School, AKA prison.

[GDJ]

I'm not going to even bother saying anything to you teenagers. What's the point? You know everything already, right?

[SuperWeegee4000]

I'm not going to even bother saying anything to you teenagers. What's the point? You know everything already, right?

Hey, not called for.

[Galacticruler]

I'd learn just fine if they fired all the dinosaurs and hired some younger teachers who were more..."updated".

[swiftgates24]

I'm not going to even bother saying anything to you teenagers. What's the point? You know everything already, right?

Yeah, and I'm not going to say anything to you adults. What's the point, you always stereotype...

[MalletFace]

If you could combine the point of that with Neil deGrasse Tyson's point when he said "... kids are born curious. They're always exploring. We spend the first year of their lives teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.", you would have what is very likely the most powerful reason many people hate school, the reason many kids find it pointless, and the reason many adults and children alike think most educational systems are failed.

Even if children and adults don't realize it, they ask two of the most important questions from a very young age; "Why?", and "How?". Its surprising for me how they actually very rarely get answers to these two questions at home or at school, and even more so that most adults will rarely admit to a kid, while not showing anger or irritation, when they don't have the answer to one of those questions.

[Jackissimus]

Reminds me of a coworker; his daughter had been living at home for most of her college carreer and when she did live on-campus her father paid all her expenses.

So now she gets a job and moves out to live on her own. Next time she visits she complains on how expensive living is. “Do you have any idea how expensive car insurance is?!†she complains to him. He couldn't stop laughing. Yes, he had a pretty pretty good idea how expensive her car insurance was

Um, I dont know, I think the father should have actually told her earlier how expensive things can be. I am 27 and although I am grateful to my parents for guiding me to the right career (I wanted to be a musician when I was 18, I am glad I am not), real life still kind of hit me in the face. And why not share it anyway? To protect them from it and let them concentrate on their studies? They won't study when they don't see the world as it is. You know, I don't want my parents to be messiahs in my life, quietly protecting me from evils, I want them to be my partners really, openly sharing what they know. This way I am just wondering what else they are keeping from me..

[Omicron314]

I just wish they could remove the social aspect of school. I'm just not that kind of person. Today I got scolded for recording the responses to the questions posed by the Name Game (your name + where you'd rather be) despite the fact that there was no rule expressly forbidding this and I was 21st. What are they trying to do, help us learn each others' names, or do some controlled scientific study on the cognitive functions of 8th graders?

[NGTOne]

-VIDSNIP-

This. Right damn here. 100/10.

I was lucky enough, during my high school career (I am now attending a well-regarded university), to have a few "free-range" classes - my high school was big enough to support a set of yearly programming courses, but my province (I'm Canadian) still has not developed a standard curriculum for said courses. The net result was that the teacher (who, as an extra bonus, had worked in the industry for a number of years and was, if I recall correctly, independently wealthy enough not to need the money from teaching) was able to design the curriculum and the semester as he saw fit. And he saw fit to arm us with a few basic concepts, a set of tasks, and set us to exploring. I learned more about the Java language (and programming in general) from the "free-range" format than I ever could have from poring over a textbook for days at a time. No exam, no tests, nothing but a set of (incredibly broad) assignments. Simultaneously one of the most difficult and most rewarding courses I took in my entire high school career. And you know who drove the difficulty? Not the teacher, ME. I was able to set my own goals (within reasonable boundaries), and see how far I could push the envelope. THAT is how education should work.

And the end result? 3 years later, I'm a computer science major at one of the top-rated Canadian universities. And it would likely have turned out very differently if the programming teacher had been a by-the-book stickler, or had a standardized, teacher- and student-proof curriculum been devised.

Wake up and smell the science, people! Memorizing facts and figures and names and dates isn't learning - it's a way for the bureaucrats to quantify the "return on the education dollars they spend". The paradigm has to change sooner or later. I vote for sooner.

[Kerbface]

Everyone always complains their school serves crappy food. Ever heard of bringing food from home? Is this some taboo in the states or something?

[Diche Bach]

NGTOne: I'm glad you had a good experience with a more 'free-form' approach to education. This is the approach that I evolved into over the years that I taught University courses and for the courses I taught it worked quite well. Define a syllabus using primary readings (articles form the peer-reviewed literature) that addressed major themes pertinent to the course, have weekly quizzes to keep students on task, require students to lead the class 2/3rds of the time. It worked pretty good at first, even better as I improved the design.

