*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, July 19th, 2015 9:10pm PDT - promote requested by notarobot.

*hiphop

Adding video to channels (Hiphop) - requested by ant.

well... yeah... he has SOME point. There definitely should be a lot more pratical teaching up to the end of highschool.

Well, yeah, he has a GREAT point.

At least where I come from, there's practically none. If I could retool the educational system I'd include one mandatory course on the basic stuff like doing taxes, knowing civil rights, and so on, and you could elect to skip that course and take something else if you could pass a prequalifying test with a high enough grade. This needs more public debate.

I'm hoping that Videosift will let me do at least this.

*promote

Invocations (promote) cannot be called by Retroboy because Retroboy is not privileged - sorry.

Well then.

"Hi Retroboy! Here's all these powerpoints that you can't spend! Muahaha!"

It's like telling pacman he's on a diet or something.

Off to sifttalk we go.

http://videosift.com/talk/How-about-a-little-love-for-long-time-but-low-star-members

You can only promote your own posts until you sift a few more.

I've got your back though

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Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Sunday, July 19th, 2015 10:46pm PDT - promote requested by oritteropo.

It also seems that his schooling didn't cover the early history of the U.S. education system, or he'd quite likely have mentioned that at first almost all schooling was entirely practical and contemporary rants complained about that too.

I thought the video made a good point, but rather different from the one I assumed it was going for before watching.

As I was finishing up my senior year of High School after 4 years of taking crap for being a nerd etc., a friend/acquaintance of mine was starting her freshman year. She got picked on also, probably worse than I had had it. She made it through 1 semester before dropping out. Then she got a part time job for a half-year, took night classes at the local community college, and got her GED.

At the time, I thought she was making a terrible decision by not sticking it out and trying to get through High School the usual way -- 4 years of hell. But then, the next year she ended up at the same University where I was, both as Uni-freshmen, and she handled the much more mature University environment just fine.

It ended up completely turning the tables for me, to the point that I thought that her path of dropping out -> GED -> Uni was actually objectively superior to my suffering through the more traditional path.

So, that's what I thought "don't stay in school" was going to refer to.


But the actual message is good as well. The best classes that I had in Middle and High School were more practical things. But oddly enough, the best examples of that for me were my math classes. I had the same teacher for Geometry, Algebra 2, Pre-Calc, and Calculus (AP, so equivalent to Calc 1 at a University). He stressed the real-life applications of advanced mathematics by doing lots of word problems, and only teaching topics that he could point to concrete, real-world applications for. And by letting us use calculators for everything as long as we could explain WHY specific operations were needed to answer the questions.


...So, long-winded response boiled down:
I like the message. More practical stuff in school is better. And feel free to drop out -- especially if doing so is just a shortcut to further education at a University, Vo-Tech, or whatever.

Drop out of school so you can learn more important things faster.

One of the very best days of my life was the day I dropped out of college. I was living a dream for MONTHS after that. It was totally unreal. I felt truly free.

Autodidacticism: Look it up.

But he's not saying people should drop out of school. Rather, his message seems aimed at changing what schools teach to children. On this point, I'd have to disagree. The institution itself should dissolve - or rather, it already effectively has. It was never a sustainable idea. It's all upon the parents, and parents should recognize this and start acting like it. In as much as they do so, their progeny will be rewarded for their parents' diligence.

I always had this opinion as I was going through the school system.
Hearing his rant, I realize that somewhere along the way, people realized the transient nature of human paradigms, like government and social structure, and decided to focus education on the constant factors of human existence: Math, Science, the world.
I can also justify education of history for allowing us to not repeat the mistakes the idiots before us made (though that's a hit or miss most of the time).
While I agree with his complaints, I'd rather not have an educational system that simply geared people for functioning in the current society. We're always fighting against the educational system from turning us into cogs in a machine as it is, but imagine if our schooling concerned itself primarily/solely with matters of state? We'd fully realize that nightmare of an assembly-line workforce.

Nobody knows that want to be an x or y when they are 11. It's easy to look back in hindsight and say "I never needed to know quadratics", but maths is absolutely critical to a vast number of academic areas and skilled trades. How do you give everybody the opportunity to become, idk, an engineer, without a lot of what you teach becoming more or less useless to most others. It has to be a broad curriculum which narrows as you progress because either you have to allow kids to make decisions about their futures for which they really lack the experience or knowledge to make, or you are allowing schools to effectively close off career paths for their students which is fucking dystopian because they'll just do whatever maximises their success rates.

