This is mainly directed at those who attended American public schools, but it could also be answered by those who attended non-American or private schools.
I don’t really feel as though I learned anything in school. I guess, upon closer examination, I feel as though I did, in fact, learn a few particular things, but I really did not learn anything other than how to spell in kindergarten.
Things I did not learn in school:
I did not learn to read in school.
I learned almost nothing about mathematics in school.
I did not learn anything about history in school that I did not already know.
I learned almost nothing about literature in school. I did read certain books for classes, but I did not really learn anything about literature in any broader sense.
Looking back, I basically feel as though I didn’t learn anything in school. I’d like to know if anyone else feels that way.
Edit: I am speaking of kindergarten through high school.
Dude, yes. I really feel I could have skipped high school entirely with no adverse educational effects. I often discuss this with people at length, in fact, until they remember pressing engagements elsewhere.
Not so much primary school - I feel primary school was a fairly useful diversion, and I definitely learned about tadpoles, times tables, and how to execute a passable forward roll (although, actually I was in a private gymnastics class for a lot of primary school, so scratch that. I may have honed my forward rolls).
High school, though? Fuck high school. In high school I took French for five years. I can’t speak French. Votre sur le bicyclette, yeah? I don’t think I need to go on, but I shall. I played approximate hockey for five years; I don’t know the rules. We seemingly watched *Schindler’s List * at every opportunity - for R.E., for English, for History, and once - I swear - for Maths. Any challenging book I read I brought in myself. Equations of any flavour? No idea. I basically agree on all points.
And I was a “good” kid - bright, receptive, Marks & Spencers blazer, not pregnant in the third year, not building a bong in woodwork. I wanted to learn stuff; I just didn’t.
Attended school in New Zealand. I learned a lot. A whole lot. I’m flummoxed by how someone couldn’t, but maybe schooling is much better in New Zealand? I don’t know.
I mean, you didn’t learn any mathematics at school? Just to take one example, you didn’t learn the concepts of medians, means, averages, modes, and the subtle (or not so subtle) differences between them?
Maybe you and I are talking about different definitions of learning. I’m talking about the aquisition of skills, knowledge and understanding.
Man, I’m glad I didn’t go to the schools of the first two posters. I mean my schooling was dull and tedious at times but to feel that you learned absolutely nothing all thirteen years? That’s sad to me.
Five years for me, not thirteen. I think primary school was pretty useful. High school, however, was a dead loss. Absolutely. I’m angry about it. It wasn’t a bad school, apparently, either - it had governors and funding and Bunsen burners and so on - it just seemed to be consistently aiming at the lowest common denominator, both through the curriculum and the attitude of the teachers themselves.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I was so much of a screaming intellectual for high school - I wasn’t - but I had reasonable - normal! - curiosity and intellectual drive for a kid, so I don’t feel school was much of a source of new information, no.
No.
Were they raised at any point? Sure.
But are they in my head now, and did I understand the concepts at the time, and did I learn them? No.
Take something like apostrophe use, as a further example. This was never raised - I know how to place an apostrophe because I learned it outside the school. Nobody ever taught me. I don’t mean to give the impression that we didn’t do anything in schools, or that concepts weren’t alluded to, but I’ve never had any moment of “Good grief, I understand that!” in an educational establishment. Anything I know - to my probably now limited adult remembering, granted - I either knew before, or discovered elsewhere. nikonikosuru is right, it is sad.
Wow, I’m really surprised with this, I went to highschool in the Netherlands and pretty much everything I know (or at least, everything I knew when going to college), I learned in highschool. Everything about maths, economics, history.
Is it because the schools are only interested in getting their pupils to pass tests?
I don’t know much about the schooling system in the US and pretty much what I do know is based on what I’ve seen on television, but it does seem to me that the US is very keen on ‘testing’ its students throughout their entire school life. That would encourage teaching that results in good grades as opposed to good understanding.
I reckon it’s not too wild an exaggeration to say that up to about the age of 14 the primary purposes of school are (a) somewhere to keep the kids off the streets and out of adults’ hair while they go about their business, and (b) for kids to learn social skills.
I don’t think I learned a huge amount of useful stuff at primary or middle school. After the age of 16, when we do pre-university level studies here, we did cover a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have worked out for myself.
Oh yes, I didn’t mention that I’m in the UK. I think there are similarities, though.
Passing tests definitely came into it – I remember lots of Sir, will this be on the exam?, where an answer in the negative justified not bothering to absorb it, or to teach it. That’s a terrible attitude for anyone to have, both for teachers and for pupils.
Also I’m just the wrong personality type for the system, I guess. I expect lots of people were. I’m naturally quiet – or I was! – and somewhat reticent, and the sort of person who wasn’t comfortable asking questions in front of an audience. There’s a bit of a sad culture of “thick is cool” in UK high schools, too – I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone if I knew something already, so I was never pushed.
And really, the lowest common denominator was low. Classes were streamed in later years, but for the first three you were in with very deprived kids who couldn’t read. As in, no hyperbole here, could not read. The school had a programme where the able elder pupils – me – sat with the less able at lunch times and hand-held through the cat sat on the mat. I am not making this up.
The streaming was badly handled, too – I wouldn’t know a quadratic equation if it carjacked me, you know? But I was quiet and nicely spoken, so into Set One I went. Sink Estate Sarah with the second-hand uniform? Set Five with the other write-offs, although who knows how bright Sarah actually was. So neither of us gets the support we need, but it’s easier for the administration. This was in 1994 – 1999, by the way.
Amazing as this sounds, this wasn’t a bad school. I chose to go there. It churned out a steady stream Oxbridge candidates as well as burger flippers. It just didn’t work for some people.
