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