Hell, 56% is 6% too much work.
Edukashun
#16
Posted 20 February 2005 - 09:50 PM
Hell, 56% is 6% too much work.
JM's official press secretary, scientific advisor, diplomat and apparent antagonist?
#17
Posted 21 February 2005 - 09:49 AM
I just wish that schools would do more to encourage independent thought and creativity. Some individual teachers do, but the school system as a whole does not.
Remember Emu's face, people; one day it's going to be on the news alongside a headline about blowing some landmark to smithereens, and then we can all sigh and say, "She was such a normal person".....
....We'd be lying though.
-Laughlyn
If my doctor tells me to exercise, I am going to force him to do my homework.
-Mirithorn
- Do Not Use the Elevators - deviantART - Infinite Monkeys -
#18
Posted 21 February 2005 - 12:32 PM
#19
Posted 22 February 2005 - 02:39 AM
And school/university provide the escape route from said dull job. School isn't aiming you towards a 9-5 job for precisely the reasons elaborated on earlier -- when do you need GCSE history at work exactly, etc. Those school subjects are aiming you towards academia. And given the choice between wasting my life working and expanding the bounds of human knowledge with a univeristy's research team, I know what I'd be doing.
#20
Posted 22 February 2005 - 10:46 PM
My experience of education has been this: primary school was fun and by year 6 I'd learnt probably some of the most important things I know today. Then secondary school.
For me this started as a couple of years of pointlessness as we were re-taught the last 2 year's worth of stuff, as clearly the primary school curriculum wasn't well enough defined that all the separate schools could teach up to the same level, and they had to acommodate the lowest common denominator. What little I learned in the remaining years at highschool was vasty outweighed by what I was denied thanks to the culture that builds up in highschools of rejecting everything that is attempted to be taught to you - if you don't do the work you get 18 different varieties of faeces kicked from you! I blame this on the way schools punish rather than reward. At secondary school the only motivation for going against the flow and trying hard was some vague promise of a better job at the end of it all. Hardly inspiring. Education at this level shouldn't be forced on people. Children of 11 upwards are capable of making that decision for themselves - surely.
Scraping enough GCSEs to go to college, things are suddenly a bit different - most of the people at 6th form actually want to be there and the general attitude is that it's ok to learn - there are no beatings involved. The stuff I learnt at college was quite interesting, I guess, but I felt there was a massive amount of pressure to go on to university after it. Right from the start of the second year at college we had to start making applications to universities - pretty much whether we wanted to or not.
And then uni. Yes its relaxed, in the first year at least. But you soon realise that the whole of higher education - and everything that preceeds it - isn't an open-ended pick-and-choose learning experience where you can bounce from subject to subject as you please, absorbing whatever you find intellectually stimulating at the time. It isnt a source of answers to the questions you have in life. It isnt a place where you can explore your true potential in whatever creative activity you like and better yourself or find who you are and what you are truely gifted at. Instead it's all a huge factory for which the raw materials are humans and the product it manufactures is worker drones. The whole system is to mold you into a neat little cog to fit snuggly into the giant corporate machine. The only thing you're taught is to obey, and that success in life is a piece of paper with an 'A' on it. And also that to suceed you must force yourself to commit things to memory for short periods of time without ever appreciating exactly what it is you're reciting parrot fashion onto that exam paper.
I suppose the worst part is they're also the best days of our lives.
#22
Posted 24 February 2005 - 05:28 PM
Well, I hope you're ready for this, because you will work for your whole life until you retire. Thats how you make money to survive. And it sucks. As for "expandind the bounds", who cares? All that kind of thinking has done has made us what we are now, a culture that destroys our own planet, because we have no other choice. We are trapped by the culture we have built ourselves.
This post has been edited by floppydisk: 24 February 2005 - 05:29 PM
#23
Posted 24 February 2005 - 06:07 PM
No, no, and thrice no. Children of 11 think they know exactly what they want from life. Problem is, they're 11, and know sweet FA in the grand scheme of things. Allow kids to leave school at 11 and well over 50% will do so, and end up screwed.
Not within the bounds of whatever course you've taken, I'm sure. But you're surrounded by the leading lights in the arts and sciences -- not to mention peerless research facilities. Don't tell me you couldn't find this stuff out if you wanted to.
Schools teach you to obey because it's a means to keeping the place from getting torn to pieces. At university, everything is voluntary. Where exactly are you being told to obey? What's more, the top end of higher education revolves entirely around research -- which means parrot-fashion repetition will get you nowhere. You need to be free-thinking in the truest sense -- surely the very opposite of your archetypal worker drone?
It's not like you're given no choice about this molding process you describe in any case. Yes it's easy to fall into the role of a cog in the machine, but it's not like all jobs are meaningless drudgery. If you're doing what you love, for a decent salary, and this also happens to help the machine, is that so bad? That's what university can help you achieve.
#24
Posted 24 February 2005 - 06:09 PM
1. What do you want to do with your life?
2. What's stopping you?
3. Don't know the answer to one or both? That's probably what pisses you off -- I know it does me! Don't stop til you find out!
#26
Posted 24 February 2005 - 07:18 PM
1. What do you want to do with your life?
2. What's stopping you?
3. Don't know the answer to one or both? That's probably what pisses you off -- I know it does me! Don't stop til you find out!
Answers:
1. Have 300 bajillion dollars so I can buy the moon.
2. Not having money.
3. Stop being optimistic. I hate it when people break out in an off-tune rendition of "The sun will come out....... toooooomorrooooooooow!"
#27
Posted 21 March 2005 - 01:57 PM
I must say that I am not really happy with the way my schooling has been run so far though, here goes a list of what school has yet thought me in my eight years of it:
1. Algebra
2. English until the level after counting to 100 and naming the animals of the farm poster
3. Some french (although this is debatable, much of what I know is from what I did the summer I skipped a grade by doing the first year of it (the french) during the holidays)
4. A pathetic amount of wannabe, postmodern phrases to please all kinds of PC government officials (inclduing the classic, "You KNOW that I am right, it takes two for a quarrel, even if it has been the same five, hip guys against the one guy without friends, labeled "potential victim for a suicide" for the last four years")
What of this could be of any use? Probably most of it depending on the career I choose, although I doubt I will become someone with a need for the last. Thing is that you could probably narrow these things down to a one day week for 1-2 years plus homework, christ, what was really the irony with the Awsomedome?
This post has been edited by Obbah: 21 March 2005 - 02:02 PM
#28
Posted 22 March 2005 - 08:55 AM
JM's official press secretary, scientific advisor, diplomat and apparent antagonist?
#30
Posted 24 March 2005 - 06:31 PM