Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Why are people under the impression that High School English and/or Lit classes should have anything to do with teaching kids to love reading? Other classes aren't saddled with the responsibility of making students "fall in love" with their subjects. It's class, not book club.
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I would argue that's why our schools and test scores are in the toilet. In today's world I don't think today's rote "sit still and learn this" works anymore. I didn't learn how cool history and science actually are until I got out of school. History is endlessly fascinating but every single year I had to learn about the bloody cotton gin. I never knew Nikola Tesla existed until I got out of school, every year it was Edison and the light bulb (again, not learning what a thief he was until I was out of school). If you can't engage or excite people about what they're doing, most will end up rejecting it.
Schools are competing with everything under the sun, from the internet and video games to smartphones and TV. The only thing the old ways of looking at education is good for is churning out incurious, intellectually lazy drones (some might say that that's the plan with government schooling but that's an argument for another site
). Thank God I had some natural curiosity going into school, I think that's the only thing that saved me from becoming another "I haven't done X since school" drone. Schools are supposed to instill a love of learning and open minds, not fill them with rote programming then slam the door.
However I will say that a good teacher can make even relatively boring material exciting and engage the students within the boundaries of their curriculum. Sadly many choose not to, I did horribly in high school because the way the material was presented was painfully dry and unengaging. I'm not saying I need flashy graphics and lasers to keep my interest but they've really gotta do better than "learn this because you're supposed to" and hand out a worksheet.