# What is going on in our schools? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 31, 2003, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977 "2003-01-31T22:46:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Legomancer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/779978/32.png) [@Legomancer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Legomancer)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/61 "2003-02-03T14:19:13Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by amarone \* > \*\*While I join in the hand-wringing about the appalling lack of knowledge imparted about geography and history and such in the school system, I think that memorizing the planets and their order is one of the more useless bits of information you can be taught. How many people will put this information to any use? \*\* So in other words, nothing should be taught unless there’s an obvious monetary compensation at the other end? So in addition to teachers being counselors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, police, janitors, babysitters, therapists, detectives, secretaries, guards, and - oh yeah - educators, we also need to add _fortune-tellers_ to the list. They need to be able to look into each student’s future and know exactly which road that student will take so they don’t accidentally teach them something that will be useless to them, such as the order of the planets, or higher math, or South American history. There’s no need to fill up the student’s head with useless knowledge that will neither profit her nor make her into a more productive worker for the hive. If she wants to learn about the planets, that’s for something other than _school_, by gum! ---
**Author:** ![Astroboy14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/df705f/32.png) [@Astroboy14](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astroboy14)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/62 "2003-02-03T15:38:29Z")
In the interest of following our credo of fighting ignorance: You might want to take the mneumonic “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” and its variations with a grain of salt (at least as far as a method of naming the planets in order of distance from the sun anyways…). Lookee [here](http://dosxx.colorado.edu/Pluto/orbits.jpg). Pluto’s orbit is rather eccentric, and dips inside the orbit of Neptune from time to time… and (warning! I been drinking! My thoughts are slightly befuddled right now.) if I recall correctly, Pluto dipped _inside_ the orbit of Neptune in 1999, and will remain closer to the sun for some time to come. I may be wrong about this, though, as a quick google search got me nothing other than the beginnings of a headache from squinting at the screen of a borrowed laptop computer (mine got shipped this AM… moving). ---
**Author:** ![Dragon\_Ash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b3f665/32.png) [@Dragon\_Ash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dragon_Ash)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/63 "2003-02-03T15:51:22Z")
\*\*So in other words, nothing should be taught unless there’s an obvious monetary compensation at the other end? \*\* [/QUOTE] Just about all information taught to students until about high school will be “useless” to them, at the time. Let me tell you a story. My youngest little brother is a genius. I mean, seriously intelligent. He is so smart, he scares me. One little story: we were playing a video game where you go back in time and re-create some historic event. I accidentally put in like 200 million B.C. or something. My brother, SIX YEARS OLD at the time, says, ‘Oh, nice move, now we have to sit and watch the continents drift apart for the next four hours…’. Blew me away. So by the time he got to 2nd and 3rd grade, he was literally bored to tears. He knew _everything_ that was going on. He stopped paying attention, stopped caring about school, because the teachers had to teach according to the speed of the slowest person in the class - What do you mean, my little Johnny needs to go to a special class? He’s not slow, you are doing a crummy job of teaching him! So these little kids - ironically enough, often the ones most interested in learning - slow the class down. And there was no ‘advanced math’ class for fourth graders. By the time he got to junior high school, he wasn’t interested in school at all. He got caught up in drugs, alcohol, petty crimes the whole thing. Looking back on it now, he says, ‘hey, it wasn’t a total waste of time, I got a great education on our judiciary system’. It wasn’t until a high school student turned him on to computers that he suddenly realized that he had ‘found’ his calling. And now he right back on track. You see, had he had a bit more breadth of teaching early on (his school didn’t offer _any_ computer courses until junior high), he might have found his calling early on. I think the idea behind a ‘broad’ education is that it exposes our children to the incredibly vast, rich world out there just waiting to be explored and learned. My sister loved biology and science; she is pre-med now. My other little brother loved shop and woodworking; he runs a maintenance office for a massive aparatment complex. I loved history, math, and economics - so I went into finance. We want to our kids to be fascinated, challenged, excited about learning. By giving the a basic understanding of a variety and wealth of subjects, we increase the possibility that they will find things to be excited about, in turn making them want to learn more. Isn’t that how it is with books? You read a great book, and you keep reading other books, hoping to find another ‘great’ one. One interesting side note - some schools (private, mostly) specifically ask parents NOT to teach kids at home before they enter the school system. I am still working out my opinions on this, my knee-jerk reaction aside. I think we need to pay teachers more - for the job they do, and the responsibility we dump on them (is there ANY more important task in the world today than educating our future???), we pay teachers SHIT. We need to pay more, not necessarily to get good teachers, because I honestly believe we already have a lot of good people, but to encourage them to STAY. We also need MORE teachers, because I think we have to work at tailoring class speeds - not for the slower kids in class, but for the faster kids. They are the ones that end up losing out in these days of ‘no kid left behind’. OK, a lot of this is off the seat of my pants, so no flames please. But if this stimulates some debate, great. More teachers, better paid teachers - yep, this costs money. And schools are already under-budgeted, it seems. I don’t have any easy answers. I have long felt that schools should kick out kids distrupting classes. For many parents, schools are public baby-sitters. Kicking out kids who obviously have no intention of being students would help turn schools back into actual places of learning, not detention centers for juviniles - at my brother’s school, they do random checks of school lockers. :mad: I am quite familiar with the Japanese education system. It used to be incredibly draconian. The schools had unbelievable powers; the parents had _zero_ say in what went on. A student caught smoking would beg his parents not to tell the school. The teachers would decide what universities the kids should try for. But put another way, this means that the schools had the total, full support of the parents, who worked at making sure the kids did their school work, got the tutors, put them in to after-class prep courses, etc. The result? Well, by and large kids were taught well. The stereotypical image is of kids memorizing text books with no free thought. That is complete bullshit. More accurate would be to say that they didn’t have many places to _express_ their free thoughts. But they were taught a fairly diverse range of thinking on any number of issues (even if they were taught what was supposed to be the “correct” answer on entrance exams). Other results of this system, of course, is the ‘exam’ hell for unis. And after 12 years of that torture, kids basically go to uni in Japan to screw around (literally and figuratively) for four years before hitting the corporate world. Japanese universities, quite frankly, are a joke. There are exceptions, and some departments at some universities are world-class. But in general, kids don’t go to uni to learn. They go to uni to relax. I know of NO kid in Japan who paid his own college tuition. Zero, zilch none. And that’s after 20 years in and out of Japan. Parents pay their kid’s tuition in return for getting 12 years of hard work. One other aspect of Japan’s education system. Because it is so intensive, so drilled, and so regimented, kids have almost no choice in what classes they take. Very few electives. So they don’t really know what they are interested in. Their major at college? Depends on what college department they enter - see, they don’t take an entrance exam at a uni then decide their major 2-3 years in - they take an entrance exam for a particular department of a university. Doesn’t really matter, because a) they don’t really learn anything at uni anyway, and b) the company they join, and job they end up doing, will have almost zero correlation with what their ‘major’ was. I know econ majors doing computer sales, computer majors working in accounting, etc. And one other aspect - by and large, people don’t really like their jobs. They don’t necessarily dislike their jobs, either - jobs are just - jobs. Not careers. It is what they have to do every day. “getting ahead” isn’t ‘doing a better job’. It is ‘not screwing up so I can get promoted’. Anyway, this is turning into a different rant, so I will head it off here. There are lots of upside to Japan’s system as well, of course. The entire nation is very literate - I think literacy rates are close to 99%. Kids with parents actively interested in their education (and not just getting them into a ‘good college’ will get a great education in their areas of interest, because they have an excellent grasp of the fundamentals. They will have a better idea of what they want to do, and can look at their uni options with a more learned eye. Japan has churned out two generations of highly skilled engineers and scientists, largely thanks to the fact that the kids receive a very thorough education in the basic fundamentals. Can’t put a price tag on that. I find lots of issues with the implementation of these resources, but I can’t find fault with the basic result. I say ‘used to be draconian’, because over the past few years, Japan has been seriously dumbing down their schools. No school Saturdays anymore (used to be half-days on Sat). Massive reduction in classroom time. Subjects are easier. One brilliant policy change last year - I heard that it passed, but don’t know the exact details: Pi is to be rounded to 3. To make calculations easier. Not 22/7. Not 3.14, even. \*\* 3 \*\*. I don’t think they should have dumbed things down; I was hoping they would simply work at letting kids have more choices in what they learned. My point? I guess I would want the ‘best of both worlds’ - a good, basic understanding of the world around us, but the flexibility to go deeper in areas of interest. Would I want my kid to go to a school that would ‘hit the books’ fairly hard? Or would I want him to go to a place that would let