Motorcars? Um...

From skimming a bunch of the blogs, pretty much everything has been said so warning: I'm just going to go and sorry if I repeat.

Have any of you experienced a time when, while reflecting on life, you come to the conclusion all Americans think the same way? Yeah, neither have I. Look how divided we are on political issues, religion, etc! If we were motorcars, then we would all be exact replicas, and anyone can see this is not the case.

Yes people have jobs they're not much concerned with. If we look at reasons for that, is the education system to blame? Perhaps it's a boring job, but they make a lot of money. Maybe they inherited the family business. Or maybe it was established when they were born they would be working for the community industry (e.g. mining). It's a complicated "problem".

I agree with Jay. The arguments for educational reform are trite because we all know that a radical transformation would take money and resources that aren't available. In an ideal world, we'd have a 1:1 teacher-student ratio and students would constantly be challenged the perfect amount. Not going to happen.

Yes schools are focused on certain abilities, but look at what's important in a society. I don't need to delve into the importance of citizens being literate and able to do math- it's obvious.We learned from the atomic bomb that science is power, so obviously schools will expose students to that field. Many students are good at soccer and football, but very few will play professionally, so should everyone do it? Having a nation where 50% of the population are artists won't help us stay on top. Sorry.

He also mentions competition. This, again, I feel is not the fault of the school systems, but rather the growing population. You can't have a 3.5 and have Tech be your backup school anymore because there are more people with higher GPAs who can fill those spots. Students aren't stressed because of standardized tests (at least the ones at my high school aren't) because they don't care. The ones who do care are stressed because of the pressure to attend college, not because they feel their education isn't liberal enough. Besides, in high school, we were given 3 elective courses to take what we wanted.

I want to see where he got his statistic about "more people..dropping out of education." Doing minimal research shows that the dropout rate is decreasing, and 2007 was the first year the drop out rate was less than 9% (www.nces.ed.gov). Dumb.

I agree there are some small changes that could occur, but a radical change isn't what we need.


http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16