I’m interested, silenus - do you consider the class of illiterate eleven year olds in my example to have failed themselves, or do you concede a problem in the system in that instance?
wolf-alice, you’re cracking me up!
I would say that I learned plenty in school, but it was distributed pretty sparsely. I probably could have learned twice as much in half the time elsewhere.
Nope. That sounds like a complete failure of the system. But even under those circumstances, if a child wanted to learn, they could find a way. Happens all the time. Did the system make it a lot harder, and so discourage most from trying? Looks like, in this case, if you are relating things completely. But even then, I’d be willing to wager a substantial amount (up to 1.35 Euros!) that there were a majority of your fellow students who would answer the OP differently than you did.
Dude, all children want to learn (barring, since this is the internet, the example of an honest-to-Christ sociopath which I’m sure is about to be raised). It’s the default setting for a child. It is.
Also, listen. Case in point. I know nothing, literally nothing, about History. No dates, no kings, no battles, no concept of continuity, and I took this to GCSE level (and I got a B). History was primarily concerned about sources - determining primary and secondary sources, and their reliability - and really, that seemed to be it. We watched a lot of videos. We watched Braveheart once. And look - I’m fourteen, yes? I’m here in a History class. I get good marks. I’m learning History, right? It’s only with adult hindsight that I think; hang on, that wasn’t so good. What would you have had me do?
How am I, at an ignorant fourteen, supposed to assess the quality of what I’m learning?
And how is a child supposed to know what is available for them to learn?
I guess I was lucky. I learned a ton of stuff in high school. Some of it was actually useful and still gets used today. Some of it didn’t sink in until later, like the part about all the rich shits that made my life a living hell were actually miserable themselves and were trying to make themselves feel better by dumping on me because I was smarter than they were.
Public school, northeastern US, 1980’s-early 90’s. Pre-standardized testing.
I think I learned a lot in K-8: reading, writing, math (including ‘light’ statistics and geometry), general science, US history and government. The omission of foreign language was incredibly short-sighted in retrospect. There was also a puzzling emphasis on penmanship, which we worked on daily for 5 years.
High school was more hit and miss. The one year self-contained classes, like the sciences and history, were generally very good and allowed me to ace the first 2 semesters of the equivalent courses in college. The classes that were taught as a 4 year series, like math and english, did not build much on what we already had learned. Again, there were strange decisions about what to teach: no calculus, but 2 years spent on seemingly nothing but quadratic equations. Foreign anguages were perhaps the the only real failure to educate. After 3 years of Spanish and 5 of Latin, I can stumblingly ask directions to the restroom and decipher most taxonomic nomenclature. The problem wasn’t bad teaching, but refusing to give failing marks to those of us who just did not get it.
I am actually boggled by this question.
Even as small children we were sent to the library to look at the Encyclopedia for reports and such. In case you’ve never seen one, the encyclopedia is in many volumes, aphabetically organized. By flipping idly though the pages, I began to sense that there might be at least 35 volumes worth of knowledge in the universe. Soon after, I noticed that the library was a large building filled entirely with books about all sorts of things.
For me, I still use essentially the same revising technique I was taught in the second grade (1st draft - get your ideas out; 2nd draft, organize your thoughts logically; 3rd draft=polish and edit for final draft.)
I went to an exceptional public high school that requires an entrance exam. I had a pretty exceptional experience overall in terms of high school.
I was an A/B student in grades 7-9 but in 10-12 the school was a circus and that made it impossible to get any real value out of it. Teachers made no attempt to maintain control of the class, bullying was rampant. As a result, my GPA took a serious nose-dive. I still use some math and science from time to time, and I’m genuinely surprised when I do recall something that I learned from high school that helps me in daily life.
Somehow I managed to beat the odds and landed a pretty decent job in the IT field during the dot com boom. My employer evidently saw potential in me and provided a lot of in house IT training. Using that as a spring board, I have been able to jump to better and better jobs.
I learned everything in school (midwestern US public school, graduated '97). I probably don’t go one day without recalling something I learned in school, whether it be while reading an article, doing my job or even doing a crossword puzzle. I even learned about sex, drugs and alcohol in school!
