Don't stay in school

So, my 12-year-old niece showed me this:

Music sucks but the kid has at least half a point. Though I have to ask do they not teach Civics and Government anymore? I graduated in 1994 so I'm sure things have changed to a degree.

Anywho, thoughts?

I graduated in 2011 and a government class and an economics class were both mandatory to graduate. This doesn't mean that people didn't bullshit their way through them and learn nothing but the opportunity to learn about them was there and that's really all we can do.

Weird, I learned most of this at home and then again at school...

I went through an Economics and Participation in Government course in high school. And I'm not the only one. The chump in the video seems to be an exception.

Moronic. Learning should occur at all times from all sorts of sources. Should the education system also teach him how to wipe his ass? I'd tell him: Dude, I am sorry your parents sucked and all your other sources of learning sucked... or maybe you just suck.

BS Video, sounds like he's a school hater for stupid reasons, and spewing out false information about school, and making it sound like school is worse than it really is.

My teachers drilled into me that the most important thing you learn in school is how to investigate and educate yourself. That was a while ago, though, and everyone complains now that school is 'teaching to test', but I wasn't sure how far that pendulum had swung.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I didn't know loco thought he could rap or that he had red highlights.

Hee hee, and I know you said Loco obviously because of all the anti-college threads he makes. :P

that dude looks gay

I don't think he makes good points at all. The point of education should be the acquisition of knowledge not simply acquiring generalized skills you can use throughout life. Things like Shakespearean classics and sciences are equally if not more important than the general life skills that we pick up throughout life anyways regardless of whether school teaches them to us.

I actually agree with your assessment, if we only taught people what they needed to know to sort of get through an average life how would people be introduced to subjects that they might eventually become passionate about?

Also I might be more impressed if any of these ideas were originally his, but let me do a quick google search for an infographic,

and that's why it's hard for me to take this dude seriously. If he were bringing up points that he didn't simply happen to see on a facebook post I might be more invested. As it stands however he's just repeating points that he heard elsewhere which were probably made by those who didn't make it beyond lower middle class and came to blame the school system for their lack of greater success.

So?

Just an observation. There's nothing wrong with that.

I'm just going to come out and say it bluntly: That was garbage.

I listened halfway through. stopped it, and started over taking notes. Two things that really irritate me about this:

1) Literally everything he lamented that wasn't taught in school was taught to me in school. Every. Single. One.

2) Education is about more than preparing someone for a job. He's arguing that people should not have to learn about anatomy (while also arguing that we should learn medicine - but let's ignore that little tidbit), isotopes, physics, and mathematical foundations.... sigh. Education is about more than preparing the middle managers and cashiers of tomorrow. We need to know how our world functions for a variety of reasons - not the least of which because if we don't others can (and will) take advantage of our ignorance.

makes a point.. but the whole "let a 12 year old decide what they think is important to learn" is BS imo.

sometimes you just need to sit the **** down and learn what you're being taught, even if at the time you think it is pointless..

i would say the MOST important thing any school should teach a child is how that child can educate themself. at this point if you have access to the internet you have ( for all intents and purposed ) INFINITE knowledge at your fingertips. that is an unfathomable concept for pretty much all of human history.

teaching the child how to educate themself will be more useful than anything else.

i see what you guys are saying but i think everyone knows how to use the internet these days.

That dude looks like the personification of teenage Tumblr angst.

i probably should have clarified that slightly... :)

teaching children how to educate themselves and instilling in them a desire to want to will be more useful than anything else

Math past the 8th grade is the only subject that shouldn't be mandatory.

Everything else is incredibly important, especially English and History.

I agree to a degree. Math and even science classes get ridiculous at the high school level. Almost all of it is completely useless to the average person. Why I was required to take physics classes when my degree was in Liberal Arts at the time was just asinine.

Now that I have decided to change my major to engineering it makes sense for such classes to be required, but before thise classes had literally NOTHING to do with what I wanted to.do with my life.and.just wasted my time and money.

The idea is to create a well-educated individual and not someone who knows how to do just one thing. College isn't a trade school, college is about ALL the education.

wtf. Math past the 8th grade is the most important subject. Everything else you can do without. To learn most subjects at a deeper level you need a comprehensive understanding of math. Economics, physics, computer science. It even sneaks in into subjects like history and linguistics.

