The school system - what is it really about?

[Kagim]

To understand school you need to take a step back and look at it a little harder.

For the record, Canadian, BC, Public school graduate.

School, for better or worse, is to teach us how to deal with people. It's to give us fundamental abilities.

English class is meant to teach us how to understand those around us. Why the major focus of any literature assignment on "What did they mean?" is to help the students learn how to read people words. Understand why and when people lie, and when we should feel compassion. It's learning empathy. In my school system English is needed from K-12.

Math is meant to train our minds. Math is one of the few courses that has nothing to do with memorization to get the answers. Unless you memorize every single possible mathematical equation possible the only way to pass is to master the finer points of the formulas. Being told how to perform 3*3 does not instantly grant the knowledge of 1582*98712 (156162384 by the way). It trains your mind to grasp difficult concepts. In my schools Math is required from k-11.

Science, science is an interesting world. It's meant to keep an open understanding of how the works. More importantly sciences can be applied to anything. Unless your future lies in the food services One of the three branches of beginner sciences will help you on your way. In my school system sciences were required from k-11.

Now, to quote someone directly for Social Studies.

But why do I need to know about Napoleon's great feats or any other person?

Because our history is important. Humanity as a race has a long arduous path we have trodden. To ignore any of it honestly is horribly irresponsible. Who is to say what piece of the past might be important in the future. We need to appreciate our past. K-10.

Pe, music, the arts. I would think these are self explanatory. K-9.

One more thing, if i may pick on you a bit, sorry i mean no ill will.

But! In grade ten I had finished all ONE of my schools programs to become an animator. And it only barely touched flash. I wonder why I have to learn about P.E, chemistry and others when they have little to no use for my Career path.

Whats wrong in learning? Yes, PE and Chemistry might not help you much as an animator, but as you said Bio and Physics could help you. How would you know that if you never took them? What if in your later Chem classes you discover a spark of something you find interesting. Sure, you don;t need them for what you want to be NOW. But what about the future? What if you missed out on something you may have liked INFINITELY more simply because you narrowed your mind and only learned the skills for one profession. Hell, maybe there are other areas you can accomplish and enjoy greater you have just set aside because you decided, while still in high school, that your going to be an animator. Never limit yourself. Learn EVERYTHING you can.


Now, this is to everyone.

The major criticisims i hear about school are "But it won't help me find a job!"

High school isn't about finding a job. It's about finding out who you are. It's about figuring out where your talents lay. How would someone learn they have a knack for Advanced biology if they never took a class and sunk there teeth into it. Can the school system be refined and made better? God yes, i could go on for ages about ways they could fine tune the education system.

Elementary school and High School teach us how to deal with people around us. The suck ups, the assholes. The stupid shits that fake there way in life and the people who will actually stand by us. How many friends have you met through school versus, well anywhere else. Yes, friends come and go but with each one you learned a bit more about yourself and how to be a person. If you seriously think the pricks and ass kissers just disappear after high school? No, they enter the work force just like you.

However to think it's merely a ploy to keep younger people out of the work force? Sorry, i don't buy it.

Think of it this way, which world would you rather. One where you are born and bred for certain jobs without any consideration for any other possible occupation. Or one where you are given a plethora of options and possibilities for you to pick and choose? As said the education system can most definitely stand some re evaluation and refinement, but it is in no way a total waste.

 

[Stikibunn]

And this is why I never became a teacher.
I love new knowledge, especially when it's within my favorite subjects such as history, architecture, art, culture and literature. I get very excited.
But if I tried to teach I couldn't pass on the excitement.

 

[Kryzantine]

Holy. Shit. You have thought about this more than anyone else. But I have to agree on pretty much every point! I'm in high-school and I find myself questioning things such as;
Why is it mandatory to take Geography, History, and PE when I want to go into medical studies?

I hate to be the one interjecting here, but I will contend that modern schooling is not a societal method of control, and on its basis, it is a system that educates people, but the execution is horrible; this is using American education as a primary example, for I do not know every nation's education laws.

You want to get into medical studies. Personally, I feel that that's already step 1 to disaster considering the ludicrous number of doctors already out there, but OK. Geography is intrinsically useful for being an intelligent human being. So you won't need to predict the future, but geography is more than physical landscape (and even then, it's simply appalling, the degree to which some Americans are terrible at identifying countries and their locations). It is about trends, not just in nature but among people, and if you want to be an intelligent human being in our society, you have to be able to take this information in. Where are events occurring, where is the culture changing, and how will I be affected by it? And in a world that is becoming more globalized each and every day, what happens in India or Zimbabwe or Egypt will affect you more than you think.

