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donttread
12-04-2014, 08:39 PM
How quickly could our high school ciriculum be taught if the real focus was upon education?

Just teach the subject material and be available to help when needed.
Sports, music and art all available, but more intra than inter focused. It seems tome HS could be covered in 3 year saving a year for either college prep or trade school
I think we keep it at four years because we don't know what else to do with them

Captain Obvious
12-04-2014, 08:41 PM
Our educational system isn't about educating, it's about PC and fairness.

This is why the Chinese, Pakistans, Indians, etc. are eating our lunch.

Peter1469
12-04-2014, 08:42 PM
Our educational system isn't about educating, it's about PC and fairness.

This is why the Chinese, Pakistans, Indians, etc. are eating our lunch.

It is about creating the perfect manufacturing line worker. It is from the 50s.

Captain Obvious
12-04-2014, 08:52 PM
It is about creating the perfect manufacturing line worker. It is from the 50s.

I have to disagree with you Peter.

High school, definitely not. They've pared the fundamentals down in order to meet "standards" so school systems don't look bad.

College is another animal. College education is designed to sell. It's mostly diploma mills now focused on selling the education product. To a degree I agree with you that our education system is designed to put people in jobs for the most part but where it fails is that more of the focus is on selling the product than the actual product.

Peter1469
12-04-2014, 08:57 PM
I am talking about high school. A large percentage of high school students need remedial math and English when they get to college. Why? Because you don't need math and English on the manufacturing line. You should not be well educated because you will be dissatisfied with your lot in life. Good citizens. Compliant citizens. That is the goal.



I have to disagree with you Peter.

High school, definitely not. They've pared the fundamentals down in order to meet "standards" so school systems don't look bad.

College is another animal. College education is designed to sell. It's mostly diploma mills now focused on selling the education product. To a degree I agree with you that our education system is designed to put people in jobs for the most part but where it fails is that more of the focus is on selling the product than the actual product.

Mister D
12-04-2014, 09:04 PM
Education is conceived of entirely in economic terms. It should surprise no one that a) it's more or less job training and b) it's designed to sell.

Dark Mistress
12-05-2014, 12:00 AM
Also consider this. How much of a teacher's time is spent trying to get kids to focus or pay attention? Most kids don't give a crap about school and ruin it for their peers who are there to learn. A lot of time in school is wasted dealing with the students themselves.

Dr. Who
12-05-2014, 12:29 AM
Also consider this. How much of a teacher's time is spent trying to get kids to focus or pay attention? Most kids don't give a crap about school and ruin it for their peers who are there to learn. A lot of time in school is wasted dealing with the students themselves.
I think that's true. My BIL just retired from teaching, he's only 57, but he couldn't stand it anymore. The proportion of undisciplined trouble makers in every cohort was increasing, requiring him to spend more and more time dealing with nonsense rather than teaching. There were also other factors related to the administration, but ultimately it wasn't enjoyable anymore.

PolWatch
12-05-2014, 12:40 AM
I know I could never teach. I don't have what it takes. My son needed help years ago and I really tried...ended up hiring a tutor! Both my son & I appreciated it!

Mac-7
12-05-2014, 08:59 AM
I have to disagree with you Peter.

High school, definitely not. They've pared the fundamentals down in order to meet "standards" so school systems don't look bad.

College is another animal. College education is designed to sell. It's mostly diploma mills now focused on selling the education product. To a degree I agree with you that our education system is designed to put people in jobs for the most part but where it fails is that more of the focus is on selling the product than the actual product.

Public education is designed to turn children into liberal zombie adults.

Adelaide
12-05-2014, 11:16 AM
How quickly could our high school ciriculum be taught if the real focus was upon education?

Just teach the subject material and be available to help when needed.
Sports, music and art all available, but more intra than inter focused. It seems tome HS could be covered in 3 year saving a year for either college prep or trade school
I think we keep it at four years because we don't know what else to do with them

Things need to be staggered and learned over a longer period of time to be useful. If you tried to teach all of high school math back to back and reduced the amount of time given to actually process and learn then people will be screwed come university. The last mathematics course I took before university was when I was 16 and when I had to take life science calculus (the hardest, aside from the calc courses the engineering students had to take) I was so, so very out of my depth. I couldn't remember what I had learned in high school. It was basically like starting over.

CaveDog
12-07-2014, 05:59 PM
As early as the late 19th century the focus started shifting away from core competence and critical thinking. Utopian thinkers saw public education as a tool for social engineering. Industry saw it as a tool to mold an efficient work force. Both have influenced the system over the past 150 years to the point that it fails miserably in the simple task of producing competent citizens.

southwest88
12-07-2014, 06:13 PM
Public education is designed to turn children into liberal zombie adults.

(My bold)

One or the other, please. Pick one. If you don't like public education, please tell us why not.

The charge as it stands is ludicrous - I don't think most US citizens - of whatever political persuasion - have ever been to Haiti - poor beleaguered country. & of course public education is meant to produce adults - what other outcome would you prefer?

