Obama Would Redirect NASA Funding to Education 357
QuantumG writes "In a recent article on The Space Review, Greg Zsidisin reveals that Barack Obama plans to delay Project Constellation for at least five years, using the redirected funds to nationalize early-education for children under five years old to prepare them for the rigors of kindergarten and beyond, if he is elected president. It is feared that if this happens the Vision for Space Exploration will flounder and that may be the end of human spaceflight altogether."
Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we mod article summaries?
-1 Drama Queen
So according to these doyens of space and associated fields, if a U.S. project is put off for 5 years (to educate children - how DARE they?) then this will quell humankind's desire to travel in space forever?
I think there's some space all right, but it's obviously not all out there beyond the stars...
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However if this is true or not, I think, it's a good idea and should be at least taken in to consideration! Just ask yourself: What would be more useful for the world and U.S. citizens?
Sixty-six billion dollars (Score:2)
Do you really think that Department of Education is giving us four times the value that NASA is? (It's main initiative right now is something called "No Child Left Behind." )
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You assume that if we pull out of Iraq we'll loose influence with the middle east and that nothing positive could come out of it. This would also significantly reduce the budget in coming years by a considerable amount.
I don't see how spending more money on education will automatically cause students to develop political awareness that will shield them from corrupt politicians. We've been increasing spending on education for decades now and a major
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Education is no good reason? Dear lord, the ignorant trolls I see these days...
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Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:4, Insightful)
> more money always buys a better gun, but more money can't buy a better
> teacher.
Simple, lets start with guns. There are LOTS of guns, built for every possible use and you can pick the one best suited to your intended use. There are lots of good reviews to allow you to make an informed decision.
Now lets contrast this with teachers. Testing teachers for quality control is forbidden. Parents disagree over what 'teaching' even should be, but the State prescribes one doctrine for all. If one disagrees with WHAT is being taught it is hard to see how buying more of it will change anything. If we can't quantify quality other than waiting thirten years to see how many children out of each batch gets destroyed it is hard to get a grip on quality control, thus throwing more money at a broken design is contra indicated.
Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
1. Create obedient drones to man the dehumanizing factories of the industrial revolution. (Leader types were to be the children of the wealthy who would continue attending the best private academies.)
2. Ensure every drone (child) was properly instructed in socialism, including their palce in the new order. i.e. They follow, and the annointed elite lead.
3. Remove children from the labor force, thus removing a major competitive pressure on the trade unions.
Even if the schools were operating with 100% efficency I'd be arguing for burning the lot to the ground and starting over. But the reality is even more horrible. No. Sending a child to government schools is child abuse and pissing away the entire Federal budget on the current schools could only, in a perfect world, bring them back to the dystopia I outlined above because that is their stated DESIGN GOAL.
When you are ready to join me in abolishing the current system and privitizing education we can talk about whether and how much the various levels of government should subsidize education.
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And is hiring administrators without huge egos that won't run schools like their personal kingdoms also forbidden?
State
Ahh, a Libertarian. Right. Why are you even commenting? You're not in favor of fixing public education, you're probably partial to dismantling it. There's not much constructive you can contribute if your goal is destructive.
Now consider the original published design goals for mandatory public education:
No, let's not. You can continue to live
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Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:4, Insightful)
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A. The commissar of education of the former Soviet Union
B. The minister of education for the government of Communist China
C. Adolph Hitler
D. Justice H. Walter Croskey of California Court of Appeals
The answer is "D."
"Writing for the court of appeals' 3-0 decision, Croskey held that parents without teaching credentials do not have a constitutional right to hom
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The time in US history when education was at it's best happens to be the same time when spending on the space program was it's highest.
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Actually, within the last 20-30 years, the democrats have always given NASA a rough time on their budget. During the Clinton administration before the republicans took over congress, they slashed NASA's budget more then the total of the previous cut and the next three cuts combined. It was a whipping post issue when Reagan and the first Bush was in office too. They might not have slashed the budget but they railed against it and cut increased purposed by the the
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Well, the fear is somewhat unreasonable, but it is there. But there're also people who fear the takeover of the British monarchy by alien lizards (insert your own choice for ludicrous things to be afraid of). So saying someone is "afraid" of a potential future ie not a useful observation to make.
