8 ms·

School is half education and half babysitting. The problem is that schools aren't aware of that, and they try to cram too much learning/work into a day at schoo

by learc83 13y ago

School is half education and half babysitting. The problem is that schools aren't aware of that, and they try to cram too much learning/work into a day at school. Kids just don't have the attention span. College isn't taught this way. Colleges realize that even young adults can't handle 40 hours a week of continual instruction, why do we do this kids can? I think the reason, is that we're always behind other countries trying to "catch up"--50 years ago it was the Soviets, 20 years ago the Japanese, now it's the "global workforce". In our frantic rush to compete with everyone else we end up forcing an overambitious curriculum on kids. How much time can kids really spend learning everyday? A few hours at the most? I have a friend who teaches 1st grade, she knows kids at that age can't spend time on focused learning for more than 20 or 30 minutes, but the school districts forces here to teach in 1 to 2 hour blocks and spend almost 6 hours out of the day instructing (they get 15 minutes, no more, of recess; 30 minutes lunch, many times in silence because the lunchroom gets too loud; and on some days 45 minutes of focused PE). What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day?

pekk 13y ago
Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves. That doesn't mean that others should be stigmatized, but it's not like this is impossible and unprecedented.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Also historically, many, many children have been thrown out of school or deemed ineducable because they couldn't sit still in school and behave themselves.
  - derleth 13y ago
    Or they never went to school in the first place. Similarly, the average high schooler was better back then because the average person stopped their education at the eighth grade, if not sooner. (Note to non-Americans: In the US, high school runs from ninth to twelfth grade, usually named freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years.)
    - samatman 13y ago
      More to the point, the children/teenagers in question range from 13 to 18 years of age. I gather that "12th grade" is meaningless in much of the world.
      - ivix 13y ago
        Thanks. It was kind of cute how the american terms were explained using more american terms.
        derleth 13y ago
        Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic.
        derleth 13y ago
        > Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic. This is true, you know. Or are you saying only Americans can do arithmetic?
- learc83 13y ago
  First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers not to promote creativity. Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker. Second, much of this is unprecedented. When my parents were children, they didn't attend Kindergarten, and first grade was a half day. When my parents younger siblings were children, Kindergarten was a half day. When I was a child, I didn't attend preschool. In 3 generations we've added more than 2 years of education for every child, and that education is qualitatively quite different, even from what I experienced (Kindergarten 23 years ago) When I was in kindergarten the majority of the day was playtime, we had 30 minutes of recess, 45 minutes of mostly freeform PE, 30 minutes of naptime, and a few hours of structured playtime (drawing, making crafts etc...). From friends of mine who are teachers, since no child left behind, all of that has been removed or severely restricted. Recess is now 15 minutes, PE is more structured and not every day, no more naptime, and they don't have time for freeform activities because the curriculum is so dense. In Kindergarten we spent almost the whole year learning the Alphabet. Now the curriculum assumes that children already know it. Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education.
  - cafard 13y ago
    "First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers..." Or else until about 100 years ago there was no economic benefit to educating the great mass of humanity, and industrialization created a type of work for which literacy and numeracy helped. "Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker." The education of the children--sons, mostly--of the well off always involved a lot of monotonous boredom. Orders were enforced with a stick. But indeed kindergarten was a half day in my day. The extension of schooling to younger ages is at least partly a result of the need for day care, with more and more mothers in the work force. "Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education." Quite so.
    - selimthegrim 13y ago
- webwanderings 13y ago
  Because most likely those schools were in the business of producing zombies, or scared shitless kids due to teacher's punishment techniques. Those days are gone for good unless you are in the third world countries.
- icebraining 13y ago
  They used to behave here 30-40 years ago as well. Getting your hands beaten with a wooden ruler is a hell of an incentive.
  - sabat 13y ago
    No, they'd end up getting hit again and again. School was designed by women for girls, and so it plays to typical behavior of young females.
  - robryan 13y ago
    Sure they will behave, I can't imagine it produced a lot of motivation to learn and excitement about attending school.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  Yeah, with the aid of a paddle.
- Taranis 13y ago
