Twelve Years of Stupid

I don't understand the public education system at all. It feels to me like it was designed centuries ago for a society in which the presence of sources of knowledge was very limited (if this sounds too wordy for you, stick with it, it gets easier and I start swearing later.); in other words, designed for a world wherein you need to retain as much knowledge as you possibly could. That's now the absolute last way I would describe our society today. We have libraries everywhere, we have the ability to communicate with many, many people, and we have the internet. On the internet, you can find almost any bit of knowledge you could ever want.

(By the way, when I say knowledge, I mean things like facts, forumlae, historic dates, and so on).

Let me phrase this in the form of a role-playing scenario/question.

You come across something you don't know the answer to. What do you do?
1. Call a friend
2. Google it
3. Give up. After all, if you don't know the answer, you should have studied harder!

Now, which of these answers applies to real life, and which one applies to a test in school? And, a better question is, why is it that the one that applies to school has nothing to do with the ones that apply to real life?

We now have smartphones and laptops which can be taken with us and can give us any bit of knowledge we would ever need. If you have a smartphone and an internet connection, congratulations, you have access to everything anyone has ever studied, worked on, experimented with, published, wrote, or ranted. Knowledge used to be very valuable, because it was hard to find. Printing presses were rare, books were rare, libraries were rare. What you could learn was very valuable because, if you forgot something, you would never know if you could look it up again. Now, we can find knowledge anywhere. If you are ever curious about anything, you can go to your nearest library, computer, or wi-fi enabled smartphone, and look it up. Knowledge is everywhere.

Schools don't know that. Schools now have libraries in them, we have computer labs and the internet and we're still being taught as though these things don't exist. Let me explain to you what I mean: Exams. You sit in a room, filling out, essentially, a form that tests you on your ability to regurgitate answers someone else came up with. Talking to another person is considered cheating, looking up some information in your own notes is considered cheating, looking up information on the internet is considered cheating. How is this sort of testing preparing anybody for anything resembling real life? In what situation are you going to have to solve a given problem with a given solution without being able to call someone, ask someone, or look something up? Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Cash Cab? The only examples I can think of are TV quiz shows, and if that's what we're preparing our kids for then we are setting the bar very, very, very low.

I recently took a test in Earth and Space science; I am certain that, given the ability to google absolutely anything, I could have scored 100% on that test. Kids today can find anything they would ever be asked, but adults seem to think that finding information is somehow inherently worse than knowing information; instead of learning to find anything you may ever need to know whenever you need to know it, they expect you to just "study things and hope they come in handy later."

That's fucking wrong.

My Computer Science class is a brilliant class because of how open-ended it is. We are given tools (i.e. we are told what loops are, what methods are, strings, variables, conditional statements, and so on) and then we are given problems. Our job is to find how to solve a given problem using anything we have learned, and anything we want to look for on the internet. That sounds an awful lot like real life. Why aren't there any more classes like this? Classes should have less structure, and kids should have more time to figure things out on their own, using any resources they have available. Schools are not preparing kids today to find and solve practical problems; schools today are training their students to be good at terribly designed and outdated forms of standardized testing. Why? So that your academic achievement can be butchered, turned into a number (your grade point average) and then given to a soulless corporation or government branch which determines how much money the schools deserve.

Schools lie to us, constantly. They tell us all we're different, but they treat us like we're all the same. For eight years, everyone is taught exactly the same subjects using exactly the same (flawed) teaching methods and judged by the same standards. In some cases, kids can skip a grade or repeat a grade, but these cases are very few and very far between. Why are we grouped by age? Age is probably the most arbitrary way to separate kids into learning groups. Let kids form their own groups; groups based on common interests, on learning methods, on levels of intelligence. We're not new to the idea of finding friends; we certainly do a lot of that during whatever time you give us when you're not busy hammering us in the face with rote learning. Why do you think people like to sit with their friends in classes? Because when you're with your friends, you learn from each-other. If you understand each-other and you are comfortable with helping each-other, or asking for help from each-other, guess what?

You're fucking learning!

If kids are arbitrarily (a fancy word that means "for no logical goddamn reason") thrown into classes of twenty or thirty, and the class progresses at the rate of the slowest kid (remember, no child left behind!), you're failing to provide an education to the smarter kids in favour of making the slow kids feel better. We start separating kids by what groups they want to be in (Here, the different courses are called Academic or Applied - courses for bright, university-bound kids versus kids who just need credits, to apply for college, to get into trades, etc.) That's a few years overdue, to say the least. I think, if you're good at math, and you want to challenge yourself with more advanced math to get you in more jobs where math-based problem solving is required, chances are, you know long, long before the ninth grade that you can crunch numbers better than the doofus three rows down cramming crayons up his nose. And maybe, just maybe, if math class trucked along at the rate the kids who were good at math moved (you know, the ones that actually have some interest in that class), we wouldn't have high-school and university teachers complaining today about how "kids are unprepared for higher-level learning."

Schools also tend to spend a lot of time trying to get kids to stay in school. They do this by giving people shit for skipping school, especially if it was during something "important" (i.e. a test, a presentation, etc.) Generally, any time they're dehumanizing you by reducing your intellectual worth to a number, they sure as hell don't want you to be late.