My take is that Obama is exchanging a program with concrete goals, even if they are expensive and perhaps poorly planned, for a feel-good measure. The money might be spent on "education", but what guarantee do we
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(snip)...and take the funds for the proposed education program (assuming it actually has some value) from known overfunded areas like the entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, government retirement programs, etc. (snip)
I am curious as to what you read where you learn that Social Security has too much money and that taking away government retirement programs is a good thing (hint, the primary reason people work for the government is the benefits, and most of those are the retirement).
Also, the more socialist Obama becomes the more my vote swings back the other way.
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I am curious as to what you read where you learn that Social Security has too much money and that taking away government retirement programs is a good thing (hint, the primary reason people work for the government is the benefits, and most of those are the retirement).
You can always pay less benefits. And superficially putting money into education seems a more worthwhile use of Social Security than merely to transfer wealth from young to old. Second, while there are some tough jobs like in the military where the benefits are justified, most such positions would be filled anyway. The benefits are overly generous and those people would work anyway. The combination of job stability and benefits is hard to beat. Then there's such things as the federal retirement fund for r
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The ones that forbid 90% of what the Federal Government is currently doing. It's quite simple actually and you might be up to the task.
Step One: Obtain a copy of the US Constituition (Hint: Google is your friend) and read it.
Step Two: Locate and quote the section that authorizes the Federal Government to do any/all of the following:
Step Two-A: Establish government schools, or to fund them
Step Two-B: Require children to attend government schools
Step Two-C: Establish nationw
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As my father always explained to me, the problem with getting Federal or State grants and funds as a local school is that it always has strings attached. You need to jump through dozens of hoops to get the money, so many that sometimes it renders any financial advantage provided by the grant moot, or at the very least diverts human energy which could be spent dealing with problems on the ground.
That said, for all its problems, more money for local schools would be a very good thing in the majority of cas
Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the pool of available and willing professional expertise is not static. I've already witnessed this at my current workplace, where, after less than 1 year of abandoning a relatively complicated process for a far more simple but grossly less efficient one due to temporarily relaxed requirements, the very same people who used to run the former process are unable to revive it as requirements swing back towards tighter schedules and resources--in fact their efforts to do so have made things even worse.
It is always harder to start (or revive) a program than to keep one running, and even highly skilled people who are capable of the latter may not be able to do the former if it is interrupted or temporarily disbanded for a significant period of time.
If you interrupt an extremely technically demanding program for 5 years, it will either or both take a long time or a director and team of a totally different caliber to bootstrap it again.
The principles described in the above also apply doubly to political will. At this point, NASA's funding is largely due to the legendary inertia of the government. If it were scrapped, it would take someone with an overwhelming mandate and clear, focused vision to build the political consensus and drive it through congress again.
Note that 5 years means that he is scheduling the program's revival in the next presidential term. He does not feel that it should be his responsibility to put humpty dumpty back together again after pushing him off a the wall.
It is hyperbole to say that this would kill manned space exploration, but it may well kill manned space exploration in the US until the next cold war/space race, which we are likely to lose if we try to revive gutted institutions to compete with a program with strong, decades-long unbroken momentum.
Also, speaking to the larger issue of education, 'more funding' is absolutely not a silver bullet that will guarantee better quality, and the education section in his 'blueprint' booklet is totally opaque. It identifies many issues (the easiest part), states proposals to address the issues (also easy), and then does nothing to explain why or how those proposals will work (the only part that really matters).
In all honesty, I think Obama is probably the candidate I dislike the least at this point, but--and I don't hold the following against him directly, per se--it really bothers me that his supporters seem to be under the influence of a Jobs-esque reality distortion field. That people on /. of all places are willing to trivialize the scrapping of a major program of NASA because a politician cries 'think of the children'--without even attempting a strong explanation of why this is necessary--is just sad.
