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[Zrk2]

If you want to get rid of schools travel to India, or Africa, or somewhere without a well developed public school system. Then take another look at your position.

[Mesa]

If you want to get rid of schools travel to India, or Africa, or somewhere without a well developed public school system. Then take another look at your position.

I don't think you understood my point.
I don't want to abolish schooling as a whole. As harsh as me or some other people might be about it, I understand it has its benefits and trying to remove it completely would lead to a disaster on far too many levels.

What I do want to eventually happen is to change in a way that does not resemble the current factory line model that's been established for far too long.
Humans change, our ideologies change, technology changes, the entire world around us changes yet most forms of schooling are still stuck in the Industrial Revolution mindset of producing uncreative, obedient people - granted, that worked for when there were many factories around that had to be manned and when states needed massive armies that were easy to order and move around.
Things have moved on yet that's still the primary outcome of public schooling - I'm not saying that creative, imaginative, critical thinkers who went to school don't exist, but do they exist thanks to that, or in spite of that?

[Thorik]

I'm 20 and just got my associate's degree in the arts after 2 years of community college, and have transferred into a university to get a degree in history (useless I know).

I can tell you that I learned absolutely nothing in high school. I actually did learn shit in elementary and middle school, but that is because kids that age are so stupid and know nothing that they can't help but learn even in a shitty environment. High school was just a waste of time. I learned nothing in English (was reading at college level in middle school), forgot pretty much everything in science and math, and I already knew the stuff they taught in history from reading history books.

ALSO! Spanish class. I had to take two years of compulsory foreign language in either French or Spanish at my school, and I basically cheated off the Spanish kids in class and managed to get C's. (I live in Florida so lots of immigrants)

I really feel I learned nothing at all in high school. I guess if I had tried harder I could've retained some knowledge of math and science to make some sort of engineering degree possible, but I don't find those subjects at all interesting enough to pursue a career in. The only classes that I learned things in were music classes and music theory.

Self education is far more efficient. Just having a class full of kids reading educational books would probably be better than listening to a teacher talk about such basic things and having to reiterate them frequently.

[TempAcc]

One of the major problems with current schools is that they have adopted a model that expects to transmit a large ammount of basic information and tests it using... Well, tests, instead of developing the practice of the skills that they want to teach. It adopts a mostly expository model, in which the teacher exposes what he wants to teach, and the students just listen and participate through questions which are only very rarely asked.

Its a system that teaches you to memorize things rather then learning and knowning them. The info gets temporarily stored, and after the tests in which that info is required, it is discarted.

There are decent methods of education currently being used in certain places of the world (IE Finland, singapore, malasya, etc) but the problem is that doing education reforms in big countries like the US require a lot of economical and political effort, and it would be a slow change anyways.

[Trapezohedron]

The only thing I hate about schooling is that there is an emphasis over "graded" tests, meaning there's always an incentive to cheat and therefore ignore the lessons that could have been learned.

Also, IMO, schooling is very rigid and inflexible up even at the college level. Sure, you get to learn things that might become important to you, but you're also going to need those units, and not taking the "minors" leads to unit deficiency, delaying your graduation to professional life even further.

I guess allowing branching out at high-school level and up would be best? God knows how to implement this, though.

[Thorik]

If students were allowed to begin specializing in their chosen field with an intent to pursue a college degree beginning in 9th grade, then maybe the amount of schooling required could even be reduced. Without the need for extraneous classes that have no bearing on the student's interest/degree, then high school could last just 2 years. Students would waste less time learning things that they don't care about and don't need, and could have a 4-year degree by age 20 rather than 22 (going by the standard pace). That doesn't even count what further reductions could be made if colleges in the USA didn't require hoards of prerequisites to actually get into what you want to do. I've had to take classes in 19th century American literature and Art History for some reason... so many isms. Also had to take classes in Oceanography and Chemistry. For a history degree. And they make me pay for it. w0t?

Society would be more productive, people would be able to get full-time jobs sooner, and a lot of teachers would lose theirs... oh well.

[Flying Dice]

One of the major problems with current schools is that they have adopted a model that expects to transmit a large ammount of basic information and tests it using... Well, tests, instead of developing the practice of the skills that they want to teach. It adopts a mostly expository model, in which the teacher exposes what he wants to teach, and the students just listen and participate through questions which are only very rarely asked.