For the things Dave wishes he was taught...well some of them are actually offered as subjects in some schools e.g. Economics. For the others, well, I work in Adult Education and we do actually do a lot of the things school misses. For example, we have courses for single parents (particularly young/teenage mums) on how to budget effectively etc, all funded 100% by the tax payer. It's an area that actually survived the latest budget and that we've been asked by Ofsted to expand, so, you know, it's not completely ignored, its just not really delivered by schools.

The concept that you can go to university and learn how to cut people open and fix their heart = you do not need abstract concepts in high school... Dissecting a frog doesn't prepare you for putting it all back in working order.

The things I've learned since I left school 22 years ago dwarf the knowledge I learned at high school and have since discarded.

Core skills like literacy and numeracy, of course, but you shouldn't be doing complex maths when there are many more practical things you could be doing.

eg. The local high schools now offer MSCE and Cisco certified courses in high school as an elective. So you can study in year 11/12 and come out of high school fully papered up for a career in IT rather than doing it once you leave.

I also fully support the right for kids to drop out of school to start apprenticeships at 14-15 so that they have established a trade by the time they are at the same age as graduates. Why waste the extra 3 years doing classes that will almost certainly not assist you in any way, shape or form, when you can be working full time learning a trade and earning a wage (albeit not a great one, but you don't get paid to sit in class either ; ).

I disagree. You can't show up at Uni at 18 expecting to do medicine without having spent the preceding years learning biology, and probably maths as well. Of course, it's true that this knowledge is eventually eclipsed, but I don't think you can look at the cap stone and dismiss all the stones at the bottom as unnecessary.

That said, I do think there is too much focus on Uni as the sort of aspiration for everybody. Vocational routes have been looked down upon for much too long. The stigma is real. Every politician will applaud apprenticeships as a vital and honoured progression route...but how many will be happy with their kids dropping out at 16 to do one?

If you did high school bio, think about what you covered that has any sort of influence on medicine... =)

Frog or rat dissection? Covered that in Bio 101 in the first year of my Applied Chemistry degree (and yes, you can give a rat a Columbian necktie... . Photosynthesis? Mating?

Yeah, Bio was pretty much introducing you to broad concepts and it's nothing that doesn't get rehashed in the first 6 months of Uni via intro subjects. I think of it more as a way to dip the toe in the pool and see if the subject matter excites you enough to try and turn it in to a career.

eg. At 40 now (and having forgotten my chem degree and gone in to IT as a sys admin after working as a chef, bouncer etc), I could go back to uni barely remembering anything about chemistry and start from scratch and be none the worse for it. The keystones you talk about are literacy and numeracy, that's about it. And they are learned in primary school.

Oh sure, it helps if you can do some higher math, but English lit? Physics? Drama? Almost nothing you do at high school has any real defining affect on most of what you do as an adult. It's more like a sampler platter, and of course a way of grading students (on a curve of course, we can't have people's scores based on their own merit) to distinguish what tertiary studies they should be eligible for.

School should be about igniting curiousity as much as practical skills for life. I did "Home Economics" (ie. cooking/sewing/budgets etc) and typing (on real mechanical typewriters no less) as opposed to wood/metal shop ( I was awful at shop). My home ec teacher was always interested in making different food, so we tried some pretty out there things in grade 8 (~13 years old), and I've always been interested in cooking since. Similarly, learning to touch type has made my life radically simpler, particularly in IT (try writing a 40 page instruction manual hunting and pecking).

Most of the high school grads we see as cadets or trainees are essentially useless and have to be taught from scratch anyway. Most of the codified BS we have these days doesn't prepare kids for life, doesn't encourage critical thinking or creativity, it a self justification to keep schools open.

I didn't do medicine so I can't be certain, but a fair amount of my syllabus seemed to be a useful foundation for medicine. I didn't dissect any frogs, we did pigs hearts and rats mind. I also learned a lot of practical things from biology, in fact it was one of the more practical and "relevant to everyday life" subjects I took.

Oh, and I still think there is value to the purely academic stuff. I learned an awful lot of things which I have had no practical use for but are nonetheless precious to me. Truly I pity those who have no appetite for it. Perhaps I was always this way, I don't know, but I'm still a firm in my belief that all that inconsequential arcana has enriched my life and that school had a large part in nurturing it.

Most of the stuff he mentioned (human rights, taxes, writing a check, how stock market works, etc) were taught in my high school civics class. My high school (and middle school) had other practical classes too - wood shop, metal shop, home-ec, etc.

Of course all this was pre no-child-left-behind, so who knows how shite it is now compared to then...