History is another area that is neglected. This continues on the idea of being an intelligent individual, that you know our past. If you ever get into medical research - and you should at some point - you're going to get to know a lot of older practices. Why, just the other day, they made the connection and discovered that the Nubians had knowledge of anti-biotics through tetracycline tests on skeletons. The theory now is that the grain they used to ferment their beer contained the soil bacteria streptomyces. This is relevant stuff, you know. You're going to have to come up with clever solutions some day, something you can't open up your medical handbook on, and you're going to have to think. You're going to have to interpret information. You're going to have to know what you can do with what you have.

PE is a very interesting one. You ever make the analogy between doctors and sports? You ever realize that a lot of doctors used to play basketball, football, lacrosse? There's a reason for that, it's team building. It's relationship building. It's part of what makes you a person and it's that which tells you that you have to lay it all on the line at some points and be the most you can be. Surgeons in particular are very, very much into physical activity. I would absolutely not neglect PE if I were to consider going into medicine. It is the most underrated aspect of the practice in today's world.

Now it's time to address the more general viewpoints of school. It is a transition from childhood to adulthood and an entrance into society as we know it. It teaches us to be complete human beings. It eases us into a particular role in the world. The original posters contended that a human should know survival skills by 13 years old. They should learn botanical information on their local area and they should learn how to assemble weapons, tools and gather food. And yes, most people that age do not know how to do any of that stuff. But the fact of the matter is, do they need to? Are we at threat from wild animals? Do we need to defend ourselves from those crazy rednecks a mile to the west? OK, bad example. You ask if humans can defend themselves if everyone else randomly died, but I say that's a very idiotic notion to base an argument that we need survival skills off of, because under our current system, that situation is impossible without everyone foreseeing it and being able to learn these skills when they become useful.

That tribal kid may know enough to be able to live his life at 13, but we are not tribal kids, nor should we be.

We should be an educated civilization. Civilization is founded upon and thrives off of technological innovation. Education comes as a consequence of this: it is a system, a tool for innovation to occur. The only difference between a high school, a botanical research lab and a computer software development company are the people that compose them. Their ultimate goal is the exact same: innovation to promote society and civilization as a whole, so we can become more specialized, and we won't have to learn basic survival skills.

Our modern education system does not achieve that on a grand scale. You have to realize that in America, the primary education focus is on the select few schools filled to the brim with intelligencia. It's entirely possible that the next President, the next Greenspan and the next CEO of Walmart will pop out of the same graduating class in the same high school. This is where innovation comes from. These are the places where events are unfolding. These are the places where we identify Sartre's fallacies, where we identify the US's best move against China, and where we come up with the next economic tool to exploit Americans with. This is a high school, damnit. The education is capitalist: the richly intelligent students combine to go into a few schools where they do everything, while the masses go to schools where they don't do all that much; and people rise from the crowd, sure. They join the ranks of the elite. We love those success stories. But it ain't happening every day.

Education as a base concept is not flawed in America. Having a well rounded education is not a bad thing. No, our problem is that the system lies to its students early on, and is promoting a cause that is directly contributing to our troubles as a nation. There is a war on science in America. We hate research. We hate anything that can factually prove somebody wrong. We want people to be mindless, to consume, consume, consume.

You didn't know what you were getting into when you majored in English or History. You thought you could make money in medicine. The system lied to you. The humanities and medicine have become middle class professions. If you are in the humanities, you can expect to find work in management, because that's where the government wants you, not writing books or arguing against the current gov't or the corporations said gov't represents. Doctors? There are too many of them. You won't be rich automatically. You'll be riddled in debt and buying things you don't need just like every other middle class citizen in America. How do you know you'll become one of these people? You're getting a B.A. Bachelor of Arts. That's the employers' signal that you're the next victim. Good luck getting stuck in your management role.

But back to the OP, because I'm losing focus. You contend that students are upset with school, that they're not interested in learning, and that they won't need any of the skills they learn. I vehemently disagree with that. I grew up in an environment where school was the most important thing on your mind, that you had to be a good student more than anything. You had to care more about school than your own family. This is not a personal mentality, this is a culture. I went to a school where, I'm not joking, 98% of the students loved school. They loved the teachers, they loved learning, and they loved each other. We didn't have fights. We didn't have crime. OK, we had a few drugs and we did insult our teachers occasionally, but very intelligently. Consequently, the teachers loved teaching and did their best with us. Their biggest problem when dealing with students was the amount of college recs they wrote, not the number of failing students in their classes. And we learn from all our classes. The whole point of our system is that we learn from all things. We combine ideas from multiple fields to create new, unique ideas. Isn't that what innovation is all about? Every subject is relevant to a human being.

