Fishing License

[tfreeman at intel.digichem.net]

On Thu, 11 May 2006, 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.
> >>     
> >
<<snip>> 
> > 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.

Sadly, in my humble experience, the simple majority of people take school 
as only training for their future job. 


-- 
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If you think Education is expensive
Try Ignorance
                   Author Unknown
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