My whole high school experience seemed pointless to me.
My college experience wasn't any better. It was rehashing the stuff I was supposed to have learned in high school, with just a little more detail.
As the article says, perhaps this is just what guys do. Maybe we should be taught things that have more immediate paybacks, or at least frame subjects in a way that kids can relate to.
Why not teach kids skills they really want to learn, and could get genuine use out of?
I've never understood why we should waste time on Shakespeare, for instance, when reading him requires that we acquire an entirely new vocabulary we will never use again for as long as we live.
I definitely think I would have gotten a lot more out of school if I'd been able to learn more creative writing and less reviews of books I wasn't terribly interested in in the first place. Creative writing, after all, is something you can do as a career. Nobody's interested in your review of 'Henderson, the Rain King' save your teacher. And maybe, not even her.
So why make assignments like that the center of education, when people could be taught how to be creative and how to stretch their imaginations?
D
Those are all good points. I agree that boys, and often girls, too, would benefit from education that teaches them to do something useful. Fixing an air conditioner, for example, would be more valuable to me than all the Spanish literature I've studied :-).
We live in a society that emphasizes "schooling" rather than "learning" or "education." I find that makes it difficult to focus on what my children really want to learn and might need to know (for real life), because we also have to consider what the state wants them to be doing now, and what colleges will want them to know and have done for admission. While it's true that college is not always valuable for a student, I want them to have the opportunity, if they choose to pursue it!
I like your suggestion about creative writing. My oldest daughter does a great deal of that, and it definitely develops skills. However, it's also useful to do persuasive and expository writing -- giving facts about things, expressing and opinions and reasons. Free Republic gives us all opportunities for reading and writing of this kind :-).
Regarding literature, I agree that much of what is taught in school is pointless at that time in life, and in that situation. Most of the world's great literature is aimed at willing adults, not incarcerated 15-year-olds. When a person wants Shakespeare in his life (or Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy, etc.) those books are available in the library, along with the information the reader needs to help him understand it, if he finds it difficult.
This is what people (of any age) will do when they WANT to read and understand something, instead of being forced to. For example, I taught myself to read French in college (although my efforts to speak it are catastrophic), because I wanted to read "Cyrano de Bergerac" in the original.
I've never understood why we should waste time on Shakespeare, for instance, when reading him requires that we acquire an entirely new vocabulary we will never use again for as long as we live.
How would kids know whether or not what they desire out of education is genuinely useful? There are undoubtedly some kids who think watching MTV is enough education for them.
True, Shakespeare may not have a contemporary application--especially with the way kids butcher plain English, using tools such as instant messaging and e-mail--but that doesn't mean that there isn't educational value in learning the social, political, and historical implications that Shakespeare's works had on modern literature.
I remember a class I took on database management in college. The professor told us, "I'm not going to teach you specific database packages such as FoxPro, Access (or whatever else was popular at the time). Instead, I'm going to teach you how datbases work in general, after which you'll be able to apply to any database package."
It was sage advice. Knowing only things that have "immediate payback" are fine, but not always transferable. Understanding the foundations of things, whether it be phonetics, algebra, logic or ancient history goes much further to creating a life-long learning experience.
The whole thrust of FR is recognizing the "rot" that comes out of many people's mouths. You can't do that by simply learning air-conditioning. In that case you are driven to and fro by one demagogue after another.
I sincerely doubt that most subadults have a clue about what's good for them. Parental guidance is needed or else, if left to the whims of teenage boys, the reading curriculum might look like something out of Hustler magazine
Shakespeare is about pushing the boundries of language to make something beautiful. He made up, quite literally, many of the words and phrases still in common use every day, many by people who have no idea what they are really saying. You probably quote him constantly.
Well, I went to a school in the 70's where they dispensed with all that outdated stuff. We never did Shakespeare, or read classics. We did a lot of 'creative' poetry writing; we read science fiction, we read some other strange stuff. We did the "who to throw off the lifeboat" exercises over and over, studied communist countries, and the 'culture of poverty'. This was all supposed to prepare better for the real world than all those old, stale lessons that those older than us had. We never had to memorize math tables, never had grammar (we got brand new books in 5th grade, but never opened them). My understanding of history was woefully inadequate to put current events in any context (WWII was never mentioned in any of the years I was in school, because it wasn't 'current events', wasn't 'social studies' and wasn't far enough back to be history to any of my teachers).
Science worked out pretty well, as we did a combination of labs and studying the scientific method.
Foreign languages weren't required, but I was interested so I learned enough spanish and russian to understand the similarities in language. Incidentally, in Spanish class I learned english grammar.
In english I've found that there are often references to literature that I don't understand, having never read the books that most other people have. I learned to write on my own more than I did in english class, where we did more True-False and multiple choice exercises than we did actual paragraph writing.
In summary, as a student of the 70's in a college town, where we were the guinea pigs for many of the things you see in public schools today, I don't see them as that positive. I didn't get a great education (even though the school district then and now considers itself "world class"), but I did learn to read well enough to learn whatever I needed to catch up on for myself. Of course, that probably wasn't because of the 'whole language' reading we got. It's more because my older sister (having the older teachers who weren't trying all the latest methods) came home from school every day when I was 3 and 4 and had to play school, where she was the teacher and I learned to read and add...
Most telling statement on FR, ever. You've defined yourself, albeit negatively.