School (Page 1 of 6)

I like Makow too, lyra. Especially the way he doesn't emphasize his personal faith.
Bob Dylan once said that colleges were a lot like old-age homes, but that more people died in colleges.  I understand that statement better now than when I first heard it.
I'm a three-time dropout from "higher education" factories. School is the Last place you want to be if Learning is what you're after. I think that by the time I was in fourth grade I had learned all that was useful to me from school. Spelling, basic grammar, rudimentary math, and how to fake respect for authority. In fourth grade, I began to learn things detrimental to my survival, namely that I didn't mesh well socially. This cemented my lack of self-confidence into a permanent place in my psyche.  As peer pressure came into play, my individuality seemed to be in danger.
That was in the 50s.  Two hundred years ago, a school was a different place. It was actual preparation for higher learning.  And regardless of everything that may be wrong with England, the school system there is vastly superior to ours.  Think of the uncountable fortune spent on american education and the typical result of a K-12 process.  Would that much money go into a program producing such poor results?  Yes, if poor results are desired by those who control the system.  (This irony of american education is transferrable to almost any government department.  Take the ATF. You might guess that they're in charge of making sure there's plenty of booze, cigarettes and guns to go around, as easily as you'd guess that they are supposed to be regulating these things.  I have to wonder what the center for disease control is really doing.)
School now is a place where individuals are innoculated against learning.  Administered is a dead form of the "learning virus" (the desire to gain wisdom & understanding), resulting in immunity to mental development.  Students are taught that to succeed in school, they must leave their minds in the closet with their coats.  They learn to meet the requirements but not to understand the information in any useful context.
Unfortunately, in many cases, homeschooling is done by the previous generation's victims of the education system, perpetuating the situation. Homeschooling generally requires the same faulty textbooks to be used as in school. The primary benefit is a less-crowded classroom, as I see it.
I used to say that if I had children, I'd only send them to school for recess. I wouldn't even do that now.
A child turned loose in a good library and allowed his own discoveries will not only educate himself, but will probably develop a love of learning no school could foster. 
My advice to students of all ages: Drop Out. Drop Out Now!
PS  Forgive my generalizations. There are still good teachers and environments conducive to learning, but these are rare as hen's teeth. Or out of financial reach for most people.

i totally agree with all of the views expressed here, montalks and others. the school system is mediocre, to say the least.

why dont they begin teaching advanced concepts? science is leaping forward, yet we are still being taught the same ol' stuff...

for example;
in middle school i took algebra, so i had a headstart when i entered High school. i went thru geometry and alg2 in a flash. then i took up calc.

wait, let me back track to alg2. in alg2 i remember is when i found out about Fractals. i was so intrugued by the endless designs fractals yield, and i wanted to know more. naturally, i asked my teacher if she could help teach me. to my surprise- SHE DIDNT EVEN KNOW ABOUT FRACTALS!!!

i had to take it upon myself to learn them. and they are some very complex ideas, especially when u realize they are based with imaginary numbers and imaginary axis !!!

then, in calculus, i remember one day clearly;
it was a test day, and i was more than ready. as soon as i got the paper i did all the problems with godspeed. the teacher (and a-hole) was walking around making sure no one cheats, when all of a sudden he comes to my desk and he stops.
he grabs my paper, and proclaims "you are cheating, you had the answers already, didnt you?" to which i reply "No Sir, i did not cheat, this is easy for me"
he then crumbled up my test, and tells me "take the test again"
which i did. and just in the same amount of time.

he got the new test, compared to the crumbled one, and the answers were the same.

that teacher NEVER bothered me again.

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now, what the hell does this show?

a student who is beyond the public school system, who is ridiculed for being smart. neglected for being intelligent.

this is how it is. the school system doesnt like those students who are above the level of incompetant sheeple.

and they even try to shoot down those who are "gifted"

Word!  (to every poster on this thread)

Quantity over quality results in big piles of garbage. From what I heard, back in the old days students were assigned small quantities of quality homework. Today it's the reverse -- hours and hours of trivial busywork.

There are various PC excuses for piling on garbage, like creating a "well rounded person" or "enhancing educational performance" and "raising test scores" so that "no child is left behind." All that does is cut with the flat side of the blade, spreading students thinly across so many subjects that they learn nothing deeply enough to use for themselves, only enough to carry out instructions or orders. This turns students into tools.

