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> I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and

> I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Of course. Any bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning, and furthermore often interferes with it. If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous. How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school? > want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does. Teachers aren't in control. They're prisoners of the classroom every bit as much as any child is. Maybe more so, they can't hope to be expelled or to flunk out or to graduate. Teachers will never be in control again, if ever they were.

mehrzad 12y ago
>bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top college) we might as well make the most of it if the privileges are afforded to us.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"? I wouldn't say that. The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.
  - xaa 12y ago
    > Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. > If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? I don't think this analogy is quite right, nor is the conclusion you are using it to illustrate. A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class (bad teachers nearly always err towards teaching too little and therefore being easy). The worst case scenario in most subjects is they have a hole there, which in the case of non-STEM subjects is not catastrophic because they (English, history) are more about general principles rather than specific facts that nearly all adults forget. In STEM subjects, it can be worse because they build on one another. I guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution or something like that, but that typically only happens in controversial subjects where a student should have prior knowledge that there's a controversy. If they aren't, they will figure it out soon enough. But really, a bad doctor can kill you. A bad teacher leaves a hole that a self-motivated person with natural curiosity can completely fill. Take programming (I'll assume you're a developer). If one of your CS profs had just not bothered to teach a specific course, would you be able to live through it? Of course, as attested by the many successful developers who are self-taught. When you grow up, you have to take responsibility for learning for yourself. If some students have to do it sooner than usual, that has pros and cons.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
      > A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class ( There are many sorts of "bad". Sometimes they're simply ineffective or uninterested teachers. Other times they're borderline mentally ill and abusive. How many times does the child need to be mocked or called names for lasting damage to happen? Can you judge this before the fact? "Oh my boy Timmy, he can be called names at least a dozen times with no ill effects, and you look like you'll only do that 8 times, Mrs. Kuntzenheimmer." > guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution Or lock them in a closet. Or tell them "girls can't do math" so many times they believe it, and roll their eyes derisively if any of the 9 yr olds object. Or fail them out of spite... or have them expelled without true cause. Oh man, there must be a 100 different kinds of bad. And few children have the life skills to mitigate that (few adults, if we're honest).
IgorPartola 12y ago
I have a different perspective on this. School, especially in the later part of K-12 is many different things. There is a lot of bullshit, academically speaking. I'd say about 2/3 of my highschool teachers were pretty mediocre. Then there were the good ones. I actually liked studying math in high school because I got placed in advanced classes, and in a grade above my own. It provided a challenge, but also the teachers did a good job of explaining what I might use this math for: becoming an engineer or a researcher. The 10th grade algebra teacher actually had us do labs that would normally be reserved for physics classes: let's measure the swing of the pendulum and show that it's a harmonic oscillator empirically. So I wouldn't say "I hated school", but I would say I hated my gym, art, and health classes for sure (don't get me started on sex ed. and I grew up in a fairly liberal state).
Squarel 12y ago
I enjoyed the learning part of school, apart from classes I had no interest in, and was terrible at. The alternative to school currently is homeschooling, and, I do not feel that I would be able to teach my children the range of topics covered at school, and ensure they understood them, even with a university education in a STEM subject. My role therefore is to pique their curiosity about life in general and the universe, and allow them to explore questions, and show them why the world is so cool. This then enables them to use what they have learned in school to form bigger questions and answer them themselves.
jerf 12y ago
"If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous. "How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school?" I just wanted to tell you that was the-truth-that-hurts so much it literally made my eyes well up. I just... it's... sadness. Sickness.

