Page 2 - school is a waste of time

To self educate on all the topics school covers throughout 12 years is tough. Motivation wouldn't push you to wake up everyday and sit in front of books for 6 or 7 hours (at least). School forces the student to sit down for 45 min and learn from someone who already knows (making the education process faster), 7 or 8 times a day!

It isn't tough to self-teach on limited topics, but unless you have no life, it would nearly be impossible to reach the broad range that schools reach. To re-iterate what im trying to say..
If you want to self-teach yourself computers, then school isn't needed. If you want to teach yourself history, calculus, physics, american literature, biology, chemistry, trig, algebra, etc. etc. a school will actually save you time.

-andy

i am in the thick of the degredation of the american education system, i'm in my 11th grade year, 17 and livebin one of the worse states for education, Florida. they switched from teaching to national standards to state standards and things have gone nowhere but downhill, i've ridden the wave of the changeover and things are far from pretty. half the teachers are under or even unqualified for thir positions, the school systems budgets are in peril, etc.

As to school being a waste of time, i agree on some fronts, i have said for the past year that it's a waste of time and i should go on to higher education (at least colleges have bigger budgets and don't teach only to state test standards), but i'm STUCK here...

i run my own business and think it's a waste of time.

When you're in school, you most likely do think it is a waste of time, but later on you will be happy you didn't drop out!

If you think that school and your personal business are a waste of time I must ask..Do you think everything is a waste? If so, you are one who represents my earlier post/idea on 'one with no value' or someone who 'doesn't believe in value.' They're are plenty of people in the world that believe nothing matters and everything is a waste of time...as school, they're jobs, pretty much they're whole planed lives. These are the people who will have to make the decision to "follow the path, or make a new trail" (sorry bout that lame quote)

-andy

I feel that a great deal of my time in school was wasted. Most of my 12 years of public schooling were spent in a very rural area. As a result, the school had very little money. Things always fell apart, we frequently shared textbooks, and for the first 11 years of school, I didn't see a new textbook ONCE. Not ONCE. And not "didn't get one" - didn't SEE one. I had two classes that were conducted from trailers in a field. We frequently didn't have pencils, paper, or chalk. Library shelves were "sparsely populated" when all the books were in to put it in overly optimistic terms.

During this time the football and wrestling teams got brand new equipment every year (purchased - not donated or sponsored). They put in new goal posts, new bleachers, and re-sodded the football field. The Superintendent pulled down over 90K a year and the only thing I can remember him doing is picking his ****ing nose while he sat in on one of my 9th grade science classes.

Students were highly unmotivated and disruptive, and the classes were too large for individual teachers to control them. The cirriculum was strictly regulated by the state dept of ed and filtered down through a harshly conservative school board, then diluted by individual department boards for consumption by the lowest common denominator.

After I left, the state decided that funding would be based on performance on standardized testing. Last reports I heard of people who are still in the school(s) / sending kids there is that the teachers, out of fear for their meager paying jobs, are forced to teach tests so that schools recieve bigger checks.

There were a few bright spots. In 11th grade I first learned to write properly thanks to one Ms. O'Neilly, a 2nd year teacher who was run out of the school after that year for not teaching the cirriculum. There were about a half dozen other "good" teachers as well, but I didn't have the privilege of studying with them.

Public school in this country is a mess if you don't live in a pasty white suburban utopia. I can empathise with 1eyedhive's feelings because, looking back, I feel that my public school education did almost nothing to prepare me for college or the real world, and, as I understand it, it's still going downhill.

I could point some fingers, but I don't have enough fingers to point to get everybody who's responsible, and it would take another several hundred lines to do it.... so forget it. There's plenty of study available on the poor state of public education within the United States and plenty of people who try to offer solutions, so I suggest that you find a library and do some reading on the subject if you want to know more. That is, if you can find a library. The locale I hail from originally (thedude: Perry County) voted "against" libraries last year. That is, they voted NOT to support libraries in the area. Doesn't surprise me since I'm sure with their schools no one is graduating who can read anyway....

I am afraid i must take the side of the schools, school makes you learn lots of usefull things, ok, so there is the occasional topic of SPAM that will never ever EVER help you, most topics are important to your potential career. If you don't want to be rich then you are pretty dumb and you need an education to get rich.

I am sorry but if you took a subject that won't help you, that is your own bl00dy fault for taking it

I had a seriers of about 17 acedemic courses throughout highschool that I HAD TO PASS THEM if I wanted to graduate highschool. It wasn't my fault or really much my choice If I wanted that deploma.

Ummmm..... no. That's why it's called COMPULSORY education - you DON'T have a choice.


You mean like in 10th grade Biology when I had to learn about cow semen? Or maybe you're referring to my 9th, 10h, and 11th grade classes which all covered the same concepts, just in subtly different ways with problems of slightly varying degrees of difficulty? Or, maybe you mean the music class in which I was constantly berated for my lack of singing ability? No? OK, how about in 11th grade chem class. I learned all about... ummmm.... uh.... yea, what did Ilearn again? Maybe we could go on to some of my earlier classes where I learned how to use Microsoft Word 6.0? Yea, I'll have lots of uses for that.

Shall I continue?


So... all of these topics are important to my careerr as a programmer:

Chemistry
Biology
Literature *
Marketing
Business Management
Art
Music
Calculus *
Trigonometry *
Geometry *

* These are classes which serve a "general thinking skills" purpose but have no specific application to the career.

Black, you missed the point. The point isn't that school is inherently useless, the point is that school in it's current broken state is useless and people need to get their heads out of the sand and work on fixing it.

interesting exchange, but what is the primary objective?

Are you suggesting that these conversations should have some sort of focused purpose? A so-called "point" if you will? HERESY!



I think the original poster was just bitching about his/her school in general for whatever reason. For awhile it morphed into a discussion on the U.S. school system which is what I tried to bring it back to. Black seems to have tried to throw it into a general gripe about school all around.

At this point, I don't think you can expect much to come out of all this - but if you'd like to direct the topic to something specific, please feel free.

Im gonna redirect it..to why the hell ctb has four eyes? does your avatar represent you having glasses?

//LOL

You're one of those crazy English/Lit people who think that everything has some hidden symbolic meaning aintcha?

Maybe it symbolizes that I'm a hideously deformed MUTANT. Ever think of THAT???

(.. does anyone else think the "cool" smiley looks more like a bank robber than a cool guy with shades?)

hmmm?

is this thread still open..... ?

by the way, i think your ears are nice.....

can you do anything with them?

just curious

j