It’s not as if my parents kept me from learning at home, or that I wasn’t the curious sort - we went to the library a lot, watched Sesame Street and had an honest-to-god Funk & Wagnalls set. But before the Internet, the world was a very small place. Unless you went wild at the library or had parents with varied interests who could help you on your quest for knowledge…all the learnin’ to be got was to be found at school.
Yes, but I think it’s my fault for not retaining more information. I wasn’t the best student in school, although I got mostly As and Bs, but I didn’t always care enough to pay attention (or memorize things) long term.
I feel that I was really lucky growing up. For K-8th grade I had some really wonderful teachers and I feel that I had a good grip on math, science, literature, etc. I didn’t learn to read in school, but that’s because I already knew how to read by the time I got to Kindergarten when they were starting to teach that.
In first grade my family moved to a smaller town and I had the same teacher for grades 1-3. Most people find this strange, but I think it was really beneficial to have the same teacher for that period of time. In 4th grade, when I was struggling with math, my teacher spent time after school with me going over the lessons. To this day, I really appreciate his dedication because he was not required by anyone to stay after school to help me. 5th grade really focused in on history, or at least that’s what I remember most about it, and in 6th grade we finally branched out and had different teachers for different lessons. I still remember the names of most of my teachers from that time period, which I’m also told is strange.
7th & 8th grade went much the same, although this is where science started to slip because so much of it became about memorization (we had to memorize every Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species of something like 100 different animals or we failed), and my math teacher was a huge bore. I loved English in this time period though. We read lots of plays, and even acted a few out, we had real writing assignments, and even put together a school newspaper complete with a political cartoon.
As far as highschool, I spent most of my time trying to escape it. My freshmen year I suppose can’t really count because I went to a boarding school which, for that year, was pretty awesome in terms of education. We read several “classics” and wrote reports on them (that were really a joke, but hey, at least we did them), science was very experiment-heavy and we had to keep a journal, complete with sketches of things, explanations, etc. History was hugely lacking here, though, and I don’t feel I learned anything new in history until college.
I transferred back to public school Sophomore year, and did whatever I had to to graduate early. I will say that I really enjoyed my English and literature classes in high school though. We wrote A LOT, did tons of peer review, and had to analyze pieces of writing meticulously. Oh, and my science teacher in high school was great.
The only area I really feel cheated in from high school was History. I didn’t learn anything new and wasn’t challenged in the slightest. After taking a few History classes in college I was actually fairly angry with my high school for sugar coating and glossing over so much.
I knew how to read and write well before Kindergarden. In elementary school, my district was concerned mostly with political correctness (before they started calling it that- this was the mid 70’s after all) and being ahead of the curve with the whole metric conversion. So whereas my brethren in other districts had math problems like “Jessie weighs 75 pounds. Her friend Kim weighs 73 pounds. What is the difference between Jessie’s weight and Kim’s?” I had math problems like “Shabazz has a mass of 26 kilograms. Consuela has a mass of 22 kilograms…”
But high school is where things really went sour. I entered college:
[ul]
[li]Having never learned how to write a check.[/li][li]Having never learned how to conduct research or compose a scholarly thesis.[/li][li]Having never heard of Charlemagne.[/li][li]Having never heard of Joan of Arc.[/li][li]Believing that Jesus of Nazareth was put to death because he refused to worship the Roman gods.[/li][li]Believing that Las Vegas bordered Mexico.[/li][li]Believing that New Orleans was in the general vicinity of Florida.[/li][li]…and being ignorant about a multitude of similar things that every person who enters an accredited college should have figured out by now.[/li][/ul]
[quote=“HeyHomie, post:32, topic:527779”]
[li]Believing that New Orleans was in the general vicinity of Florida.[/li][/QUOTE]
Google Maps says it’s a three hours drive from New Orleans to Pensacola. How is that not the general vicinity of Florida?