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No different than a town near me. They had a big problem with drugs and prostitution. So they closed the topless bars. Looks like you are doing something with out really doing anything useful.
If the US puts off it's space program for a few years. Thousands if not tens o
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It's not the only bad idea he has. Unfortunately, Obama supporters have already modded you to zero for stating the readily-apparent truth, and no doubt this too will be modded down as well. It's a similar phenomenon to how they've taken over digg and spammed the forum with pro-Obama and anti-Clinton media for the past several months.
The bottom line is that NASA and human spaceflight are going to suffer because (a) the m
Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare it to other countries and US education's problem isn't even lack of money, the whole system's just fscked up.
Also, if Mister Universe would slash the DoD budget to more sane levels (i.e. less than the money spent by all other nations on earth combined when the majority of that money is spent by your allies), then instead a few billions he'd be able to distribute a few hundred billions and perhaps he could even give NASA another billion or two without anyone noticing.
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This idea Obama has here might be stupid, but it pales in comparison with the sheer stupidity of the Clinton campaign.
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Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
Radical and disruptive is exactly what the US needs right now.
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Re:Err. Can we mod summaries? (Score:5, Insightful)
What we need is a return to rationality, common sense and decency, real compassion for other beings, and respect for human rights.
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Let's hope America can survive this one and get things in shape f
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Perhaps you might want to rethi
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One, they won't want the loss of the war on their record. And regardless of if we are losing now, it would be the next president that lost the war when they take actions to, lose the war. If they could force Bush to lose the war first, it might be a different story. It doesn't look like that will happen though.
Two,
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*yes, I know this is melodramatic. But the fact is that tax authority comes either from the consent of the taxed or the threat of violence.
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As for your observations of people in college, that is expected. People in college are there to learn things but have no real world experience most of the time. This allows them to have abstract views on life and society in general. Some people grow out of it and into other areas, some stay firmly attached. A whole lot m
That's disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)
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All of that with nukes. No thanks. Dealing with the strategic consequences of that in the long run may actually outweight current investment in th
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Perhaps. Then again, Soviet Russia survived the death of Lenin and later Stalin, and communist China outlived Mao. Simply because a dictator is dead doesn't neccessarily mean that his regime will collapse.
Does anyone know pre-invasion Iraq well enough to know if the Baath party could had stayed in power with Saddam dead ?
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One of the conversation themes that arised was the invasion of the USA on Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein. I found very interesting the point of view of this people that come from the Middle East and some of them (having just started their PhDs) were in their respective
Re:That's disappointing (Score:4, Informative)
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The truth is, the reason the middle east is in such shambles is because culturally, people from that part of the world are very complacent about the status quo.
Talking about status quo, isn't that the same status quo that is making people in the USA fear the "communists" attempts to have national health programs?
People prefer to stay the way they are, we discuss it quite a lot here in slashdot talking about "John D
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OTOH, anyone who thinks that Iraq will turn into the next Japan or Germany if we stay a few more years is completely insane.
It's going to be bad now or it's going to be bad later.
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All of that with nukes. No thanks. Dealing with the strategic consequences of that in the long run may actually outweight [sic] current investmen
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Quickly pulling out of Iraq will create an Iran which is double the size of present.
No it wouldn't. Iran is considerably larger than all of Iraq in population and land area. So adding southern Iraq to Iran, which isn't likely to happen IMHO, wouldn't "double" Iran. What could happen though is that Iran becomes considerably more powerful in the region due to a breakup in Iraq. That could require a larger US military presence in the Middle East than we currently have especially if Iran obtains nuclear weapons. For example, how do you prevent Iran from invading southern Iraq in the advent o
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Quickly pulling out of Iraq will create an Iran which is double the size of present. There will be a Kurd fragment in the north (with a tiny bit of oil) which may or may not end up being eaten by Turkey, an arab fragment in the west (with virtually no oil, just camels) which may or may not be eaten by Saudi and a Iraq-Iran shia state in the south, west and center.
I have no idea why, but that entire paragraph just made me hungry. Except for the camels bit. Now I have to go find breakfast.
