Blizzhackers

I would like to have a reasonably spam free, serious discussion about education. For those in the US, what is your opinion on our current situation? For those outside of the US, feel free to chime in as well.
I'll throw my opinion in later in the thread, I want to get some responses in here before I waste my time.

College is a sham. Our public schooling needs some work. All in all I think if you want to succeed it is possible.

The fact that you NEED to go to college just to make a comfortable life for yourself pisses me off. The public school system needs some work.

This is untrue.

Our system was developed 200 years ago and still hasn't necessarily changed in terms of how we teach students. I'm thinking about dropping out and continuing my education online, because I hate falling asleep during class. It makes me feel/seem lazy when I can be very productive. Of course, doing this limits myself, as no one fully trusts getting a certificate above a diploma, but eventually I don't see it being an issue, seeings how we're technologically driven as a species. I could be wrong though, I could end up fucking myself over in terms of career options.

You can't teach someone who doesn't want to learn, and you can learn if your teacher doesn't want to take the time to teach.

I feel that the problem with education goes both ways. some kids just do not want to learn, and some teachers just like sitting on their BA while collecting a pay check.

In high school I had a few great teachers who loved to teach and tried to get all the kids on the same page, I also had teachers who would say here's your assignment you have a test on friday, and I've had teachers who,i'm guessing did a lot of drugs in the college days, just didn't give a shit. They would lose papers forget to enter stuff in the grade book. In fact I had one teacher who was so bad, you could tell her you turned something in and that she must have forgotten to enter it in the grade book, and she would give you a B without producing any work to prove you did it in the first place.

That being said, I'd like to start with the basis of the educational system. We have one system designed to teach millions of kids. Of course this system wont work properly, because everyone will learn at different speeds and different styles. some people can catch on after being shown how to do something once, others take a few times. Some people can learn simply by listening to a voice, others need to see stuff happen, and try it themselves to fully grasp a given concept.

Then there is the problem of educational pathways. Where I live they have a predetermined set of classes that you have to take before you can take other classes, and you usually can't get into those other classes until your senior year. Which can leave people saying; " hey I really enjoyed this class, and I want to pursue an education towards a career that does stuff similar to this class." or "this class sucked, Im going to avoid anything to due with this kind of crap."

I took German in high school, and we worked on a segment that involved their schooling. Germans go to school from kindergarden, to 5th or 6th grade. From there they take a test to see who field would suit them best. After they take the test they go to one of three sections of education, and retake the test every year up until their last year. which is amazing, instead of tossing a kid into the machine, they stop, do a little test and send the kid to the school that the kid will most likely excel in. ( at least that is my understanding of their school structure)

I'm sure we could do this in America as well, if we had the funds going to education instead of makings ourselves the biggest fish in a pond that doesn't give one fuck.

People who go to University : System is good mang, of course it has to get tougher because we're always moving forward. Our advances in nearly every field make it impossible to enter into the working field with the same credentials our parents had because there's so much more to learn

People who didn't go to University : Fuck d00d derp system is corrupt can't do anything with absolutely zero skills and knowledge about the subject, WHAT THE FUCK. They're also outsourcing the only form of labor I can do to people that can do it for cheaper and be even more effective! What the fuck, that ain't American!!!

I'll take the "fuck the system, so i'll educate in a way that's easier for me so i can help make change in the world" tab.

Hopefully with the rise of technology, we'll soon see the ability for affordable personal educations on a mass scale. But right now, it looks like home-schooling and private schools are becoming more popular. That could mean that public schooling as a whole is doomed if it doesn't get into shape and quick, but again, that's to be seen. For now, I think that it is a shame that everyone has to invest as much time and money as they do in order to get an education that provides the job potential that it now does. And it's another shame that all you get out of even going to college these days is just that, a potential for a job. However, that's not really the fault of the education system, but the current job market situation.