Why does this sort of thing have to have artificial consequences? A detention, in and of itself, solves nothing; if skipping school was actually bad, people would stop skipping school to begin with. It's like saying "don't touch that poison ivy, or I'll punch you in the face." If the people who skip school were given any reason not to skip school (for instance, if the curriculum started offering engaging courses in which students were allowed to think for themselves), we wouldn't need artificial consequences. Hell, we don't even need them now. Here's how you save schools a whole bunch of time and headache:
1. Tell kids to go to school.
2. If they don't go to school, leave them the fuck alone. The fact that they missed out on learning the material should be enough of a consequence; if the material was important, they wouldn't skip school to begin with, and if it's not important to them, why are you punishing them for making what they believe is a rational decision?

Let me phrase this another way: if Timmy gets a more fulfilling experience by playing World of Warcraft than by going to school, why is that Timmy's fault? The two pastimes have the same goal - make Timmy give a shit - and World of Warcraft is clearly the winner here. If schools were teaching Timmy things he could easily see were important (for instance, let's pretend Timmy lives in a forest, and schools had a university-level class on how to kill a bear with your bare goddamn hands) you bet your ass Timmy's eyes would be glued to the blackboard like Bill Cosby's kids on a handful of Jello brand pudding pops (they taste just like Jell-o gelatin.). If Timmy decides the class isn't important, we can assume natural selection will kill him off before his genes have a chance to be passed on. You don't always have to defy nature, folks, sometimes it just knows what it's doing.

And here's another question: why is it that if I miss something like a test or an assignment, I am treated as guilty until proven innocent? If I miss a test, I need to provide a doctor's note or a court order. Here's why this is stupid:
1. You don't always see a doctor if you feel shitty. Some people have the mental capacity to figure out when they just need a little Robitussin and a few naps, I don't need a guy with a degree in a white coat to tell me I've got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.
2. People who pretend to be sick to skip school don't give a shit about their marks, so failing them on a test they missed isn't a punishment at all.

What this means is that the smart people - i.e., the ones who can self-diagnose common household maladies and treat them on their own, while also knowing that doing good in school is important (important to whom is a separate issue entirely) - are being punished. The only way around this is to:
1. Waste a doctor's time with something you could have handled yourself solely because the people at school seem to think you and your parents are filthy liars, and the doctor is a paragon of truth and justice and only gives out doctor's notes to people who are really sick.
2. Go to school despite being sick, probably infecting several people in the process.

As a result, people who want to do good in school are punished while the people who, quite frankly, don't give a shit, aren't going to start giving a shit. Great job.
Here's another thing I don't understand: homework. Homework is an absolutely terrible idea that accomplishes nothing beneficial to anybody except an impatient teacher working behind a flawed curriculum on a tight schedule. I am firmly in belief that if I go to a place and do work I'm not getting paid to do, then that work should at least give me the courtesy of not following me home. People often reply to this complaint with "oh, but the curriculum has packed too much material for the school day to handle!" or "oh, but with the elimination of the thirteenth grade we have to cover more subjects" and an old favourite, "Kids need to practice the skills they learn at school, at home."

When was the last time an auto-mechanic went home and took apart his car, then put it back together, simply because "I need to practice the skills I use in the workplace, at home!" I guarantee you it's probably never (unless the guy was secretly building a Batmobile and a Tron bike in his garage). You know why? Because he gets enough of that shit at work! If he doesn't know something, here's what he does:
1. Find the manual.
2. Read the part of the manual pertaining to the thing he wants to do
3. Do what the manual said he should do

What is it that students are doing that is so important they can't do it in six hours a day, and they have to take it home with them to do it some more? If there really is something wrong with the curriculum, why don't you call whoever the fuck is in charge and get them to get their shit in check and fix it? If a bridge has a big hole in it, you don't just put up a sign that says "Warning: big fucking hole in bridge ahead" and hope everyone gets used to the fact that there's a big fucking hole in the bridge ahead, you fix the goddamn hole! And yet, we're applying weird band-aid solutions to big, gaping cannon-ball-wound-sized problems. Like, instead of allowing us to use a computer, a nearby library, a close friend, or even our own notes* during a test, they tell us "oh, study with your friends/the internet/at a library, but don't you dare try to use your resources on a test!

And hell, maybe if you stopped giving these kids homework they might occasionally have enough energy at the end of the day to come up with one of their own thoughts.

*Some teachers actually allow you to take a limited amount of information with you to a test, say, a one-sided page of notes. There is some hope left in the world.

"Schools don't teach us how to learn. Schools teach us how to hate to learn." -Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes. Schools teach us how to be evaluated. Schools teach us how to appeal to the folks in charge of handing out jobs, scholarships, and college admissions. They're not teaching us, they're training us. Like dogs. The only reason I'm in school is because there are people out there with employment opportunities who think school is somehow important, necessary, helpful, or anything that isn't synonymous to "a huge waste of time."

The reason we, as kids, don't like school is because school doesn't offer us anything we find useful. If your child tells you he doesn't want to go to school, what are you going to do? Acknowledge the fact that schools are outdated and teaching based on obsolete principles? Or are you going to tell your kid to shut the fuck up and pump them full of whatever drug gets them in a mood you approve of? When are we going to acknowledge the fact that standardized testing is a terrible way to judge anyone's achievement and that the ability to find information is infinitely more important than the idea to memorize it?

If children are the future, stop preparing them for the past.