So this dude want to learn finance. But he doesn't want to learn how to solve a quadratic equation. My brain right now. And you don't need to go to school to learn how to vote. You put a piece of paper in a box. Why is that hard for him?

I think our educational system certainly needs to change. I would like to see an emphasis being placed on learning a trade while in high school. If I had been given the opportunity to take classes related to computers, my life would be completely different. Unfortunately I was shoehorned into an educational program that I didn't enjoy and which gave me a bad experience regarding education.

It seems like we're going in the complete opposite direction, though. We now have this common core nonsense that treats every single child as if they're the same.

physics is basically the underpinning of how the entire natural world actually works. it may not be directly related to one trying to get a job with a liberal arts degree but ****, you'd think more people would want to know this stuff..

He has a point.

School should've taught this dude to be less ugly.

He's making some pretty broad generalizations regarding school

I was taught several of the things he makes a point about not having been taught in school, so either he attended a shitty school or he wasn't giving the curriculum his full attention

This is why you refrain from projecting yourself upon the rest of the world, the world will just end up seeming as simple or as complex as the intellectual faculties of the observer allows it to be seen

School taught me that :D

It's even more complicated than that, unfortunately.

I've learned that a significant portion of the population doesn't know how to properly analyze and filter information. Things like separating fact from opinion, learning how to identify blatantly ridiculous claims against previously learned facts, knowing how to vet sources, and such are extremely important and usually overlooked. That stuff is hard.

But we live in the [mis]information age. That stuff is also important.

That's a problem with your school, not the education system. High school offers electives. Even my little podunk high school did (class size of 74) and my son's podunk high school does (last graduating class was in the 60s, although it varies a bit from year to year).

I took 2 programming classes in high school. Petition your school board to offer them if they don't already.

Come on man, I know you're smarter than that and can figure out the importance of unrelated courses. Electives help you out in the job market since employers want you to stand out - taking different courses than the garden variety engineering ones simply needed to graduate makes you a more well rounded individual and enticing to employers. If the classes themselves suck and aren't interesting, you need to pick better classes lol.

College and unvierserity is for specialized eduction.

This is 'Merica where science has no place in the lives of ordinary citizens. If we don't take science we can continue to believe the world is 6000 years old and that we don't need to take care of the environment because global warming is a hoax.

Wonderful. In the span of three posts you three have created an argument against attaining knowledge outside of your desired trade, illustrated how that stunts your worldview, and shown how that can be a detriment to your own well being as well as to society's as a whole.

Was he one of those weird Brits that ended up joining ISIS or what? Who'd give this any attention?

@br0kenrabbit: So you're like 50 years old then?

Yeah, public schooling is just that. Schooling for the government's reasons. You are starting to unschool yourself when you think that what they teach isn't for the benefit of the students.

Give me another 10 years then you can pull that one on me.

@Aljosa23: You misunderstood what I said I feel. I had a declared major of Liberal Arts at the time (thank God I woke up to how dumb that was before I really dug into the major more) yet I had to continue to take math and science courses as if they had any bearing on my life.

I say this as someone who has an interest in math and science (hence my deciding to go into Engineering). Especially at the college level I think it is bullshit that they make me take all these unrelated classes that not only cost a good chunk of money but add another year or two of schooling into the mix keeping me out of my field longer.

I want to get my schooling done and get to work. Stop wasting my time and money on shit that is completely unrelated. I can learn about what I want on my spare time.

"If the bridge says 2 tons it can hold 2.65." -Engineer friend of mine

There are parents out there who resist having their children educated in civics and government. So much that such classes would be removed from school curricula. Let's know give our children a mind and the ability to detect all the BS that's out there.

I think it depends on your school, parents, and your attitude regarding education. Perhaps he's right but as others pointed out here, they succeeded because of high school so perhaps he's wrong. I went to a fairly good high school but had a piss-poor attitude towards most of my classes. I was only interested in history and writing but lacked insight on my future plans. Some of my peers who were in the same high school did develop some great experiences and did go on to greater things in life.

It also depends on maturity. Some people mature when they're 16, 18, or even mid 20s. There's a lot of factors in all this so who knows.