Come on you guys.
Even If spent 3x more on education, hired better teachers and did instituted some New age hipster education system. It wouldn’t pump out 21 year old doctors as easily as some of you guys think.
But the buildings would be totally bitchin’.
The streets leading up to it, and the neighborhoods? No, but the actual buildings would look top of the line, and totally not leak within a year like my old high school did.
By totally bitchin’ I actually mean boring as Hell.
I don’t think anybody here is saying that. I think what they are saying is that the current school system in America could be better. The whole Montessori thing was brought up because somebody said that way too many young people at a college town are dumbasses when it comes to doing anything outside of school tests. If people come out of university/college and still the only thing that they can do is answer test questions, then that was not time well-spent for them. If they haven’t learned how to apply knowledge they’ve gained or how to discover new knowledge (at least one, if not both), then they didn’t really come out of it educated.
But I don’t need real life skills Karnov.
I can make money writing essays for the rest of my life.
If I started going to year round school as a kid I could be [S]6…er[/S] 3 years ahead in my life. Especially in da mathz.
And that’s bullshit.
Excellent posts Karnov and Havatchu, it reminds me of the article Mark Cuban wrote a few days ago regarding the student loan bubble. In that article he stated that he felt the reason people went to college was to “learn how to learn”. If you’re just getting to college and needing to learn how to learn something went horribly fucking wrong well before you even applied.
Pretty much what happened to my cousin.
She lives in BFE.
And the government doesn’t care because the people don’t care. If people had the will to do what needs to be done, scientist’s wouldn’t be on our list of imports. You do make good points in your last paragraph that I also would like to be implemented, but I do not agree with the value of AP courses. They do nothing, and still suffer from the same problem’s regular classes suffer from.
but it would be more common, and we would have more student’s who understand what they learn, which would facilitate the whole process of education because kids are being taught ideas and concepts instead of being taught how to take exams. I willing to bet money that more than 80% of students in high school trig classes wouldn’t be able to tell me or you the relationships between a sin cos tan function graphed on X Y coordinate system, and the Unit Circle graphed in polor coordinates. If we invested not only would we have kids who understand this relationship, this would extend to other subjects such as Critical thnking in History, English, Physics, etc. And we would have student’s graduating from Engineering programs, MD programs, English, etc much earlier and with a more solid understanding of their subject of choice.
This guy is a real life version of Dr. Temna.
I just linked this to some of my co-workers. Their responses were along the lines of “pushy Asian parents.” So I asked the following questions:
“Aren’t you still neck deep in law school debt?”
“Weren’t you not able to afford a mortgage a few months ago?”
“Didn’t you tell me you had to default on a credit card debt?”
My response: “I bet you wish you had pushy Asian parents now.”
All jokes aside, good on this kid. He challenged himself, is obviously gifted (UChicago is no joke) AND he gets to help people with his talents. Overall win for humanity.
my dad was a dick, but it all worked out for the best. i’ll be a little “nicer” to my kids, but fuck yeah i’m going to buy them math and english textbooks/workbooks and make them study. but i’ll make them join a sports team too, preferably wrestling so that way if bullies try to take their lunch money they can defend themselves, that’s the only thing i wish my parents had made me do. also MMOs will be banned…
^Fish if you do that save that until they’re around 6 or 7, their early lives let them explore their world. Buy them things such as marbles, a bag of legos, etc. Things without a set form or whatnot that’ll really allow them to be creative.
I’ll recommend this book again:
Also an article by Mrs. Principe on the five best toys for X-Mas:
I understand the desire to push one’s kids to reach their full potential, but one crucial element is to allow them enough time to be kids, as Mrs. Chua found out when her wunderkind daughter exploded on her after an early childhood with extreme high standards, no sleepovers, and constant music lessons. I think a lot of the people in here remarking about the parents aren’t saying it to make themselves feel better. It’s more so to stress that being forced into stuff like Mozart right out of the cradle isn’t the optimum way to a .well-adjusted.(which doesn’t always correlate to “successful”), adulthood.
I wonder if he was spanked as a child. Judging from the success he is enjoying I would say that they probably pistol whipped him as a child and made him study at gun point. An interest strategy.
Buy kids creative toys, let them decide what they want to do with their life. Maybe the kid will take to lego’s, and someday he will be an engineer and have fun doing it. Forcing children to succeed just makes them fail in the long run. Let them live up to their potential, don’t force them to reach your expectations. The kid could be a poor doctor(in terms of work) and be unhappy with his life, but he could be an excellent programmer and be content with who he is and what he does. I think you should let them go where life takes them, and if the education system is eventually fixed, the kids will be able to see their potential and strive to reach it.
Kids whose lives are micromanaged by their parents won’t necessarily fail. They will likely become adults who thrive under micromanagement.
playtime is definitely important.
this article by some berekly dude was linked on josh waitzkin’s site (the chess prodigy in the searching for bobby fischer movie) on the importance of play, and i think josh mentioned the importance of it too in his book art of learning.
luckily my dad always bought me lego sets in addition to math textbooks, so that freedom gave me the creativity that has given me great success as a troll on the internets. my kids will have access to legos as well.