I think the world may be improved with this kind of school system:
-You take out higher math except the basics. Most adults don’t use that stuff in day to day life.
-You take out most of chemistry, for the same reason.
-Language is kept a lot the same but higher language skills are etched out.
-History is changed from names and dates to the lessons learned as well as a baseline of what happened.
-I think PE is probably for the best, but we should learn the principles of health and common physical related illnesses and how they can be avoided as well.
…I think the higher stuff should be studied by those who wish to study it, so it is optional.
-Classes teaching about emotions are promoted. As well as health, well being, mental health, getting along with others, economic and political UNDERSTANDING (relating to the real world), futurism (understanding the future of man), critical thinking. Relating to others would be a good class too.
I personally am for a class in spirituality also…
You don’t want to force students to learn things which they don’t want to learn which they will most likely forget later on because you tried to ram something down their throats which they don’t care about and its not going to have worked anyway to educate because they won’t care to remember. Their grades will suffer and lead worse lives and maybe have a minimum wage job all so they don’t learn something which wasn’t relevant to them in the first place.
How is a person supposed to predict what skills he or she will need in their career? Sure, most people aren’t going to be using calculus on a regular basis but how do you find your future engineers if you don’t teach it?
This sounds terrible and promises to encourage the already deplorable state of lack of general knowledge by many people in this country.
BTW we already have classes on health (which is required in California), politics (ie government), and economics. I agree we need to have a philosophy and theology class or at least teach them in some other class though.
Its not so much about predicting skills. But dumping everything on students who don’t care about the subject doesn’t usually work. I think that a baseline should be covered, but the higher stuff should be kept for when the students actually want to learn the subject as an option. The students who take it up will be more likely to succeed, and those who don’t probably won’t use it so much anyway even if they were to be forced to learn/“learn” it. This is more in regards to high school, the higher stuff being electives.
Hmm, I didn’t know health and politics were manditory. Good if they are.
Well, frankly, if you think about it the deplorable lack of knowledge by many would not likely be solved by adding more information to the mix, and the current state of the education system isn’t doing too well. A motivational class may be hit or miss. If we eliminated the necessity to learn subjects which many adults don’t have use for in day to day lives, do you not think that it would turn out a better success rate? Rather then having to temporarily swallow info or not caring at all and getting a bad grade, they can do what they feel they want to do in terms of what they want to learn, their favorite subjects to a higher degree. They aren’t held to a superficial standard of knowing everything only to have a comparison of our country compared to others. It might make students have a better view of going to school in general because they don’t have to learn tons of stuff which is irrelevant. At the very least I think it’s worth a try.
Oh yeah, money should be taught. Not econ, but personal money principles.
Education’s primary purpose shouldn’t be “preparing someone for a job” but rather imparting some basic knowledge all people ought to have. And simply reducing standards isn’t going to improve anything. BTW people can already pursue their favourite subjects in college.
I am not saying to simply prepare someone for a job. I am saying lets teach knowledge which will stick and actually benefit the people learning it. I am also not saying to simply reduce standards, but to reduce arbitrary standards.
They are arbitrary because if it is higher knowledge, and you are not interested then: you will either learn it just to pass the class and forget it, or you will simply not learn it. And then? You will go out in to the real world never having needed it. Some of it may stick but if you weren’t interested in the subject and it stuck, you will likely not choose a job in that field because you don’t enjoy the subject. This renders it simply something floating around in your head which has no bearing on your life.
By that I mean that according to you, the best thing to do is just have a good number of kids not go on to high school and get jobs straight out of middle school after they learn the 3 R’s but you want to avoid controversy by still giving them a watered down diploma.
So, why the middle man of extra schooling to no real purpose?
It just seems like a way of exacerbating class and wealth differences and giving up on educating our children and leaving a pretense they’re still getting a high school level education.
As I recall my high school history classes thirty-five years ago, little emphasis was placed on memorization of names and dates; rather, we studied events, the major players (okay, so there were some names), and their significance as to subsequent events. Has this concept changed in the years since, such that names and dates are required?
Well, what good is a diploma?
What good is it to know how to solve for X in normal life?
What good is it to know the exact date of the civil war in normal life?
What good is it to know how to write chemical equations in normal life?
…At least usually?
All a diploma seems to say is you have a knowledge of certain subjects, but what good is most of the knowledge to most of people? Not a whole lot. That is my point.
