The Ignorance of America

Dear Kiamat,

Welcome back! I hope you had a really good summer vacation.

Before fall semester starts, you should know we made a couple of changes in the way off-topic works while you were gone. Just two things !

1) we post facts here, and opinions too, but not opinions as facts. For example, "There's a reason that, given the choice, most people send their kids to private school anyway. " - is probably your own assessment of reality, unless you have a study you can cite that backs that up. If you don't, then you should probably say something like "it seems to me a lot of people send their kids to private schools" - and this is because:

2) we tend to pounce on people who make up stuff around here.

Anyway, again, welcome back, and don't forget that we no longer serve soft drinks in the cafeteria.

Yours,

Taco

I completely agree that the educational system has it's problems but I thought I would ask the obligitory, "Weren't you educated in the United States cause you seem to get your point across well enough?" question.

"because"

One might say I succeeded in spite of the educational system. Or one could say that I got my education before the system was overrun with unmotivated teachers, too much political correctness and revisionist history. I also paid attention in class because we got this thing called "grades", and bad grades meant my parents were gonna grief the crap out of me when I got home

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Cindy if you read news from other countries you would see we are less of an idoit than most.......................
or knew their policies..

Or one could say that it is easy to point the finger at how screwed up everyone else is "supposed" to be while at the same time proclaiming nothing is wrong with lil ole me. Point being, you are a product of the United States Educational system and so am I, I think we turned out ok.,.. lol.

There is also a logical reason for the lack of knowledge that you pointed out... teenagers are... um... stupid... rofl. Always have and always will be.

Yes, I am playing the devils advocate here and fully recognize that the Educational System needs some work.

One thing that should be pointed out (if it hasn't already) is that The Simpsons has consistantly been one of television's best examples of intelligent satire. When you laugh at something, you have to think about *why* it's funny. The Simpsons make us laugh at our own flaws...and they make us *aware* of our own flaws.

I embrace the Tao of D'oh.

i always look forward to darksyde's diaries on dkos... and today's seems tooo fitting not to share.


"The Roman Empire is crumbling, the fragments of the classical world regrouping in Egypt when Thasos, son of an ill-fated scholar, meets Hypatia of Alexandria. Astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher at a time when women were shunned from learning, Hypatia is a daring visionary in a world about to change forever."

Science Friday: The Great Library

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/8/4/72341/16309

teenagers are not stupid. They maybe naive, but not stupid.

Oh, I agree, that was kind of a joke my man! Teenagers are inexperienced, nieve and have much yet to learn is my point.

I don't live in America, but I home educate my children. The home education community in the UK country is more or less evenly divided between people who have never sent their children to school, and knew home education was legal and an effective way to educate their children and chose it from the start, and those who took their children out of school due to a problem like bullying, school refusal or behavioural problems.

I always say I did both: my sons were very unhappy and bored at school, and one of them was badly bullied. By the time my daughter was old enough to go I was so sold on home education that I chose to home educate her from the beginning.

Notice I say home educate, not home school. Schooling is something I think of as very negative indeed. It smacks of training people to think "right", not think for themselves. I think that education in the UK has come to mean filling children up with facts and then having them regurgitate them over an exam paper - at 7, 11, 14, 16, and 18 years of age.

Home education regards education as the natural state of children and adults too, if you do not interfere with them. What I have found is that home educated children retain the curiosity which all young children have, but most schooled children gradually lose. I believe that partly comes from constantly telling children in classrooms to stop doing this and start doing that, even if they are absorbed and engaged in the activity they are doing.

Far from finding stereotypical socially-handicapped misfits in home education groups, I have found children who are open and social and kind to each other. We have been attending a weekly home education camp some distance from our home for several years and the children have 165 acres of woods to run around in. There are incidents of disagreement between children from time to time, but no bullying that I or my children have witnessed... being able to choose your companions, and being able to get away fom them when required, is a very good safety valve, impossible in school situations usually.

I highly recommend the works of John Taylor Gatto, Frank Smith, John Holt and Roland Meighan if you are interested in learning how education could change for the better.

I must admit that school and everything about it seemed normal to me when my older son was ready for school, because I had been through the system myself. Once I started to look at the truth behind a lot of the things school does, I realised how ridiculous a lot of them are. And how much time is spent on crowd control, moving from one place to another, and waiting. And what a poor system it is, for education, for teaching children discernment and judgement, for motivating children to learn because it is fun and interesting and not hard work and a chore.

For those who think that school is essential to a good psychological development of children, bear in mind that NOT going to school was the norm for hundreds of thousands of years ... going to school has only been the norm for about a hundred and thirty in the UK. Bear in mind also that literacy levels appear to have gone DOWN and not up in the time that compulsory education has been in force, in the US and the UK. And remember those subjects which you hated at school and love today. In my case, Shakespeare, history and French.

If you worry about dumbing down and actually understand what John Taylor Gatto was talking about when he coined the phrase - the lowering of a child's intelligence by not allowing him or her to think their own thoughts and make their own investigations into the world - then read the articles I have linked to and make your own mind up about whether there are vested interests who don't want children in general to be too clever.
Cali

i commend you. good teachers are in short supply because it's an overworked, underpaid, underappreciated job. tell me how do you feel about Bush's 'No Child Left Behind'?

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These same people voted to Elect King George president in 2004AD.

I think that its a good idea, but in practice its unrealistic. What is really needed is less mandated material that teachers HAVE to cover. If they want improved results and better education standards, let me teach to suit my students strengths instead of the way my father was taught

why do you keep posting?

Caliandris, What a wonderful post. I think you are exactly right when you talk about how school tends to pound a child's creative, inquisitive mind into a conformist box. I saw some statistics on home schooled children not long ago, and in the U.S. they perform as well or better than children who went to public schools. There should be no surprise there.

I have no problem with home "educated" to use your word. With one small exception, when the parents shelter their kids too much, then the child can have problems interacting with others. It seldom happens but it is very troublesome when it does. Its usually what I call the "only child syndrome" and/or the "spoiled brat syndrome" *



*note this is not ALL children in this situation, but we all know the ones I am talking about.

*sits back and waits for united states to become the world's biggest theocracy*

<sits back and waits on France to discover deodorant>

Like the big wig family rights groups, King George,

because you have no right to tell me to not post and you have no right to attack me

who attacked? I just asked why you keep posting this trash. You added nothing to this debate, just annoying rhetoric.

We are 99% of the way there now.

That is another attack. Its not trash.

yeah it is trash, it is nothing but political rhetoric that you've said 800 times. Your right that was an attack, I think you give your side a bad reputation. Your in the same ilk as Kevn Klein.