Scrustle said:
The main problem I have with how the school system is supposed to work is that it doesn't really teach you to be well equipped for a future in the given topic. What really happens is they teach you to pass exams. Everything is about just ticking boxes and getting the grade at the end of the year. It's all focused on unnecessary pedantry and meeting arbitrary targets.
At the end of it you aren't really any wiser or smarter. You know some more facts and you can write an essay with them, but you're not a better person. You just met the arbitrary requirements to be allowed to do it all over again next year. That's all you achieved. You absorb and regurgitate information and at the end you are given a letter that vaguely represents how much of that information you could reproduce, and if that letter is the right one then you are given the opportunity to do it all over again.
Or at least, that's my experience of the "education" system. That's why I'm done with it.
Midgeamoo said:
My main problem with education is by the end of it, it's aimed towards passing exams and NOT y'know, education. That's just fucked up, what is the point of getting an A level in Chemistry or Physics if all you can do is rattle off text book paragraphs and redo the same mathematical process 10 times over.
Oh, and because over here they normally do 1hour 30min exams for 4 months worth of shit, I seriously doubt that the majority of people get the grades they deserve.
These so much. From 5th grade onward, pretty much all we were doing was preparing for City and State standardized tests. My 8th grade [at least I want to say it was him, my memory is foggy on who said it] math teacher said it best: "You're not here to learn, you're here to learn how to take tests."
Hell, in 6th & 7th grades, by the time winter would roll by pretty much all the classes we had that didn't have a Standardized Test attached to it were dropped and replaced with more classes that were.
Even if I had a class that didn't have one of those stinkin' tests hanging over it, most of the time, they would be forced to throw in lessons associated with them anyway. If a class was lucky enough to not have that happen to it, it would still be crippled by lack of funds, overcrowding, lack of a proper teacher, lack of space, and/or have a teacher attached to it that taught two or more different subjects, thus the class would progress slowly due to the teacher being exhausted/unable to keep track of what should be happening/over-encumbered with work to grade/etc.
BRex21 said:
I think the school system is almost defective by design at this point. Heck most of the free world has now decided that the whole language method of teaching English is superior because it provides a more even outcome than phonics methods did. Not a higher average, or an improvement to any group but rather that everyone learned it at a slower pace so there was less difference.
You can find far too many examples of the public school system shooting itself in the foot to appease politics.
I can safely say that learning how to reading phonetically is a horrible way to learn how to read. When I had to learn how to read, all the lessons we had to do and books we were given to read had the words written out the way they sound. If I heard right, pretty much everyone as a result couldn't spell since they were taught phonetically, so they naturally try to write out a word by how it sounds since that was how they learned to read. Granted, I'm not sure how true this is, but that's a problem I've faced all my life. My spelling was so horrendous that in 3rd/4th grade I had to be given special spelling tests that used very simple words.
Fast forward to now, my boyfriend often points out that I write out many words more like how they sound rather than how they're spelled. Like, for example I always write out 'kindergarten' as 'kindergarden', 'retarded' as 'retarted', etc. If it weren't for spell check, I would look like a bigger retard than I already am.
That's New York City Public Education for ya. ;]
EDIT: Something I just remembered. During the last two or so years of high school, we were often told that were we to go to college, the first year or two would be high school leveled stuff that we already did a bit of, since the stuff we should have known by the time we were to enter collage, we barely covered and learned about. That's right, the school was freely admitting that they did a piss poor job educating us, and that in order to learn what we should have, we were going to have to pay for it.
(unless you were like me and learned some of the things the school should have taught you out on your own [granted I'd have still been screwed since I'm horrible at math, science, and Spanish, but lucky me for not being able to afford it in the first place, right?])