mehrzad 12y ago

>bright student realizes that school has nothing to do with learning Depends on the high school and teacher. My high school (and primary schools) had really great teachers and they motivated me to learn things I otherwise would not have. Young people often need a push to learn things that they don't immediately see as useful. Schooling does interfere with learning, but when the stakes are high (getting into a top college) we might as well make the most of it if the privileges are afforded to us.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> Depends on the high school and teacher. In the US, each student will have between 20 and 40 teachers by the time they graduate highschool. Thus, you can't just hope to play the public education lottery and get all good teachers for your kid. Even if things work out better than could possibly be imagined, that's what, 10 or 15 good teachers, quite a few more mediocre and 2 or 3 bad ones? Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? Would you say "but the quacks will probably be the dermatologist anyway and not the surgeon, so it's ok"? I wouldn't say that. The only way for any of this to work out is for the impossible to happen, for nearly all of teachers everywhere across the nation to be good teachers. The distribution is pretty natural, the various colleges of education don't act as a filter, and schools are co-opted to do too many non-education tasks for that to ever be possible.
- xaa 12y ago
  > Sorry. The damage that a bad teacher can do outweighs much or all of the good that the good teachers can do. > If your kid would have 40 doctors throughout his life, only 2 or 3 of which were quacks, would that make you happy? I don't think this analogy is quite right, nor is the conclusion you are using it to illustrate. A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class (bad teachers nearly always err towards teaching too little and therefore being easy). The worst case scenario in most subjects is they have a hole there, which in the case of non-STEM subjects is not catastrophic because they (English, history) are more about general principles rather than specific facts that nearly all adults forget. In STEM subjects, it can be worse because they build on one another. I guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution or something like that, but that typically only happens in controversial subjects where a student should have prior knowledge that there's a controversy. If they aren't, they will figure it out soon enough. But really, a bad doctor can kill you. A bad teacher leaves a hole that a self-motivated person with natural curiosity can completely fill. Take programming (I'll assume you're a developer). If one of your CS profs had just not bothered to teach a specific course, would you be able to live through it? Of course, as attested by the many successful developers who are self-taught. When you grow up, you have to take responsibility for learning for yourself. If some students have to do it sooner than usual, that has pros and cons.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    > A kid, especially a smart kid, knows when a bad teacher is bad and can just coast through the class ( There are many sorts of "bad". Sometimes they're simply ineffective or uninterested teachers. Other times they're borderline mentally ill and abusive. How many times does the child need to be mocked or called names for lasting damage to happen? Can you judge this before the fact? "Oh my boy Timmy, he can be called names at least a dozen times with no ill effects, and you look like you'll only do that 8 times, Mrs. Kuntzenheimmer." > guess a truly bad teacher can deny evolution Or lock them in a closet. Or tell them "girls can't do math" so many times they believe it, and roll their eyes derisively if any of the 9 yr olds object. Or fail them out of spite... or have them expelled without true cause. Oh man, there must be a 100 different kinds of bad. And few children have the life skills to mitigate that (few adults, if we're honest).

IgorPartola 12y ago

I have a different perspective on this. School, especially in the later part of K-12 is many different things. There is a lot of bullshit, academically speaking. I'd say about 2/3 of my highschool teachers were pretty mediocre. Then there were the good ones. I actually liked studying math in high school because I got placed in advanced classes, and in a grade above my own. It provided a challenge, but also the teachers did a good job of explaining what I might use this math for: becoming an engineer or a researcher. The 10th grade algebra teacher actually had us do labs that would normally be reserved for physics classes: let's measure the swing of the pendulum and show that it's a harmonic oscillator empirically. So I wouldn't say "I hated school", but I would say I hated my gym, art, and health classes for sure (don't get me started on sex ed. and I grew up in a fairly liberal state).

Squarel 12y ago

I enjoyed the learning part of school, apart from classes I had no interest in, and was terrible at. The alternative to school currently is homeschooling, and, I do not feel that I would be able to teach my children the range of topics covered at school, and ensure they understood them, even with a university education in a STEM subject. My role therefore is to pique their curiosity about life in general and the universe, and allow them to explore questions, and show them why the world is so cool. This then enables them to use what they have learned in school to form bigger questions and answer them themselves.

jerf 12y ago

"If schools existed to provide food instead of education, they'd start by lining up all the kids at the beginning of the week and doling out a single crumb to each. And if those crumbs happened to be rat turds instead of crumbs of bread, they'd never notice. Every once in awhile, the school stumbles across the rare child that is starving, absolutely ravenous. "How long do you think it'd be before that child started to hate school?" I just wanted to tell you that was the-truth-that-hurts so much it literally made my eyes well up. I just... it's... sadness. Sickness.