And I am not saying to just have a watered down education. I am suggesting to have higher learning OF THE STUDENTS choice. You get the basics down, and then you choose the subject(s) which most appeal to you. So if you are an artist by heart, you won’t waste time learning the advanced knowledge of other subjects. You then get very good at art and then possibly see way more success
But education’s primary purpose is to prepare someone for a job. The “hidden curriculum” is simple:
Be passive
Be deferential to authority
Respond to the bell that tells you where to go and what to do next.
The distasteful subjects dovetail nicely with the fact that most of us go on to distasteful jobs, in which we are expected to accept tasks that we would not do unless coercive force was involved.
School exists to turn you into a factory worker. Or an office worker. Or the nail that doesn’t stand up. It is twelve years of preparation for a lifetime of exploitation and low expectations. The actual curriculum doesn’t matter. You are being taught how to sit in a chair all day while taking orders.
By the way, I am not sure it would work but I am exploring the idea on here.
I mean, there are things which I did not care about before which I now care about and have school to thank.
Although, adopting in part at least could yield good results. Could. Maybe not in all cases but possibly a bit.
You mean, other than as a prerequisite for many jobs?
That’s merely an excuse. That’s saying to effectively water down education. And if we only require a minimal set of standards that is less than our current standards, that is, in effect, only requiring a middle school education.
So fine. Then why require they stay in school any longer? Give them a middle school equivalency and let them go out in the real world and earn some money.
To force them to stay in school longer is taking that choice away from them.
It seems you still believe that some advanced study should still be required. The problem is that until you’re already in the real world and have been out there for a while, you don’t know what you need. So, require it all or require none.
Letting the students themselves choose is letting the blind lead. High school students may know what interests them, but that’s not the same as knowing what they need to learn, even if they already know what they want to do with their lives. You are telling them not to make an educated choice but deliberately to make an uneducated choice on what to study.
Worse, the real effect will be that the kids who are in higher socioeconomic classes are going to “choose” to take all the advanced study classes, since their middle to upper class parents will tell them to, and it’s necessary for college anyway. We’ll simply be disenfranchising the kids who need the most structure and who are already in the worst position to make an informed decision on their studies.
ETA: Have we really learned nothing from history? This idea is, in effect, what we’ve already done until recently. Our current requirements for a high school equivalency wasn’t created in a vacuum but based on what we figured out a high school education should entail based on decades and centuries of experience. It’s really funny how a lot of suggestions on how to “improve” education are, in effect, telling the kids in the worst positions to settle for less, i.e. go back to being less educated and having fewer opportunities for social advancement than they currently have.
Isn’t that the way things are? I struggled through math and science courses at high school; but then I got to university, where I could excel in literature, foreign languages, and history.
I did have the basics of arithmetic, and to this day, I can calculate sales taxes in my head while waiting to pay for my items, and put together clients’ accounts at the end of the month. But I’ve never needed trigonometry or calculus in my daily life. My career requires that I do need a knowledge of history, of logic, and of language; which may be why I do it, instead of being an engineer or scientist.
My feeling is that high school is a time to realize what you can do, what you cannot do, and the time to acquire the wisdom to know the difference. I’ll never pass a high school calculus class, but I will ace a law school’s constitutional law class. But I learned what I can do, and what I cannot do, at high school. Isn’t that what high school is for?
For some perhaps. If a person’s a drone by nature, the school system will train them to be an employable drone.
But plenty of people used school as an opportunity. They’re the ones who decided they didn’t want to spend their life as a drone and learned how to avoid that.
It’s not like there’s some secret educational system where they’re training the Alphas. You look at all the people who are successful and you’ll find they came out of the same school system the drones did.
I know, I know. What I am saying is to look at the system. What do you honestly know if you have a diploma? You glean a few of the basics from it and that’s about it. It shouldn’t be the standard of landing a job just because its what we’ve always done.
This is not what I am advocating. Though in the real world unless it is job related we don’t necessarily have much need for more than a middle school education. Can you name me one subject which is
Why require it all or none? The thing is, you and I ARE in the real world, the thing is is how much of the schooling from highschool do you use on the day to day in real life if not work related?
So you are going to tell them what they need to study? Who is the one who is to tell them what they MUST know and study to be successful, especially when college graduates can’t find jobs and people like Bill Gates make it when it comes to financial success?
It may be structure but it is often pointless structure, it seems to me. How well is that system working out now? And if it can be improved, why not try?
I will say once again that most of the advanced knowledge taught in high-school is useless, but you don’t seem to be taking in that point…