  Correction officers in prisons work to achieve this same effect. I absolutely think it should be stigmatized.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  > Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves. I'm not sure I understand your point. Please quantify this. Historically many, many people haven't been felons, but we still have a criminal justice system.
tokenadult 13y ago
Yours is an interesting comment, but none of it is responsive to the submitted article's concern about differences between boys and girls in school. I have actually lived in another country, and I am aware by direct observation that that country has BOTH higher academic achievement by school pupils than the United States and pervasive recess periods during the school day when young children get outdoors and exercise. I think that United States school officials need to stop believing legends about what goes on in other countries and actually a) OBSERVE what the school day looks like in other countries, http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740181 http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740... b) analyze textbooks and teaching practices that produce superior results http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843/ http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... c) take careful note of classroom practices that respect learners and help learners learn deeply and not just superficially, http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study and d) systematically train teachers in effective teaching techniques. http://teachlikeachampion.com/ http://teachlikeachampion.com/ Boys and girls, all over the world, are exposed to many different kinds of school schedules and school practices, and it is the basic procedure of educational science to carefully observe the different combinations of home, societal, and school influences on children and try to figure out what helps learners have the best results.
- aroch 13y ago
  I'm so glad my elementary school here in the US gave us 2, 45min (~10:30 and 2pm) and an hour long lunch/recess period each day. It really made things much more bearable; except Spanish, it was right before the afternoon recess
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  Both of these comments - just changed my view of how I should teach my child and what their school should be like. wow. Epiphany
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kaitai 13y ago
Puer 13y ago
How come they don't seem to have this problem in China, India or Germany? It isn't that kids can't handle the workload, the problem is the boring curriculum.
- chez17 13y ago
  One issue is that people think that there is "the problem". It is a multitude of problems ranging from economic to cultural to institutional. There are many things wrong with our education system and trying to wrap it up in a talking point only prolongs the real discussion that needs to be had.
- jahewson 13y ago
  In China the kids take on an extraordinary workload, because long hours show dedication - but they're not learning effectively - instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc. The appearance of working hard and actually working hard/effectively are two different things. Don't be fooled by cultures with endemic corruption. Germany obviously excluded.
  - jsnk 13y ago
    >instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc. This is wrong. Sure there are stories of Chinese students, parents and teachers cheating the system, but keep in mind that China is a country of whopping 1.3 billion people.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Just this past week they had a riot because some poor teachers tried to crack down on cheating.
      - DrewRWx 13y ago
        The justification for the protests was that the crackdown was a "pilot program" that only affected a small portion of students.
jared314 13y ago
> The problem is that schools aren't aware of that I think the schools, and the teachers, are very aware of their "half babysitting" role. The public schools, in the US, are paid based on heads-per-day, with some restrictions on minimum days and test scores (depending on the state). They get money for providing services to the children. So, as with all incentive plans, the system gets gamed. > What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day? The ones society wants to succeed in school. Like sports, not everyone has the ability required to succeed at higher levels. If someone hadn't forced me to stop watching TV when I was young, I would be in front of it right now. This says nothing about their ability in reality, just in playing the school game.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  >> What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day? > The ones society wants to succeed in school. So, the malleable, obedient ones should succeed. I'm sure that will be convenient for someone.
  - jared314 13y ago
    > I'm sure that will be convenient for someone. Individual action and group inaction can have the same result. A conspiracy is not required.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Alex3917 13y ago
"School is half education and half babysitting." As currently designed, the five basic functions of public school are sorting, socialization, warehousing, training, and FRPL. They tend to be pretty aware of all of these.
cynoclast 13y ago
Most schools in America do little more than condition children to the 40 hour work week + homework/overtime. It makes us slaves. My school will be different, and America doesn't deserve it.
pinaceae 13y ago