However, it would NOT work for many subject matters, it would not work for all 'levels' of course work and it would not necessarily work for all students. I noticed that I many students would seemingly 'flee' as soon as they realized how such a course was to be run. I can only guess that the course design was something they feared. These slots would generally fill up with other students on the wait list though.

Some folks clearly struggle if they are given too much autonomy.

I think that the single biggest factor that leads to deficiencies in education is that it is instituationalized; but herein is the paradox. If it were not institutionalized then it would be very difficult for education to play a key role in societal order. Once upon a time, education was not institutionalized but 95% of people were illiterate and received virtually no education apart from learning to perform some sort of physical labor in service to a lord or property owner. Here we see the more paradoxical point: the fact that education is in virtually all modern nation states institutionalized and subject to governmental standardization is from an historical standpoint a reflection of reforms to promote equality, upward mobility, and individual empowerment. Ironic that it seems to 'feel' oppressive, hierarchical and stifling for so many people.

Education works well when a relatively small number of students are afforded an opportunity to interact with a teacher, someone who knows about a topic, and has a sincere desire to facilitate learning about that topic by others. Here we see additional features of modern education that lead to shorcomings: too many students relative to teachers; teachers who are not actually very expert; teachers who are burnt out or apathetic, even malicious; teachers who either do not really care to help their students learn, or actually are more concerned with establishing their own authority and power than with facilitating learning; related to this last bit, a disturbingly widespread belief among teachers that they as an expert are there to 'dispense' knowledge into the 'empty vessels' of students' minds. Even when someone IS a true expert, this model of how learning or education works still could not be further from the truth. Effective teaching always involves more activity on the part of the student than the teacher, even when the curriculum design is much less open-ended and self-guided as the one you describe above.

I fear that for various reasons, none of these problems are going to really be addressed at any time in the near future, perhaps never. Education is now a very well entrenched 'industry' and the pervasive theories about education are deeply entrenched with the perpetuation of the very societal and institutional models that are inherent flaws in the system. Add to this a wide range of political and ideological factors that complicate any actual hope of rectifying problems (e.g., the fetishization of standardized testing seemingly for the sole purpose of setting up a 'filtering' system to screen candidates for any given trajectory or goal). It is all rather disheartening really, and while I have joked in this thread, I do actually feel a great deal of empathy for you. I personally hated High School, but once I got to college I found that I loved it.

All I can say is: don't let it get you down. Even it is a bummer, it is worth finishing it, and indeed moving on to college may well reveal that education isn't so bad after all. The best way to learn is to explore something for yourself, but that requires true curiousity and engagement with a topic. While school might actually drain your curiousity about any given topic, try to find those things that you really take an interest in and pursue them and educate yourself, perhaps even find teachers or friends who share those interests.

[Randox]

I like the point about driving yourself. One of the more interesting ones I have come across is the Finnish system, as apparently their culture doesn't put much importance on academic performance. No standardized testing, no awards, no scholarships. One of the things you see coming out of this is that, with all the competition out of the way, and worrying about your GPA, it really free's people up to actually learn things. Things like bird courses no longer being a thing because people don't need an easy class to shelter in, or boost their marks with, instead going out and taking something that would be useful to them. It's the situation I find myself in, in University. Do I take something that I think could be really interesting, and perhaps useful, yet is outside what I know I can excel at, or do I find something less engaging and get my easy A?

As for the primary education system, I think partly there is a pretty massive divide between how adults and children/teens see the world, much bigger than one might expect considering that all adults were once younger. I suppose that, as we get older, our memories are now processed through the eyes of adulthood. We lose our perspective, or at least a good portion of it, and are left with perhaps a few memories that we don't really understand, because they no longer make sense.

Do I wish that perhaps I had more freedom in school? Perhaps, though I think there is a balance, especially for people like me who will take advantage of the system if they can. When doing things like papers, I never really liked being told what to do them on. I would much rather come up with some ideas, get them approved, and then be researching something I am really interested in. I did a couple papers on nuclear technology in high school. My first year of university I took the only history course I have ever enjoyed in my life (because there was next to no emphasis on dates, just culture and technology), and wrote my paper on the effectiveness of Gothic and Maximilian full plate armour (spoiler alert: really effective).