Anyway, no. I learned tons of things in school. I learned how to read and write before I went to school, but I learned to read and write well in school. I learned how to speak Spanish halfway decently. I learned enough math to function in my daily life. I learned a lot of history. I learned about good literature and how to read it. I was in band for most of my schooling and I learned a lot about music and working in a group through that. I learned about how the government works.
I feel like the subject I learned the least about in school was probably science. I thought I hated science then, though. Since I’ve grown up, I’ve changed my mind about that, and I enjoy popular science books now.
I went to public schools in urban and then suburban areas in Northern California.
American Public Schools, Northeastern US (Connecticut). K-12 from 1980-1993. B+ish student (Could probably have gotten straight A’s, but was… not a motivated hard worker.)
I learned a LOT. Math? Check. And while I’ve pretty much forgotten calculus and trigonometry, the rest of it remains useful to this day.
History? Yup. Pretty good grasp of American history (foggy on some details, but that’s bound to happen with anything you don’t use every day.). Less good but much broader grasp of Western European history (There was a lot more to cover, since we started somewhere around the time of Ancient Greece.)
Sciences? Strong grasp of biology, adequate grasp of the basics of chemistry (electron levels, components of the atom, hydrogen bonds, blah blah), good grasp of basic physics.
English? Okay, so I really didn’t apply myself here much at all. I read a few books. Learned good grammar (early stuff here), appropriate use of most punctuation marks (still fuzzy on the semicolon) and how to break up my run on sentances. Also learned how to BS my way through a paper on a book I had barely opened, and if that’s not a life skill, I don’t know what is.
I suspect strongly, though don’t actually recall, that my generally adequate grasp of US geography comes from somewhere in elementary school.
Was there plenty of stuff I didn’t learn in school? Sure. Lots of ‘practical’ stuff (like the aforementioned ‘how to write a check’. Who the heck learns that in school?) But in terms of academic topics, both useful and non, school had me covered.
[quote=“HeyHomie, post:32, topic:527779”]
But high school is where things really went sour. I entered college:
[ul]
[li]Having never learned how to write a check. [/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I actually had a class that was half learning about computers, and half “life skills”. We learned how to write a check and balance a checkbook, and how to do a budget acting as if we were a single parent (this was far more effective than any sex ed class).
Even during college, I felt this area was hugely lacking.
Yes, I learned an *assload *in school, both skills and facts. Sure, I could read and write and count and even add and subtract before kindergarten, but I sure as hell didn’t know how to multiply, divide, handle negative numbers, perform algebra, geometry, or calculus, do research, draw conclusions from that research, write an argument based on those conclusions, find and address flaws in others’ logic and my own, read musical notation and play several musical instruments, or speak French.
Before school, I also knew nothing about history, literature, biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, sociology, psychology, politics, music, art, geography, and on and on. I’m constantly surprised when someone doesn’t know some basic fact about, say, human anatomy or world history that I remember learning about when I was 9 or 10.
I mean, I was a *voracious *reader and a huge nerd. I also learned an assload outside of school. But even if I had spent every waking hour learning, school was where I spent the vast majority of those hours, so by default, I learned more there than anywhere else.
I certainly am not claiming I got a top-notch education. I went to ordinary public schools in a tiny, fairly poor, backwater cowtown in the Midwest in the 80s-90s, and when I got to college, I felt incredibly humbled at times by the private-school education of most of my peers. But I wouldn’t have even gotten into college, and certainly wouldn’t have excelled there, if I hadn’t learned as much as I did in school.
I’m well aware that this is not always the case; some schools suck, and fail their students miserably. I just have a hard time believing my experience is the exception, rather than the rule.
OMG, It would take months to list the things I learned in HS. Small school in East TN in 1966 - 1970. Maybe I just liked learning, but this was the period I really took learning to its limits.
American schools mid 80’s - I learned quite a lot.
I learned typing, programming, journalism writing, how to solder, drafting, driving and lots more. I went to a much maligned H.S. in the US. I would say it prepared me pretty well for life.
Canadian, late 70s and 80s were my school years.
I learned lots, I am sure. Probably more than I remember learning, if you see what I mean.
When people complain about not learning something, it’s usually because they didn’t try to learn.