This is a branch-off debate topic from the dress code discussion.

For the vast majority of kids in their teenage years, their government mandates them to attend a four year educational institution.

For the sake of simplicity, I will be focusing on the American High School system.

In my personal opinion, I feel that the high school system as it is right now, is not adequate in serving its intended purpose to prepare teenagers for the world ahead.

Rather, teenagers suffer through the trivial and often irrational "education" they are forced to go through and learn what they need to learn during the breaks between those cranial force-feedings.

I feel that the high school system is inefficient, impractical, and should be revamped entirely, with a focus on social interaction, employment, and self-study.

I think high school exams have turned into papers for which you have to prepare by learning useless information by heart without understanding it. People who understand the course get lower marks compared to those who just learn the content by heart.

And the course is irrelevant. And I'm talking about College too. Why should a young person who aspires to be an engineer have to learn about literature? And that too, useless poetry about the French revolution which I don't need to care about

I think, high school needs reformed. The current system is a bit of a waste of time. Most of my high school was able to help me in college, but that was just because I took AP courses and was able to earn college credit from the AP exams.

I know a few states are looking into, or are currently, making high school into just two years. I think this is a better idea. This way less time would be wasted, and people can start sooner on their careers.

I'm on the fence bout this as my highschool ended up making the first two years of college [ie, all lower div classes and some of the uppers] pretty easy because it was very hard on you. Try taking 5-7 classes in a HS with a 95% asian population, tough teachers who can scare the bejeezus out of you, and getting something above a 3.5GPA. You either sink or swim at my hs which was a pretty good lesson.

On another note: I don't see how hs is suppose to get you ready for the world. Currently a highschool degree is useless because people are more willing to hire a college graduate than a highschooler. Unless one wants to stay in a minimum wage job for the rest of their life, a highschool degree ain't going to cut it most of the time.

The way I see it, hs is suppose to prepare you for college and nothing more. A bit like how middle school was a stepping stone to hs and had no purpose after that.

So, since my hs was very good at preparing me for college the system worked very well for me. I bet if every hs had the horrors standards like mine, there would be a lot more competition in college (and probably more hs suicides too. My hs ended up in a pilot program to prevent depression/suicides cuz it was so hardcore. Ah well.) lol.

@theone:
"And the course is irrelevant. And I'm talking about College too. Why should a young person who aspires to be an engineer have to learn about literature? And that too, useless poetry about the French revolution which I don't need to care about"

^because many people do not know what they want until they try something new. I don't know how many times I've heard about college people switching majors constantly before settling on one that suits them. They didn't like/failed their initial major and dropped it in favor of other things.

If I take an entire society within the teenage population. And put a survey up, majority of the people will agree to the fact that high school education is worth it. And it helps you in college. No one can deny that.

Suggestion: put up a poll.

You’re argument is entirely opinion based. You haven’t stated facts to support it. Perhaps high school is a waste of time for you, but not for everyone else out there who, as mentioned before, don’t even like studying to begin with, and would end up doing nothing if they hadn’t attended high school.

High school education has its value. If you don’t know the basics in life, you can’t take a step forward.

The grading curve in the Canadian HS system is awful. It's what's making things easier and easier and making kids think less and less. Nowadays, they're more worried about being one of the cool kids than learning in high school, so the things we learn are crap.

I used things I learned in high school on a daily basis, like when I dabbled in web design. I did get paid through ads. (Around 2400 a month altogether) My other jobs didn't have much to do with HS though. I was a waitress, a stocker, secretary (Oh wait, learned the skills for that in high school).

Social skills are important. Charisma is something you can learn while developing your personality during puberty. =/

In truth there is some dismay about the level of "education" in colleges here in the US as well Lack of Rigor.