Perhaps the most fun I have ever had was my grade 12 art class, where we had one assigned project, which was a reproduction of a famous painting. I did the penrose triangle for that, and then spent most of the year making wireframe skeletons for plasticine sculptures (my favorite was a dragon, which was also a pretty difficult one with all the thin bits on things like the wings). Made for a nice offset of the maths and sciences.

What I definately have an opinion on are some more practical things. I got a bit of this from economics, and also from my parents and older brother (my brother in particular has been fantastic at making sure that I understand things like insurance, mortgages, bills, how much money I will probably be making and how long it takes to save up and so on). But there is other stuff, and if I can quote a cracked article:

I. How to Patch and Paint a Wall So You Can Get Your Deposit Back From Your Landlord;

II. Identifying Which Wires in Your House Will Kill You if You Touch Them;

III. What to do When You Wake Up to Find Your Toilet/Refrigerator/Hot Water Heater/Air Conditioner/Sink is Puking Water Onto Your Floor;

IV. When to Call the Repair Guy;

V. How to Figure Out if the Repair Guy is Screwing You;

VI. Foreign Objects You're Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let's Just Get it Out of Your System Now.

Stuff like that. That's the industrial repairs section, but also things like how to balance the household budget, how credit works, how to cook. I worked with a girl for a bit who used to run classes out of her house on how to eat healthy (as in, fresh fruit/meat/vegetables) for $10 a day.

As for the whole sheltering children thing, I see it as a balancing act. I've seen people who weren't sheltered, people who learned much younger than most how to organize their entire life, and how to advocate for themselves because they had to, and I think it definitely robs you of some of the joy of being a child. Why should a 14 year old kid have to worry about the bills and what not? This is the part of his life where he is still learning, and still learning how to deal with people.. Maybe there is a best time to start bringing them into the real world, perhaps in proportion to their responsibilities.

Which brings me to one last point, about removing the social aspect of school, and here I would have to disagree. I'm not sure what I have to say to bullying, but what I can speak to is that people need to learn to compromise, the skill that our society is based on. I have to imagine that most people have met someone who largely lacks that skill, the 'my way or not at all' attitude (I think everyone goes through it when their young, as part of the brains development. Without social interaction, you never grow out of it). Another way to put it is that the world is run by extroverts, and like it or not, us introverts need to be able to play the game too if we are to one day rule the world

[NGTOne]

However, it would NOT work for many subject matters, it would not work for all 'levels' of course work and it would not necessarily work for all students. I noticed that I many students would seemingly 'flee' as soon as they realized how such a course was to be run. I can only guess that the course design was something they feared. These slots would generally fill up with other students on the wait list though.

Some folks clearly struggle if they are given too much autonomy.

A fair point - however, I don't think it would be detrimental for certain classes, especially in, say, the upper-level sciences (especially at the high school level), to be run more like an English class (i.e. more open-ended, discussion- and research-based as opposed to memorization-based), to promote critical thinking and research skills, as opposed to brute memorization of content (a paradigm that isn't particularly useful in the information age in any event).

I think that the single biggest factor that leads to deficiencies in education is that it is instituationalized; but herein is the paradox. If it were not institutionalized then it would be very difficult for education to play a key role in societal order. Once upon a time, education was not institutionalized but 95% of people were illiterate and received virtually no education apart from learning to perform some sort of physical labor in service to a lord or property owner. Here we see the more paradoxical point: the fact that education is in virtually all modern nation states institutionalized and subject to governmental standardization is from an historical standpoint a reflection of reforms to promote equality, upward mobility, and individual empowerment. Ironic that it seems to 'feel' oppressive, hierarchical and stifling for so many people.

I think there's an important distinction to be made between institutionalizing education and bureaucratizing it. I'm all for the institutionalizing of education, but dead set against its bureaucratization. A government curriculum should form nothing more than a set of guidelines (i.e. "instruct students on this, this, and this topic"). The particulars should be left up to the teacher on the ground - the person who knows the students and has contact with them. This, naturally, is in opposition to most current systems, which dictate the particulars in a golden shower from "on high", in some deep recess of a government office, far removed from any trace of students. Then, naturally, the students (and teachers) take the worst of it, suffering under a system which is geared more towards producing good reports for the higher levels of bureaucracy than it is towards actually teaching students to learn and think (which, in the end, is the ultimate purpose of education).

