An improved school system?

Great Debates
21

Its an interesting way to look at the education system, at least K-12. Maybe you are right. I am thinking about the people who are turned off to school though and they can’t get a good job because of it, and I am thinking of a possible way to fix it. Also, I think possibly more people would be turned on to things like math if they didn’t have it forced down their throats early on acquiring an ongoing bad taste for it.

You have a good point. For you the system worked, and I would not have that taken away.
I would have others succeed though where the system doesn’t work for them… maybe my way would work for them, and both educational systems could be side by side…

22

Calculus is not required in HS. Very few people in HS take it.

And if you want to talk about the need to teach “the basics” you might want to spell “arithmetic” correctly.

23

Thanks for the compliments!

I’ll add this to your remark above–it really happened to me in high school, when I was discussing my high school’s course choices with the guidance counsellor (paraphrased, because it was years ago):

“Why do I need English lit?”

“Because it allows you to understand “fuzzy” concepts. Why did Romeo and Juliet commit suicide? You tell me, and if you can make a good enough argument, you’ll do well.”

“Why do I need history?”

“Because studying history, and comparing the past to current events, allows you to reasonably predict what will happen next. ‘Those who do not understand the past are doomed to repeat it,’ as the saying goes.”

“Why do I need math?”

“So you can take it next year.”

In other words, the end result of taking math seemed to be … taking more math. No disrespect intended to those who excelled at math, and enjoyed it (some of my high school friends were math junkies; one actually achieved a Ph.D. in math from an Ivy League school); but to me, the idea of “taking it now so I can take more later” seemed silly. English lit and history concepts, I could use and apply in the here-and-now, but if I was taking math only to take more math, I had to ask–why?

That being said, I agree with the idea that those who wish to study higher levels ought to be allowed to do so. As long as others do not have to do the same, of course. I still admit that my high school advanced English, advanced French, and advanced history courses, really helped me in my undergraduate studies at the university. But I did not, for example, expect my math-loving friends to experience anything but frustration in studying advanced English lit, where there is no right or wrong answer, only an educated guess and a grade predicated on the defense of that guess that can range from shaky to solid. If they wanted to take advanced math, let them–as long as I didn’t have to.

24

Right. Calculus isn’t even required for college prep. Though, I’m guessing kids planning to go to college are still expected to take trig.

Most college students take calc and chemistry in high school and many will still struggle with these subjects once they get to college. Imagine how much harder it would be for them if they had no exposure.

25

My biggest problem when I was going through school was the fact that I learned the same thing over and over again. It revolved around the major themes. Columbus sailing the ocean. The American Revolution. The Civil War. I went over these topics at least eight times in K-12.

Look at it from a different angle: You get general learning until Middle School and then High School becomes “College Light”. E.g. if you have an interest in, say, Geology you can take courses that focus on geology. Animal Husbandry? Fashion? Etc. But you only get out of Middle School if you can prove you had learned the basics.

This is more of a teacher’s variation. Some teachers teach via charisma. Dates and hard facts don’t matter as much as an understanding of the overarching themes and flows of the events at hand, even if you can’t remember the specific date.

Other teachers, however, read the details from the book and make you recite them.

This method, sadly, is what the NCLBA focuses on. Which means that people will forget most of what they learned.

That’s a horrible take on it. The current method of teaching has never worked, really.

It’s just that in the past (in the USA, going only with the period of structured education), if you scored -16 on your SATs, you had a career as a journeyman pipe feeder in a factory somewhere. It didn’t matter that you had learned barely enough to emulate moss on a log.

Since we have been moving to a customer service economy with a lot of the cheap manufacturing going overseas, those factory jobs have moved from “need a meat bag” to a need for smarter people. So now we have a hysterical cry for thinking of the children in regards to education. And instead of trying to weigh the pros and cons of a situation that might change things, many people, and I include your variety of statement in this, put on the rose-colored glasses and go “In my day, education worked!”

It’s not true. Our current education system is GREAT…If you are intelligent enough at an early enough age to take advantage of it. If you are slower than (or, paradoxically, faster than) that particular band of intelligence, the system grinds you down. If you are slower, you get more and more behind and can never catch up. If you are faster, you get bored very, very quickly. In both cases, the pupil loses interest.

Worse is, we repeatedly try and go back to something like NCLB where we teach to a test with rote memorization instead of realizing that education is not something that’s easily quantifiable.

