I don’t recall him ever kvetching about it. And someone who stays in school long enough to get a PhD probably doesn’t hate it. I didn’t.
Damn. I hoped things would be better by now. I especially would not have expected a guidance counsellor to act like that: it’s incredibly unprofessional. as well as a weird bias (isn’t going on to study engineering a good thing?)
Also got a Ph.D. I loved 11th grade and after that, and liked 9th grade and 10th grade well enough.
Before high school, I liked 3rd grade and the part of 5th grade where I had an awesome teacher (in fact the same awesome teacher). The rest of it wasn’t much fun and one of the things I’m really grateful to my parents for was to let me skip 8th grade so that I had one less year of the awful parts of school.
One of the things I’m grateful for is that my parents did not let me skip 8th grade. In New York junior highs there was a 2 year and a 3 year SP (special progress) program, where the two year one let you skip 8th grade. My mother said no, possibly out of a not misplaced concern for my maturity.
If I had taken it, I probably would have gotten drafted when I left college. As it was, Tricky Dick stopped the draft just in time for me.
From the seventies until 1985, the state of Georgia funded driver’s ed in its high schools. Then they quit. The licensing requirements for 16 year olds was to hold a learner’s permit for a while and then pass a written test and a driving test at the local state patrol office. After ‘85, the death rate for teen drivers in Georgia climbed regularly. The legislature responded by instituting a graduated license scheme and when that didn’t help a law requiring private driver’s ed. Link: Teen Drivers | Georgia Department of Driver Services
Georgia is awash in tax money right now. If the legislature cared to save lives, it would put driver’s ed back in the schools and make it a graduation requirement, with obvious exceptions excluded (blindness, etc.)
Romeo & Juliet really aren’t good role models anyway. Let’s teach a real life skill.
You would assume that, but weirdly, as a current PhD student, almost every student I know will cheerfully admit they absolutely hated school. I certainly did.
My PhD is my project though, I’m the one ultimately calling the shots, plus I get paid for it… Very different from the tedious curriculum of school.
It’s just possible. Apparently he said that children “appreciated the irony.” I honestly don’t recall, from my long-ago reading, whether we were supposed to think, “Yeah, she’s right, it is more fun to be in school with your friends,” or, “Wow, that girl is so wrong, going to school is definitely not fun.”
But then, I don’t know much about this obscure Asimov fellow or his general attitudes. Did he ever write anything else that I might have heard of? 
You think it’s weird that many people are biased against girls in STEM? Except for Biology/Pre-med/Healthcare, there are very few girls in STEM even now. My daughter’s department is 85% male and the 15% female is almost entirely Asian. She has been in classes of 100 or 150 with just a couple of white females.
Her high school was 97% white with a very high average family income. Totally an environment where girls are expected to go to Wellesley/Swarthmore not MIT/CMU.
Even at her university parents day presentation the dean referred to our children as “He/Him” and “your sons” and he was probably under 45.
My sister went through this almost 40 years ago. It’s better now, but not much better. And my sister is probably worse than most in thinking girls do not belong in STEM!
My memory of school was that they were very focused on targets. Two girls in my class decided not to go to university, and the school was not happy and tried to persuade them to do so. They want to be able to tell parents that “95% of our students went on the university”, or some similarly high percentage. I assumed that having students go on to MIT/CMU is something that looks good in the school’s statistics, whatever their sex or race.
And while I’m not particularly surprised to hear the robotics coach was biased, I do think it’s odd for a school guidance counsellor to be biased against girls in STEM.
I didn’t go to an affluent school like your daughter, but no one discouraged me from applying to study physics, and that was a quarter century ago. The physics department at university had a similar sex ratio, though I think the percentage of women has risen slightly since.
They’re not? It’s been part of the curriculum of every health class I’ve ever heard of.
It’s almost as if your experience is not universal!
You should have a poster of non-Nobel Laureate Jocelyn Bell posted in that school’s main office.
I think that the bias against Bell was more that she was a grad student, rather than that she was a woman. There have been a number of cases where grad students were slighted for a Nobel.
Though there are also plenty of women who have been slighted in plenty of ways, in STEM and otherwise.
You don’t say. 
Maybe I was mis-understanding. I am sure there is non-smoking education in school (and I probably received some), but in the context of the question of the OP, the claim that anti-smoking campaigns are the “main reason” smoking is less prevalent today implied that it was work in the schools that was the main driver for reduction in smoking. I don’t think that’s true. For whatever degree that anti-smoking campaigns have been successful, that success involved massive marketing from anti-smoking orgs, lobbying for legislation, actual legislation, etc etc. What is taught in the classroom has a part, but only a small one, in societal changes in smoking patterns.
(and, Velocity seems to have edited this point out of their post after I quoted it, so, beyond explaining what I meant, it’s probably a bit of a hijack to get into it more here)
I took Drivers’ Ed when I was 14, in central Texas, when 14 was the minimum age for a driver’s license, providing one had taken Drivers’ Ed. Otherwise, the minimum age was 16. Because I went to a rural school until 10th grade (when I transferred to a city school), I had to take a year of Vocational Agriculture - girls had to take a year (or more) of Home Ec, which I would have preferred to take, but that was not allowed.
I think both classes should have been replaced with Personal Finance, which I took at university when getting an Interior Design degree.
At the city high school that I attended, students could take college prep classes or vocational training classes in order to graduate. I did take a drafting class, which was part of vocational training, but would count toward graduation either way.
I think literature classes are good for helping students understand psychology and interpersonal relationships, if they are taught correctly. I took a Russian literature class at university and had to read a lot of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (plus Gogol, et al.), and I learned that Freud had used Dostoevsky’s characters in developing psychological theories. Freud said that all personality types could be found in Dostoevsky’s writings because his characters were so fully developed.
Sign of the times (sadly):
And a more positive (or would some RWNJ call it “political’?) extra (and externally provided) scheme:
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/schools-and-young-people/travel-for-life
And for the record, I think basic financial literacy should be taught in schools. I taught it as integrated in my Financial Algebra class. My issues are:
The people who seem to complain the loudest about it not being taught are not talking about financial literacy, they are really complaining about schools not teaching them to not be a dipship. When you roll over $30,000 of negative equity into a $90,000 truck because you won’t setle for less despite having to use Klarna to finance your groceries, no that is not a financial literacy issue, or a scam or that you were forced to buy it. It’s you being an idiot and guarantied had you had an financial literacy class, you would have still done the same thing.
The assumption that teachers know financial literacy. They are like the general public in that some do many don’t. So are you the taxpayer going to pay for districts to buy curriculum? Hire CFPs as teachers? Pay teachers to learn basic finances through classes? And what classes do you drop to make room?
Lastly, is this a movement that schools should teach real-life and not academics? Once personal finance is in the curriculum (like it now is in Colorado) are we going to hear demands for mandatory classes in basic car maintenance? Small repairs around the house?
Can autodidacticism be taught?
You’re on your own there:)
But seriously, isn’t that what teaching in most subjects should be sparking off, i.e., encouraging self-starting in wider learning, and how to evaluate sources?