One thing which is true in school and in life, YOU need to seek out the best things for you. Take the AP/advanced courses, challenge yourself and gain your own experiences. I know that in college, I had very little good science background and basically taught myself first semester chemistry while I took the second semester course with lots of people who had had AP chem and I still ended up with a Chemistry degree, so don't be afraid to go the extra mile - you will be doing yourself a lifetime of favors.

As for why you need to take art or other classes you aren't "interested" in? In this world - you never know what you will need. Most people change jobs several times and you will need many, many skills to get along in life. All knowledge is worth having IMHO and you can never stop learning.

I think that High School should be four years. For one thing, we learn our social skills from there, even if it's not a class. We also learn the things that will usually have an application in the real world there. Some of the courses have a focus on University/College, so they're not meant just to prep you for the work place. If they did, then we wouldn't know that much about things like chem/biology.

Something else- people really need to be in a learning environment or a place where they aren't just in the workplace during their teen years because they both physically and mentally aren't ready to deal with the real world.

One more thing- I heard somewhere that you need to take an English/your language course if you want to be an engineer because sometimes, the writing in reports and other documents was unintelligible. Do not know if this is accurate info or not... Correct me if I'm wrong.

Quote:

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

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I admit that I don't have facts, because what type of facts are you looking for? A comparison trial between kids who have gone to high school and kids who haven't?

What I'm looking for is some rationality. It's one thing to argue that students should be forced to branch out in order to expose them to things they might be interested in. However, it becomes absurd to make compulsory classes that basically continue at more sophisticated levels if the student had absolutely no interest in it whatsoever at the basic level.

And don't you think there's a reason that some students have seemingly no will to study? There's no learning disorder going on. It's just that the piano prodigy who dreams of going to Juilliard and becoming a concert pianist doesn't have much interest in the study of Earth Science. Instead of wasting those 10 hours a week of studying, sitting in class, and doing homework for a subject he is going to wipe out from his brain the second after finals are over, he could have spent that time furthering his goals.

Kids don't like doing what they are forced to do. Not at that age. The younger generation is not being well served by the old methods of gathering information. Not with the booming use of the internet.

Quote:

I'm starting to get a little frustrated with our continual miscommunication. Do you really think my argument is "High school teaches you the basics in life, therefore, we should ban it"?

Before we continue, could you reflect in your own words, what you think my problem is with high school? I just want to check that we're on the same page, because it's like you're arguing with a completely different person.

If I'd stayed in normal high school, I would not have been allowed to go anywhere... thank Boeing for tech schools... >_>

High school =/= education

Public High school that I attended was focused more on paying teachers and letting psych majors try their thesis out on unknowingly forced audiences. I was considered weird in High school for:
not smoking pot
being intelligent
not being obsessed with one of the 3 big groups, anime, sports/farming, or drugs
not doing underaged stupid things with girls (I'm saving myself, also considered weird)
not sleeping in class
not smelling like animal manure every day
being a pilot (although in the right circles this got me some cool points)
being a computer technician
coming from a business family
not being messed up somehow (o.0???)
being multilingual


High school needs to be reevaluated in the US because the US is doing so poorly right now.

We need less focus on useless credit-crunch classes, and more focus on real skills.

In countries that are doing well:
2nd languages are taught to fluency
2nd languages are useful [ie: my friends from japan all can speak spanish, Chinese, German, or french; in addition to Japanese and English]
business 101 is required
How to get a patent IN THE US is a mandatory class [many americans have no real idea what a patent actually does or what types there are]
Business law is a recommended class
Manufacturing is actually a class
There are classes for Technical English[/Spanish/language] for computers[/business/research/medical/major/field]
School doesn't start near as early
School lunches are much better
Calculus II is considered 10th grade level, after that you decide how much more math you want
"Environment" isn't the main focus of science classes
They don't actually have shop, their "shop" has evolved into manufacturing
You can (sometimes have to) start taking field related classes as early as US middle school age

They need to incorporate some of these things if they want to do well.

@ FishSantiago: Waitwaitwait... Calculus II is 10th grade level math? 0.o My god, I would die.