The problem I have with math is that it’s disconnected from what math is for: Finding results to situations. The reason that math is stand-alone is that science teachers want to teach science and not math.

For an anecdotal example, I had no easy time understanding differential calculus…until I started using it in my later biology classes for bacterial growth patterns. It was a common ailment among my classmates at the time. One girl went “THAT’S what we can use diff calculus for??” when the lab team started going over the growth patterns.

I would support augmenting science classes with access to a secondary instructor to teach the math (in high school an extra period whether block or traditional, in college an extra 45 minutes) that goes with the current studies in whatever science class you’re taking. “Math” as it’s own course of study should cap out at Algebra 2 (or Solve for x, y, z, and a in this equation if “2” is different in your own educational experience) which is roughly 8th-grade level.

26

This seems remarkably like something a person with a middle to upper class education (including college) would say.

High schools in the US were meant and designed to turn out a large number of students who had a basic level of skills capable of driving our economy.

What you are suggesting is pretty far from that vision.

The OPs idea is basically to lower standards. To say, in effect, that the minimum anyone needs is learned after middle school. If high school is actually to be “college light”, we have to deal with the fact that the ones who benefit the most from the change are the ones who don’t need it - the ones who are already headed off to college and will differentiate themselves then.

The ones who don’t benefit are the ones who don’t have the infrastructure (parents, community, education/experience up to high school) to benefit from this.

Millions of school children beg to differ.

This is a classic example of letting the perfect get in the way of the good. We do a better job now of educating millions of kids than we have at any point in history.

Is it perfect? Probably not. But is it better than education has been through millenia of human history? Absolutely.

That’s not what math is for. I have a degree in math and could not disagree more and it’s a problem that students, parents, teachers, and companies still do not get.

Teaching/learning most school subjects are NOT directly about jobs training. After learning how to read, write, and do a bit of arithmetic, education is about learning how to think.

The people who expressed an interest in engineering in our incoming class at college had an introductory address by one of the engineering department heads. And he made a good point. Sure, it’s useful to use your education to learn how to do specific things. But those skills are outdated eventually. New tools come by. New methods come by. Times change.

So, sure, learning how to operate the latest CYX-192 machine is useful after you graduate. But that machine is going to be obsolete in 10 years. What’s equally (or possibly more) important is learning the theory behind it and the skills necessary to adapt to the new stuff. And whether or not they realize it, a college graduate (and to a lesser extent, a high school graduate) is better prepared to handle those transitions. One very real problem is that companies want colleges to handle their jobs training - to have students learn how to merely operate the latest CYX-192 machine instead of learning the fundamental principles behind them, i.e. a vocational program rather than higher education.

My first job after college was in geophysics. I never took a single geology class nor learned anything about geology after middle school. It didn’t matter. I was able to apply what I already knew about math and physics and pick up the rest. I learned, in effect, how to learn.

And I’m not an exception. The majority of people working IT jobs don’t have degrees pertinent to IT. Perhaps the most valuable skills you can pick up in school is learning how to learn and how to think.

27

This is exactly why we should teach more math. Most adults don’t use what’s taught in math classes in their daily lives, but every single adult, every single day of their lives, has the opportunity to use it, and would benefit greatly from doing so. As it is, most students never even get any math courses at all until tenth grade. Maybe if we started teaching math earlier, people would develop and use critical thinking skills.

28

A few days ago, the weekly teen section of the local newspaper published a piece by a high school sophomore titled “Please teach us skills for the real world,” which was somewhat similar to the premise of this thread. Here are some excerpts, with my comments.

I don’t know what “solve the Pythagorean theorem” means, and I suspect you don’t either—what does it mean to “solve” a theorem? But the Pythagorean Theorem itself does come up in “real life” and is worth knowing, as this recent thread in GQ demonstrates.

So I question both whether you actually do know these things, and whether you’ll never need to know them after high school. But also, keep in mind that someone who knows only the things they need to know is a bored, boring person.

The IRS does publish instructions for how to file your taxes. These instructions have a reputation for being complicated, but learning to read and understand complicated things is one of the things you should be getting from your high school education, and it should serve you well in all sorts of real life situations. (Ever hear that the most important goal of education is learning how to learn?)

Wanna know how to fix a flat tire? Try asking someone who’s actually done it—one of your parents maybe—to show you how. If all else fails, you should be able to find a video online that shows you how to do it. But it doesn’t seem to me like the kind of thing that is best taught in a classroom setting, nor does it need to be taught by somebody who’s gone to school to learn how to teach it.