Mac-7
12-07-2014, 06:26 PM
(My bold)

One or the other, please. Pick one. If you don't like public education, please tell us why not.



The goal is definitely liberal zombies.

Meaning you fill every minute with liberal dogma that the kids can absorb without ever having to choose.

southwest88
12-07-2014, 07:05 PM
The goal is definitely liberal zombies.

Meaning you fill every minute with liberal dogma that the kids can absorb without ever having to choose.

(My bold)

Nah, see, that isn't possible. A liberal is a person with a political orientation towards the Left.

A zombie is a mythical creature, magically raised from the dead. As such, a zombie is @ least a quasi-religious figure (attributed to voodoo, but voodoo - AFAICT - denies having any formal connection with the notion of zombies).

& so it comes down to a contradiction in terms - a liberal isn't considered to have any belief in quasi-religious figures - & certainly wouldn't go so far abroad as to take in African nativist cult figures.

So it's no sale. (The same goes for liberal dogma, by the way. Dogma used to refer to authoritatively true beliefs, & was limited to strictly theological issues. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma for history & details. Can a liberal have dogmas? Not in the theological sense - or @ least, not without causing a lot of unnecessary cognitive dissonance. It would be more fitting to say that a liberal has beliefs - better to use unloaded language, I think. Belaboring a liberal with language that is mostly relegated to R. Catholic theology - in my experience, @ least - is truly counterproductive.)

& could you really fill every moment of schooling with teachable content? Now that is amazing, in & of itself.

PolWatch
12-07-2014, 07:10 PM
(My bold)

Nah, see, that isn't possible. A liberal is a person with a political orientation towards the Left.

A zombie is a mythical creature, magically raised from the dead. As such, a zombie is @ least a quasi-religious figure (attributed to voodoo, but voodoo - AFAICT - denies having any formal connection with the notion of zombies).

& so it comes down to a contradiction in terms - a liberal isn't considered to have any belief in quasi-religious figures - & certainly wouldn't go so far abroad as to take in African nativist cult figures.

So it's no sale. (The same goes for liberal dogma, by the way. Dogma used to refer to authoritatively true beliefs, & was limited to strictly theological issues. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma for history & details. Can a liberal have dogmas? Not in the theological sense - or @ least, not without causing a lot of unnecessary cognitive dissonance. It would be more fitting to say that a liberal has beliefs - better to use unloaded language, I think. Belaboring a liberal with language that is mostly relegated to R. Catholic theology - in my experience, @ least - is truly counterproductive.)

& could you really fill every moment of schooling with teachable content? Now that is amazing, in & of itself.

Wow! a perfect example of if ya can't dazzle with brilliance, then baffle with bs!

Mac-7
12-07-2014, 07:42 PM
(My bold)

Nah, see, that isn't possible. A liberal is a person with a political orientation towards the Left.

A zombie is a mythical creature, magically raised from the dead. As such, a zombie is @ least a quasi-religious figure (attributed to voodoo, but voodoo - AFAICT - denies having any formal connection with the notion of zombies).

& so it comes down to a contradiction in terms - a liberal isn't considered to have any belief in quasi-religious figures - & certainly wouldn't go so far abroad as to take in African nativist cult figures.

So it's no sale. (The same goes for liberal dogma, by the way. Dogma used to refer to authoritatively true beliefs, & was limited to strictly theological issues. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogma for history & details. Can a liberal have dogmas? Not in the theological sense - or @ least, not without causing a lot of unnecessary cognitive dissonance. It would be more fitting to say that a liberal has beliefs - better to use unloaded language, I think. Belaboring a liberal with language that is mostly relegated to R. Catholic theology - in my experience, @ least - is truly counterproductive.)

& could you really fill every moment of schooling with teachable content? Now that is amazing, in & of itself.

You have given a very prim and proper non answer to my opinion that the lib public teachers are brainwashing defenseless children with liberal bullshit.

So I suppose you are not totally useless.

southwest88
12-07-2014, 08:08 PM
You have given a very prim and proper non answer to my opinion that the lib public teachers are brainwashing defenseless children with liberal bull$#@!.

So I suppose you are not totally useless.

(My bold)

Well, lib public teachers certainly underscores your opinion of public education. So is the problem that it's public education, or that it's liberal teachers who are in charge? If public education was OK up to a point, When did it change?

brainwashing defenseless children is another phrase that simply tell us how you feel about the subject. Is it brainwashing? Is it inculcation of values? The pursuit of education is going to foster reading, writing, math, history - all of which have their dangers for the unformed mind, I suppose. Public education is understood to be mostly instrumental - it's a background of skills & knowledge with which to make your way in the World.