How many teachers in the past were men? I went to primary school in the 80ies (Austria) and had only female teachers. Which completely sucks as those women do. not. understand. young boys. Any natural behavior by young girls is good, any natural behavior by boys is distracting. You can't do that ad nauseum. My step-son, 10years, had a male teacher for 3 years. What an amazing difference that makes. It's a mixture of laissez faire (I don't give a shit if they are beating each other with sticks) to quick and decisive aggressiveness (immediate consequence, not hour long conversations, nagging, etc.). The girls could not cope with this style so well.
- speeder 13y ago
  Teaching became a female job around the early 1900s, but I don't remember why now... I need to find it again. I once had a male teacher when I was 12 or something like that, he managed to engage both male and female students with pure awesomeness. Also when male students had a problem, this teacher was the automatic go-to one. Later during the end years of the school, I went to a elite one focused to get people into university no matter what (yet in my year 90% failed, while all previous years they had a 90% of success, and the only change is that on my year affirmative action went into effect), then I had balanced male and female teachers, usually the male teachers were way more popular (sometimes too much... ie: one of them got fired multiple times for having sex with female students, and then hired back because students demanded him back...), maybe because as you said, they tended to allow people do random shit (in fact, sometimes they joined the fray too, one teacher destroyed a lamp by accident after throwing a shoe across the room), but were also hard to crack down if needed (the sex with students teachers only once threw people out of the class in about 15 years of career, two female students that insisted in chatting REALLY LOUD and after it bothered him too much, he said: "Ugly near the fat, you two, out", after the news of that incident spread few people ever bothered in challenging him again, since it was quite clear he was ruthless if he wanted to).
  - barry-cotter 13y ago
    What country are you from?
- 13y ago
ronaldx 13y ago
Schools know that they are primarily a babysitting service: it's easy to understand from the nature of the fuss that parents make when school is closed on a work day.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  :) Since UK schools are considering experimenting with shorter/different summer holidays for the educational benefit, there was a parent on talk radio just this morning saying this was unfair because he may need to organise more babysitting. Luckily, most parents are looking for good education.
weland 13y ago
> now it's the "global workforce" I know this is highly anecdotical in nature, but perhaps there's some useful information to it :-). I'm part of the "global workforce"; I don't live in the US, but I have done some contract work with US employers as an independent consultant. I was born and currently live in Europe. Funny thing is, while I absolutely loved learning and still do -- to the extent that an important factor in my choice of avoiding large corporations (after getting burned twice) was that a job there would leave me too little time for history, philosophy and programming of my own -- I didn't go to school that much. I was one of the top students in the class (I even unintentionally ended up as a valedictorian, so besides my BSc in Instrumentation Engineering they also handed me a badge of nerd shame or something), but I was regularly getting into trouble for skipping classes, faking illnesses and, every once in a while, challenging the professors' authority. Fortunately, I actually had my parents behind me on this, and both of them are teachers (high school and university level, respectively). I'd literally tell my dad I was too hung over to go to school this morning, he'd shrug and tell me that as long as I think it's best to stay at home, I can stay at home. And it was ok. I'm not starving -- I'm actually quite well off -- I have a job that I love, I do what I like and what I am best at. Despite my trouble with authority, my academic credentials are fairly good (to the extent that I am a published author -- my work ended up in IEEE journals -- but that was before I got my BSc, and I didn't push for an MSc after that). Quite frankly, I'm horrified at the amount of work we put children to. I managed to dodge it because the system in my home country is shaggy enough that, as long as you're blunt and cunning enough, you can get away with anything. The sheer thought of actually having gone to school all that time is simply unrealistic, I'd have broken down. I think this is a typical case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". No one bothers to think what the problem is, and appears to put it strictly in terms of MOAR SCHOOL MY LITTLE MINIONS! This is woefully unproductive. I swear, if I'll ever have kids of my own, I'll do just like my dad did with me -- encourage them to think for themselves and learn what's interesting for them, treating school as the necessary diploma-producing evil it seems to have ended up in our days.
- pestaa 13y ago
  Your parents are truly nice, but that makes you the exception, not the rule. Most students at my university perform like crap because their parents are either too demanding or don't give a damn. I also observed that people who get great grades at school usually can't get anything serious done on their own. I'm perfectly happy being average in school.