As for some of the other things you mention, yes, it might be a good idea if they were part of the high school curriculum. When I was in high school, there was a Consumer Education class that all sophomores were required to take. I don’t remember much of what it covered, though. Personally, I find I have a tendency to tune out practical, real world knowledge if I haven’t reached a point in my life where I have an immediate need for it; but maybe that’s just me.

29

I’m disappointed by several basic things that are NOT taught at a high school level (to me or anyone I know). Things like the process for buying a home or a car with financing. What paperwork do you fill out? What kind of credit do you need? Explain how letting your bills go more than 30 days late can make you pay more for the car or house, or not let you buy one at all.

Learn how to negotiate and get information when buying a car. How do you find a good mechanic, a doctor, or a lawyer?

Explain 401k investing and secure versus risky allocation. Learn how to budget. Then after the students have budgeted, make the central heating unit in the house quit working on January 13th in a snow storm. Where do they get the money then?

Learn how to make a grocery list and buy things on sale. Do a 1040EZ tax return.

Those are just a few of the things that students should learn. It would only take a couple of months, and if they have time to read Shakespeare, then they need to make time to teach these things among others.

30

Higher math is taught to people so they can learn the principles of thinking and manipulating thoughts. You seem to want to turn out cashiers and waiters. Chemistry is necessary so that all these future meth cooks don’t kill themselves and increase the quality of meth available in this country, as well as bringing the price down through competition. Did you miss the documentary “Breaking Bad” where a chemistry teacher finds his old student, who was doing a crappy job, and teaches him to be the best meth cooking slave in the whole world?

31

I hated taking math in High School, and would gladly have opted out of it if the opportunity were available.

I was an idiot, then, and a perfect example of why you don’t let sixteen year olds set educational policy.

32

Gateway writes:

> . . . college graduates can’t find jobs and people like Bill Gates make it when it
> comes to financial success . . .

O.K., it’s clear that you don’t know what you’re talking about with Bill Gates and dropping out of college. People sometimes use him as an example to show that it’s O.K. to drop out of college and start your own business, because obviously you can start your own company and become rich. They often use both Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as examples, since they both dropped out of Harvard.

The fact is that both Gates and Zuckerberg grew up in families that were clearly at least upper-middle-class. Gates’s family could even be described as borderline rich. They both took classes or belonged to clubs in high school that made them vastly more experienced with computers than the average high school student, and such classes and clubs are not available to nearly all other high school students. They dropped out of Harvard because they were able to use their connections, some from their families and some from Harvard, to get started in computer businesses that no one else had thought about.

Had Microsoft or Facebook failed, they each would have simply gone back to Harvard and graduated. They would have each eventually started some other computer business or joined some other computer business that was starting up. They would still now be rich, just not as rich. Had anyone poor tried the same thing and failed, they would be screwed for life. They would be lucky to get back into a good college. They might ten years down the road eventually finish college going part-time.

Telling people from poor (or even average-income) families who can easily get into top colleges that they should forget about college and start their own business is terrible advice. A lot of what determines success in American society (and other societies too, I presume) is using your connections. College isn’t as important to kids from rich families. They’re already hooked into a network of connections. Kids from poor (and even average-income) families don’t even know that anything like connections exist. They have to go to college even to find out what connections are. A poor kid with a good degree from a good college will have acquired some connections. By that point they will be able to know whether it’s best for them to work for someone else or do something independently. It’s extremely unlikely these days for a poor kid to become rich without graduating from college.

33

Why exclude work related skills? Many of my work-related skill were acquired in Elementary and High School, way way before I ever realized that this is my calling And I do mean not just my job, but my calling; it was simply a calling I resisted for many years. If I’d been able to scootch out of algebra and chemistry because I found them super boring and stupid, I would have had to learn them much later in life, and it would have been so incredibly difficult, just thanks to a lesser neuroplasticity in my brain, that it probably never would have happened. And the world would be short one getting-better-all-the-time-and-someday-will-be-good nurse.