:.:.:

In my high school, we had three education 'levels': General Education, College Prep, and AP/Advanced. We also had a technical/vocational school that was an option in Jr/Sr year.

I took mainly college prep and AP classes and still wasn't prepared for college. When I first went to college, I had no idea at all how much work it would be. I don't think my education was wasted, but I do think I could have been better prepared for college.

Unfortunately, part of my problem in college was that I couldn't get away with things like I did in high school. Because I was what was considered a 'good kid', I got away with a lot of things I shouldn't have.

For example, in my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I had a full 8-class schedule, with no study hall. So, I tended to do the 'homework roulette' when I did home work. Sadly, this meant I was spending three hours doing homework, and only half of it got done. But at the end of the quarter, my teachers would still let me turn in the homework I missed. This was in part because I actually did well on tests and the homework I did turn in, but also because I didn't act out in class.

Also, even though my school required all college prep students to take two years of a foreign language, pretty much the only thing I can remember from French class is how to ask 'may i go to the bathroom/library' and say 'I don't know'. I know more Japanese then I do french, just from watching sub-titled anime and not trying to learn it. That's really sad.

So, when I went to college, and couldn't get away with that type of thing anymore... It wasn't the only thing happening at the time to make college harder, but it certainly didn't help things.

:.:.:
I have a question: did anyone's high school force them to take a 'fine art' class as a graduation requirement? Mine did, but I have no idea if that is normal or not. We also had to take economics, but that class was such a joke it wasn't even funny. We learned nothing in that class, and we weren't allowed to take the books we were 'learning' out of home. The class was such a waste of time.

Quote:
I've seen cases like this. My high school was a regular Catholic high school but when I was in grade 11, it also became a performing arts school (basically having two streams: a regular stream and a performing arts stream). I was a regular in the school band but also taking private piano lessons, so the music teacher was telling me how frustrated he was because there was a kid who auditioned for the piano/keyboard program at our school. He was very talented and could play professional level pieces, but the school wouldn't accept him because his grades in other subjects were not as polished >_>

Which makes me think that perhaps high schools should allow students more choice, so they can study what they want to study.

However, how many teens actually know what they want to do with their lives to pick wisely? I'll bet the vast majority would simply seek out the "bird courses". After all, a course like calculus is hard work and who wants to work hard when you could be hanging out with friends?

And being presented with too many choices can be confusing and overwhelming for someone who doesn't know what they want to do. Sure, someone who wants to be a professional pianist or a math teacher or a doctor may be able to pick out the courses that will help them reach their goals, but the majority of people I knew in high school (including myself) had no idea what they wanted to do. Even now, after university, I know people who don't know what they want to do.

However, I am in agreement that the way in which high schools go about teaching students is wrong and needs to be revamped. People need a reason to learn. Also, simply memorizing facts to regurgitate them on paper is useless. Students need to learn to think critically, to use and apply knowledge rather than simply memorize, and maybe then they'd want to learn.

For example, there was one science teacher at my high school who was very...unconventional...but everyone in his class loved him. Why? Because he dispensed of the traditional lectures and textbook questions and instead devised ways of teaching that were fun. Chemistry was learned through the art of wine making (they actually got to make wine LOL). One project (probably related to physics? I'm not sure) had to do with building rockets with a competition for whose rocket could go the furthest. In that way, he made learning interactive.

Also, here in Ontario at least, I believe school before university isn't challenging enough. I remember first learning how to find the area of a rectangle in grade 3 or 4, but in grade 8, the teacher was still reviewing it. I was bored and a bit irritated that we were simply repeating lessons rather than moving forward. In high school, I was able to get by without doing much work because I found most of it easy. I mean, when a grade 9 geography assignment deals with colouring maps, you know it's too easy. I appreciated the teachers who actually challenged us (which is why I really liked my grade 11/12 biology teacher and my grade 10 and 12 English teachers).

