A+ derail goofy.

goofyballer is a big pile of fail here. It's almost so bad it's good, except not. My advice is avoid public schools, the government controls the curriculum, and you will get destroyed for trying to come up with your own syllabus. I went to some of the best public schools in Houston from age 5-18, and pretty much everything relevant I learned in life was on my own from age 24-26. Most everyone in the public school system gets a **** education and ends up working some slave job, or a military position.

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I don't think schools really have that big of an impact on people.

I feel cheated and abused, lol.
If they had called it a day care center I would have been ok with it.
Trying to pass themselfs off as a place where you learn important things that you just have to know was def bs.

Don't be a boring teacher plz!

The whole notion that the public school system turns kids into mindless drones is pure hyperbole at best. Yes, it does fail in many ways but I don't know a single person that I went to high school with that has a job that would be called "slave or slave labor"; even by socialist standards. I think many of you are giving way too much credit to public school teachers.

?

Who or what are you addressing this to. Also I'm not following what you're saying.

I'm not a libertarian, but I do think Gatto's "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher" should be required reading for teachers.

The problem with schools is not that they are government run, but that they consider rule enforcement their primary goal. They wouldn't admit this to be the case, but it is obviously true since minor rule infringement punishments are an order of magnitude greater than punishments for not trying to learn. Of course, rule enforcement is important when dealing with hundreds of adolescents, but what has happened is that petty rules like dress codes and etc are enforced with a ferocity that is nonsensical.

One reason Gatto is such a good teacher academically, is that he understands the administrative BS and somehow manages to connect with his students (I imagine by somehow painting himself as separate from the rules he enforces).

But private schools are just as bad at treating discipline as a priority. And, from my experience, kids from private schools are no more likely to be independent or original thinkers.

A doesn't follow from B here. Just because the main problem is that they they consider rule enforcement their primary goal, that doesn't imply that this problem isn't a result of the fact that they are run by government. Bad outcomes come out of bad processess all the time.

But private schools have the same backwards mentality. It's just not as noticeable because private schools have a lower threshold for who they can toss out and generally have parents who are more engaged in the disciplinary process.

Since both government run and non-government run schools have the same issue, I don't think government can be blamed (though it is possible government could make it worse.)

because there is hope for some people, you not so much, but many people can learn and grow as humans.

I don't understand this. What is your political philosophy? Do you think schools should be run/funded by government?

The thing is that private schools aren't really private and/or competing in a private environment.

See:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...olland-402636/


I'd also like to mention this private schooling method:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sudbury_schools

I read this to mean that a high school diploma is a "nationalized" thing and controlled/enforced by the state, which is why private schools must teach a similar curriculum as public schools? I was about to ask the question as to why most curricula are very similar. Thank you for the insight.


edit: if i had gone to one of these schools i would have been posting on 2p2 all day. i did that in college and still learned some stuff though

The point of government education is not to make anyone an outright slave. It is to get you to trust authority. It's to condition you to accept, even welcome government intrusion in your life. How successful public schools are at this is debatable, they are government run after all.

Sooner or later (probably sooner) in your public school career you are going to be required to teach your charges something you know is either blatant government propaganda or flies directly into the face of your belief system. Perhaps it will be a history class where you are required to deify Lincoln or FDR. Maybe you'll have to shill your students into having their parents sign permission slips for "voluntary" fingerprinting or additional vaccinations. Good luck and hold on to your beliefs if you can.

But I think your opinion is biased. The effect that a school has on a person, in general, is anti correlated with his intelligence. Witten (to use an arbitrary example ) would have been brilliant even if he went to the crappiest school in the country, mostly because he would just teach himself everything he wanted to know. You yourself admitted to not learning much from undergraduate classes and instead doing things more on your own.

But for most, school is quite important. For me it was. The main thing I got out of school was how to learn on my own (really, that should be the goal of any good education: not to teach facts but to teach how to learn). I guess I wasn't bright enough to know how to learn without being taught how to learn (and that turned out to be a very awkward sentence).

The point of public schools is to prepare children to enter the working world and be productive citizens. It annoys me how cavalierly people here slander the millions of education professionals.

Then how about they start by teaching things like how a credit card works and monetary management rather than mandatory classes on advanced literature.

right ... and they fail in an epic fashion.

doesnt a statement have to be untrue to be slander?

I dunno man, I think Home improvements tool time and random summer gigs time did a better job preparing me for the working world.

Catholic schools teach the values of Catholicism. Baptist schools teach the values of the Baptist Church. Government schools teach...

I don't think you are most. You were smart enough to get something out of a good school and were willing to work hard even on things that didn't directly effect your life etc. I think alot of people would get the same out of a really good school that they do out of a crappy one.

Can we just rename this "catch-all thread for people to spout ACist talking points and tin-foil hat theories about education with no rationale like robots" ? This is great! It's hilarious that you all say that the ones coming out of public school are the drones, when you've all now been conditioned to become mindless anti-government postbots.

Its sort of the obvious anybody that thinks like me is a free thinker and everybody else is a drone. I've had some pretty heated arguments with my office mate who is Chinese and believes in alot of that system. He is also one of the most creative and imaginative people I have ever met. If you want to say most government people are drones, i bet you could say the same thing for pretty much any group.

I find an overwhelming amount of support among engineers I work with as well. It's not something that comes up terribly often, but I did a search on who donated money to Ron Paul from my company, and found several friends who I had no idea were supporters. The funny thing is, the ones who are Republicans usually are for Libertarian Reasons (spending sucks), and the ones that are super liberal are also for Libertarian Reasons (big business handouts suck/civil liberties are important).

You do see some nanny-staters, but that's because they view the economy as just a big engineering problem, so if only they were in charge, they could fix all the problems and find the optimal solution. The big thing here is they often have a difficult time understanding that people often think differently and have different preferences and values than themselves.