I learned a lot of maths. Though I haven’t used very much of it since.
I learned a fair amount of science, though I can’t remember much, as my teachers were monumental bores.
I didn’t learn much in English, but I was given free reign to write, and the guidance provided for that was invaluable.
I didn’t learn much in History, because it tended to be localised, and as New Zealand was barely 150 years old, and pre-that was almost exclusively oral history, it was limited. It was like telling us about what it was like when the electricity was out.
I definitely didn’t learn much about computers. As a teen during the home computer revolution, my friends and I knew more than my teachers did.
There was some amount of Social Studies that was sort of semi-interesting, but it was either so general as to be obvious, or so specific as to never apply to me, that I don’t think it mattered much.
Yeah, I gotta say that apart from rare fundamentals, there wasn’t much of use for me.
I think most people who claim this or feel this are greatly exaggerating.
“Learning nothing” in school implies this: That every test you took could have been given to you before the material was covered in class and you would do as well on that test as the one given to you after the material had been covered. For most people, I don’t think so.
If you don’t remember anything you learned or think it was useless information, thats a whole nother thing.
And even IF your classes and teachers were that lame, if you werent striving to take all the hardest classes and utilize the library and computer lab resources its your own fault you didnt “learn anything”. And if you were THAT much of a wizkid, get out early, push to be advanced a grade or three, kick butt on some standardized tests and start community college.
I think this feeling is mostly an adult echo of that stupid teenager mindset that they already know everything, the teachers are stupid, and all the stuff they are learning is useless and waste of time, because, you know, they have important REAL learning to do back somewhere else.
Honestly, if you didn’t learn anything in school then either you were very poorly served by your educational system (possible, but not as likely as some people on this board would have you think) or you didn’t apply yourself. Generally speaking, in most education experiences you get out what you put in. What did you put in?
I learned only one thing in my last three years of high school: journalism. It was the only thing that that loser of a school could do correctly. I had transferred from an excellent school district with a real advanced placement program to a loser school with the ridiculous mission statement that “all kids can learn” and an inneffective outcome based education philosophy. What the bullshit meant in practice was there was no advanced placement, everyone was in the same stupid-person English class, and teaching was done to the level of the lowest common denominator, because “all kids” – even the stupid ones – can learn. It also didn’t help that I’d come from a real four year high school to a three year high school. I’d started all my high school classes the previous year. By time my senior year came along, I had nothing left to study, and had all of the requirements met at the end of the first semester, and those stupid bastards still wouldn’t graduate me. My senior year curriculum: swimming, journalism, jazz band, symphonic band, Spanish I, German III, French I, and Pascal.
What year did you graduate? I only wonder if the experience of it being worthless is from more recent graduates, who had to deal with the No Child Left Behind thing. I graduated in 1992, and I felt like I learned quite a bit. I did very well in school and was in a lot of advanced classes, so maybe that was part of it too.
“I didn’t learn a thing” means a) you are exceedingly hyperbolic, b) you have zero memory capacity, c) you are deluding yourself, d) you are lying, both to yourself and to others. Any or all of the previous, in varying percentages. Anyone who wants to learn can learn, under any circumstances. You failed yourself, the system didn’t fail you.
I graduated in 2000 and I feel like I learned quite a lot. Every day when I walk past Alexander Hamilton’s grave site or wander by the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd I am reminded of history, english, music, and literature classes I took in High School. Heck, two days ago I was talking with a coworker and we were complaining about working for 40 hours a week and I just started laughing. She asked what was so funny and I told her I was remembering the stuff I learned in high school about working conditions in the US 100-200 years ago. I was remembering Upton Sinclair, the institution of child labor laws and the origin of unionized labor and thinking that after all those people fought tooth and nail for us to have 40 hour work weeks and safe, comfortable working environments we are still bitching that we have it too hard. All of that was remembered from my high school history classes.
Even the stuff that you never thought would have any use can come in handy sometimes. I remember going to a play at my college and talking with some of the crew members afterwards and saying, “Your set design reminded me a lot of Louise Nevelson’smore popular works. Was she the inspiration for your set?” and having them all stare at me, slack-jawed. When they said, “How in the world did you know that?” my response was, “I studied her in art class last year.”
Oh yeah, I learned tons. Was it hard and difficult? Largely no - I was considered a “gifted” student and probably could have been challenged more. I rarely had homework and got mostly straight As (or top marks, for non-US readers). Have I forgotten a lot of it? Probably - I graduated from high school 15 years ago, and the stuff I know now has been supplemented so much with university classes and self-study that I’m not sure I could separate out what I learned when.
I agree that it’s a bit of a stretch to get out of the basic core education set (years 1 - 12) without having learned anything.
Most significantly, I took a typing class my senior year. The ability to be a fast, accurate touch typist is a skill I use on a daily basis, especially at work.
In elementary school, I have clear memories of learning: homonyms (we had a cute pair/pear tree where we matched up those types of words), fractions, lesser than/greater than (adorable crocodile mouths!), how to figure the area of a circle (including definitions of radius, pi etc), I could go on and on.
In high school, I have clear memories of learning various works of Shakespeare (can still quote passages from several plays), French (I later got a degree in French Language & Literature in college), direct objects, how to diagram a sentence, lots and lots of vocabulary words (I had a teacher who adored weekly vocabulary tests), genetics (we had a year long experiment breeding fruit flies), how to factor an equation (which I showed a kid a few months ago, so it stuck), the angles of a triangle = 180 degrees, Avogadro’s number = 6.023× 10 to the 23, how to play a flute (band!) etc etc etc.
I am a trainer/technical writer - I owe a lot of my success to my very strong background in writing/grammar.
Can you really get through 12 years of school and learn NOT ONE THING? Not one?
