On 2006-05-13 12:00:00, Anonymous wrote:
"my point is that 20% of the us population suffers from some form of mental illness. Many great people were/are mentally ill. What is so great about normal? To quote on of my favorite Canadians: "the trouble with normal is it always gets worse"
G Bernard Shaw rightfully observed that "reasonable men adapt to the world. Unreasonable men expect the world to adapt to them, therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men" As I have said before,a reasonable sane man would not have founded Hyde on the premise that the world of education need to change. Just because you have mental heath issues does not mean you are wrong or unfit for a certain type of work. Funny there was a piece on Winny this morning. They said a reasonable sober man would have concluded that GB was doomed, fortunately Winny was neither of those two. They played the Blood sweet and tears speech. Very moving.
The israel air force pilot training has something on the order of 98% success. They has a scientific sscreening process. The US air force has something on the order of 10%. You meet the basic qualification, you want to give it a shot you get a 1 in ten chance. Very democratic.
So I think that just because people are crazy and your chances are not good is no reason to shoot a process down. That is my point.
SD
"
Let me see if I follow your logic here: I get the impression you're saying that Hyde may work for 10% (or whatever small percentage) of its students, so parents should simply sign their kids up and hope for the best, hoping that they'll end up in the "success" group, even though the odds of success aren't good? Are you really arguing that? If so, that seems incredibly insensitive and arrogant. What you seem to be saying is that parents should take a huge risk, financially and emotionally, and that it's okay that most of them will spend $35,000-40,000 a year to send their kids to Hyde even when Hyde will end up not being a good place for their kids. And that's not to mention the emotional travesty for these families who have to live through what is likely to turn out to be a painful Hyde experience (except for the small percentage who have a good experience). Are you REALLY taking that position?
Our family was mislead by Hyde. We had no idea they accepted so many kids with so many mental health problems and didn't have a trained staff to deal with that. We had no idea so many of Hyde's staff are inexperienced when it comes to the type of student body there.
We wish Hyde had been more honest from the beginning about the way it accepts a huge percentage of applicants, including those who need a very different kind of school. We wish Hyde only accepted the kind of students that are a proper fit for its character education model.
To push your analogy, wouldn't it be much more fair and appropriate (and sensitive) to try to do careful screening at the front end, the way the Israeli Air Force does it? Isn't that the right way to do it for all concerned?
