Quote:
Originally Posted by Joebill
Well, I find that in the US the educational system is very laughable. Promoting kids to the next grade level, even if they cannot read. Or the local school board promoting a religious belief as if it were science.
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Education in the US suffers from a double hobble.
The first is "social promotion", grounded in the concept that
flunking a failing student and forcing them to repeat the courses causes psychological damage, and it's better to promote them with their age mates regardless. The end result is a generation of semi-literates who can just about read and write. Couple that with an ideal that
every kid should go to college, and you get college graduates with less knowledge and skills than high school students of a previous generation, and degrees that are meaningless in the workplace, because employers rapidly learn which schools maintain any sort of meaningful standards and likely just ignore employment applications from folks claiming degrees from schools that don't.
The second is that local communities have a fair bit of influence and control over what gets taught, so the curriculum winds up being what is politically acceptable in any particular area. If the area has a heavy Fundamentalist population, "evolution" becomes a dirty word. (I gained grudging respect for a Fundamentalist commentator locally some years back because he was
against efforts to do things like ban the writings of Charles Darwin. He felt (correctly) that you
couldn't meaningfully argue against someone if you didn't know what he actually
said, and advised other Fundamentalists to
read Darwin, and refute what Darwin said, not what someone else
claimed Darwin said.)
And thinking about it, there's a third hobble: US society recognizes and glorifies some differences between students - talented athletes and performers get lauded. We shy away from the idea that some students are simply brighter and learn faster than others, and tend towards a curriculum aimed at the lowest common denominator, so the bright kids are often denied the ability to realize their potential.
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Dennis