him explore where his interests lie? The problem with the ‘hard-core’ book studies is that it risks pushing away kids who don’t want to be ‘pushed’, or maybe can’t keep up sometimes. The problem with the ‘go at your own pace’ method is that, let’s face it, kids, like adults, have times when they are simply unmotivated, and they would be able to flaunt the system - teachers I have met from these types of schools have looked shocked when I ask them how the prod kids to get back to their work - ‘oh, we respect the children’s rights, and we don’t want to risk upsetting them by pushing them’. But some kids flourish under a ‘hard-core’ book studies method. I was one. Some kids flourish under a ‘study want you want’ method. My youngest little brother was one. So ultimately, it comes down to the PARENTS understanding what works best for their kid, then supporting the school/teachers with what they are trying to do. Vouchers for less-advantaged kids works for me. I have seen more than enough disruptive kids from wealthy homes, so I resent the implication that ‘poor’ kids are ‘disruptive’ (although maybe I misread that wrong; I certainly hope so). Vouchers or no vouchers, kids not interested in being students simply don’t belong in school. Kinda comes back to the ‘children’s rights’ thing. We are so scared of ‘emotionally scarring’ our kids, that we have given them far too much leeway, and - let’s face it - kids know it, they are taking complete advantage of it, and they are laughing at the grownups. Yes, kids have rights, but let’s not mix them up with responsibilities. We are giving way too much of one, and not demanding enough of the other. ---
**Author:** ![Lizard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/dfb087/32.png) [@Lizard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lizard)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/64 "2003-02-03T16:47:00Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jr8 \* > \*\*I think flat maps give kids a warped sense of geography (case in point: I _still_ have no concept of how big Greenland is relative to other places). Buy your kids a globe. \*\* No doubt! I remember showing a map to my teacher in 4th grade and asking why Greenland wasn’t considered a continent, since it appeared to be about the size of South America. I think her head exploded. It took me another 4-5 years to learn about how various typed of maps distort things in order to show more territory, etc. I read so many books as a kid and went to such a crappy school system that it was a safe bet I usually knew about as much about basic science as any teacher I ever had. I had one teacher tell me that rockets needed the air of Earth’s atmosphere to push against. Apparently, he thought every rocket ever launched just shut down and coasted once it hit vacuum in space. In a discussion over friction, another teacher told me the reason two carts that are identical except for weight are not equally easy to move is because extra weight “scrunched the molecules together” of the heavier cart’s wheels! Aside from stupid teachers, I think people worry a bit too much about what kids don’t know. People learn things at different times. Someone is not automatically undereducated just because they don’t know something you might think is obvious. ---
**Author:** ![RenMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecb155/32.png) [@RenMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RenMan)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/65 "2003-02-03T17:12:08Z")
Parents, I have a suggestion. Please tell me what you think of this. Now I am not yet a parent myself (I am 25) but something that my parents did for me proved invaluable when I was four years old. They got me an atlas. Two atlases for kids, actually (“Our World” and “Our 50 States” by National Geographic). They also got me a cheap globe (so that I understood, for example, why Alaska was near Russia even though they were far apart on a Mercator map) At first (being a tiny sprout who had just learned to read), I only looked at the pictures. Between each set of maps were beautiful color pictures of all sorts of places in the world, full of people doing what they do all over the place, and also moutains, rivers, oceans, cities, etc. I was so fascinated, I looked at them all the time. Soon, inevitably, the map pages caught my attention as well, and I learned all about the countries in the world and where they were located, and what their capitals were. And the flags! I loved learning those and still do. This knowledge made me want to learn about history and culture and language, and even as a young kid, I was learning this stuff at the library of my own volition. Thus, by the time I got to junior high and high school and we were learning history, I already had an excellent geographic context in my brain in which to insert each new bit of knowledge. I got good grades in school. I am the one in my group of friends known for being a geography question go-to guy and the most up on not only current events themselves, but the historical context into which they fit. I consider myself an education success story, the combination of decent public schooling plus!! a great start at home that proved indispensible. So, parents, don’t wait for someone else to start teaching your kids! Start it at home, by putting neat brainy toys in front of them (calculators, atlases with pictures, globes, models, whatever!) and let them just play. Anyone else have a similar story? A rebuttal? ---
**Author:** ![RenMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ecb155/32.png) [@RenMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RenMan)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/66 "2003-02-03T17:14:02Z")
One more thing: I think my parents’ gift of an atlas with pictures and descriptions of other cultures was also a good weapon against racism and cultural misunderstanding. ---
