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I read all the boring comments and this is the only one I liked. Learning is hard, caring about stuff that has no relevance to food or sex is hard. School is no

by PhilipM 16y ago

I read all the boring comments and this is the only one I liked. Learning is hard, caring about stuff that has no relevance to food or sex is hard. School is not about helping the rug rats but getting them out of the adults hair until they can kill their own horse for supper. Edumacation is about following rules. Follow pointless rules in a chain for 200 hours straight and maybe you'll discover something that actually helps the human race. Otherwise its all masturbation. If the kid is stupid, I want the kid beaten into submition. If the kid is smart, he can do the assignments trivially and get an A. I see no need to change the way babysitting kids works. Creativity is not the same as rule following skills. If she really wanted to educate herself she would have realized that she should have been skipping class, reading more sci fi and masturbating harder. She was probably just unhappy from being russian.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
I disagree on the current purpose of school (which really came to be in the late 19th century). School is there to train people to 1) tolerate being bored eight hours a day and 2) do what the authority figures say. These two items were critical for training a workforce who would sit in a factory screwing the lid onto the tube of toothpaste. Unfortunately, today's jobs are all about creativity. Knowledge workers increase value through their creativity, which is all but stamped out of them in school.
- timthorn 16y ago
  At that time, the majority of the workforce was involved in agriculture. Toothpaste was nowhere in it...
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    At the time, the industrial revolution was rapidly pulling people from the agrarian life to the factory life. Factory owners knew they'd need more and more people who could sit around, day after day, expressing no individuality. Politicians recognized the economic benefits the factories were providing. Together, the current US school system was born. Here are the real questions: Current industry leaders recognize the education system is not training knowledge workers they way it could be. Do politicians recognize the economic value of the knowledge economy and will current politicians and business leaders come together to build a new education system that meets those needs? Of course, 125 years ago, there wasn't an existing bureaucracy that needed to be torn down first... The first country to get that right is going to thrive. A country like Costa Rica could do amazing things.

by PhilipM 16y ago

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

I disagree on the current purpose of school (which really came to be in the late 19th century). School is there to train people to 1) tolerate being bored eight hours a day and 2) do what the authority figures say. These two items were critical for training a workforce who would sit in a factory screwing the lid onto the tube of toothpaste. Unfortunately, today's jobs are all about creativity. Knowledge workers increase value through their creativity, which is all but stamped out of them in school.

timthorn 16y ago
At that time, the majority of the workforce was involved in agriculture. Toothpaste was nowhere in it...
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  At the time, the industrial revolution was rapidly pulling people from the agrarian life to the factory life. Factory owners knew they'd need more and more people who could sit around, day after day, expressing no individuality. Politicians recognized the economic benefits the factories were providing. Together, the current US school system was born. Here are the real questions: Current industry leaders recognize the education system is not training knowledge workers they way it could be. Do politicians recognize the economic value of the knowledge economy and will current politicians and business leaders come together to build a new education system that meets those needs? Of course, 125 years ago, there wasn't an existing bureaucracy that needed to be torn down first... The first country to get that right is going to thrive. A country like Costa Rica could do amazing things.