221–230 of 371 posts
It should not be judged so easily. However I have to say when I was in MBA course in US, I don't know why the teacher needs to teach the students how to calculate a linear equations of two unknowns. In China that is a question in elementary school and less than grade 5. I wonder how they graduated from high school and learning business.
Of course the US does poorly in this survey. The survey measures life skills. We've spent the last decades changing our schools from teaching life skills to pure college prep. A terrible disservice to young people. Here's some sample questions http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Education%20and%20Skills_onli... .
yeah just talking to elementary school kids from America vs. Korea was an eye opening experience. I couldn't help but feel that the future is kinda bleak for American society because so much of it is centered around jock/warrior culture that places far more emphasis on physical education whereas in South Korean kids who study and is intelligent is revered as the alpha male model. Kinda explains why South Korea ranks…
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> Help your parents with tech support at least once a year I did that for a while, then once, when she had a basic problem with her printer, we spent a rather tense evening while I walked her through how I think through technical problems piece by piece and google stuff I don't know. She ended up figuring out a solution that I was unaware of. She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me)…
I used to work support for an agricultural telemetry company, and on helping a user with a laptop-based problem over the phone, he said "lucky we have you smart guys, I'm so dumb". To which I said "I know about computers, but I couldn't concrete in a post. The stuff you find trivial around the farm is stuff I'd struggle with" I meant every word, too. I mean, I could describe the basic actions of concreting in a post,…
It's not like we're expecting people to have a specialized skill in technology. They don't need to program.
Basic technical literacy should be treated like basic literacy: treated as a basic requirement of being a functioning adult and as something you would never outsource to others.
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13 year olds should be treated like 13 years olds: they go to school and after they leave they get to go hang out with their boy/girlfriends, do sports, ride their bikes around or play videogames with their friends.
Mozart at 13 was not hanging out with his friends partying around.
I don't expect the public school system to teach my children anything. Hence why they won't be attending. Most of the schools I attended growing up were completely useless. Filthy, full of drugs and gangs. Sadly I even listened to some of my teachers more than I did my own parents (indoctrination) which I now see lead me down the wrong path. I don't expect the public school to teach my kids any kind of career skills…
> Think they'll teach them Python or Swift? Those will not be a career path for much longer. > Conversely, I fully expect to start "outsourcing" my web dev work to my children when they are 13. Child labor got outlawed long ago, which is one of the reasons a lot of countries have mandatory education. High school is about much more than learning programming language or marketable skills, that's what you have secondary…
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One has to wonder...does it really matter what you learn in school? Relative to who you meet, and what brand you get to slap on your resume at the end of the day? Do you remember anything you learned in AP Calc or APUSH all those years ago? I think it's important to learn how to think. But you can always do that in your 4 years at college, once you get into an ivy league, right? Who needs life skills when you can get…
before you care about that question, you should ask yourself, "should it?." BTW: Am I doing this little american grammatical quirk with the punctuation within quotes right?
Give a few of these pages a read if you'd like to really get into it:
From Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS style), "Q: This may be impossible": http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Pu...
From Modern Language Association (MLA style), https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/03/
From American Psychological Association (APA style), http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...
I don't expect the public school system to teach my children anything. Hence why they won't be attending. Most of the schools I attended growing up were completely useless. Filthy, full of drugs and gangs. Sadly I even listened to some of my teachers more than I did my own parents (indoctrination) which I now see lead me down the wrong path. I don't expect the public school to teach my kids any kind of career skills…
I learnt those things, and while I really did not want to learn most of it back then, I am glad now that I did.
"Non scholae, sed vitae", as they used to say back at my school.
And even if you restrict the use of a school education to "preparing you for work", I for one did not know what I wanted to do until I was roughly 17-18. And then, I was spectacularly wrong about it and took a few years to find my calling in computers at about 22.
On the other hand, school is - let's face it - where kids learn a huge percentage of their social skills and make friends. That is not to be underestimated.
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Ah just like the old System the UK had with Grammar schools for the middle class and Secondary modern for the working class kids whose role in life to leave school at 15/16 and work in industry.
It's got nothing to do with "working class kids" and their "role in life". I've had classmates from very affluent parents move into vocational training, and I've had poor friends complete a university degree. That the US and UK fail in this matter doesn't say anything about the rest of the world's ability to provide equal opportunity for all children.
And from what a German HN contibutor said here its funny how all the "dark skinned" Germans get put into the vocational track.
Germany is unfortuntly an outlier.
I don't expect the public school system to teach my children anything. Hence why they won't be attending. Most of the schools I attended growing up were completely useless. Filthy, full of drugs and gangs. Sadly I even listened to some of my teachers more than I did my own parents (indoctrination) which I now see lead me down the wrong path. I don't expect the public school to teach my kids any kind of career skills…
What the hell? "My kids are gonna be web devs by 13 and they're gonna like it!" Is this considered normal with you stylish, American, Silicon Valley types? Do you think children are like Pokemons or Sims or RPG characters who you control from a 3rd person perspective?