[12dn94dst]

I believe the world is going to hell in a pollitically correct hand basket. People are so concerned with not offending anyone that they are losing sight of who they are and what they believe as individuals.

I believe that a good deal of the discipline problems we see in children can be attributed to parents who are too damn lazy to raise their own kids, letting the television raise them until they're old enough to go to school and expecting the already underpaid & overworked teachers to raise them until they go off to college.

I believe that some parents are so preoccupied with not wanting to raise their kids how they were raised, abuse cases excluded, that they forget they (the parents) didn't turn out badly.

Jerry Springer, Ricky Lake, Jenny Jones and other "talk" shows that rely heavily on shock value to get ratings should have been off the air LONG ago.

Schools should stop using standardized tests as a means of promotion for grade school kids. Instead of teaching these tests, we need to go back to teaching the BASICS. Kids should know how to read at or above their grade level before they proceed to the next one (on a side note, I don't beleive in social promotion). They should know how to write a grammatically correct sentence and be able to diagram it. They should be able to divide large numbers without depending on a calculator. They should be able to confidently tell people that New Jersey is a state (not a city), Atlanta is a city (not a state), that Africa is a continent (not a country) AND they should be able to locate these and many other parts of the world correctly on a globe. And my personal favorite, they should be able to use context cues in a sentence to determine possible meanings of words in that sentence they don't know.

I believe that some school administrators use the "zero tolerance" policies as an excuse not to use the critical thinking and problem solving skills they allegedly acquired in college.