**Author:** ![ptr2void](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ptr2void/32/3406_2.png) [@ptr2void](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ptr2void)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/67 "2003-02-03T17:24:42Z")
RenMan, I’m right with you (I’m even a software developer outside of Boston :D). My grandparents gave me a subscription to both \*National Geographic \* and their kids’ magazine, _National Geographic World_ when I was pretty young. It was an excellent educational resource, not only for learning geography, but for all sorts of scientific subjects. My wife and I got our 3.5-year-old grandson (actually, my step-grandson) the current incarnation of the kids’ magazine, called _National Geographic Kids_ (natch). He loves it – his parents read it to him, and he gets to enjoy the pictures. I noticed at their house the other day a small beach ball globe, commenting on it to his father. Whattaya know, it was a gift from us, through NG. I love NG. ---
**Author:** ![Neurotik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/91b2a8/32.png) [@Neurotik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Neurotik)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/68 "2003-02-03T17:42:05Z")
Another good way is the game _Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego_. Man, I used to spend hours leafing through the World Almanac looking up flags, capitals, governments, etc. Good times. ---
**Author:** ![eponymous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e0b2c6/32.png) [@eponymous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eponymous)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/69 "2003-02-03T18:36:12Z")
As a geographer, I’m obviously distressed at the lack of basic geographic knowledge that is being taught at the K-12 level in the US. Personally, I feel that geography should be taught as a seperate course, rather than combined with other courses (most commonly in social study or history courses). I can understand and sympathize with K-12 educator’s need to cover the basics - obviously a seperate course in geography would cut into the need to teach important topics in history and the like (especially at the lower K-9 levels). However, at the higher levels (10-12) I would like to see a push by educators to include geography as a mandatory course. I know when I was a high school student, geography was an elective. Unfortunately, since geography is often seen as unimportant (for whatever reason) by many students, then, of course, it isn’t one that is commonly taken as an elective. I do know that some school districts have made great strides in improving the geographic education of the teachers and have incorporated geography as a seperate course (or have placed greater emphasis in those courses that have a geographic component). But, of course, there’s still a lot of improvement needed. Part of the blame can be put on geographers themselves (primarily for not emphasizing its importance). In addition, people also need to be made aware that geography isn’t soley about knowing _where_ countries, cities, physical features, etc. are located (although that is an important element). It’s also about understanding why/how/what, etc. the various phenomonon of the physical/human realms exhibit the spatial patterns they do across the earth’s surface. It’s fun trivia stuff to know where countries are located, or the capitals of all the states of the US, for example. But it’s even more interesting to know and understand, for example, _how_ New York became the largest city in the US, or _why_ Washington, DC was chosen as the site for the US capital, or _what_ are the historical/political/socio-cultural reasons for the conflict between Arabs and Israelis? To me, _that’s_ geography 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/70 "2003-02-03T19:27:38Z")
Geography was mandatory in my high school. It was a semester-long class that you either took sophomore year (if you were in the honors track), or junior year (if you were on the normal track). Either way, you _had_ to take it. And I second _Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?_ for good educational fun (blech, that sounds like crappy market speak). I spent God knows how many hours playing various incarnations of it (I remember playing it on my computer when the colour scheme was black, white, magenta, and blue) since I was about 4 or 5. I wasn’t that good at it when I started, but still. It’s also good for non geography reasons. I learned what things like “tow-headed” meant at an early age. Sure, that’s only a description of hair, but I learned a lot of vocabulary from that game (since they’d try to use things like that to confuse you). I loved the show too. ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2003, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/71 "2003-02-03T23:47:55Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by pkbites \* > \*\*As for your comment about not wanting my kids tainted my certain other kids, well…Duh!:rolleyes: Of course I don’t want them in school with trouble makers. How bad kids are getting in via vouchers is beyond me! Vouchers are bad enough, but if they’re going to be used, why aren’t only the best students getting them? I don’t get it.😕 \*\* Do bugs ever fly into your nose that is so high in the air? Perhaps vouchers are being given to kids who **need a chance**. This opportunity is not **only** for students who already have their shit together; it’s also for students who have the potential to make something of themselves, but can’t accomplish that in their overcrowded, underfunded public schools. Incidentally, what’s your definition of a “bad kid”? ---
