Fishing License

[Richard England]

Thomas Cameron wrote:
> Tim wrote:
>> On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 14:52 -0300, Jacques B. wrote:
>>  
>>> It's unreasonable to expect parents to have access to PowerPoint for
>>> school projects.
>>>     
>>
>> I think it's unreasonable that parents should have to stump with $1000+
>> worth of machinery (a PC), plus proprietary lock-in software, for
>> homework purposes.  And what are you going to do with it?  Use it as a
>> high priced electric typewriter, and to look up dubious sources of
>> information on the internet as your references, with no trained
>> educators to help you as you struggle along with your project.
>>
>> But then I disagree with the notion of homework, anyway.  It's only
>> value is to involve parents with their child's education, but most
>> don't, or don't do it in a worthwhile manner.  The kids go to school to
>> learn, at the end of the day they've done enough of that.  Likewise most
>> parents have had enough work during their day, and don't want to spend
>> several more hours doing work on something at home.
>>
>> It, homework, is pointless anyway.  I work in electronics, I highly
>> technical field.  I've never needed anything I was taught at high school
>> beyond basic maths in the first couple years, and the same applies for
>> most people that I know in a wide variety of jobs.  All those nightly
>> hours of grief were a complete waste of my time.  If I knew then what I
>> knew now, I would have coasted school.  I would have flatly refused to
>> waste my time with pointless rubbish, insisted that they constrain
>> themselves to teaching things that were genuinely useful, and flatly
>> refused to co-operate with any punishments meted out.  Even when I
>> worked in schools I realised it was a pointless place for most people.
> That has got to be the dumbest argument I have ever heard in my life.
>
> The academic load at school is not just to teach you the fundamentals, 
> the core bits of knowledge about mathematics or sentence structure or 
> turning wood on a lathe.  The academic mix is to teach you about 
> pooling knowledge, to be able to associate dissimilar knowledge sets, 
> to (hopefully) think critically.
>
> Learning, say, geometry might not *seem* to help you directly in your 
> job, but every time you want to cut a board or navigate a curve in a 
> car, you will be more likely to be successful if you understand the 
> concepts of measuring and calculating the curves and angles.
>
> School is about learning to think, not silos of knowledge.  I am 
> appalled that no one ever taught you that.
>
> Thomas
>
HERE, HERE!!

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