Your opinions on American Education System?

Public education is not up to par, but university is still fantastic. Still, I get the feeling that a lot of college kids do not realize that this is where new ideas and discoveries are made. Universities are the forefront of innovation and many fail to use this time to the fullest potential.

 

College is really expensive, and exploitive in my opinion.
The USA definitely doesn't have the best education system.

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOfRkdVlLZA]YouTube - How Public Education Controls Your Perception - Mind Control (David Icke)[/ame]

 

perfect.

 

It's based too heavily on grades rather than what you actually learn.

 

thats the whole hundun rite there man.

dunno about in other states but in dirty FLA they have this thing called the FCAT. The whole school year revolves around learning the material for those tests. If its not on the test, you dont learn it.

Thats why america is leaps and bounds behind britain, china, and japan in education, because americas public education system is FUBARed.

 

Well for one thing we separate out for lack of a better term 'smart' and 'dumb' kids in school, the ones that do very well in school and the ones that struggle to succeed. In Europe they keep the 'smarter' kids together to help teach the kids that could use the extra help. Another problem is before tenure teachers had no job security and could get fired at the drop of a hat, so kids could get away with a lot and teachers were afraid to really teach, not the pendulum has swung so far the other way , it's almost impossible to fire bad teachers who don't care about teaching.

So in my view the public education needs an overhaul in a big way

 

Can't speak for college, but K-12 is a joke. 90% of the teachers I had admitted they were just trying to push us on to the next grade. No one gives a fuck about teaching for the sake of learning, and they sure as hell don't want to make sure that what they teach is actually learned. They just wanna push the kids on so they can make it through the next group. It's just a formality these days. Kids go to school to "learn" the things the tv can't teach them and to keep them off the streets for 7 hours a day. And in my experience, the teachers that DO give a shit, and try to actually teach kids something worthwhile are the ones who end up fired.

 

It sucks.

 

It's terrible, although a lot better than many other countries as well.

 

Well first of all, it's unequal. The varience in quality seems to be all over the place. In the better schools, I think you can get out of it what you put into it. My HS was one of the top 15 or so public schools in the state, and I had access to a great, well rounded, top of the line education there had I decided to go after it. But like most students, I found school to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so I did the bare minimum and relied on my ACT score to get me into a good college. So IMO even at these upper echelon schools, there is a fundamental flaw in the way the system engages the students.

The same routine 8 hours day, 5 days a week, and 5 or 6 classes a day clearly just doesn't work. From what I've heard from those who experienced it, block schedules definitely aren't the answer either. Like everyone's mentioned, the preparation based curriculum is another big flaw. Every level of school from kindergarden to 12th grade is designed to prepare you for that next level. How many times did we all here, "Oh you think this is bad just wait till you get to 5th grade or 8th grade or high school or junior year or college, etc., etc." from our teachers? We got threatened with that crap 5 times a day. It kind of wears off by the time you get to high school, and you realize it was all a load of shit.

I agree with the consensus that we need more learning for the sake of learning rather than passing the test or succeeded at the next level. The biggest problem is that in order to achieve that, we need better teachers. Any schmuck can prepare students for tests and follow the curriculum, but to take it to the next level and actually teach these kids life skills and provide them with a solid education it takes a lot more than your average $25,000/yr took the job for the summers off and because everything else seemed to difficult teacher. Now sure, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule when it comes to teachers, but that kind of salary just doesn't attract the kind of people we need to turn the system around.

So yeah, the education system blows lol.

 

pretty good system they got,everyone can become what he wants.

 

The china part is completely wrong. All pre-college education in China prepares them for the "GaoKao". This is a large comprehensive exam that determines A. where they can go to college and B. what there majors can be in college. They don't get to choose what they study in college, their score on the GaoKao determines what they can learn. It's like your FCAT, but if the entire USA did it, and we used that score instead of the SAT/ACT, and it was the most important thing employers looked at for entry level positions when you decide to work out of high school instead of going to college. It's what you are complaining about with the FCAT but exponentially worse.

Also, Chinese K-12 is completely based on memorization, they don't spend a second teaching them critical thinking or problem solving skills. It's all: when you are asked X you reply with the answer Y. As soon as you give them research material and ask for their analysis they all look at you like a deer in head lights. Granted, there are plenty of shit public schools in America as well.