Slashdot! News for nerds. Looking after your daily nutritional needs since 1997.
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What do you think, that only USA can install puppet states? Other nations know how to do it as well and there is nothing easier than doing this on religious grounds. In fact it is the cheapest way of doing it.
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Re:That's disappointing (Score:5, Informative)
The Iraq war is paid for almost exclusively with special funding initiatives, it is not part of the budget. So ending the war won't suddenly free up trillions of dollars for other uses, it will just slow our descent into debt from the Demon Drop speed it is currently.
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Do these "special funding initiatives" somehow not have to be paid for? If so, let's just declare "special funding initiatives" for universal health care, a trip to Mars, and a pony for every American.
Of course ending the war would free up funds. The fact that war spending isn't accounted for in the regular budget is jus
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Just because people aren't interested doesn't mean that it's not an important cause worthy of tax dollars. The fact of the matter is, a number of o
The rigors of kindergarten (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh no you don't! Not until you've studied up for your advanced color identification exam!"
Exactly! - this is pre-K babysitting (Score:2)
Rob Reiner just tried passing a similar bill/program here in California. I'm surprised NASA's the target this time. It's ususally cigarette smokers or the "rich". Guess they're becoming an easy target, too.
Hey moms, dads - no need to spend time with your kids anymore. No time for babies. Send them off for early "education".
What a brave new world we live in....
And Iraq? (Score:2, Offtopic)
This remids me of... (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) [wikipedia.org]
I call shenanigans (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I call shenanigans (Score:5, Informative)
http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/HQpress/112007%20education%20plan%201.pdf [barackobama.com]
barackobama.com, of course, being the official Barack Obama website.
This link then redirects to the 3cdn hosting site, where the PDF is located.
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Re:I call shenanigans (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck, I hate politicians.
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In Soviet Florida he changes his message.
The worst thing is, I'd still vote for him because Hillary and McCain are probably worse. If only his supporters would stop being so annoying. He's not a saint, he's a politician just like the rest, hell, he's better at negative campaigning than Hillary.
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Wait... wrong site.
How 'bout a cite there? That's an awfully inflammatory thing to just lob out there.
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The Orlando Sentinel had a story that they ran where it compared things Obama said outside of Florida to things he said while in Florida.
Hm I thought he "didn't campaign" in FL. Can you get a link to that Orlando Sentinel story? It'd be great to send off to some Obama-trolls.
But something else is important to remember everyone: the president cannot legislate, only Congress can. So everything requires the approval of Congress for funding, etc, and Obama would simply be initiating the discussion on these topics.
Citation (Score:2)
I checked Obama's site and found no mention of any plan to make this particular cut. I think the author of the original story is making things up.
The first time he mentioned space in his campaign literature was on page 15 of a 15 page document about his plans for education (which in itself provides some insight into how important space is to him), where he says he's going to fund his additions to the 66 billion dollar education budget by cuts from NASA. The first citation is here [3cdn.net]
No one needs pre-kindergarten education (Score:5, Insightful)
Open letter to the people having these children: Your genes are not special. Your kid will not cure cancer. Get over yourself. It's expensive to raise children--especially when you have to pay the people who are actually doing it. Why don't you just volunteer for one of those Big Brother programs on the weekends? You'll see those kids just as often as your own, with the added benefit of not causing all that emotional damage.
Rigors of kindergarten, pffft.
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Now the idea of making it nationalized is terrible. There should be choices out there for more or less academic pre-schools, depending on what your kid enjoys.
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Biology. There comes a point in the lives of many women (in their late 20s in my observation) where a hormonal switch gets flipped and they suddenly say "I want a baby." Then, after a horrific pregnancy + labor + first 3 months, they say "What have I done?" By then it's too late.
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The bloke can quit his job and raise the kid theres no need to pass of the responsiblity as soon as possible.
When I used to live with my parents, my mum was a child minder and it always used to bug me that I would spend more time with the kids she looked after than both parents combined and I would be activily avoiding them. In pr
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My aunt just had her first kid at 40ish. She rushed off back to work as soon as possible, a scant few months after the birth, dumping her responsibility on perfect strangers in some daycare center. [...] Of course, it's not actually a mystery why she had the kid. It was just yet another piece in the yuppie status symbol puzzle.