the education system in pretty terrible as it is (and considering that im saying this while being a canadian, with one of the highest ranked quality of education in the world)

there is really no emphasis on education despite how important and critical it is to society. funding is very limited such that most schools are forced to use old facilities/equipment, teachers are forced to teach classes in excess of 40 people, which makes it extremely difficult to effectively educate each individual. libraries are full of outdated books for the most part, and science labs only have enough money to replenish supplies of things that break frequently (like beakers, thermometers ect). non science classes are for the most part jokes, because of teaching restrictions these classes basically are reduced to memorizing and reciting in multiple choice tests. smarter kids just get bored since stuff is just repetitive and lacks challenge, missing a potential period of development. kids that perform poorly become discouraged because they are doing bad and arent receiving teaching tailored to their abilities which would allow them to improve without the lowering their self confidence.

the schoolboard is too scared to do any fieldtrips or day trips to museums or anything else because retarded parents are concerned about something stupid, or they just dont have the funding to afford it. course material could be presented in ways that are interactive and interesting, allowing students to engage themselves in their own learning experience, but because of these restrictions they are forced to memorize textbooks or something just as boring.

i got a chance to tour several private schools in my area and i was in awe at how their facilities were incredible compared to what the public schools offered. really improving education is almost guaranteed to benefit society, yet funding continues to be sucked out of public school systems for other stuff since politicians are pushing for short term benefits that allow them to get reelected instead of long term improvements to the community and society.

Here's a depressing tidbit about education:

http://gizmodo.com/5671062/there-are-50 ... -with-phds

Posting from the promised land of education. What makes the education in Finland so good is: EDUCATION LOL. Seriously, from what I've heard, the teachers all the way up to university are "better" than the teachers of most other countries because they are required to study more.(heard this from a teacher in my school when Finland was ranked high in education) They have to study more than one subject even if they only specialize in one and they also can not teach unless they have a degree in ped-something, can't translate it but it means that they need to study different teaching mechanisms, some psychology and they need to be able to interact with students from age 7 to 60+. But in uni and after, we have it worse because of lack of money.
Other reason I'm pretty sure matters is that some of the books used even in the "good" schools in USA are outdated. A few of my friends are in the states as exchange students, and they tell all kinds of crazy shit there is about Europe and especially Scandinavia in the books. Some of them say that the polarbears and penguins of Finland are in danger because of the global warming. Fuck, the only penguins and polarbears here are in the zoo.

I dunno how overpopulated the classes are, but unless it's like 35+ it shouldn't do a big difference. In my old school the kids go classes 1 and 2 (ages 7 and 8 )with around 20 people and 3-6 (ages 9 to 12)with ~30. The teacher is encouraged to be more of a friend than authority to the kids and there is a "special teacher" who teaches kids with learning difficulties. He or she takes groups from 2 to 6 thus taking the noisy kids out of the class where most kids are doing good.
And all of this is "free" as we pay for it with taxes. Because of that we don't have classes or schools for talented or rich kids. Only big companies like Nokia have "Private schools for talented children" where talented kids study to become engineers and they specialize really early.

OT: I'm trying to prepare for the final exam in English in the Finnish schooling system, so I'd really appreciate if someone who read my whole post would point out any grammatical errors they find.

It's probably not very good, I wrote it up for a class I didn't try very hard in, but I did write this essay on the subject of education.

Oh, yeah, I'm aware the grammar is horrendous.
 


Before the advent of localized public schooling and privatized university education centers people learned the trades and general knowledge associated with the area in and around which they lived. They drew from a pool of knowledge built up over the years by the people around them and shared almost incidentally, though apprenticeships and the like served as their university level education. During and after the Industrial age, when mass transportation became possible, centers of learning (mostly run by the church) became popular due to the constant shifting of populations. This evolved into government and locally funded public schooling and college education and then into privately funded universities during the age of mass communication. In the digital era we must undergo yet another evolution, something already started but not quite yet embraced in the educational sector. Education online.



 The history of focused education in the United States began with the opening of Harvard University in 1638. This was quickly followed by mandated schooling and, eventually, public schooling provided by a combination of state, federal, and public funding. 
With the industrial age came an explosion in immigrants ignorant to American ways and the concept of the public highschool was born, again in Boston Massachusetts in 1821, both to facilitate the assimilation of the newly arrived and to prepare the nations teenagers for the rigors they would face in college level studies.