Here we see additional features of modern education that lead to shorcomings: too many students relative to teachers; teachers who are not actually very expert; teachers who are burnt out or apathetic, even malicious; teachers who either do not really care to help their students learn, or actually are more concerned with establishing their own authority and power than with facilitating learning; related to this last bit, a disturbingly widespread belief among teachers that they as an expert are there to 'dispense' knowledge into the 'empty vessels' of students' minds. Even when someone IS a true expert, this model of how learning or education works still could not be further from the truth. Effective teaching always involves more activity on the part of the student than the teacher, even when the curriculum design is much less open-ended and self-guided as the one you describe above.

I think the problem is cultural as much as anything else - a lot of parents these days expect teachers to act as surrogate parents for their students, or start interfering in the classroom to ensure that Timmy earns a good grade, despite having done nothing to ACTUALLY earn it. A teacher has to deal with 30 different sets of parents (at minimum), all of whom want to know why their precious snowflake isn't getting an A+++. I can quite readily understand why so many teachers are burned out - when the students have no desire to take ownership of their grades, and parents are breathing down their necks all the time, what's the point in actually trying to teach? I think I'd get pretty damn cynical pretty damn fast if that's what I had to deal with in my 9-to-5 (funny enough, a lot of teachers at my high school commented on my cynicism regarding the educational system).

I fear that for various reasons, none of these problems are going to really be addressed at any time in the near future, perhaps never. Education is now a very well entrenched 'industry' and the pervasive theories about education are deeply entrenched with the perpetuation of the very societal and institutional models that are inherent flaws in the system. Add to this a wide range of political and ideological factors that complicate any actual hope of rectifying problems (e.g., the fetishization of standardized testing seemingly for the sole purpose of setting up a 'filtering' system to screen candidates for any given trajectory or goal). It is all rather disheartening really, and while I have joked in this thread, I do actually feel a great deal of empathy for you. I personally hated High School, but once I got to college I found that I loved it.

All I can say is: don't let it get you down. Even it is a bummer, it is worth finishing it, and indeed moving on to college may well reveal that education isn't so bad after all. The best way to learn is to explore something for yourself, but that requires true curiousity and engagement with a topic. While school might actually drain your curiousity about any given topic, try to find those things that you really take an interest in and pursue them and educate yourself, perhaps even find teachers or friends who share those interests.

I didn't hate high school, but that's mainly because I found a niche and filled it nicely. Decently high-performing in classes that caught my interest (programming, the sciences, history), OK at classes with an open-ended format (English), abysmal at everything else (math, French). Not much of a social life, definitely not a "typical teenager".

Realistically, high school is what you make of it. You can let the awful format and occasionally awful teachers get you down, or you can seek out the interesting teachers and get to know them, even outside class time (join a club they run, or something to that effect). I didn't mind it, but I know a lot of people did and still do. Do what you love, and at the end of the day, nobody can tell you that you're wrong.

I like the point about driving yourself. One of the more interesting ones I have come across is the Finnish system, as apparently their culture doesn't put much importance on academic performance. No standardized testing, no awards, no scholarships. One of the things you see coming out of this is that, with all the competition out of the way, and worrying about your GPA, it really free's people up to actually learn things. Things like bird courses no longer being a thing because people don't need an easy class to shelter in, or boost their marks with, instead going out and taking something that would be useful to them. It's the situation I find myself in, in University. Do I take something that I think could be really interesting, and perhaps useful, yet is outside what I know I can excel at, or do I find something less engaging and get my easy A?

I constantly have to avoid this temptation. I hate the idea of a bird course, but I wouldn't mind a boost to my GPA to make prospective employers a little happier. I've found, though, that the primary limiting factor for me isn't the difficulty of the material, it's the "boredom factor" - if I'm bored with a professor/subject, I switch off, and my grades go through the floor. I'll do work that falls into "difficult but interesting" without a second thought, and enjoy it. Difficult and boring... I'm more likely to pitch it in the trash than do it.

