Canada: What are your 'fringe' political ideas?

[Ronald Kephart]

On 4/26/09 9:14 AM, "Harold Schiffman" <hfsclpp at gmail.com> wrote:

> What are your 'fringe' political ideas?

Jeez, Hal, almost everything I think is fringe, which is why I have so few
friends. Where to begin? Hmmm...

(1) Universal tax-supported health care in the US (and of course taxation
that supports it).

(2) Ditto for education through university. Nothing corrupts the
student-teacher relationship like money.

(3) Give Texas back to Mexico.

(4) Round up the entire G W Bush administration and send them to The Hague
for trials. I suppose we have to do this before we do number (3).

See what I mean? Anyway, for language and related issues, with the US
specifically in mind:

(a) Institute first literacy in a phonemically based spelling for all
English speakers. We know it works, we know that kids so treated quickly
surpass kids who do only traditional spelling.

(b) Develop a policy of respect for dialects such as Appalachian, AAVE, etc.
that children bring to school, and USE them in early education especially.
(I believe that something to this effect can be found in the UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child... which, most likely, the US has yet to ratify.)

(c) To help make (b) possible, all teachers of children K-5 should be
certified in basic linguistics.

(d) All "social studies" teachers should be anthropologically trained, and
middle and high school "social studies" should be anthropological and
linguistic, so that every kid who escapes high school comes out knowing
something about these fields.

This will probably get me in enough trouble.

Ron
Blog: http://crankylinguist.blogspot.com/