Let’s think of a few of the “basic”, not “advanced” stuff I learned in school:

Basic arithmetic up to algebra and the understanding of how numbers and units relate. I use this every single damn day. My patient is taking one 6mg pill of warfarin. She has a bottle in her closet with a few 1mg pills. Her test came back high and the doctor wants her to start taking only 4.5mg of warfarin a day. If she doesn’t cut back to the appropriate dose, she could risk a life threatening bleeding in her stomach. The pharmacy is closed for the weekend, so they can’t deliver the correct dose. What do I do? (This is not a hypothetical, by the way. This is my yesterday.) The answer is that I give her one half a 6 mg pill and one and one half of the 1mg pills. I need to understand that more pills may not equal more medicine. I need to understand fractions. I need to understand how to get 4.5 out of units of 6 and 1. I don’t use any calculus to do that. I don’t even have a formula for that (although I could figure it out if you put a gun to my head.) I use my understanding of relationships that I got from learning all those stupid formulas and proofs and math facts. That kind of “now it feels intuitive” understanding of math is very difficult to acquire if you’re beginning as an adult learner.

In outside of work life, I like knowing, roughly, what my $63 of groceries will actually cost with tax before I get to the check out, and I like being able to compare interest rates, or the prices across units. Last week, I was at a salad bar which listed their price as 59cents an ounce. Woah, that looks great, right? I mean, I usually pay $5.99 a pound at the other place! :wink:

Language arts/writing/English/composition, I use every day. Exhibit A being this post. (Ooohh…I get to say it: my post is my cite! :wink: ) Of course, I also use it every day at work. I have to write a “narrative note,” that will let my nursing supervisor know what the hell I actually did with the patient. That means grammar, vocabulary, spelling…these notes are actually legal documents. If I cannot communicate effectively in them, and someday I’m sitting on the witness stand and can’t answer detailed questions about my patient’s condition and care, I’m, well, fucked. I have to be able to write to communicate with doctors, who often only know what’s happening with their patients when they get my written reports. I have to write instructions to patients that they need to be able to understand without a medical background, so I have to know how to write to different audiences. I have to read with a decent vocabulary to understand other people’s reports, and studies and teaching materials. Had I followed my passions in elementary and high school, this is where you would have found me, up to the hips in books and writing stories.

Gym, nutrition and health: Well, need I go on?

Science, including biology and chemistry obviously, I use at work. Observation and interpretation of data are a huge part of my job. I don’t run a whole lot of labs, but I do spend a lot of time explaining the chemistry of metabolism to diabetic patients, and the chemistry of drug absorption and diet a lot. People don’t remember “don’t drink milk with your iron pill”, but funnily enough they do, if you tell them why with easy to understand chemistry, “Calcium, like in milk, and iron, like in your pill? Well they stick to some of the same receptors in your intestine, so if you drink milk when you take your iron pill, some of that pushy calcium just bumps it out of the way and the iron ends up in your poop. Make 'em take turns - milk with breakfast and iron at lunch, with water.” (And I also have to understand the studies coming out saying that may not actually be the case at all, and decide which way the evidence is leaning and when to change my advice.)

History and social studies: This is the closest to irrelevant to my life. But I do enjoy being able to follow conversations that other people are having. I’m not really sure if I buy the whole, “those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it,” thing. Seems to me we do a lot of repeating of very ugly bits of history anyhow. But I do think that humans are wired to be social creatures, and building our social bonds is often best done through discussion of history, recent or distant. That’s what gossiping is, really - recounting recent history to build bonds. Silly chatty monkeys, we are.

What does that leave? Art and Music, I guess. Do I need to know about them in my job? No, not really. But they make life worth living some days. And studies have shown that getting rid of the arts in schools leads to nosediving test scores, increased drop outs and more disciplinary problems, so I’m good with keeping them in the curriculum just on that front.

So…what’s my point? My point is that I think if you dissect most careers, you’ll find a similar smattering of general education knowledge in them. So I think I agree with other posters who have said that high school is *already *pared down to “the basics”. When kids have a passion beyond those basics, those are the ones you see in extra-curricular activities, in band, in theater, in physics club, in student government… Those are the place for self exploration. I’m certainly all for expanding those programs, but budgets don’t seem to allow for it.

34

And what is that supposed to mean, exactly? By the way, you’re wrong.

If that’s true, and we can apparently (according to you) be more efficient because those skills are covered by the end of middle school. So, why wouldn’t we turn them loose on the economy at 13/14? Oh, wait. That’d be a terribly bad idea and is only being pushed by you. You reject my scenario for what high school could be like for no other reason than it “Seems remarkably like something a person with a middle to upper class education (including college) would say.”

That being said, with no lower-level factory jobs really staying in the states, we don’t have a place for all of those just-out-of-high-school students to go to work. Heck, we don’t even have a place for all of the students that’ve completed college to go to work. Not even in most of the STEM fields.