Yeah, not saying it has no value at all, but if we handled scalpels as a doc like we did in high school... /shudder X D

And definitely, there are some cool things to learn out there, or even just things (like a lot of history) that gives us context or just informs us of the big things that we missed. I like learning stuff just for the sake of knowing it as well (and promptly forgetting it, what are ya gonna do ; ).

I'm glad I've convinced my son of the value of "experiments", basic chem and physics that do cool things and have ignited his curiousity at 5 years old.

I was thinking the same thing. We had a good deal of choice of what classes to take. I didn't take Lit, but I did do the basic English classes, where we read some Shakespeare and the like, but not to the degree the Lit students did. I didn't do any complex math classes either, I did Algebra. But then I also did Applied Business, or whatever it was called. I did Civics with the base History classes. I did Home Economics in 9th grade, not a required class, but an elective. Woodshop was another example of an elective class. Have they removed electives from schools? If not then it's this dude's own fault for not choosing the proper electives. If they are gone and all that is taught is the core, then there may be too much core.

I got to disagree with the video's premise that Math, History and the cores aren't needed. Do you need Calculus, no but you should graduate with a strong understanding of basic Algebra. History is important to, though I'm not sure the methods used are effective, route memorization of facts and dates for tests, rather than a general understanding of history and how to avoid the same mistakes. Teaching for tests period is a problem... Lit isn't important and should remain an elective, but having read some of the "classics" is important too, even if it is just a quick Cliff Notes sort of version of it (do they still have Cliff Notes?) Actually a Cliff Notes rundown of lots of the "classics" would probably be better than what most English classes do, while encouraging students to read more modern what they want fare for reports and the like. I didn't take Biology, but basic Science understanding is important, problem is it's politicized and rather than stick with the facts, too many people want to introduce at the very least doubt about the facts if not introduce ideological ideas that contradict the facts and are based on a misunderstanding of what the facts actually say... due to a messed up literal reading (well when it's convenient to take literal, other times things are dismissed as "literary" or "poetic" be it about the Earth not moving or bats being birds and on and on) of one particular bronze age book.

Also you can't teach people who to vote for... you gain understanding of the issues in History and Civics... so...

How to move away from testing is a tricky thing. You need to prove you have an understanding of how to form an Algebraic formula and to solve one. You need to prove you understand the issue(s) of the Civil War and the basic era (I'm not convinced you need to remember exact dates, know it was the 1860s), same with the other wars. What was one's nation's involvement in the World Wars and what caused those wars in the first place, and again basic era, if you don't know the exact year of the bombing of Pearl Harbor or D-Day or the dropping of the atomic bombs, okay, but a basic close approximation of the years. For English you need to prove you can write and read, and a basic understanding of literature, not details of classic books, but narrative structure etc. There should perhaps be more time spent on critical thinking and how to vet sources. You need to have a basic enough understanding of science not to dismiss things as "just a theory" which proves you don't know what theory means in science, and don't ask ridiculous questions like "if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys" instead you should be able to answer that. You should be able to answer properly if somebody notes that CO2 is good for plants or that compact fluorescent have mercury in them so they aren't better for the environment than older bulbs.

How does one prove these things without tests? That's the question. And it needs to be Federally standardized to a degree to ensure that you don't have lose districts teaching that the Civil War wasn't about slavery nearly at all, rather than the fact it was the primary reason, or that Evolution is "just a theory", or deny the slaughter of the Native Americans or interment of Japanese Americans. You need to insure that all students are getting the same basics, and insure they have a good range of choices for electives. It's the basics though that basically need tested for, and I personally can't figure out a way to prove a student knows say what caused the Civil War or that they know what Evolution actually is, or how to form an Algebraic formula to solve a real life problem without a test.

Everyone is skirting the fact that parents are the first and last line of education when it comes to their children. It isn't just up to schools to teach. You must always question authority and make your own decisions, if you want your kids to know this stuff, teach it yourself! Sure you may not know 100% but every bit that is different than what cookie cutter schools teach is invaluable.

This being said, that's why my scheme of taking a qualifying test to see if you know how to do a certain percentage of the stuff that the class teaches, and then getting a 'get out of this course free' card if you pass, could be useful.

It may be the parents' responsibility to teach this stuff, but there's no guarantee that parents, particularly ones with horrendous financial management or other challenges, are going to do so. Those kids could benefit from that sort of course.

While this video has raised quite a conversation did anyone else notice that this song sucks?

Guess no one else took a music appreciation course.