@Fish- True, true. One of my cousins is studying in the US in the University of Colorado, I think. Sorry if the spelling is wrong or something. Anyways I've done the same thing for Grade 10 and we're studying more advanced stuff in Grade 11 now.
Also, even though I hate the literature part as I said, we get to learn lots of languages. For example, I know French, Italian, Urdu, English and Arabic.
As one person, put it
"You know that education levels are dropping when foreigners start speaking better English than Americans."
This is happening. Some people in the US have terrible English and terrible spelling

lol - yeah I would agree that learning your own language well is a better thing than emphasizing learning a second or third language. Still, there is a lot more to learning a language than just the words - it's an exercise in learning how another culture thinks, eats, ideas, history, etc. so learning a second language (even if you don't get to be proficient in it) is a good idea.

I didn't have to take art in High School, but I did in college. A well rounded person has some exposure to art, science, literature, history, economics (which was I will admit very basic at my high school, but something is better than nothing), civics, math and language (yours or someone elses). Being a part of society means that even pianists need to know something about the scientific method and logic and math majors need to know some history, etc.

Of course we were in a rural setting, so things like tech courses were available for those who wanted to take them. Business was another of our elective areas in my high school. I have to say that I NEVER saw a bigger bunch of lazy people than in the business class I took in college - they insisted on only learning as much as was necessary to pass the tests - it was SUCH a bore.

As for learning about patents - I have to say that I don't necessarily think people need to know so much about the ins and outs of this - but more the general ideas of copyright laws, patent protection and licensing. In truth, I think the idea of plagerism is a more foreign concept to most American students these days and that is definitely a problem.

@lj: learning a language is pretty much "memorize this list of ____ words" and use them in a sentence. How is that learning about another culture?

Also, i don't see the point in learning about patents. It's not like any of the hs are inventors who need to patent stuff. And really, learning about patents won't do a thing about plagiarism. Almost the first thing every teacher did at my hs was pound in your head that plagiarism is bad, the consequences of plagarism, etc. Doesn't mean it won't happen.

Also, copyright laws? Most hs kids by this time have downloaded at least one song/movie/game/ebook by now. They know its protected/copyright, but don't care. So teaching them that isn't going to change anything.

"they insisted on only learning as much as was necessary to pass the tests"
^ isn't that like for everything? College, hs, elementary, middle school. Name one level of schooling when people are suppose to learn beyond what they need for the test.

@KTC- Exactly. As a student, I can say we don't even learn the whole course, only that which is important and most likely to come

@theone: Naw, not even what is important. just what's most likely to be on a test.

Speaking as a science major all you do is regurgitate what you memorized until your upper divs. Now most of my upper divs classes expect you to not only memorize, but also think outside the box. Much harder to do. Unsurprisingly, the toughest classes in the bio department are the ones that ask the most in the memorization and the thinking outside the box.

@KTC- It's the opposite for me. I hate memorisation and like thinking outside the box questions more. One more thing, am I the only one who learns stuff for one day only? I don't remember the answers 1 day after the test

@theone: haha, than science majors aren't for you probably.

Cuz I swear, science majors are 3/4 memorize, and 1/4 thinking outside the box. (Or in some cases like my cell bio class, all memorize. Which was nasty because each chapter was 100 pgs and you have to memorize each chapter. Ugh. Teacher was really nasty to put something on the test that, in the book, was barely a blurb.)

Them sociology/psych/history majors though got a lot more going in the thinking department.

As for remembering: naw, i tend to retain stuff for at least a few weeks.

I am taking science. Just not Biology. i'm taking chemistry, physics and Maths which is mostly being practical and innovative except the formulas and derivations

A funny incident I remember from my O level Bio class.
Bio Miss: If you get a good grade in the board exam, I'll resign
3 Months later
Me: Miss? You're resigning?
Miss: Why would I do that?
Me: I got 91%
Miss: That was because of my hard work
Me: Yeah, right.