by learc83 13y ago

pekk 13y ago

Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves. That doesn't mean that others should be stigmatized, but it's not like this is impossible and unprecedented.

pessimizer 13y ago
Also historically, many, many children have been thrown out of school or deemed ineducable because they couldn't sit still in school and behave themselves.
- derleth 13y ago
  Or they never went to school in the first place. Similarly, the average high schooler was better back then because the average person stopped their education at the eighth grade, if not sooner. (Note to non-Americans: In the US, high school runs from ninth to twelfth grade, usually named freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years.)
  - samatman 13y ago
    More to the point, the children/teenagers in question range from 13 to 18 years of age. I gather that "12th grade" is meaningless in much of the world.
    - ivix 13y ago
      Thanks. It was kind of cute how the american terms were explained using more american terms.
      - derleth 13y ago
        Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic.
        derleth 13y ago
        > Elsewhere it is posted when people begin school in the US. The rest is arithmetic. This is true, you know. Or are you saying only Americans can do arithmetic?
learc83 13y ago
First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers not to promote creativity. Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker. Second, much of this is unprecedented. When my parents were children, they didn't attend Kindergarten, and first grade was a half day. When my parents younger siblings were children, Kindergarten was a half day. When I was a child, I didn't attend preschool. In 3 generations we've added more than 2 years of education for every child, and that education is qualitatively quite different, even from what I experienced (Kindergarten 23 years ago) When I was in kindergarten the majority of the day was playtime, we had 30 minutes of recess, 45 minutes of mostly freeform PE, 30 minutes of naptime, and a few hours of structured playtime (drawing, making crafts etc...). From friends of mine who are teachers, since no child left behind, all of that has been removed or severely restricted. Recess is now 15 minutes, PE is more structured and not every day, no more naptime, and they don't have time for freeform activities because the curriculum is so dense. In Kindergarten we spent almost the whole year learning the Alphabet. Now the curriculum assumes that children already know it. Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education.
- cafard 13y ago
  "First, historically mass education of the type we now employ is only about a century old, and designed to produce factory workers..." Or else until about 100 years ago there was no economic benefit to educating the great mass of humanity, and industrialization created a type of work for which literacy and numeracy helped. "Learning to handle monotonous boredom and obey orders was of primary importance to a factory worker." The education of the children--sons, mostly--of the well off always involved a lot of monotonous boredom. Orders were enforced with a stick. But indeed kindergarten was a half day in my day. The extension of schooling to younger ages is at least partly a result of the need for day care, with more and more mothers in the work force. "Teachers know this doesn't work, but schools are obsessed with testing and metrics to the determinant of real education." Quite so.
  - selimthegrim 13y ago
webwanderings 13y ago
Because most likely those schools were in the business of producing zombies, or scared shitless kids due to teacher's punishment techniques. Those days are gone for good unless you are in the third world countries.
icebraining 13y ago
They used to behave here 30-40 years ago as well. Getting your hands beaten with a wooden ruler is a hell of an incentive.
- sabat 13y ago
  No, they'd end up getting hit again and again. School was designed by women for girls, and so it plays to typical behavior of young females.
- robryan 13y ago
  Sure they will behave, I can't imagine it produced a lot of motivation to learn and excitement about attending school.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
Yeah, with the aid of a paddle.
Taranis 13y ago
Correction officers in prisons work to achieve this same effect. I absolutely think it should be stigmatized.
darkarmani 13y ago
> Historically many, many children have sat still at school and behaved themselves. I'm not sure I understand your point. Please quantify this. Historically many, many people haven't been felons, but we still have a criminal justice system.