I'd say 80% of school is wasted time. In college I was required to take core classes and electives that had nothing to do with physics and engineering, as though they assumed I would be an illiterate racist square if I didn't take classes on culture and literature on top of my sciences. With the free time I could have instead hung out with culturally different and literate people downtown instead of reading about them in a book.

Nowadays, college and school load you up with so much work that you have no time to think for yourself. Like Lyra said, it's a prison system...or a brainwashing camp. If you look at what techniques are used in concentration camps to wear down prisoners and brainwash them, you'll see most of these are also used in schools directly or indirectly.

Well, I do have to give props to college for giving me a basic foundation in hardcore math and physics. But I learned these only during the first three years when things were kept simple, general, and useful. I think these "basic" classes serve as bait, like a drug dealer offering a free hit until you get hooked. I left college just in time - enough foundation to know where to head, but not so much indoctrination that I become a robot.

I agree with Aaronfirebrand, "School is the Last place you want to be if Learning is what you're after." -- yeah, if you want a diploma, learn things on your own first, then hurry through school with the minimum amount of effort to get your degree.

Hey everyone. I take a bit of hiatus from the internet for a few days, and NR is busier than ever. Who woulda thunk it. Time to play catch-up.

Ah school. I hate it with a passion. I'm currently finishing up my last year at university, which is surprising considering I've hated it so much that I nearly subconsciously sabotaged myself to fail out. My parents have been so distraught with my grades. They didn't understand why I've been so unmotivated to do well. I told them instead of Cs and Ds this last semester I would get all As just to prove that I could if I wanted to, and I did. Right now I've decided to finish school simply because I've already invested so much time and money into it, I may as well go through with it.

Aside from the curriculum, the faults of which you all did a great job of conveying, the absolute WORST problem I've had with schools is the actual teachers and professors. At college, out of about 30 professors, I can say I've had only one professor that actually knew how to teach. High school was the same. Teaching is not dictating material from a textbook. Teaching is not regurgitating your knowledge of a subject regardless of whether your audience understands it or not. No, what teaching IS is quite different than what goes on in schools. Teaching is the process of leading the student along the path of knowledge, not prodding them from behind, which is what happens in the educational system. Learning is a free will process, it can't be forced. When something is truely learned, it need not be relearned. Think of those days when you went back to school for a new year and you had to 'review' concepts. If the students actually learned those concepts in the correct manner, they wouldn't need to be reviewed, no matter if they were 'forgotten.' Do you need a review when you haven't ridden your bicycle for 10 years? LOL of course not. That's because you've learned how to ride the bike subconsciously. Learning is not related to conscious memory at all, except in the modern educational system of regurgitation of facts.

I have always thought, since a young age, that the apprentice-mentor system would be the best method of learning for job professions. It would be an efficient system, plus workers would get additional pay from apprentices simply for observation of their jobs. Any necessary knowledge that the apprentice would need for the job but the mentor was unable to teach would be the responsibility of the apprentice to learn on his/her own. However maybe I'm being naive and this wouldn't work so well. After all, there would be people who'd rather not have someone around watching them at their job all day.

See....that's exactly what I'm talking about.   A part of the problem with school is the teachers.   I have had quite a few nightmare teachers....OH my god.   I look back and I cannot BELIEVE they were allowed to teach.   Sometimes I wish I could go back as my current self in the body of me as a kid, coming face to face with those teachers.....hehe    Would be very interesting.    I'd have a mouthful to say, that's for sure.    My brother had a kindergarten teacher who was the angriest woman you've ever seen.   Teaching little 5 year olds.   She had a bell on her desk that she would pound with her hand / fist when the class got to "noisy" and would just SCREAM at them.    She was a nutjob.    For me, my 4th grade teacher was this man-woman named Mrs. Anderson with a smoker's rasp and too much perfume who carried on like trailer trash.   No offense, but, that's what it was.   She was always bellowing at everybody in a raspy man voice, choking us all with her ghastly perfume.    Mostly the only thing we did that year were dittos.   Anybody remember ditto worksheets?   She'd literally hand out 20 - 25 dittos every day --  busy work -- just to keep us preoccupied all day.   Dittos and spelling tests, that's all I remember about 4th grade.   No learning projects, no field trips, NADA.    8th grade we had a psychotic English teacher named Mr. Kenney.   He walked in long strides with crazy bugged out "pyscho eyes", looking around the classroom like a mad dog for a target.   This isn't funny though, what he did was actual verbal abuse and verbal / emotional attacks.    From the first day of class he wanted to make sure we understood loud and clear who was boss.   The guys sitting in the back of the class who like to harmlessly joke around and have fun?    He was like,

"You think this is funny?"

