DISQUS

danielmiessler.com | grep understanding: I Honestly Don’t See Any Way For the U.S. to Succeed

  • AJ · 1 year ago

    An issue is No Child Left Behind. Its premise seems to be that a classroom is a chain and students are only as strong as the weakest link. Curriculum has been reformatted toward passing the all-powerful standardized tests. Creating a well-rounded individual is not a goal. Creativity is not a goal. Critical thinking is not a goal. Having children excel beyond expectations is counteracted. Teach to the test because a school's failure on the test can be devastating. It's no longer about nurturing individuals, but about keeping the school's test scores on par.


    My local state university offers a host of remedial courses in order to bring freshmen up to college requirements. In short, the university is teaching high school courses because school systems have failed our children. There was a time when a student worried about whether his academic scores were good enough to gain college admission.

  • Arik · 1 year ago

    Daniel,


    You simply have to see the movie "Idiocracy" by Mike Judge.


    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/


    -- Arik

  • Katherine · 1 year ago

    Things are pretty bleak, but not quite as bleak as that. The reason is the skilled trades: electricians, plumbers, mechanics. These are jobs that don't require college but actually pay pretty well, and for work that the highly educated are increasingly unable/unwilling to do for themselves. These are also jobs that are impossible to offshore because they require physical presence at a location.


    These are also the jobs that people worried about illegal immigration are talking about when they talk about illegal immigrants taking jobs away from Americans.

  • dale · 1 year ago

    I'm just glad we have quotas to make everything better

  • Maxo · 1 year ago

    I'm working on a blog entry about rethinking our education curriculum as a whole. The premise is that we are not teaching applicable life skills in school in the first place. Grade school should be preparing us for life, not for college. College should be for preparing us for jobs that require specific knowledge. Why should kids graduating high school know how to find the third side of a triangle, given two other sides, but not understand the interstate commerce clause?

  • ncloud · 1 year ago

    Dude, you need to check out the writings of John Taylor Gatto. The man was a New York school teacher for 30 years. He worked with rich kids, poor kids, middle class kids, in private, public, and tutor teaching roles. At the end of 30 years he concluded that schools destroy kids by making them mindless drones that are easy to control, and that our education system was designed for precisely that reason. Check out his book "The Underground History of American Education".

  • TIMM · 1 year ago

    Another problem is that we've lowered the standards so NO ONE CAN FAIL. The result is that both achievers and underachievers are being lumped into the same category, too, too often.


    Or worse. Take for example the program where FAILING STUDENTS ARE BEING PAID TO GO TO SCHOOL.


    What does this say for the purpose of school? Is it really just to entertain mini-voter tax-veal/cattle until they can't reach out of the trenches and attack their future for the sake of their own prosperity?


    -=T=-

  • Jason Sares · 1 year ago

    There's just not enough jobs to go around. When I lived in Cleveland I helped train people for tech jobs. Most of my students passed and we have done well in entry level jobs but they couldn't find any. So as a PR stunt for the Mayor at the time (Jane Campbell) we hired one at the company I worked for but we let him go a couple months later because we could get someone better for the same pay.