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First off, I am biased. I was a hyperactive lightly dyslexic child who the Parochial school system, and a wonderful mother, turned into a National Merit Scholar. I have also had major run-ins with the American public school sector (I'm establishing bias here).
One thing that I find utterly horrifying today is that you can graduate college without any training in statistics, and get a degree in the sciences without any courses in logic. Rhetoric is becoming a lost art. "Dead white males" is used to marginalize great writing, instead of being used to increase the number of great texts, like the Tao Te Ching, which I feel should be included in at some level in required college literature classes.
High school gets scarier. You can graduate without understanding that antibiotics will only kill bacteria, and will do nothing for a cold. You can graduate without understanding how to figure out if the buy one/get one free pizza is a better buy than the large one (after you get the radius, of course). You can graduate without knowing more than two paragraphs about the crusades, because that's all that's in the history books.
You can be in seventh grade and not know how to sound out words. I know this personally, a woman whose children I raised for five years in WV, her youngest son was in this situation. They were going to pass him on to eigth grade! You can leave grade school without basic math skills, or high school and not know how to diagram a sentence, or any basic grammer at all. You can graduate college with minimal English composition skills, and still virtually no knowledge of grammer.
Before you suggest that today's primary and secondary education should only concentrate on teaching, remember that a child who is hungry, abused, neglected et al DOESN'T learn. What's even worse is they are the children needing the most intervention. My mother was wonderful, I am indeed fortunate that way, and even with my early problems, her intervention would have helped me succeed. It's the neglected children, who have never had a book read to them prior to kindergarten, who sit around in front of a television all day, whose parents undermine the efforts of schools. Berzerker, when you post about the evils of public school, please mention then how you deal with the children of the poor, and the social problems if you don't educate them.
edited grammer
One thing that I find utterly horrifying today is that you can graduate college without any training in statistics, and get a degree in the sciences without any courses in logic. Rhetoric is becoming a lost art. "Dead white males" is used to marginalize great writing, instead of being used to increase the number of great texts, like the Tao Te Ching, which I feel should be included in at some level in required college literature classes.
High school gets scarier. You can graduate without understanding that antibiotics will only kill bacteria, and will do nothing for a cold. You can graduate without understanding how to figure out if the buy one/get one free pizza is a better buy than the large one (after you get the radius, of course). You can graduate without knowing more than two paragraphs about the crusades, because that's all that's in the history books.
You can be in seventh grade and not know how to sound out words. I know this personally, a woman whose children I raised for five years in WV, her youngest son was in this situation. They were going to pass him on to eigth grade! You can leave grade school without basic math skills, or high school and not know how to diagram a sentence, or any basic grammer at all. You can graduate college with minimal English composition skills, and still virtually no knowledge of grammer.
Before you suggest that today's primary and secondary education should only concentrate on teaching, remember that a child who is hungry, abused, neglected et al DOESN'T learn. What's even worse is they are the children needing the most intervention. My mother was wonderful, I am indeed fortunate that way, and even with my early problems, her intervention would have helped me succeed. It's the neglected children, who have never had a book read to them prior to kindergarten, who sit around in front of a television all day, whose parents undermine the efforts of schools. Berzerker, when you post about the evils of public school, please mention then how you deal with the children of the poor, and the social problems if you don't educate them.
edited grammer
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