My school was not the only one. There are others across the world that share this mentality. Not all schools. Most schools, there is no academic competition. Most people do not see this need for personal excellency. They were born to suckers for parents and they were trained for the consumer lifestyle even before school. They were trained to not care about anything except buying as much good crap as possible, and they didn't even need school to do it.

That's how the school system works. That's what it's really about - separating the innovators from the consumers, the relevant from the irrelevant. It's capitalism. You don't have to like it, but that's what's there. I just want to highlight that there is an upper class out there, and that they are pushing everyone else forward with them.

Addendum - I would like to add a personal example here, to illustrate that "useless" subjects in school are not useless. I took a woodshop class at one point. I have no intention of getting into woodworking myself. I do not want to get into furniture making or home construction. I got more use out of that class than about any other class I took in HS. We had two projects, and we were thrust into the deep end from the start. Most of our projects sucked. We were winging it. We got ideas from our head and we tried putting them to reality, and it failed. Our teacher told us to get working plans for our second project. Despite being much grander and complex in scale, our second projects were infinitely better than our first projects. You can guess why; we learned our lesson from the first time around.

We learn stuff like that in school so we don't learn the hard way - when it matters and your life is seriously threatened by it. I don't see why you want to go away from that.

 

[spartan1077]

Holy. Shit. You have thought about this more than anyone else. But I have to agree on pretty much every point! I'm in high-school and I find myself questioning things such as;
Why is it mandatory to take Geography, History, and PE when I want to go into medical studies?

I hate to be the one interjecting here, but I will contend that modern schooling is not a societal method of control, and on its basis, it is a system that educates people, but the execution is horrible; this is using American education as a primary example, for I do not know every nation's education laws.First off, I'm Canadian and currently all graduadates of medical school are put into a job right away since we are lacking a lot

You want to get into medical studies. Personally, I feel that that's already step 1 to disaster considering the ludicrous number of doctors already out there, but OK. Geography is intrinsically useful for being an intelligent human being. So you won't need to predict the future, but geography is more than physical landscape (and even then, it's simply appalling, the degree to which some Americans are terrible at identifying countries and their locations). It is about trends, not just in nature but among people, and if you want to be an intelligent human being in our society, you have to be able to take this information in. Where are events occurring, where is the culture changing, and how will I be affected by it? And in a world that is becoming more globalized each and every day, what happens in India or Zimbabwe or Egypt will affect you more than you think. Secondly; the geography in my school is Canadian geography and how the world was formed. That's it. I now know of tectonic plates and why volcanoes are made, after a whole semester of that

History is another area that is neglected. This continues on the idea of being an intelligent individual, that you know our past. If you ever get into medical research - and you should at some point - you're going to get to know a lot of older practices. Why, just the other day, they made the connection and discovered that the Nubians had knowledge of anti-biotics through tetracycline tests on skeletons. The theory now is that the grain they used to ferment their beer contained the soil bacteria streptomyces. This is relevant stuff, you know. You're going to have to come up with clever solutions some day, something you can't open up your medical handbook on, and you're going to have to think. You're going to have to interpret information. You're going to have to know what you can do with what you have.Once again it would be nice to have learned something that could be used in today, but instead we are focusing on WWI and WWII and why they happened. Also on Canadian history and how the economy was.

PE is a very interesting one. You ever make the analogy between doctors and sports? You ever realize that a lot of doctors used to play basketball, football, lacrosse? There's a reason for that, it's team building. It's relationship building. It's part of what makes you a person and it's that which tells you that you have to lay it all on the line at some points and be the most you can be. Surgeons in particular are very, very much into physical activity. I would absolutely not neglect PE if I were to consider going into medicine. It is the most underrated aspect of the practice in today's world.Here's where I can't completely disagree. But, the PE my school has focuses on individual sports and doesn't have anything for team building. Also the teacher was a dick <.<

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I'm glad you typed so much and I've added some replies in bold. Good points though, I read the whole thing and see some of your points and have started to give them serious thought.

 

[spartan1077]

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