 With the rise of various levels of schooling teaching a general curriculum from maths to arts the textbook took over. Previously the position of teacher had not been perceived as an end goal, or vocation. Teachers were generally people who had better than common knowledge and understanding of whatever subject they taught but no particular education in teaching. This changed with the introduction of two year "normal schools" that taught people how to teach. Standardized education then took over and nation wide textbook learning became the norm. The textbooks provided the teachers with knowledge they may not know or had forgotten as well as a standard base of knowledge they had to teach, meaning everyone had the same notion of truth, or there was no inconsistency to general knowledge. Any mistakes the textbook contained were mitigated by the presumed continued expertise in the subject by the teacher. Before the internet mass print was the quickest way to share information.



 With the internet this all changed but the institutions described above, for the most part, did not.
The ease of access to the internet created the same paranoid delusions mass print created when it was introduced. The internet came to be seen as a place where anyone could write anything regardless of truth and among older generations the gravity of that misconception is misrepresented to this day. The fact is internet sites are now more ubiquitous and better informed than any text book in print.



Where a text book may have a hundred sources, an article on the internet may have thousands. Where text books take months to years to put together  and thousands of dollars to print, a page on the internet takes a fraction of the time and cost for the same quality. Where people have to look at the back of a text book and find yet more books, which may or may not be available in the local library, or reports that could be hard to access for the general public to verify sources the internet provides instant linked access to any online content, of which all of the worlds leading studies, articles, and reports are provided online.



 The most glaring example of a faulty educational system is the standards by which educational text books are produced and marketed. Two states in the US, California and Texas, have the highest numbers of students and thus buy the most text books. Because of this textbooks are skewed towards educational sentiment in both states. That the other states are largely left out of this criteria is not the problem, the fact that there is any skewing at all is. For instance a recent BBC article (seen for free, on the internet) reports that a change in the texas curriculum include "teaching that the UN could be a threat to American freedom, and that the founding fathers may not have intended a complete separation of church and state." This is distressing both because students should be allowed to decide for themselves the end result of both but also because, as mentioned in the article, "Opponents of the changes worry that textbooks sold in other states will be written to comply with the new Texas standards, meaning that the alterations could have an impact on curriculum's nationwide," due to the factors mentioned above.



 Wikipedia is often maligned as an inaccurate source of information due to its changeable nature. But after considering the inaccuracy and skewed perspective of textbooks, when compared to the hard informational nature of wikipedia, it's easy to see which any scholar would prefer in the course of his or her general education. In fact it is possible, now, to develop your own syllabus online using resources readily, freely, available to learn all the general information the current schooling system wants you to know as well as any information directly related to areas of interest. If, for instance, I had known what was available during my highschool years suffering in an underfunded and non-enthusiastic art class I would have spent the time instead viewing and participating in art communities online where I am absolutely certain I would have learned inconceivable amounts more than in the 45 minutes I spent in class. A fact I can demonstrate in my knowledge of artistic programs related to my interest such as the Adobe creative suite. The which I was fluent in before I entered university despite having nothing remotely related to such programs in the course of my schooling.



 Since I left highschool much has been done to increase the technological interaction in class rooms. Most have "Smart Boards", virtual white boards, that allow the teachers to more easily interact with both students and the material. But there is still a depressing reliance on the incontrovertible fact of textbooks in learning. If the US educational system doesn't wholly embrace the more contemporary practices of online classes and using the massive amounts of virtual information available to them then Americans, little by little, will take matters into their own hands and return to home schooling using the internet as a teacher and I can't say we wouldn't be better off.

 
Works cited;
Texas schools to get controversial syllabus. BBC News. 22 May 2010 Last updated at 20:03 ET. Accessed August 7th 2010. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10141121>
"Harvard University." Wikipedia. This page was last modified on 5 August 2010 at 23:44. Accessed August 7th 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University>
"History of Education in the United States." Wikipedia. This page was last modified on 6 August 2010 at 06:28. Article accessed 7 August 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States>

My school district I went to K-12 was AWFUL. Plain awful