I taught English at a University here in China for 2 years before I got a real job, I've seen this time and time again.

Also, wtf is a 'hundun'? In Chinese hundun is a dumpling you put in soup, never heard it used in English before.

 

My biggest criticism of the American public education system is that true knowledge is sacrificed by teachers so that the "checklist" of standardized information can be briefly covered in order for students to take a test. Just about everything I do in high school is geared toward my success (i.e., an "A") on the next test, even though I remember absolutely nothing on these tests after they are taken. The general trend is for teachers to cram down information down the students' collective throats so that they can get through the year and meet the requirements that the district board mandates that the students learn.

Unfortunately, this system neglects real learning. For example, in my Spanish class, nothing we do inside or out of class actually prepares me to speak or write the language better. Our teacher is a nice enough fellow, but he completely wastes class time by going over the most mundane topics, like why the Spanish conquest of the Americas was an abuse of human rights (hardly relevant info for any high school senior about to enter the real world). At the end of class, we are assigned about an hour of tedious homework which includes memorizing archaic and practically useless vocabulary words and facts of old short stories. After every two week cycle, we are given tests that are ridiculously detailed about ancient Mayan history or abstract art styles utilized by Diego Rivera. In the end, it's the student that spends his/her time memorizing all the useless junk that gets an "A" in the class and becomes an attractive candidate for a selective college (the school system's ultimate carrot). Ironically, the students who do well on the tests speak horrible Spanish, because all they do is memorize useless junk. The students who are fluent in Spanish, on the other hand, do poorly because they know nothing we study is ever heard or spoken in a useful context and thus refrain from giving a shit.

This may seem like an unfortunate occurrence, but this scenario is quite commonplace in almost all of my classes (the exception being in a class where the teacher is arguably the smartest man I've ever met). In many public schools, useless information that is supposed to get the student to think critically is laundry listed in a fashion where it is impossible to give a fuck. But to force kids to learn the curriculum, schools prop up the incentive of performing well on tests and glorify the possibility of having a successful (in terms of material wealth, not actual happiness) life if they can obey the rules of test taking. In short, all I am shown are facts, not skills. All anyone in my grade cares about is getting that damned "A" so they can get into UC Berkeley, Stanford, Dartmouth or whatever place it is these days that charges so much for an irrelevant piece of paper.

As well, students' general rights in public school are very limited. When a student steps onto campus grounds, he waives many protections inherent in the First Amendment that an adult citizen would otherwise have in public. Look into Supreme/Lower circuit federal court cases and you can find ample evidence of schools taking civil action against students regarding "inappropriate speech". Look up S.C. case "Morse v. Frederick" (2007); in Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion, he argued that "the rights of students inside public schools are not...equal to the rights of adults in public." Case in point: on the first day of freshman year, the vice principal came into my class and, among other things, let us know that if any one inadvertently brought an illegal thing to school, they could deposit it in the front office w/o being reprehended.

A few weeks later, a boy scout in my grade came back from a 50-miler late on a sunday night. The next day, he accidentally came to school with a mini-flare (filled with gunpowder) in his jeans pocket that could have saved his life in an emergency in said hike. Knowing he could get expelled for possessing a weapon, he gave an office aide his flare, explaining he had forgotten it was in his pocket to begin with. The aide flipped because she though she would die and held the kid in custody until the bomb squad arrived (I live in a tiny white community where no real crime has happened in nearly 4 years, let alone a true bomb threat). The kid was expelled from school, and I haven't seen him since.

From my experience, it has been draconian rules like these that I feel are used to condition the student body into politically correct sheep that sooner or later become too scared to question the rules, however stupid or stupidly implemented they may be. Rather than fostering a proactive mindset on...anything, my elementary/middle/high schools have maintained "zero tolerance" policies that have expelled countless kids for either having a genuine interest in the unknown or for making simple mistakes.

In the end, no one really learns anything. Students are cruelly conditioned not to question authority, and instead resentfully eat all the shit their bosses take in their cubicles, as that's the only real skill they learn. Fuck school.

 

texas rewrote the history books, took out certain important things.. can't remember the name of the article I read it in but when you put in pieces of history you think should be learned well then, your edu sucks