tokenadult 13y ago

Yours is an interesting comment, but none of it is responsive to the submitted article's concern about differences between boys and girls in school. I have actually lived in another country, and I am aware by direct observation that that country has BOTH higher academic achievement by school pupils than the United States and pervasive recess periods during the school day when young children get outdoors and exercise. I think that United States school officials need to stop believing legends about what goes on in other countries and actually a) OBSERVE what the school day looks like in other countries, http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740181 http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Schools-David-Perkins/dp/0028740... b) analyze textbooks and teaching practices that produce superior results http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843/ http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... c) take careful note of classroom practices that respect learners and help learners learn deeply and not just superficially, http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study http://timssvideo.com/timss-video-study and d) systematically train teachers in effective teaching techniques. http://teachlikeachampion.com/ http://teachlikeachampion.com/ Boys and girls, all over the world, are exposed to many different kinds of school schedules and school practices, and it is the basic procedure of educational science to carefully observe the different combinations of home, societal, and school influences on children and try to figure out what helps learners have the best results.

aroch 13y ago
I'm so glad my elementary school here in the US gave us 2, 45min (~10:30 and 2pm) and an hour long lunch/recess period each day. It really made things much more bearable; except Spanish, it was right before the afternoon recess
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
Both of these comments - just changed my view of how I should teach my child and what their school should be like. wow. Epiphany
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kaitai 13y ago

Puer 13y ago

How come they don't seem to have this problem in China, India or Germany? It isn't that kids can't handle the workload, the problem is the boring curriculum.

chez17 13y ago
One issue is that people think that there is "the problem". It is a multitude of problems ranging from economic to cultural to institutional. There are many things wrong with our education system and trying to wrap it up in a talking point only prolongs the real discussion that needs to be had.
jahewson 13y ago
In China the kids take on an extraordinary workload, because long hours show dedication - but they're not learning effectively - instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc. The appearance of working hard and actually working hard/effectively are two different things. Don't be fooled by cultures with endemic corruption. Germany obviously excluded.
- jsnk 13y ago
  >instead they all cheat, bribe the teacher, etc. This is wrong. Sure there are stories of Chinese students, parents and teachers cheating the system, but keep in mind that China is a country of whopping 1.3 billion people.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Just this past week they had a riot because some poor teachers tried to crack down on cheating.
    - DrewRWx 13y ago
      The justification for the protests was that the crackdown was a "pilot program" that only affected a small portion of students.

jared314 13y ago

> The problem is that schools aren't aware of that I think the schools, and the teachers, are very aware of their "half babysitting" role. The public schools, in the US, are paid based on heads-per-day, with some restrictions on minimum days and test scores (depending on the state). They get money for providing services to the children. So, as with all incentive plans, the system gets gamed. > What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day? The ones society wants to succeed in school. Like sports, not everyone has the ability required to succeed at higher levels. If someone hadn't forced me to stop watching TV when I was young, I would be in front of it right now. This says nothing about their ability in reality, just in playing the school game.

jessaustin 13y ago
>> What 6 or 7 year old can possibly sit still and study for 5 or 6 hours each day? > The ones society wants to succeed in school. So, the malleable, obedient ones should succeed. I'm sure that will be convenient for someone.
- jared314 13y ago
  > I'm sure that will be convenient for someone. Individual action and group inaction can have the same result. A conspiracy is not required.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Alex3917 13y ago

"School is half education and half babysitting." As currently designed, the five basic functions of public school are sorting, socialization, warehousing, training, and FRPL. They tend to be pretty aware of all of these.

cynoclast 13y ago

Most schools in America do little more than condition children to the 40 hour work week + homework/overtime. It makes us slaves. My school will be different, and America doesn't deserve it.

pinaceae 13y ago

How many teachers in the past were men? I went to primary school in the 80ies (Austria) and had only female teachers. Which completely sucks as those women do. not. understand. young boys. Any natural behavior by young girls is good, any natural behavior by boys is distracting. You can't do that ad nauseum. My step-son, 10years, had a male teacher for 3 years. What an amazing difference that makes. It's a mixture of laissez faire (I don't give a shit if they are beating each other with sticks) to quick and decisive aggressiveness (immediate consequence, not hour long conversations, nagging, etc.). The girls could not cope with this style so well.