Do I wish that perhaps I had more freedom in school? Perhaps, though I think there is a balance, especially for people like me who will take advantage of the system if they can. When doing things like papers, I never really liked being told what to do them on. I would much rather come up with some ideas, get them approved, and then be researching something I am really interested in. I did a couple papers on nuclear technology in high school. My first year of university I took the only history course I have ever enjoyed in my life (because there was next to no emphasis on dates, just culture and technology), and wrote my paper on the effectiveness of Gothic and Maximilian full plate armour (spoiler alert: really effective).

Sounds about right. My programming class is a perfect example - for a final project, we had to create some sort of large (for a beginning programmer) piece of software using the techniques and skills demonstrated that semester. That was literally the only guideline. I decided to be really ambitious, and wrote a two-player command-line chess game. Looking back, it was an anti-pattern-y monstrosity of a program that would make coding style guide writers cry, but it was well beyond what the teacher expected from a student project, and something I would likely have been reprimanded for if I had tried it in another class (too ambitious). I had a history class like this, too - final project was a proper academic research paper, open topic as long as it related to the class material. I decided to do a comparative study of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian architecture (architecture being one of many subjects in which I have an interest), which was WAAAAY outside the scope of the class, the project, and the school library. After the appropriate bureaucratic wrangling to get access to the local university library, I dug up a few books, did my research, and turned in what the teacher later said was one of the best papers she'd seen in a long time. Open-ended education, in areas where it can be applied, is an amazing tool to motivate students to learn and seek new knowledge. And it seems to surprise the teachers what the students will do and accomplish if given a little latitude - far more than if they were confined to a straight-and-narrow textbook/exam paradigm, it seems.

Edited September 5, 2013 by NGTOne

[M.Wolfy]

hmmm, maybe there should also be a thread called Work AKA Prison for the adults as well

[KOCOUR]

But I'm pretty sure you don't have to get up at 6:00 AM to get ready, then be tired as hell while teachers are screaming at you

Now iam laughing. I dont know how about your country, but in my, most of the workers are allready working at 6AM. And cant effort to even look tired when their bosses are screaming at them.

[KOCOUR]

hmmm, maybe there should also be a thread called Work AKA Prison for the adults as well

Nope, cause adult understands the importance of work.

[YX33A]

Sorry, lost track of the thread. I'll be blunt; for you, that is school and the person yelling at you is a teacher. For me(and every last person in here who is an adult), this is not five days a week, but seven, not 6 am, usually 5 if you commute at all, and it's not your teacher, but your boss who you can't get away with responding in kind to. Or if you work in the service industry, occasionally customers as well. If you work as a staff scheduler for basically any company, that's most of the people you have to talk to. If you are a dispatcher of any kind, that's again, pretty much everyone you give work to. If you, godforbid, are a scheduler for, say, in home health care, that's not only your people you give work to, but basically everyone you are sending them to see.

I wish I was exaggerating. But if you thought your teacher hated you, wait til you have a job and things to pay for. It'll either land you in jail or smarten you up to the fact that despite the fact that some people are only alive because it's illegal to kill them, pretty much everyone who isn't a close friend of yours would kill you if they could get away with it and not have to cover it up at all. Welcome to dealing with people you don't like. It sucks. You have to do it. I still have trouble with it. But nothing save for possibly suicide would rid you of the having to deal with people issue. And lets not waste our breath here. If you aren't an adult, you generally aren't going to be able to get the stuff needed to relatively painlessly off yourself. The best kids seem to know is wrists and sharp stuff. I pity the poor souls who cut their wrists. They have no clue what they are doing and it's so sad it's almost funny. I know I shouldn't make light of teen depression seeing as I am well aware how serious and all but ignored youth mental health issues are, but I just shake my head a chuckle a somewhat sad chuckle, much like I suppose the Joker would laugh if he did in "What Ever Happened To The Dark Avenger?" comic. It's somewhat funny, but you can't pull it fully out of the sadness.