"no...."

"YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?    You sit in my class, laughing?   Sounds like something's funny.   Tell us what's so funny."

"nothing....nothing's funny...."

"YOU WERE JUST LAUGHING.   Something is obviously funny.  You obviously feel like this is YOUR class, so why don't you share with the rest of the class?"

And this would go on.   And on.   He didn't just drop it after 30 seconds.   He would go on for over 5 minutes, just REALLY angry and psycho like, his eyes all wild, strands of hair in his face.   Another time he pulled one of the "class clown" guys aside in the empty classroom when we were out of the room, sat him down in a desk, sat down next to him, got up really close in his face, and in a low voice began berating him, making fun of him, putting him down, calling him names.   I'll never forget peering through the glass window in the door and the door that was open a crack to see what was going on and witnessing that, and seeing this kid with TEARS on his cheeks.   This tough class clown, reduced to tears.   

Then there was ME and Mr. Kenney.    Anytime he'd give us a "creative writing" assignment, he'd have us go up to his desk, one at a time and sit there next to him at the desk in front of the entire classroom while he read our stuff, making comments.  The classroom would be so silent you could hear a pin drop, NOBODY dared speak.    He'd have his red pen and would just start scratching stuff out, yelling about how it was terrible, it was crap, blah blah blah.   But I was his special target, probably because I actually could write.     I'd won the school wide writing contest in 7th grade.....of which HE was one of the judges......So he targetted me and was harder on me than anybody else because of this.    So whenver it was my turn, he'd just bellow my last name, looking up from his desk with crazy eyes, and I swear to GOD everybody in the class would look down at their desks, their books, not even wanting to look up and watch this.   I'd go up there, sit down, and he'd read over my stuff, trashing it.  One time he scratched something out so crazily that he actually RIPPED A HOLE IN THE DAMN PIECE OF PAPER!     I can actually laugh about that one, that's kind of funny in a sicko way.   Oh yeah, and if he EVER called on you with a question about literary terms, the literature we were reading or stuff pertaining to writing and grammar and you DIDN'T know the answer.............holy crap. WATCH out.   He would rip you to shreds.   It only had to happen once.  You'd NEVER let that happen twice. 

It was pretty f***** up.   I actually had "flash back" sort of things pertaining to him in the next few years of school.   In 10th grade photography class we were all just sitting there, mellow, and I was spaced out and suddenly I heard Mr. Kenney yell my name the way he always did, over my shoulder.  I jumped and looked around all scared before I even realized what had happened.  REALLY weird.   In 9th grade our English teacher asked us a question about some literary term, nobody had the answer but me, because I'd been "traumatized" into remembering it.   It was the term "suspension of disbelief."   I immediately heard him yelling it in my mind, either at me or someone else who didn't have the answer.   REALLY REALLY weird.   

Nothing "teaches" humans faster or more effective than fear.   That's something I learned in school.   You want results?  You want a kid who can regurgitate like a good little robot, on the spot?  Scare the crap out them, psychologically torment them and abuse them....use humiliation in front of their peers.....guaranteed repeated humiliation and fear tactics.    You WILL get results.

And those were some of my experiences in school.  Lovely, eh?     

Oh, and wandeing1....you're right about the grades thing.   After ALL that....after 12 years of that crap we all went through.......the conditioning, the psychological torture, the beating down of our souls, in the end, out in the real world, NOT ONCE have my grades in school been asked about.    None of the spelling bees, writing contests, the awards for this silly thing or that, nor the "Diploma" EVER counted for anything, which is actually what I expected anyway when I was in school.  I never seriously believed it would matter down the line.   THAT was the confusing part while I was going through it all, because everybody around you as a kid, the school, the teachers, your peers, your parents, beat it into you that it DOES matter, that the grade you get on that stupid 7th grade history test will make or break you for the rest of your frigging LIFE.      Seriously, I could have dropped out and it would have had zero bearing in the real world.   I've never been asked to produce my "diploma" in order to get a job.  I've never been asked about anything that went on in junior high or high school. 

12 wasted years, a prison term to psychologically break you.   That's all public school is.   And they're successful, for the most part.   They get what they want.   Psychologically broken, regurgitating robots who can't think for themselves.

You know what's weird...I was thinking the same thing when I wrote my last post.....!