General thoughts on the subject (having only skimmed the thread):
I think anyone with a brain knows that things aren't entirely working. The biggest problem I had with they way things worked in most of my classes in high school is that everyone (teacher, administration, parents, other students, etc.) seemed more interested in bringing standards down to the students rather than brining the students up to standard. It pissed me off to no end and, because of it, I'm still bitter about the fact that I feel cheated out of the education I should've gotten. I know I ended up immensely better off than most for one reason: self-motivation. The vast majority of stuff I've retained is stuff that I learned on my own time. I feel blessed to have had teachers (especially my senior English teacher) who not only did a great job in the classroom, but sparked enough interest to make me go the extra mile on my own time for no reasons other than my own. It's only gotten worse over time and it's starting at an early age.
Rather than books or thoughtful discussion, parents pop in a DVD or turn on the TV. For the kids, it's a minimal effort/instant short-term return endeavor. The seeds of laziness are planted. They make it it school a few years later, struggle through the most basic of things, barely squeeze by arbitrarily memorizing a few meaningless facts with no practical understanding of them, and are allowed to proceed. No actual learning has occurred. Lets not forget the few that will be diagnosed with some disorder or learning disability and either a)medicated or b)put in special programs. Now, I understand that there are some kids with legitimate problems and I fully support special attention for those kids. On the other hand....medication because your 6-year-old boy is hyper and sometimes disobedient in class? Shut the fuck up and discipline your child. Anyhow....so after being coddled and allowed to slip by, things obviously don't improve. Then you end up with teenagers who are terrified to read aloud in class because they still have to sound out words, and can't even complete the arduous task of comprehending what they are reading as they are reading it. Then you have remedial classes that allow people to graduate (with the same degree and in the same amount of time as the kids who did work hard and do well), despite having covered only a fraction of the amount of the material their peers covered. The sad part, is that most of them don't only fail at being book-smart, but severly lack basic comprehension skills and lack a lot of practical knowledge as well. Maybe this makes me a snob, but I avoided a lot of my peers in high school (and even now in college) because I don't like having to explain jokes, eliminate metaphors and similies from my speech, and generally lower my intellect to about 30% to be able to communicate. I'm doing the night-shift at the stock room at Target this Summer
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and I had a hard time tolerating my manager when I had my interview with her. I was glancing at her notes and was downright appalled by how many spelling/grammatical erro....disasters there were. There were at least three times throughout the interview where I had to have her repeat a question because of how poor her grammar was. I don't even mean stupid stuff like "John and me" vs. "John and I". There were pretty hardcore "wtf?" moments. What sickened me more than that was the fact that she would be allowed to sit in her position. Now, I'm expected to show her respect and view here as a superior, but all I feel towards her is pity. That leads me to my belief that diplomas and degrees are nothing more than a piece of paper anymore. The only thing a college degree proves anymore is that you have tuition money. Of course there are a lot of great, intelligent, hard-working people who come out of high school and college...but if there was ever a time when a diploma/degree was proof of those qualities, that time has passed.
Having seen the more positive side of things first hand, I only feel more pity for lazy kids and more spite for the parents and teachers who let them get that way. I am the result of teachers and family members who took a proactive approach to my education early in life so that later when it mattered, I cared about my education enough to be self-motivated and (at least by my standards) successful in my endeavors. I can sleep at night knowing that I've made the most of my education, whereas all too many sleep at night not even realizing that they haven't.
