear (5) those who follow the Constitution will abide by the Law of the Land and our Court System (6) Weapons did not inmply anything different than arms..they are synonyms..they have the same meaning, (7) The use of the synonym for the kids in that class was no big deal (8) the claim of liberal agenda should not have been made on this thread...take it where it belongs!
