24
Feb
2008
Posted in General A fellow blogger asked me some months ago about my views on the educational system. Long story short… I believe that today’s schools are almost useless and the whole system is rotten. Why?
- Teaching facts is stupid nowadays. When each and every person has access to information. The Internet made this possible. I believe that you can find more about the history of ancient Greece from Wikipedia than from every textbook available in todays school. What should then teachers do in the classrooms? They should focus on teaching kids on how to organize information and how to consume the stuff that they are running across. I remember how my dad, a high school history teacher, once told me how a girl made an essay on the greatest savior in the history: Mao. She found a website about the this great leader.
- It is not only about facts. Remember all those boring physics lessons? I totally hated them. And I bet that we own most of todays inventions to Star Trek influence. The same we own past innovations in physics, chemistry or geography to Jules Verne’s books. And I believe that what a teacher should do before assigning homeworks is to seed some dreams and inspiration. To incite the interest! How about watching “300” instead of teaching a boring greek-persian war?
- Tests are useless. National test, school-leaving examinations etc. I am not saying that competition is not healthy but that all of these imposed standardized subjects are not helping anybody. All these tests have been adopted to benefit an early industrialized capitalist society in search for a standardized employes. But that is all gone now.
But competition is good. So a good idea is to have contest on a variety of niche subjects, where students should submit their projects. For example it would be very cool to have a computer games creation competition, where teams submit their electronic games creation in order to compete. I believe that the winners will need no high grades to get hired or to start a company and get seed funding.
But things will not change the way they should. It will probably be our generation to make these changes when they will be quite obsolete.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
teaching facts is not stupid at all. everything you need is on the net but if you don’t have any basis you might not know where to start searching. there are things you have to know and for that to happen you have to learn them. also internet might be a very useful material but it can’t be the only one.
i agree completely with the 2nd point and disagree again with the third. you need those tests in order to solve the problem of competition on future education. you can’t generate niche tests to separate 14 year olds who want to go to the best high-school in the city.
February 26th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Ok…. You may have a point: if we are speaking about gymnasium…. maybe!
February 26th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
you were talking about gymnasium:)
every example you gave was from gymnasium; my point still stands for high-school too
for faculty i kinda agree with you but still the starting points have to be given for a subject and maybe the most important readings to be recommended by a tutor
February 26th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I wasn’t :). I was referring to high school and university.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Testing is useless. They should follow students in class progress instead of giving them one test which you might fuck up, If a shit mark will be stained on your report card. With all the information on the net, the tv and in books, we should be at home with no school, because drilling facts into someone won’t accomplish anything.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am
well, here’s the problem about films… “300″ has almost no historical accuracy whatsoever. This is the reason we cannot confide in movies for the information: there’s no law to force hollywood producers to create realistic (or historically accurate) films.
Besides that I agree with you teachers should teach students “how to study”, or at least 50% information, 20% organizing and how to study, 30% practical skills