I have been highly satisfied with the education I received. Public school gave me an excellent grounding for high school, where I took all the history and math/science courses, studied 3 languages, received a good grounding in art, auto mechanics and electronics. These opportunities were available to all the students… if they chose not to take them, too bad. I did an engineering degree at school with a minors in French and political science, then got into medical school. It is fashionable to claim education is full of holes… how could it be otherwise? In what job do you need to apply knowledge from so many diverse fields (Shut up, Cecil. You’re the Teller of this board). Private school may do a better job than public school of stimulating academic interest, but having met lots of private school morons I have my doubts. The opportunity used to be there in Canadian schools… wouldn’t know if that was still the case.
Public school… right now im very satisfied as I can get by with no effort.
elementary=overall average
middle school=overall horrible(we spent 3 years learning how to prepare for high school)
high school=great. Freshman year wasent so good, but now that Im a junior I get to take AP college classes that I actually like to boost my GPA.(im making a A in it and Bs or Cs in my normal classes)I also get to post here during class which is obviously an outstanding education.(though counterstrike is the main focus of the class)
However I don’t like my regular high school classes. Algebra II=the kids around me call me a genius and I constantly help the people who make As with the material but Im making a C. Mostly due to homework(and just being lazy) too.
Chemestry=horrible teacher, he could sell his voice as a replacement for sleeping pills. Though I did get to melt a penny yesterday so thats a plus(hes easy to hide stuff from). I sleep in his class and make A’s and B’s on the test while everyone around me fails. What he basically teaches is some wierd way to convert diffrent chemestry scales and I can do it all in my head in 30 seconds but if I try his way it comes out wrong.
I only have 3 classes this semester but what I had last year that was important was:
English=Basically I have more advanced vocabulary than the teachers and the rest is pretty easy. I must admit I think the only required reading should be The Wheel of Time. Though I think it would take more than 12 years for the average reader to finish it.
History=best teacher in the school because he actually tried to encourage critical thinking. Bad at age of empires though. Also IMAO my critical thinking skills were better than his so I disagreed with most of what he said but he didn’t want the class interupted every 5 minutes:)
To sum it all up I don’t give a rats ass about learning in school and I blame that entirely on bad teachers. It also has made me entirely too arrogant when dealing with matters of intelligence(which is not helped by being called a genius by iq tests). Which actually is the reason why I don’t care.
I went to school in Northern Idaho, Class of '76. Nobody was expecting to go to college. In fact, until the last couple of years most of the males in my school thought they were prime candidates for the draft, and planned accordingly. The highest level of math taught was beginning Algebra, social studies wasn’t even offered until the senior year, and the school library was shared with the elementary school. There were no private schools in the area.
My education sucked
Why? Well, a good education must, aside from incorporating high-quality and relevant contents in its program, provide the intellectual nourishment of the student (that is, supply the stimulus to learn, awaken curiosity) and teach them how to THINK, as opposed to having them passively stuffing information in their brain and accepting it as dogma, as if their minds were nothing but receptacles for the traditionally accepted “wisdom” rather than the dynamic and rational entities that they should be.
Did I get that on HS? NOPE.
[RANT Commences]
I attended a supposedly very good private school and managed to get by with good grades, minimal effort and even more minimal knowledge. When I graduated I knew nothing, a tabula rasa if there ever was any. And the scary thing is that I was one of the good students, grades-wise at least.
Was it my fault that I didn’t learn shit? Well, how is one supposed to learn in a system that neither arouses curiosity nor develops on the student the ability to THINK for themselves rather than memorizing bits and pieces of abstract, obsolete and inconsequent information.
How is one expected to dip into the fascinating oceans of knowledge and bath in the showers of intellectual enlightenment without receiving an initial push? Can one be expected to look beyond the retrograde education that is being received in the absence of a system conducive to learning? Isn’t there supposed to be a catalyst that facilitates the lighting of the torch of curiosity that every individual should bear and proudly carry throughout their lives?
Onto specific critiques about my education
Foreign languages:
English for 5 years. As rudimentary as you can get. Most of what I know I learned on my own by reading and watching the tube. God, I love that damn apparatus. 
French for 3 years. Even worst. In the time it took the Earth to tranquilly revolve thrice around the sun I learned absolutely nothing of the language spoken by the French. Parle moi Francois? What do you think? .rolleyes:
:.RANT interrupted by extreme hunger::
::RANT to be concluded later::
I also learned “New Math,” which explains a lot. After “New Math” it was the metric system, which we HAD to learn because by the year 2000 (which was sooooooo far away!), the entire world would be using the metric system. I never did formally learn the pints-quarts-gallons and bushel & peck kind of thing till college.