**Author:** ![Catamount](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/catamount/32/2840_2.png) [@Catamount](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Catamount)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/72 "2003-02-04T00:15:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Astroboy14 \* > \*\*Pluto’s orbit is rather eccentric, and dips inside the orbit of Neptune from time to time… and (warning! I been drinking! My thoughts are slightly befuddled right now.) if I recall correctly, Pluto dipped _inside_ the orbit of Neptune in 1999, and will remain closer to the sun for some time to come. I may be wrong about this, though, as a quick google search got me nothing other than the beginnings of a headache from squinting at the screen of a borrowed laptop computer (mine got shipped this AM… moving). \*\* Actually Pluto moved out beyond Neptune around 1999. It won’t be the eighth planet again for about…270 years? Something like that. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/73 "2003-02-04T00:23:43Z")
As a first year teacher, these are what I see as the biggest problems i face: 1. The incredible mobility of my students. This is the biggest problem I have and the one I am most clueless about how to fix. Every six weeks, a third of my class turns over. Some of these kids have parents who move from apartment to apartment, hunting move in specials. More of them move constantly from Mom’s house to dad’s house to Aunty’s house to a friend’s house. Each of those neighborhoods feed into a different high school, and since no one has a car, they go to whtever school the local bus takes them to. 2. Absolutly no effective disciplene. I mean this. There isn’t any at all. We can suspend kids, or make them go to in school suspension, or, eventually, alternitive school, but all those things are about helping us teachers, not punishing the kids–they don’t care if they can’t come to school, or can’t come to class once they are in school. It’s simply not a punishment to them. The only way I can create disciplene is to make the kids care enough about me that they aren’t asses in my class out of respect. And that’s fucking hard to do, let me tell you. 3. Student apathy. A lot of them see no utility at all to an education–they are there only because the court tells them they have to be , plain and simple.(I sign a round of truency-monitor forms in every class). I spend mostof my time trying to convince them it’s not so, but to be brutally honest, it’s a losing battle by the time they are 16 years old. 4. Out of school is so much fun these days. For a lot of my kids, the alternitive to going to school is staying at home, watching MTV, smoking a joint, and slowly masterbating. **I can’t compete with that!**. My class is never going to be more fun than that. It’s no shocker that, unless there is some outside force selling them on the idea of school, they have trouble motivating themselves. 5. Fetal alcohol syndrome. Ok, I only think that on my worst, most depressing, most frustrating days. I’m ranting here, but please believe I’m not as burnt out or miserable as I sound–I love teaching, and I think that I have made a real differnece in some kid’s lives. But the fact remains that even great fucking teachers (and I work with some great fucking teachers, creative geniuses who spend 60 hours a week planning, tutoring, teaching, nagging, encouraging) fail to reach a majority of their students, especially in non-honors track classes. ---
**Author:** ![Astroboy14](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/df705f/32.png) [@Astroboy14](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Astroboy14)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/74 "2003-02-04T03:41:51Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by SpazCat \* > \*\*Actually Pluto moved out beyond Neptune around 1999. It won’t be the eighth planet again for about…270 years? Something like that. \*\* Oops! [Right you are](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/99/pluto990209.html), **Spaz**! Looks like I had that backwards… teach me to post drunk!😉 ---
**Author:** ![easy\_e](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/eb8c5e/32.png) [@easy\_e](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/easy_e)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/75 "2003-02-04T04:17:58Z")
For most of my education (halfway through kindergarten through my sophomore year of high school), I went to public schools in a town in Iowa of about 20,000. Granted, Iowa has a reputation for good schools, but I felt I got a pretty good education while I was there. We did a lot of English grammar (more on this later), and I remember in 4th grade we were supposed to be able to find all of the states on a map and name their capitals. In middle school we had units in geography where we learned every country in the world (including the recent “additons” due to the break-up of Yugoslavia), and we had “world cultures” where we also learned about them. My only beef was it seemed that in history, we never really progressed very far into the 20th century–we’d usually stop around the 1920s or so. We took standardized tests every year (the famous **Iowa** Test of Basic Skills), but I don’t really remember much of a pressure about them. But it’s my understanding that things have changed. My family moved to Madison, and I was a bit worried about how I would do, being in a school system in a town with an excellent university. But then, on my first day of **AP** English class, my teacher asked us how many parts of speech there were, and if we could name them. I was the only one who could 8–nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. But it’s not just the school system–I’ve always liked learning, and my parents wouldn’t let me slack off. It’s complicated. ---
