Posted: Jan 12, 2017 8:07 pm
Thomas Eshuis wrote:The_Metatron wrote:Thomas Eshuis wrote:The_Metatron wrote:What you take or not is of no account to me. These events actually happened, right here where I live.
Yes, people who produce/spread child pornogprahy exist.
The chance that one of them is your child's teacher is actually very slim.
You might just as well have posted an article about a teacher turning out to be a terrorist.The_Metatron wrote:Would you put your kid in this guy's class?
Now that I know this, no.
But neither do I see it as a sound argument against public education.
You're generally pretty good at writing about things you know.
Thank you.The_Metatron wrote:I can assure you, public education in America is not one of those things.
It was not my intention to imply or claim I was an expert on the subject.
However, unless America has a significantly higher rate of child sex offenders among the general population, I fail to see how this one anecdote about a single teacher being involved in this, is a sound argument against the US public school system.
I am perfectly willing to change my mind if you can explain/demonstrate why I should.
You do like to make shit up, don't you? When you find the place where I wrote this, we can discuss it. What I illustrated is that I dodged this risk successfully.
But, maybe it's not really fair to brag about that. As you'll soon learn below, I had probably at least a one in four chance of being successful at dodging this risk to my boys...
Thomas Eshuis wrote:The_Metatron wrote:Let's have a look at how slim that chance is that any particular child is going to have a teacher who is a pedophile. As I found earlier in this topic, some 1.7% of adult men are pedophiles. A little more than three out of two hundred, or one in every 66.
How many teachers will a child encounter before they leave school? 50? 100? In my primary and high school life, I estimate I had something around 50 different teachers.
How did that happen? And how typical is this for the average American pupil?
Work the numbers. In grade school, I had roughly two teachers per grade. Most of my elementary teachers were women. In years 7-12, each class had a different teacher, and I remember none of them that taught more than one grade. More of that group of teachers were men. Maths and sciences, mostly. My music teachers were men. So figure, six courses, 5 years, different teachers for each course. In a typical middle school or high school day, I was taught by six different teachers.
Is this common now? Maybe not. Conversations with other parents indicate it is.
Actually, it does. If 30 of my teachers were men, and about 1 in 66 men are pedophiles, then the likelihood that one of my 30 male teachers was a pedophile is a little less than 50%. I doubt these simple arithmetic problems are beyond you.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:That only works if you assume male teachers represent a 1:1 representation of the US male population.
Given that men represent less than 20% of all teachers in elementary and a little more than 40% in secondary education, they are not.
http://www.menteach.org/resources/data_about_men_teachers
Yes. And? Some 60 percent of my teachers were men. What of it? Let's do some more of this math stuff:
There was a 50% likelihood that one of my 30 male teachers was a pedophile. Even at the averages you quoted being men, that still works out to a child having some 15 male teachers. That means there's a nearly 25% chance that one of those 15 is a pedophile.
One chance in four.
Thomas Eshuis wrote:The_Metatron wrote: That back of the envelope cyphering includes only teachers. That likelihood of a kid encountering a pedophile, even only among their teachers, isn't as slim as you think it is.
Except that, again, the total population of men in the US is not necessarily representative for the population of men who want to, or are employed in education.
Who cares? Unless you're asserting that the prevalence of pedophilia among those 30 men who taught me is something different than 1.7%? You're going to have to support that, aren't you?