I also know I learned about the Civil War several times, (seems like every year) but I graduated from public HS knowing squat about WW1 and WW2. After the Civil War, somehow we always skipped up to the Vietnam War. Everything I know about the Korean War, I learned from watching MASH. (not really 
) Seriously, it wasn’t until college that I learned about American and European history in the first half of the 20th century.
high school, in a word, sucked. i graduated last year, and sadly, i know more about what people were wearing to school, and less about history, math, and science. i passed all my classes, and i left at 11:30 every day of my senior year, and usually skipped at least one day a week. i think i was noticed more when i was there, than when i wasn’t.
I switched high schools and states at the mid point of my HS Career. Therefore, what is not covered in one school was inevitably covered in another.
So far I’ve had Geography, Economics, Ancient World History, Honors US History, AP Government, Honors English, AP English, Biology, Honors Chemistry, Spanish I, Geometry, Algebra II, Pre Calc, and Calculus.
These are the core classes, not counting my electives. All in all, I’d say that I had a fairly well-rounded HS career. Could it have been better? Maybe, but maybe not. Teachers and schools do the best they can. Also, I was fortunate in that I went from an extremely small school (My graduating class was 100 students strong) to a school where there is a relatively few amount of students taking any honors or AP courses. So I have received a lot of one-on-one time with teachers.
I pretty much love all my classes, and my teachers. There is one teacher who manages to piss me off on a daily basis, but she teaches my one elective class this year, so it’s not a big deal.
I guess I was amazingly lucky to have the teachers I’ve had. I can’t think of one of them who didn’t expect a certain level of responsibility out of his/her students, and grade accordingly.
In terms of what I was taught . . . mostly.
In terms of the experience, ah . . . that would be “What would you like to make sure never happens to anyone else?” for $100, Eve.
Academically it was pretty decent. Athletically it was decent. Socially, um, yeah. I’m glad I survived.
[RANT continued]
History/ geography/ Literature: highly centered on our country (Costa Rica), rather than focusing on the more relevant parts of this global village we call Earth. Yet another example of romanticism governing pragmatism. :rolleyes:
Why are educators incapable of objectively assessing the fact that we are not a very important country in the grand scheme of things? Why can’t the educational programs be modified in accordance to that somewhat harsh reality by equipping us with the appropriate tools to properly conduct ourselves outside the boundaries of the geographical confines in which we were raised?
What about College, you might be inclined to ask? The same shit: mechanical and obsolete teaching techniques, education more conducive to passive reception of information rather than its active interpretation, YADA, YADA, YADA.
::RANT interrupted::
Anyway, I was lucky to spend significant time with some really smart and intellectually motivated people after HS. They seeded the wasteland that was my brain with newborn curiosity and delight in learning, thus sending me on the path which I am still traversing: the road to becoming a well-educated, rational, ideologically flexible person, committed not only to searching for the truth but to, concurrently, fight ignorance in the name of the one and only God, Cecil Adams.
::RANT reinitiated::
BlackKnight mentioned how Carl Sagan is not taught at schools. I totally agree with him on how ridiculous that is. We are fed so much useless crap, yet are not taught the truly enlightening and inspirational stuff; the one capable of making the mind wonder about the marvels of our universe, of igniting the flame of curiosity, of making learning the fun ride that it really is instead of the boring and reason-neglecting road to intellectual oblivion that we are forced to travel throughout must of our education.
Since we are kids the proverbial THEY is not only controlling us but restraining that most natural of our impulses, the need to think for ourselves. We are being conditioned to misuse our brains, to walk about life without questioning the system that enslaves us.
What is the matrix? The educational system is the matrix, it is the veil that has been put over our very eyes to shade us from the truth: we are taught WHAT to think yet are not taught HOW to think for ourselves. We have no identity, we are a reflection of what we are told to be. We are being subliminally coerced to follow rules and conventions without pausing for a second to ponder why.
Only until we start to think for ourselves do we live The Matrix and cease to be puppets of the system.
It’s a conspiracy, I’m telling you.
And yeah, I apologize for the obligatory Matrix reference. It’s my favorite movie and I always use the lamest of excuses to justify me bringing it up. :rolleyes:
[/RANT]
Falcon said:
I am curious as to why you don’t envision yourself having a bunch of little falcons running around the house? Sure, it’s a fucked-up world the one we leave in, but that is exactly why we need smart people like you to perpetuate their genes and raise conscious, intelligent individuals who can help unfuck this mighty fucked society. Just a thought. 
We live in a material world and I am a material boy.