I saw worse when I adopted two Russian three-year-olds. My wife and I went into court, we told them that she was a stay-at-home mom, and in thirty minutes we were done; and that's with translations needed of every word uttered. Meanwhile, there was another woman staying in the same hotel as us. She was an unmarried M.D. who wasn't planning to quit her job, and was complaining about spending over four hours in court being grilled about every aspect of her life.
Personally, I'm surprised that she was final
"Article" (Score:2, Interesting)
Calling blog posts articles sets a pretty dangerous precedent. It puts someone's personal viewpoint on the same level as say, an article from a respected published like Reuters and can create lots of FUD and unnecessary debate.
Now I know this is Slashdot and there's many of you itching for an argument, waiting to pounce and say "Well the media is stupid and has bias too". That is correct. However, when we read an article from a respected news source, as opposed to someone's personal blog, we are assuming th
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Not a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly I don't think this is a bad idea. NASA has lost its focus. Right now it's major scientific project is a space station to give the retiring space shuttle a place to go.
I think we've all been disappointed that the flying cars and weekend trips to mars envisioned by TV and authors in our childhood have not materialized. But the government was never a good way to go about space exploration. It's too risky, and governments are risk averse. A better way to do it is in the private sector. They're more tolerant of risk. The X-Prize has been phenomenally successful, and should be emulated. But government over-regulation, and subsidized competitors has prevented the private sector from flourishing. For a sad read, go over to Beale Aerospace's [bealaerospace.com] page.
NASA needs to refocus its effort on science by contracting launch services from the private sector. Congress should rearrange the regulatory atmosphere to allow this to happen (particularly with respect to human spaceflight and liability), and to enable a competitive launch industry rather than the the fat-cat subsidized government contractors we have now.
I want to go to the Moon and Mars too, but no more "flags & footprints". It's long past time we got serious about human spaceflight and did what it takes to make it an everyday occurrence. As long as all human spaceflight is in NASA's hands, nothing will change.
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The X-Prize was cool and all, but let's be realistic, they never came close to leaving Earth's orbit. Not exactly deep space exploration.
To be sure, we should relax some of the restrictions on private space flight, but that doesn't mean we should stop funding it publicly. Real deep space exploration is just not profitable, the private sector is no
Re:Not a bad idea (Score:4, Informative)
They never came close to being in Earth orbit either. That requires 20 times the speed and 60 times the energy [wired.com] than they achieved.
Rich.
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I'm not. Because I eventually outgrew childhood and learned to distinguish fantasy and fiction from reality.
They're more tolerable of risk - when there is a profit to be made. There isn't much
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NASA has never focused on science, and will never do so. They are focused on making the public feel good by putting people in space, when all the good science is done by robots. In the words of an astrophysicist friend of mine at University of Chicago, "the minute the manned missions to Mars and the moon were announced, they dropped the science budget like a $2 hooker shedding her clothes". They were glad to do it.
They don't care about science and the science co
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Good list of examples on previous exploration there. But the moon is different, because we're not currently there. For whatever reason, the initial government investment was not followed by commercial exploitation, as was the case for all the examples you mentioned.
I agree the private sector won't go there tomorrow, or next year, but they will eventually, if there is an economic need to do so. And if there's not, why should the government be going there over and over? It's not a investment in basic sc
parents (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that the parents job??
The US has no monopoly on human spaceflight! (Score:4, Interesting)
America-centric bollocks. If NASA were razed to the ground and all its employees rounded up and shot, it still would not spell the end of human spaceflight... as John F. Kennedy knew perfectly well when he launched the race to the moon.
Nothing could please the Russians more than to have lost the battle for the moon, but to have won the war for space.
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flounder (Score:2, Informative)
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Bring on the robots! (Score:5, Interesting)
Human spaceflight may be romantic and inspiring, and a human may be far more flexible and adaptable than any robot, but humans also have outrageous supply and environmental demands. It's simply impossible for manned missions to do more than a tiny fraction of what far cheaper automated probes can do.
