Why American Education Sucks

[quote]Agressive Napkin wrote:
Just my opinion:
American education sucks because people don’t care. (trust me, I’m a high school student) A large minority of the kids care, but everyone else isn’t there to learn.

People go to school because they have to get a grade to get a piece of paper to get a job. If education focused less on how many points you had and what your percent was, and more on how much you learn, we’d be in better shape. For instance, I do ALL of my Spanish work, and know 0 Spanish.[/quote]

Napkin-

I just noticed you’re a high school student. So you’re definitely getting your education via a less than ideal system. But, you don’t have to accept it passively. If you want to learn, than go out and learn. It doesn’t matter if so many others don’t care, do you care about yourself? There’s plenty of free knowledge available in libraries and on the internet.

I will say this also- nothing you study in high school is really that hard, it’s all general knowledge, except for maybe your Spanish, and you’ll be a better person for the exposure. Dig in and learn it whether you’re especially interested in it or not. Besides, you’re gonna be there anyways, may as well take something away with you in exchange for your time.

What you said about your Spanish indicates a problem. Unless you just hate the subject, how is it you can do all your work, but know 0?

[quote]Mr. Chen wrote:
Agressive Napkin wrote:
Just my opinion:
American education sucks because people don’t care. (trust me, I’m a high school student) A large minority of the kids care, but everyone else isn’t there to learn.

People go to school because they have to get a grade to get a piece of paper to get a job. If education focused less on how many points you had and what your percent was, and more on how much you learn, we’d be in better shape. For instance, I do ALL of my Spanish work, and know 0 Spanish.
Napkin-

I just noticed your a high school student. So you’re definitely getting your education via a less than ideal system. But, you don’t have to accept it passively. If you want to learn, than go out and learn. It doesn’t matter if so many others don’t care, do you care about yourself? There’s plenty of free knowledge available in libraries and on the internet. I will say this also- nothing you study in high school is really that hard, it’s all general knowledge, except for maybe your Spanish, and you’ll be a better person for the exposure. Dig in and learn it whether you’re especially interested in it or not. Besides, you’re gonna be there anyways, may as well take something away with you in exchange for your time.

What you said about your Spanish indicates a problem. Unless you just hate the subject, how is it you can do all your work, but know 0?
[/quote]

He probably means that he gets by with little knowledge, or through just using the book. Or using an online translator :-p

I would have to say I’m quite nerdy by saying this, but wikipedia has great stuff for learning. I always am interested by space, biology, and many other things. I hate having to stop learning about that so I can go to my stupid classes in school. I hate being slowed down by the class, in my Algebra 2 class even though I jumped in the middle of the year, it happens all the time. I could of easily completed that class in a semester, most likely a quarter, but I would just be staring at the walls for the rest of the year.

In schools there really is no push to have me do extra work? What do I get, a few extra points?

To some of you high schoolers talking about HS being too easy:

Read. Learn.

If you want to, you can be pretty far ahead of the curve by the time you hit college.

[quote]SeanT wrote:
He probably means that he gets by with little knowledge, or through just using the book. Or using an online translator :-p

I would have to say I’m quite nerdy by saying this, but wikipedia has great stuff for learning. I always am interested by space, biology, and many other things. I hate having to stop learning about that so I can go to my stupid classes in school. I hate being slowed down by the class, in my Algebra 2 class even though I jumped in the middle of the year, it happens all the time. I could of easily completed that class in a semester, most likely a quarter, but I would just be staring at the walls for the rest of the year.

In schools there really is no push to have me do extra work? What do I get, a few extra points?[/quote]
Check into what CLEP tests you could be preparing to take, and start working towards those as well.

[quote]Headhunter wrote:

Dewey’s followers were devout Marxists and developed his theory with the goal of establishing a Soviet-type state here. Teaching is to be designed to facilitate this process.[/quote]

And Mencken was a racist and Nietzche’s followers were devout Nazis.

Dewey rejected Rousseau (a socialist) and was pretty definitively a pragmatist. I’m pretty sure he’d be abhorred by the relativism that gets spewed in higher education today.

Additionally, he clearly valued both producing functional societal units (i.e. necks for leashes) as well as individuals who revolutionized thought (unless I misunderstood Experience and Nature entirely).

As a pragmatist, I can understand how it would be hard, if not impossible, to design a system that consistently generates large numbers of successively greater geniuses, and considerably easier to design and implement a system that merely pulled up the lower performers.

I think you’re looking at a problem inherently associated with statistics (massively shifting the means to outliers vs. pulling outliers to means vs. gradually shifting means, ideally, up) and technology (clear limits to human intellect and improvements thereof) and ascribing it to an education system that, while flawed and possibly prostituted, isn’t the mentally-crippling homogenization machine you portray it to be.

Reread what Gatto said, his grandfather tells him flat out, “The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible.” He then spends the rest of the article talking about how schools bore kids and fail to instruct the gifted performers and hold them back to the average.

[quote]Grimnuruk wrote:
PGJ wrote:
Very good article. I don’t agree with everything, but it did make some very good points. Part of the problem is that the American school system is so enormous and consists of so many different cultures that it is virtually impossible to create an educational system flexible enough to cater to individual needs. Generally speaking, anytime you increase the size of a program, the less flexibility and tailorability there is.

For every old-timer genius cited who did great things with minimal formal education there are hundreds of total dumb-asses who couldn’t read or write or brush their own teeth their entire lives. So, I believe formalized education has greatly improved the overall intelligence of the population.

I think the key here is that parents absolutely have to be involved. DO NOT LEAVE IT UP TO THE SCHOOL TO TEACH YOUR KIDS. Unfortunately, many of the aforementioned dumb-asses are raising equally dumb-assed children.

So, what is the ultimate public education system?

I agree 100 percent. Watching my children go through the mill that is public education is hard, but we make sure to take an active role in it and see school times as only a portion of their learning experience.
[/quote]

It’s irritating when I want to take my kid out of school early so he can spend some time with his Uncle who happens to be in town for a bit that day and the school acts like he’ll never make it to college if he misses 3 hours of 4th grade. Some things are just more important than the standard classroom education.