That's why public education in the US is locally controlled (usually @ the state level), by local public school districts, with local boards of education. Which may be appointed or elected, although the trend is towards elected boards. If you want to have input, you can attend Parent Teacher conferences, run for school board, offer to review textbooks or curriculum for areas in your expertise, there are a lot of ways to participate. It mostly depends on how deeply you want to get involved.

As for the last, well - I live to serve.

Mac-7
12-07-2014, 08:43 PM
(My bold)

Well, lib public teachers certainly underscores your opinion of public education. So is the problem that it's public education, or that it's liberal teachers who are in charge? If public education was OK up to a point, When did it change?

brainwashing defenseless children is another phrase that simply tell us how you feel about the subject. Is it brainwashing? Is it inculcation of values? The pursuit of education is going to foster reading, writing, math, history - all of which have their dangers for the unformed mind, I suppose. Public education is understood to be mostly instrumental - it's a background of skills & knowledge with which to make your way in the World.

That's why public education in the US is locally controlled (usually @ the state level), by local public school districts, with local boards of education. Which may be appointed or elected, although the trend is towards elected boards. If you want to have input, you can attend Parent Teacher conferences, run for school board, offer to review textbooks or curriculum for areas in your expertise, there are a lot of ways to participate. It mostly depends on how deeply you want to get involved.

As for the last, well - I live to serve.

Education is more or less locally controlled.

But there is not much variety in the liberal clones being churned out of the teacher mills.

lynn
12-08-2014, 07:35 AM
When schools allowed kids to use calculators to solve math problems, these kids are not learning to do math anymore.

southwest88
12-08-2014, 11:33 AM
Education is more or less locally controlled.

But there is not much variety in the liberal clones being churned out of the teacher mills.

(My bold)

TMK, we're not producing clones @ all anywhere - except maybe in TV sitcoms - the plotting & stock characters. Those do seem to come mainly from cookie cutters. Probably why I don't watch the vast wasteland much anymore - you should see the stack of books waiting for my attention.

Anyway, Why would clones be liberal? Yah, the state of the art (cloning) has come a long way - we can manage sheep, cattle, & I suppose we're working our way up the chordates. But liberal is a political/ideological distinction - I don't know that the art has advanced to where we can predetermine political leanings.

& besides, cloning is a highly technical art - it's probably shading into science by now, but I doubt that you can pick up a cookbook on how to clone a liberal. & if it's a complicated, rigorous, etc. set of scientific protocols, I expect you would claim that liberals aren't capable of executing.

Unless, perhaps, you meant figurative clones? Not nearly as sexy, I grant you. Still, words have meanings.

& teacher mills - Really. I get it; you don't like teachers (liberals ones, @ least). You don't like the Educational Departments @ colleges where the (liberal) teachers come from. How much of the Liberal Arts curriculum are you willing to jettison altogether? All of it? Some of it? Just the bits post-WWI?

& mills, yet. As if human beings were just chunks of raw material, suitable for folding, stapling, mutilating - until we hit the ideal Form (Plato - & safely in the long-dead colonnaded past). Yah, education is mostly instrumental - but most of us draw the line @ regarding individuals as mere cogs in the machine of society.

Mac-7
12-08-2014, 01:30 PM
& besides, cloning is a highly technical art - it's probably shading into science by now, but I doubt that you can pick up a cookbook on how to clone a liberal. & if it's a complicated, rigorous, etc. set of scientific protocols, I expect you would claim that liberals aren't capable of executing.



Libs seem to have mastered the technique.

Maybe because they know how to get grant money which frees them from needing real jobs.

BlackKettle
12-09-2014, 12:30 AM
When schools allowed kids to use calculators to solve math problems, these kids are not learning to do math anymore.

I'm just not sure I completely buy this....I get what you are saying about kids not learning the skill the way we did. But, when I think about other things kids will surely do differently such as hand-writing or just online courses, I think about math the same way. With computers becoming integrated into the minute-by-minute life of everyone under 30, maybe learning to do math changes. We don't need to write that much anymore, we don't really need to leave our houses to educate, and we don't need to know how to work out math answers when we can press a button on a phone and speak a question to google and get an answer. Sure, what if they don't have access to a phone, computer, calculator, etc. I rather think we prepare for the normal and prepare how to deal with the abnormal.

Dark Mistress
12-09-2014, 12:45 AM
When schools allowed kids to use calculators to solve math problems, these kids are not learning to do math anymore.

Ever try doing Calculus without a calculator????

PolWatch
12-09-2014, 01:57 AM
every try it with a slide rule?

Dark Mistress
12-09-2014, 02:05 AM
every try it with a slide rule?
Would believe its been ten years since I took it? Class reunion this summer. I could care less to go...
PolWatch I am having a bad night post or message me something funny :D

ace's n 8's
12-09-2014, 04:47 AM
When schools allowed kids to use calculators to solve math problems, these kids are not learning to do math anymore.I agree 100% with you.

Watch a kid, that is running a cash register, they are unable to give you back your change, until they LOOK at the register, and the register tells them how much they need to give you back.