Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm newish and I don't want seem like I'm interrupting the cosmic flow, but I need discussion. Anyway to start things off I'm pissed of that America has become this vast pit of stupidity. Anyone else?

Eh, I try hard in school, but then again... I hardly ever study for anything and I still make good grades because... well, I guess I just suck like that... but when it gets to something I'll actually have to study for, I'll most likely be screwed...

But yes, there are a lot of people who don't take education seriously. Hell, I have a friend at another school who doesn't care, flunks pretty much every class, and just goes to school to socialize and because otherwise she'd get in trouble for truancy... but then again, I have some friends who don't do too well in stuff just because they don't get it... Like math and things like that. They try, they're just not that good at it.
*shrugs*

To be quite honest I don't think it's entirely the students to blame for this cause of bad education. No Child Left Behind's focus has totally ruined education for so many students and teachers. Schools, rather than teaching how one learns new things and how one applies the knowledge they've gained to change something one wants to change, now teach how to successfully pass a test. Classrooms are no longer places where students synthesize, think, and create new and novel ideas and things; they have become places where students mindlessly absorb information that has no relevance to them.

There is a place for information and basic skills; a few building blocks for foundation is necessary for students in order to continue growth. But students can't just be handed information and merely be tested on it, just to make sure the district gains money. There are higher levels of learning beyond basic skills and testing, and to be quite honest knowledge retention is the lowest level of learning:

1. Knowledge - What Students Know (Recall a fact)
   
2. Comprehension - What Students Understand (Say something in own words)
   
3. Application - How Students Use (Use previous information to do something)
   
4. Analysis - How Students Observe (Troubleshoot A Problem)
   
5. Synthesis - Build and Create New Ideas (Design something, create a book/manual to describe how to do something new)
   
6. Evaluation - How Students... Well... Appraise/Evaluate (Let Students Decide the Best Solution, Explain Why Something Is Better Than Other)
   

Too much of the first two are happening without letting the other levels, which are higher and more fulfilling, have their turn in education. Frankly, one never uses facts alone in the real world; students should be able to use the things they learned to create new methods of solving problems, and using their judgement to pick what is the correct course of action. That isn't being taught at all in so many classrooms in the United States. Not that other countries have that problem, but my educational/pedagogy experience hasn't gone in the International level (since I'm training to be a US Teacher).

I didn't mean it in a sense that they'd be so overwhelmed that they'd kill themself (if they were given just a little bit more work, and they killed themself over it, then I call them pathetic!) Only that any amount more work the students would be given--no matter how small or big--would cause an uproar from the parents, as I'm sure we've all seen, anything an American school does causes uproar from the parents.

The problem is:

Parents are pussies and won't hit their kids anymore.

People think they have the right to barge in on other people's lives and "fix" problems.

People don't care about anyone but themselves and will do anything to further themselves.

Do you want some more of my thoughts on where society ******** up?

Considering that, if we're staying in the United States for now (or, for that matter, any developed country), information is so available (Internet, Libraries, etc.), I really don't think that knowing information is a problem in education. Why in the world would we need to know so much information in school when much of the information we don't care about is forgotten, and the important information is important because it is relevant and used often?

I think it's a better plan to teach students how to use their skills and tools to find the information they need, teach them how to observe and analyze situations for problems, and have them learn about the world and how things work in all subjects of life by having them propose, create, and critique various ways of to make things better.

I know people don't agree with my viewpoint though, but I seriously think a system focused on teaching students to learn for themselves and how to apply the knowledge that they gained themselves is better than a system that forces students to mindlessly absorb knowledge that is so available.

Just because we don't do well on the tests doesn't mean we are horrible educators. I remeber reading about a south-east Asian nation sending people over to study how to give kids more critical thinking skills, but that is beside your point. Apathy is in the schools for one reason. School is for losers.

With the rise of the internet fame is but a click away in most people's minds, and I know that if I could become a famous millionaire without school I wouldn't go to school. People see that anyone can make it on the internet and that makes school less important in their minds. This crippled with the fact that popular culture in America hates the nerd. They make the "Gangsta" out to be really smart and the nerd to be a d**k who isn't even the smartest.

This has made the "formula for success"; One internet, one good idea, being popular. School isn't involved in that.

Of course I could go on for hours on how and why Americas "care less" about education, but that is a thesis paper that I don't plan to write.

It probably belongs there, now that people are starting to talk fairly in-depth about it Waku. :3



The perfomance on tests say nothing about the general intelligence of a person at all. In particular, standardized tests, in my opinion, have no real leverage on showing to anyone what a person can do. Anyone can retain knowledge and regurgitate it in another form; it takes a good education to actually teach a person on how to apply the knowledge they know to create new solutions for problems they see in their everyday lives - no matter how small. Knowing how to answer a test is not intelligence; when are you ever, in real life, going to ever take a standardized test?



Rare as this occasion is, I agree with Saverio here. Schools in the United States are no longer relevant to the students that they are charged with educating. Again, what relevance is there with knowing how to answer a test when, in the real life, they'd never be asked to regurgitate information in such a dumb and menial level?



While I think Saverio's opinion on how the general student populace is pretty subjective, he does have the point that the Internet and technology and the wealth of information is so much more relevant to student's minds, and schools are doing nothing to show and teach students how to use this new technology - whether it be for recreation, fame, or for their own intellectual interests (because students have interests; they're not stupid). The Internet and the other sources of information (Libraries anyone?) is a valuable resource and catalyst for new ideas and new messages that students would die to learn to use, but, again, schools are doing nothing. What are kids actually learning when they memorize mindless information? Letting them apply the information for themselves (using the English skills they've learned to send their voice, etc.) helps the students learn more, and application of concepts to create new ideas is a higher level of learning that schools should be acknowledging.

The Internet is a medium for success because of its wealth of information and possibilities. But schools do nothing about this new technology and are stuck teaching in a method that is no longer relevant to the 21st-century student.