And every time NASA shoots a Shuttle into low orbit to feed the ISS so that it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule [umd.edu], they do almost zero to advance human knowledge, and spend enough money to send a whole new robot-rover mission to Mars and then run it for three months.
People who insist that manned spaceflight is worth the price do not, I think, usually comprehend the magnitude of the difference between that price and the price of unmanned probes. They also seem to have a pretty poor grasp of what space science actually entails, and how little of it even theoretically can be done by people.
NASA doesn't help education? (Score:2)
Yes, that would work (Score:2)
So, I think I agree with Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
At first, I was like, "Oh no, not the space program". But then I realized, maybe just because I'm trying to rationalize a way to agree with Obama, that I think I do actually agree. Here is why.
Firstly, thanks to Bush, we really aren't going to be doing anything interesting in space anytime soon. Sure we could putter around and send some probes, but we aren't going to have the resources to do something really extraordinary for awhile.
In the meantime, the US is slipping. We aren't the smartest, we aren't the biggest economy and we slowly shifting away from the center of the world. Like Egypt, China and Europe before, it is possible that the world's reins may slip from our hands unless we do something. Now whether that is a bad thing or not, I don't know, but as a government, I'm assuming a main goal is to retain influence.
One of the best ways to maintain our influence is through education. If we really go all out on the next generation, then in 30 years, we'll still be the center of the modern world. If not, then in 30 years, China, Japan, Europe and India are going to stop sending us their smartest people and keep them for themselves, and then we'll just have the brain-deads over here watching American Idol.
The best, most surefire way to increase the overall effectiveness of our education system is early education. We can pour trillion into high schools and get microscopic results, but just a fraction of that going into getting education out there to pre-kindergardeners and we will probably see general competency double. No I don't have a source for that, it being pure speculation, but it is well known that early development is a critical stage.
Lately I've realized how little parent teach their kids. Some, I dare say most, do absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe the teach them to count to ten, but that is all. You're lucky if you get the ABC's as well. I find it shocking when I talk to people who didn't get taught anything as a child, and even more shocking when I see children not being taught.
I was reading fluently and doing basic algebra before I entered kindergarden, and that lead has stuck with me my whole life. (Quite frustrating actually.)
So yeah, those of you who are complaining that Obama isn't thinking long term, take a moment to consider whether you are thinking long term. Getting off of the planet, to a different solar system is going to take hundreds and hundreds of years of dedicated work and research. Furthermore, throughout those hundreds of years, society will have to be intelligent enough in general to realize the need for such a project and support it (which they aren't now). Possibly, before we dive straight for space flight, we need to raise the intellectual level of society high enough that they aren't looking at their own wallets so hard that we'll never get off the ground.
Early education sounds like the best way to do that to me.
P.S. I've only gotten one, count them, one bad mod (overrated), and I've got several (8 or 9) good ones, yet my karma has decided to become "bad". So now all my posts start at zero and no one ever reads them (let alone mods them up), meaning I can never get my karma to good, or at least normal. What is up with that. Should I just start a new account. Seriously, does one overrated mean I should be censored like this? Bah. Bah. I bet no one reads this either.
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Think of the children, you say?
I will, when their parents do.
NONE of these programs will work without parental involvement in education. Far too often, parents do their kid's homework, so Johnny doesn't feel bad for being left behind. They fill their Johnny's schedule with play time, piano lessons, football practice, but somehow neglect to explain to Johnny just WHY it's important to try to learn about the world around him. With latchkey kids, it's worse. There's NO guidance whatsoever, and then these s
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As a high school student, I have been told time and time again about how "budget" issues result in no new textbooks, computers, or building renovations this year.
The federal budget doesn't fund high school textbooks, so may be true, but it's not a point in favor of increasing the Department of Education budget (which, remember, is already four times NASA's), it's a point in favor of increasing your state budget.
The federal education budget-- sixty-six billion dollars-- buys things like implementing the "No Child Left Behind" act.