[M.Wolfy]

Nope, cause adult understands the importance of work.

but also understands the frustrations of it as well, and i don't think i got my message across correctly...

the adults are using this thread to talk about "enjoy school!" and how they have to work 7 days a week and snaz like that. but to be honest, i do enjoy school (no wonder my class calls me weird ), except for the visual arts part...

and it's ironic that i get told to enjoy school by my father and a KSP thread...

Edited September 5, 2013 by M.Wolfy

[Deadpangod3]

Guys, don't let this thread get out of hand, or I'll ask a mod to lock it

[SuperWeegee4000]

Nope, cause adult understands the importance of work.

Don't think we don't understand the importance of school. But there are better ways to educate a student than some of the methods the education system currently employs.

[Randox]

Thinking about it some more, open ended probably works up to the point where the next level of education requires to to have some basic knowledge set. I suppose it really is the holy grail of schooling though, hence the highest level of education involves becoming a world expert in something new (this would be a doctoral degree).

As for education methods, that can still get interesting. This is the one I hope to see start to change in my lifetime (hopefully really soon, because right now it's going backwards and I want it getting better before I have kids of my own). Things like cutting back recess and lunch are things we already know have a terrible impact on learning, and yet we do them anyway in the vain hope that you can just shove more things into a persons brain with brute force (see: Studying with Osmosis - How to Absorb Knowledge by Sleeping on a Textbook, because that's how much sense that line of thinking makes). What actually happens is that kids become restless and bored, stop paying attention, and disrupt the class thus ensuring that children with preternatural attention spans don't learn squat either.

Another one is rolling things back into earlier years. The human brain has very distinct stages of development, again, this is all stuff we know pretty well. The human brain even transitions from stage to stage very quickly, before plateauing in the next one for some time, which makes it really easy to have a good idea where someone is at based on age alone. Perhaps the most important one is the capacity for abstract thought, the ability to comprehend a hypothetical scenario inside your own head, a capability that is fundamental to algebra among other things. What has been observed is that for children where algebra was first taught before age twelve (in grade 7 instead of 8 if I remember correctly, maybe it's 8 and 9), their math scores plummet and never recover, probably because you just spent a year frustrating them with concepts their brains weren't equipped to handle and teaching them that math sucks, and they suck at math.

Oh, and NGTOne, same thing about the bird courses. I still have to stick with things that interest me, or my marks will crash and burn. What I have found is that things that are interesting and things that are easy tend to go hand in hand. I suppose part of that is people naturally enjoy things they are good at, things that come easily to them, but it also works the other way, people will work hard to understand things that interest them. Oh, and looking at the program I did for my first Java class still makes me want to crawl under the desk. I was experimenting with multiple classes before I really understood Object Oriented Programming, I was still treating them a lot like subroutines and sub-programs from my self taught procedural days, and the results are hard to read and pretty horrific, though it worked just fine. The one I have been thinking about is doing up an AI for cribbage. It's a game where I could easily write my entire strategy on pen and paper, and it would be an interesting way try different strategy tweaks and see how they perform. Would certainly top teaching the computer to play Bingo. For me, so far open ended in computers has mostly meant that you are at lest semi-free to decide how you want the program to work under the hood, and with a lot of flexibility for additional features.

[Diche Bach]

hmmm, maybe there should also be a thread called Work AKA Prison for the adults as well

Also an "Unemployment AKA Hell!" thread too

Guys, don't let this thread get out of hand, or I'll ask a mod to lock it

Whaaa?? Outta hand how? Everybody seems very friendly, polite and generally well within the bounds of good forum etiquette, no? Sure there is a bit of teasing going on but none of it is truly hostile or mean. Rather more like this

Edited September 5, 2013 by Diche Bach

[SuperWeegee4000]

He has a point. It's not a flamewar.

[rasheed]

My school system ish weird. In grade 7 my teacher taught the class that Venus gone around the sun the opposite way. o.O

[swiftgates24]

That isn't being weird, that is being stupid

[Charzy]

School isn't that bad. At least, my school isn't. Most of the teachers are good, some of the classes are interesting and it's generally just a fun time.

That said, I can't wait to leave so that I can get a job and actually have freedom to do mostly whatever I want. For adults saying that school is the best time of your life, please remember this. You have money. You choose what food you eat. You choose what clothes you wear. You choose where you go in your free time. You get the freedom to decide for yourself what's best for you. Children don't get that.