**Author:** ![amarone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e0b2c6/32.png) [@amarone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarone)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/76 "2003-02-04T04:28:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Legomancer \* > \*\*So in other words, nothing should be taught unless there’s an obvious monetary compensation at the other end? > > So in addition to teachers being counselors, psychologists, nurses, social workers, police, janitors, babysitters, therapists, detectives, secretaries, guards, and - oh yeah - educators, we also need to add _fortune-tellers_ to the list. They need to be able to look into each student’s future and know exactly which road that student will take so they don’t accidentally teach them something that will be useless to them, such as the order of the planets, or higher math, or South American history. There’s no need to fill up the student’s head with useless knowledge that will neither profit her nor make her into a more productive worker for the hive. If she wants to learn about the planets, that’s for something other than _school_, by gum! \*\* Who mentioned money (apart from you)? Yes, of course I expect people who set the syllabuses to decide what is most useful and teach it. How much information is there in the world compared with the amount that can reasonably be taught during a 12 year education system? Many, many times more. Someone has to have the judgement (if you think it is fortune telling, then I hope it is not you) to determine what very small subset of overall knowledge should be taught. For example, I think it more useful to teach someone about places they may actually go to or meet people from, than about what order the planets occur when looking from the center of the solar system. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/77 "2003-02-04T04:34:02Z")
**Dragon Ash** , but, wasn’t the teen suicide rate in Japan incredibly high? I seem to recall hearing that suicide among teenagers was shockingly common. ---
**Author:** ![chique](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@chique](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chique)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/78 "2003-02-04T07:04:19Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Lissa \* > \*\*I’ve attended his classes. He’s a great teacher, funny, interesting and clear in his explanations. He’s willing to help any student who asks for it, but few take advantage of this offer. Instead, they skip class, refuse to read the text book, turn in papers late, fail tests miserably, and then become resentful and outraged when they do not pass the course. > > You can lead a horse to water, etc . . . . Some people just do not want to learn. Nothing is more difficult than trying to teach sulky people who just want to get a piece of paper, and are utterly uninterested in learning for learning’s sake. \*\* I think there’s a lot of truth in this. But that’s just not it. If someone can’t find freakin’ Florida on a map it’s not the fault of ‘the kid’ or ‘the school system’ or ‘the parents’ or ‘the schoolboard’ - they all fucked up. I was “lucky” - I grew up in a state which values education, and I grew up in a school district which takes itself seriously. MUCH more importantly, I grew up with an immediate family which valued reference books (almanacs, atlases, that big-ass library dictionary, encyclopedia) and an extended family which valued books and reading. I don’t know what year _Romancing the Stone_ was first aired on broadcast television (I can say it was between 1985 and 1989 because I was in high school when this event occurred), but I distictly remember sprawling on the living room rug surrounded by the World Book because no one in the house knew if Colombia actually had pine trees. I remember being praised by my sixth grade teacher because I knew the name of the bug that caused malaria. I didn’t know it because I was smart; I knew it because I had just READ A BOOK (or magazine or newspaper article or saw something on TV about malaria) and took the initiative to look it up by my own damn self. I was taught very little about Africa in school, and, while I’m not by any means an expert, I can tell you more about that continent than the average American (and reading some of the other posts here I can say I was lucky in another way: I had an 8th grade geography teacher who told us that his job description included something along the lines of “teach kids how to read a newspaper”. I’ve always thought that was neat. But I didn’t learn the location of Costa Rica through fanciful bedtime tales; I learned its location because of twice-a-week quizzes.). I can **read** and it **interests** me. Therefore I learn. There are people out there who wouldn’t know where Iowa was if it landed in their laps, but you have them on speed-dial just in case your oven craps out just as you’re cooking that big family Thanksgiving meal. You have them on speed-dial because that’s what they like and, therefore, that’s what they learn. I get really torqued off at people who blame “the school system” for poor education, because when you get right down to it “the system” has very little to do with how much kids learn, how much kids retain, or how poorly they spell. Your kid isn’t learning the nine planets? Get a fucking book and teach them. Your ninth grader doesn’t realize there is more