[quote]HoustonGuy wrote:
[quote]TigerTime wrote:
To address the point of “bad” kids lying about needing to use the wash-room << these are typically the same kids who are wasting their time and everyone else’s time by being in high-school in the first place. I don’t see why attendance should be compulsory. Some kids really are better off just starting their careers and won’t gain anything from high-school.
… Actually, no-one really gets anything from high-school (except maybe from the shop classes). After four years of high-school I realized that I’m going to walk out of this building with pretty much nothing more than I walked in with. It’s more of a test of patience than anything. Wade through four years of tedious non-sense and if you can manage it, you are awarded the privilege of doing the same thing again at a higher level (assuming you’re okay with taking on a mortgage worth of debt…).
Anyway, my point is that if teenagers don’t want to be in school, then fine. I say let them leave. The class is better off without them.
And before some idiot fails to put this together himself; No, I don’t think the teacher should be held liable if the student does something retarded and gets hurt after he leaves the class. [/quote]
Engineers, doctors, IT architects, regular architects, financial analysts, accountants, pharmacists et cetera would all disagree and would tell you that the information, especially math and sciences they learned from grade school through graduate programs, put them where they are.
And the “mortgage of debt”, which is a gross overstatement, is nothing for a petroleum engineer, surgeon or even financial analyst to handle in a couple short years and then spend a career earning way above the national average.
The only people who don’t believe in higher education are the people who don’t have one and it’s because they don’t have one and not the other way around. [/quote]
Well, I’m going for a dual degree B.Sc. in kinesiology/ juris doctorate. It’s not thanks to high-school that I have this opportunity. I’m going to achieve these things because that’s what I’m passionate about. The mandatory courses I took in high-school only ever covered things I already went out of my way to learn about on my own; They were simply a test of patience.
Yes, it’s true I wouldn’t be here if not for high-school, but that’s only because that’s how the law is set up. There’s nothing magic about high-school that changes people into successful and intelligent people and in fact there is reason to suggest the opposite. High-school was nothing more than another hurdle to get over. Also consider, contemporary high-schools are based on the Prussian model. They are designed around promoting allegiance to the state, NOT around promoting higher education.
In other words, education, especially in America, is horribly broken. Educated and intelligent people exist despite the high-school system, not because of it.
Also, I was obviously making a gross overstatement when I stated that university costs are equivalent to a mortgage. That’s the point of hyperbole.