[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

What I have learned is that you can't force feed education. Even young people are at different stages in their life. Some are interested in learning, some just have too many things to deal with in their personal life to be able to focus on education.

I strongly disagree. Children who aren't the targets of truly *vile* abuse--that is, children whose waking hours are entirely focused on bare survival--love to learn. All of them. The love of discovery and a fascination with understanding how the world works runs deep in humans; children are born with an innate desire to learn the world and how they relate to it.

It takes serious work to pound that out of children, until they think "education" means "doing really boring pointless crap just well enough to earn the right to run around at recess."

They learn during recess. They learn social mores, applied physics, arbitrary rule sets, their own bodies' limits, emotional bonding, and time management. These are hardly insignificant skills, and they can't be learned by forced structured behavior.

Some things can. But a lot of schools fail to match their structuring to the way kids learn, as opposed to the way kids *in a particularly cultural setting* have been taught to learn. Lesson plans are still devised around the notion that kids live in a nuclear family, with one parent always home and another who works full-time days and is available for help and guidance in the evenings. Both parents are assumed to be available on the weekends; the parents are presumed to speak English; the entire family is presumed to be able-bodied and have no specific dietary needs, and so on. The parents are presumed to be interested in and supportive of formal education. If any of these isn't true, the lesson plans have to be adjusted, or the kid runs a big chance of falling behind the kids who have those advantages.

There is no such thing as a 10-year-old who doesn't like to learn. (A quick experiment involving grapes, liquid nitrogen, and a hammer will prove this. The entire class will demand to know "how'd you do that?") There are, however, plenty of 10-year-olds who have no affinity for learning by reading texts and writing essays based on them; that skillset has to be taught.

If it's not taught, that's not a failure on the part of the child. If the *importance* of that skill isn't taught, that's not the fault of the child, either.

I used to tell students that refused their assignments that I am Ok with it as long as they are Ok with a D or an F. And if they think their life sucks 15 years down the road they have forfeited their right to blame the educational system (not that it will stop them).

Teenagers are not qualified to make decisions that are going to shape the entire rest of their lives. That's why we don't give them the right to vote, sign contracts, choose their own health care, or pick what classes to attend. Any teacher who tells a student in all seriousness, "well, you're free to decide [x] and ruin your life thereby" is cheating that child out of the guidance they were hired to provide.

Teenagers have *started* to make their own decisions. They have to be allowed to make some mistakes, too. But any teacher who believes "I just teach; if they decide not to learn, that's up to them" is incompetent. They're weaseling around their inability to persuade kids that the topic is interesting and important.

Correct me if I am wrong, but HS and Uni are not part of the compulsory education system. it is a free choice, with it comes the equivalent responsibility.

You are wrong. High school is a mandatory part of a child's education, at least in the US. The age at which school becomes opt-out varies from 16 to 18 depending on state. And even then, before 18, the opt-out belongs to the parents, not the child.

While most children will not care for some classic literature, a child who dislikes *all* of it has been cheated by teachers and a school system that failed to show why these stories are still of value.