As for mandatory sports, I can guarantee that they would not bring all that you hope for. It somewhat reminds me of Lockhart's Lament, actually. Kids play sports because they are fun, believe it or not. Most don't just do it for the exercise. There is a world of difference between doing a sport because it's fun and doing one because you have to, especially when you're dealing with rebellious teenagers. If, as a freshman, I was forced to do a sport, I would never have applied myself to it. "Everyone has to do one, there's nothing wrong with not being very good at it." I was terrible at cross country when I started it, my 5k time was 25:30. If someone had said to me that I had to do better, I wouldn't have tried so hard. Because I was there because I wanted to be, I worked like crazy to get better and help the team. Do you think someone that is forced to run for an hour and a half each day after school is going to find it as enjoyable as someone who wants to be there? Because if it's not enjoyable, they're not going to try very hard, and it will just end up wasting their time and the school's money.
Hey, that was a great read. It answered a lot of questions I had about maths, most notably "what's the point ?" It's nice to know that it's indeed basically pointless. This might make math interesting the next time I will have to suffer through a math class when I get the chance to go back to college.
And I agree that teaching intensive sports won't work. Once again, the problem isn't so much that school fails to give access to knowledge (whether it's sports or general knowledge or anything else), it's that it fails to give kids the willingness to be taught. A heavy dose of sports won't change that, even if every kid had magically access to a sport they actually like. It's like educational games (which is really an oxymoron) ; and school have already tried that, and it failed. Neither the stick nor the carrot works.
I think the biggest problem with school is that nobody really knows what's the point of school anymore. What's the point of school for you (you who reads me) ?
Lots of people I met says it's to learn a job, or get a job later, or ease access to a job, or something along those lines. But that doesn't sound right, does it ? The vast majority of what you learn at school is going to be useless in nearly every job. The vast majority of what you would like to know to get a job is not taught at school. Plus school keeps you from working until a very late age - at least eighteen (technically you can start working at sixteen, but it's extremely complicated to do so). If school is here to prepare you for a job, then it's fantastically inefficient at it.
My dad says that school is here to teach you to think by yourself and everything you need to know so that you can participate in the democratic system. It's an interesting idea. After all, at least in France (I don't really know in other countries), the idea of a school that should be both free and mandatory for everyone emerged with the republic. And democracy needs every citizen to participate in politics, so every citizen must be able to. But school isn't very good at this either - the many examples of both stupidity and conceitedness that people gave in this thread shows that school is failing at giving kids an open-minded, critical approach to things necessary for participation in the politic life of the country.
Actually, my dad says that school should do that, and fails, but that's beside the point. So school teaches you a lot of stuff you will never need, with no clear goal in sight, is forced upon you, and gives you no real gratification outside itself (your work essentially means you'll be given back good grades and the permission to continue to the next level, yay). It is little more than a daycare until you're deemed old enough to take care of yourself and go get a job. No wonder kids hate it !
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Topic: Things people should've been taught from the start (Read 26421 times)