than one nation on the continent of Africa? Pull out an atlas and show them. Stop blaming the school system because you’re too goddamn lazy to take some of the onus upon yourself. Your school has your kid for a finite period of time; you get 'em the rest. It’s up to **you** to teach your kid what you want him/her to know. * * * Oooh. This got a lot longer and a lot more bitter than I thought it would be. I know that some individual teachers/school systems have ISSues, but it’s YOUR job to raise a curious, inquisitive child. YOU are the parent. My aunt fought with her school district for two years to get her two very bright boys into specialized programs. If she can do it, so can you. You’re the one with one/two/three/six kids; that teacher has 15/20/57/189 kids. Where would you place **your** bet? ---
**Author:** ![Flutterby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Flutterby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Flutterby)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 12:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/79 "2003-02-04T12:32:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Manda JO \* > 3. Student apathy. A lot of them see no utility at all to an education–they are there only because the court tells them they have to be , plain and simple.(I sign a round of truency-monitor forms in every class). I spend mostof my time trying to convince them it’s not so, but to be brutally honest, it’s a losing battle by the time they are 16 years old. As a former apathetic student myself, I agree that this has a major part in how well students learn. A _lot_ of students are there because either A) their parents made them go or B) the courts did. I had both happen to me. My father was the one who made me go to school the most, and then after the divorce my mom got me going about half the time and the rest of the time I was sitting in front of the school board crying and saying I would go to school. This always lasted about a month after the meeting then I would slack off again. This lasted until I was almost 16 and they threw their hands in the air and said ‘We don’t care anymore. Do what you want.’ I was always a student who _wanted_ to learn but a lot of my problems with going to school came from problems at home and problems with the other students. I wasn’t the brainiac of the class but I was 2nd or 3rd in line for that. I got a _lot_ of shit from other students and the teachers did nothing. In desperation and pleading from me, my mother moved me to 4 different schools in the space of 2 years. In the same small town. I went to Catholic, Public, Home and a Private Christian school. What was the best? The private school. In this small town there was only 1 and it had less then 100 kids in grades K-12. I actually made friends, learned AND started going to school more often. Maybe not as often as I should’ve but way more then I was before. Even now as a student who _chooses_ to go to school to learn what I missed from dropping out of high school (we moved to the big city. I managed to adapt until mid grade-11 when I finally gave up with all the bullshit in my 3000 student high school) I look at the course work required and go WTF do I need this for?? Perms and Coms? Where will I ever use that? For the past 3 years I have learned that I like school, and that I _can_ go somewhere and not be ridiculed for wanting to learn or be held back because everyone else can’t get a lot of the required work. I’m _glad_ I found the school I’m at now. I was very lucky to get in as well (I registered last minute, 2 days before classes started). With Centre High the students there _want_ to be there. That makes a _huge_ difference in my education. Both because I am sitting there wanting to learn and paying attention and because the _other students_ are sitting there paying attention and not being disruptive. Oh we do get the ocassional person who is still like that, but in comparison to my past years of school… This is heaven. ---
**Author:** ![Dragon\_Ash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b3f665/32.png) [@Dragon\_Ash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dragon_Ash)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2003, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977/80 "2003-02-04T13:16:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Guinastasia \* > \*\ ***Dragon Ash** , but, wasn’t the teen suicide rate in Japan incredibly high? I seem to recall hearing that suicide among teenagers was shockingly common. \*\* People who committ suicide in Japan are, I believe, most likely to be middle-aged men. But I will try to track down the figures. Suicide doesn’t have quite the stigma attached to it as it does in the West, so I do believe suicide rates are indeed higher than in the US. Not necessarily ‘shockingly’ common, however - I lived there on and off for 15 years, and it certainly wasn’t on the news every day, or even every week. Certainly suicides were far more common at the peak of exam hell - those kids I really feel sorry for. By and large it was the parents (99.9% of the time, the mothers) pressuring the kids to pass the exams to the best schools - not so they could get a good education and be a success in life. No, they wanted the kid to go to a good company, make money so the rest of the family could live on easy street. And unfortunately I’m not kidding at all about this. Anyway - suicides are probably higher than in the US, but, conversely, the number of kids wrapping themselves and their cars around telephone poles after a night of drinking are probably quite lower… food for thought. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-going-on-in-our-schools/151977.md?page=5)