The highest benefit of any change will always go to those most equipped to take advantage of that change. That’s not a reason to never perform that change.

And those are the ones who do not benefit, now. So, how would this change adversely affect them more so?

Which millions of children? The ones that have excelled in spite of our system or the ones that barely got out with a D average and got pressed into factory jobs that no longer exist within our economy?

I never said our current system or a possible new system are perfect. But you are the one here saying that since the new system wouldn’t be perfect, we should be satisfied by “good enough”. No. If we can go from 50% serviced appropriately to 55% service appropriately, why shouldn’t we?

What is math for, then? Despite your protestations, it’s still what it is: A tool. Math has no use outside of complementing other things. Some people may enjoy it, but that doesn’t change it’s nature. A tool cannot be used outside of it’s application. You don’t use a hammer as a toilet seat and you don’t use Trig to solve basic arithmetic.

And here is where your argument breaks down. I wasn’t talking about using High School to learn jobs training, I was using it to inspire interest in the children, which they currently don’t really get. Do you have an interest in Geology? Fashion? Whatever floats your boat. Well, learning that to get into geology, you need a host of tools, such as geological research, math, and so forth would help them a lot more that our current system of compartmentalizing everything into it’s own niche with it’s own expectations.

The problem with this is that both are the wrong way. Just like math, vocational programs versus higher education is not the right way to think about it. Vocational programs COUPLED with higher education is. What’s the point of learning the theory about something if you can’t see how that theory is applied? That’s why math by itself after the fundamentals of algebra is pointless. You learn nothing but theory. Especially in high school. In college, you can combine that math class with another course that complements it. In high school, math goes far above the other curriculums.

But, with a base in algebra, you can go to a book (if you are old) or the internet (if you are young) and look up exactly how to do any of those calculations in about 15 minutes flat for whatever it is you are working on. What you CAN’T look up is how to solve an anonymous equation without context. But, you need to find out how to do a huge statistical equation to match demographics to a customer survey that someone mandated you put together? Bet you can learn what the formulations are and how to use them in less than an hour.

And you think that this somehow taught in our current system? Most of the kids I pick up right out of high school DON’T think. This sort of “knowing how to learn” tends to come directly from kids with their own drive and not kids that floated through without an interest in learning. That’s why the system needs to change. You have to introduce them to their interests in a way that entices them to learn on their own.

And then stop and realize that you will still have people who are nothing but “floaters.” No system will ever hit 100%. But changing for the better shouldn’t be off the table just because you can’t be perfect.

Math doesn’t teach critical thinking skills. The piece of critical thinking that you could derive from math, the methodical review, should be fairly down pat by the time you get done with multivariable equations in algebra.

35

Higher math can be more easily understood perhaps when applied to the particulars, but, things like theoretical math (I think that exists) possibly calls for using higher math then algebra. That’s my take.

36

For the record and as a little bit of closure: I am no longer arguing for what I origionally did. It sounded good, but I shouldn’t present it as an “ought to” because I don’t know all the variables. It sounded interesting to me. But even in my life, upon reflecting: I am glad I have learned math even though when I was going to highschool, I didn’t like it all the time.

**Any further discussion if I do so will be about exploring the idea of what I am saying, and not about me taking the stance of it is best. **

37

I happened to see that documentary :stuck_out_tongue:
How does it equate to the principles of thinking and manipulating thoughts?

38

Wendell Wagner,

I was not advocating that people drop out of college. What my argument was:my guess is that Bill Gates, should he have been forced to learn a huge amount more history or chemistry, wouldn’t necessarily have been relevant to his success or his life. As far as his financial success in the computer industry, he has done a really good job.

Although there can often be something gained even if the student doesn’t want to learn the thing at the time.

39

Critical thinking skills are important, and we should be teaching more of those. Logic, the rules of inference, how to identify a valid argument and (most of all) how to identify the flaws in an invalid one. These are all vitally important and basic tools that will be useful no matter what the student ends up doing. Learning the basics of probability might be useful too - being able to usefully figure out ‘which event is more likely, and by about how much?’ is handy.

The same is not true of most forms of higher math, though. Can you give any examples of things ‘every single adult’ does ‘every single day’ where they would benefit from being adept with linear algebra, calculus, the use of complex numbers, differential equations, or calculating cross products?

40

I can’t say I see all the principles that I need to see to agree to disagree but I definitely get your point and thanks for sharing.