speeder 13y ago
Teaching became a female job around the early 1900s, but I don't remember why now... I need to find it again. I once had a male teacher when I was 12 or something like that, he managed to engage both male and female students with pure awesomeness. Also when male students had a problem, this teacher was the automatic go-to one. Later during the end years of the school, I went to a elite one focused to get people into university no matter what (yet in my year 90% failed, while all previous years they had a 90% of success, and the only change is that on my year affirmative action went into effect), then I had balanced male and female teachers, usually the male teachers were way more popular (sometimes too much... ie: one of them got fired multiple times for having sex with female students, and then hired back because students demanded him back...), maybe because as you said, they tended to allow people do random shit (in fact, sometimes they joined the fray too, one teacher destroyed a lamp by accident after throwing a shoe across the room), but were also hard to crack down if needed (the sex with students teachers only once threw people out of the class in about 15 years of career, two female students that insisted in chatting REALLY LOUD and after it bothered him too much, he said: "Ugly near the fat, you two, out", after the news of that incident spread few people ever bothered in challenging him again, since it was quite clear he was ruthless if he wanted to).
- barry-cotter 13y ago
  What country are you from?
13y ago

ronaldx 13y ago

Schools know that they are primarily a babysitting service: it's easy to understand from the nature of the fuss that parents make when school is closed on a work day.

ronaldx 13y ago
:) Since UK schools are considering experimenting with shorter/different summer holidays for the educational benefit, there was a parent on talk radio just this morning saying this was unfair because he may need to organise more babysitting. Luckily, most parents are looking for good education.

weland 13y ago

> now it's the "global workforce" I know this is highly anecdotical in nature, but perhaps there's some useful information to it :-). I'm part of the "global workforce"; I don't live in the US, but I have done some contract work with US employers as an independent consultant. I was born and currently live in Europe. Funny thing is, while I absolutely loved learning and still do -- to the extent that an important factor in my choice of avoiding large corporations (after getting burned twice) was that a job there would leave me too little time for history, philosophy and programming of my own -- I didn't go to school that much. I was one of the top students in the class (I even unintentionally ended up as a valedictorian, so besides my BSc in Instrumentation Engineering they also handed me a badge of nerd shame or something), but I was regularly getting into trouble for skipping classes, faking illnesses and, every once in a while, challenging the professors' authority. Fortunately, I actually had my parents behind me on this, and both of them are teachers (high school and university level, respectively). I'd literally tell my dad I was too hung over to go to school this morning, he'd shrug and tell me that as long as I think it's best to stay at home, I can stay at home. And it was ok. I'm not starving -- I'm actually quite well off -- I have a job that I love, I do what I like and what I am best at. Despite my trouble with authority, my academic credentials are fairly good (to the extent that I am a published author -- my work ended up in IEEE journals -- but that was before I got my BSc, and I didn't push for an MSc after that). Quite frankly, I'm horrified at the amount of work we put children to. I managed to dodge it because the system in my home country is shaggy enough that, as long as you're blunt and cunning enough, you can get away with anything. The sheer thought of actually having gone to school all that time is simply unrealistic, I'd have broken down. I think this is a typical case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". No one bothers to think what the problem is, and appears to put it strictly in terms of MOAR SCHOOL MY LITTLE MINIONS! This is woefully unproductive. I swear, if I'll ever have kids of my own, I'll do just like my dad did with me -- encourage them to think for themselves and learn what's interesting for them, treating school as the necessary diploma-producing evil it seems to have ended up in our days.

pestaa 13y ago
Your parents are truly nice, but that makes you the exception, not the rule. Most students at my university perform like crap because their parents are either too demanding or don't give a damn. I also observed that people who get great grades at school usually can't get anything serious done on their own. I'm perfectly happy being average in school.