Posted on 05/02/2016 8:04:32 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When I got out of high school in Central Florida in 1970 a buddy of mine worked at a door manufacturing business with a couple of engineers cast off from Cape Canaveral.....at minimum wage.
When the moon program was gutted, there were a lot of very highly educated people flipping burgers.
The idea pushed by many liberals that “dirty jobs”, the skilled manual labor work is beneath them, is one reason why we have so many crises.
You send kids to go to college to train for the few management and middle class knowledge labor jobs we need, employing lots of professors but resulting in many grads working menial labor with major student loan debt.
Meanwhile, due to the skills mismatch, there are many manual labor jobs begging - so employers beg for illegal and legal immigrants to do the work many of the bottom third of American kids should have been trained to do.
Now that my kids are in high school, I can really understand home schooling. I always understood wanting a good environment for the kids, but assumed the time would be too great for my wife and myself. Ours is a good high school in a good area, with good families and kids (which is why we moved to the area we live in) but I have seen, even here, in a 7-hour school day, the amount of time wasted is just amazing. Useless time like assembly, gym, or health. The teacher must spend time with all the students, smart or stupid, and spend time on discipline. Silly union work-rules and bureaucracy are another HUGE waste of time. For example, my daughter's AP Euro History teacher has been out 1/2 the year with pregnancy and illness, so the school has given the class a parade of useless substitutes. My daughter's class is far behind where they should be in preparation for the AP exam, and there is nothing administration can/will do about it, so we signed her up for an on-line course with an, energetic young teacher who sits across the country. Our daughter says she has learned more in 5 sessions than she has in 5 months in class.
In sum, I estimate the total, actual "learning" time is about 1.5 hours out of the 7 hours they are in the building.
Not only is top-down, centralized public school a bad environment, its a massive waste of time. I realize, especially with the internet, there are so many more options and communities out there. The entire system should be blown-up and re-created. Our leftist/progressive government of course is going the opposite direction, and will only make it worse as it seeks to centralize political control.
Oh yeah, well I was on Dean’s List in college.
After my GPA went over 2.0, I got off it.
Even the AP classes are BS. We looked at having our daughter have the AP stamp for chemistry. We could not because it was trade marked. If we wanted it she would have had to take a test to get it which we had to pay for. So we looked at what was tested during the AP chemistry test and it turns out 14 of 15 things not on the test she had already learned. Because they were beyond the scope of the class. So we skipped the test and put advanced chemistry on her transcripts. We figured if they asked we could explain it.
Long story short we told the college what classes she took and they said “home schooled right”. It is even apparent to the colleges that public schools are failing.
We should just teach high school the way they did 100 years ago, and separate hobbies like music, art or gym from real school subjects that might help someone earn a living.
1) They are well prepared to thrive academically.
2) They are far less likely to have “drama” in their lives which is time consuming and expensive for the colleges and universities to handle.
It requires a subscription.
Foreigners in general do tend to be better students because they often have seen what lack of an education does to people; they come from countries where they are just cogs in a massive wheel, easily replaced with a similar “part”. A century and a half ago, the only way off the farms of Ireland was an education - and we are sliding back to the same scenario here (with low-skill work replacing the potato patch).
On the other hand, many foreigners then just prolong their education here so they don’t have to return to the dump from which they escaped (or avoid military service - I went to school with Turks from wealthy families studying here for that reason).
The only thing she had trouble with was the speed of the class. By that I mean when we home schooled we sped up easy stuff and slowed down harder stuff she had trouble with. So when she started classes some parts were real slow for the other students to keep up. She was surprised that they had not learned some of the basics in high school.
We will see how she does next year when she starts getting past the stuff she was taught in high school. It will be calculus II, physics, and a little into organic chemistry. We had her take some classes that she already knew the material so she could learn the class routines.
Our homeschoolers rarely spent more than 2 hours in formal homeschooling. The rest of the day they played. It was a fascinating process to watch because gradually their play became **intense** adult level work in developing their artistic and academic talents.
All of my children play a musical instrument. All sing in our church choir and later 2 were active in the university chorus. All took dancing lessons and as teens were very active in a local ball room dancing club. As elementary school aged children they were very active in the local community theater. They were active volunteers at the local library. One became an internationally and nationally ranked athlete who traveled the world representing the United States.
Academically, all were admitted to college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. All finished their general college course and Calculus 3 by the age of 15. The two younger completed a B.S. degree in mathematics by the age of 18. One earned a masters in math by 20. The oldest still managed to finish a masters in accounting by the usual age even though he was training full time as an athlete.
Not as much of this would have been possible if they had gone to school.
It is crazy that my daughter is doing so well yet she is just average in the home school group around here.
She is not doing as well as your kids but she will still have her BS by the time she is 20. It just amazes me how far behind the public school kids are. Like you my kids spend just a few hours a day doing school work.
I hope your next pilot, surgeon & lawyer never went to school.
Then when you are either dead or in jail you can brag about how superior your spawn are.
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