Yeah, hey, this is a good topic... I realize I may freak everyone out by posting, but schools here in the US aren't any better. Almost surely worse, actually. I'm at college here and while there's a little more leniency than in high school, I've got better books on chaos and philosophy to read than do any dumb tree method logic crap. Someone should also teach me about run-ons. Here are some good essays by an American schoolteacher. He's annoyed at the current systems here, which I think have a lot in common with your stuff over there.
John Taylor Gatto essays There'll be a little popup as you go to that site... it's sort of interesting, too. Anyway, props to Tim for reading philosophy. You'll be more interesting in the end, and I promise someday that you'll get that Wynton story I promised long ago. So what are your thoughts on education?

-- laura (laura@nesson.com), October 18, 2000

Answers

A few days ago, a friend of mine was telling me how awful schools in Florida are. When he lived in Arizona, he was getting C's and D's. When he went to a Florida public school, he got A's and B's. Now he's in an independent school taking Honors classes and getting B's and C's. Another friend who went to school in Pennsylvania said that her school was one of the best in the nation (and it shows). She's got high A's in all of her Honors classes. I'm not asking schools to be harder. I just wish that the education system was more education than work, if that makes any sense at all.

-- Krys (krysten@geek.com), October 18, 2000.

Yeah, most of the schools in california have pretty crappy scores on all the standardized tests, really crappy teachers, really crappy grades, but I go to one of the top rated public schools in the whole state, and I am loving it! We have some of the best teachers, but we also have a majority of teachers who could use some tips on how to teach. I don't know, some teachers just CAN'T TEACH!

But I think that the reason why we have such crappy test scores is because we have so many people, particularly latinos, who just don't care about their future or their grades. I don't mean to offend anyone, but it brings the rest of the school down when there are so many people like that who just don't care.

And then there's the top five percent, which are usually asian, but that's because their parents make them do all their homeowrk, and make them get all a's, because if they didn't, then they wouldn't be accepted in the family, or something like that.

Anyway...I was going to say something else, but I forgot what it was... :o)

-- Jessica (essicaj@pacbell.net), October 19, 2000.

I'm an Asian and my parents would hardly disown me if I didn't pull the grades I do. The reason I have a 3.6 GPA is because I want it, not because my parents demand it. So...uh...no generalizations please. :)

-- Rasee (lilwitch@poetic.com), October 19, 2000.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to.

-- Jessica (essicaj@pacbell.net), October 20, 2000.

Funnily enough both the smartest and one of the least smart person in my class are Asian. The only other Asian in the class is, like me, chronically average.

-- Tim (tim@almighty.co.uk), October 21, 2000.

I was going to be an education double major at college, but I quit when I started hearing about how awful most education schools are. The don't teach you how to teach. They just teach you fluff. And some of it may be interesting fluff, but it's still fluff. At almost every education school in the country, you have to take Foundations of Education and Education Psychology, both of which teach you things like the history of public schools, major figures in public education, etc. And that's NICE and all, but you're not learning anything about teaching, really, and you're not learning anything about the subject you're going to teach. I'm an English major, and one of my friends is an English Education major, and she only has to take FOUR upper-level English classes, whereas I have to take many, many more than that. She *could*, technically, take four classes on Modern American Lit and *never* study Shakespeare or Chaucer or Romantic poetry or anything like that. Pretty lousy, huh? They cold throw her into a 9th grade class in a few years and tell her to teach a Shakespeare play that she would have NEVER read!

Yeah, I get pretty riled up about this. But I wish education schools would lay off the fluff and really TEACH people about the subjects they're going to teach OTHER people. I think that's so much of the reason why many schools are really going downhill in America. There's a huge teacher shortage, and many of the people who are going to fill those holes aren't going to be the most motivated and smart people ever (i.e. my friend, who is going into teaching because she thought journalism school was too hard).

-- Laurie (Laurie317@prodigy.net), October 21, 2000.

Tommy Boyd was talking about all this on his talk show over the weekend. He was saying about how the school system is a surviver of one of the World Wars (I forget...) when the military told the government that to win the war they needed new recruits who were half trained already. What was meant by that was the hierarchial system in schools, which is, if you notice, rather similar to that of the army. Scary...

-- Tim (tim@almighty.co.uk), October 23, 2000.

Well, this is interesting cause I'm from New Zealand, and our education system is really crap. We used to have exams, but they're bringing in these new things called unit standards, which some schools have already. You don't get marks, you don't get grades, you just get a pass/fail in different modules. I had a friend who did 6th form drama, and he now has 1 unit standard in being santa claus and 3 in being different types of clown.

-- vanessa (ness_nz@hotmail.com), November 03, 2000.

this sucks

-- John smith (iwantyou@heartbreaker.com), May 02, 2001.

DONT ASK ME IM JUST AN AMARICAN !!

-- sfsdfsdsfsd (etgrdgd@aol.com), April 13, 2003.