Its a system that teaches you to memorize things rather then learning and knowning them. The info gets temporarily stored, and after the tests in which that info is required, it is discarted.

There are decent methods of education currently being used in certain places of the world (IE Finland, singapore, malasya, etc) but the problem is that doing education reforms in big countries like the US require a lot of economical and political effort, and it would be a slow change anyways.

This is half of the conundrum of standardized testing as a method of evaluating the performance of teachers and schools, and I agree that "teaching the test" is harmful. The issue is, what do you want to replace it with? Not in terms of educational content, we've got a mountain of better ideas, but as an evaluative tool. Keep in mind that standardized testing is a thing because, prior to the waves of educational reform that brought it in, public education was woefully shoddy and inconsistent. Standardized testing is a thing predominantly because it's relatively straightforward and cost-effective, and the negative effects weren't really intended and didn't show up until schools and teachers figured out that their continued funding/employment rested overwhelmingly on the scores they produced.

Personally, I'd lean more towards designing tests which don't incentivize rote memorization, and which test for real skills rather than memorized factoids and test-taking skills. In particular, the multiple-guess format is poisonous; I remember full well my public education, and those standardized tests could be aced in almost every case solely by knowing how the questions are designed.

[itisnotlogical]

"Self-teaching" isn't the miracle cure that people like to believe it is. For one, it's very hard to see a big picture if all you have is individual lessons and no structure, i.e. a class or a teacher that can explain how concepts are related. Try learning all of math with nothing on hand but a textbook, pencil and paper; I guarantee that you will not have a good time. You will hit something that the textbook doesn't explain well, and you will be stuck there. (Before responding "lol i don't use math", consider common tasks in engineering such as measurement and basic physics to determine the structural stability of a building.)

[Frumple]

Ehehehe, yeah, MC stuff was always fun. I still fondly remember the test I took in a dual-enrolled class -- college level american history, of all things -- where I had missed like the entire week beforehand, had no idea what particular subject class was on, nor any outside-school exposure to it, came back on a test day and ended up scoring as something like one of the top five or so of a 25-30-something person class. Had no bloody clue what the answers actually were, coming in to the test. Didn't matter.

Now mind you, it's very possible to design a multiple-choice test that actually tests retention and knowledge. It's just that, well. People generally don't, and when they do the incredible stink that gets roused by students and parents is just almost physically palpable. Being fair to them, a well designed MC test is generally absolute hell for any student that has anxiety issues and whatnot when it comes to test taking.

teachers figured out that their continued funding/employment rested overwhelmingly on the scores they produced.

Not just that, actually. The students often end up significantly bettered by being taught to the test, too, from what I've seen. Particularly those that have greater trouble with taking tests -- the ones that might know the material, but just can't get it out on test day. There's definite detriments, and it certainly shouldn't be done in the place of actual teaching, but making sure the student is capable of performing well for evaluation purposes, even if they're less proficient in other areas, does have its benefits (including a great deal of stress reduction, oft times). It's particularly true for those students that frankly don't need or want the education itself, but do need the diploma for employment purposes.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's one thing the tests did well, they brought the lower end of the curve up much closer to the middle in terms of performance. That's not to say that that average is anywhere approaching an objective "good", but relatively it's much improved. Purely in terms of having a population capable of, by and large, crawling through a simple and unrigorous body of knowledge on their way to a job, it's not a terrible system. It's when you get to the students who are both capable of and want to exercise themselves intellectually in any meaningful way that it breaks down.

S'not the endpoint of the whole "an educated society... &c. &c." paradigm, but it's a step closer than we were a couple centuries ago.

[WealthyRadish]

I was a student aide in high school for a biology class (the basic biology class that was taught to freshmen I think), and the teacher would actually have me look over multiple choice test questions (or rather the given possible answers) to try and make them as horrible as possible. Like a lot of people I coasted through many MC tests with just basic logic and a vague recollection of the material's key points, so I found it pretty cathartic to go through and make questions that try to trick the student (to the point of vindictiveness). It's like in Dark Souls, where you beat a boss and then get the fun of invading all the scrubs trying to blitz it with co-op.

For me the thing that killed schooling as a kid was the system of assigning grades. It made me pretty bitter as time went on that it was never enough to just know the material, which I guess I was foolish enough to think was the point of education. What I would've loved to see is a system where students get some choice in how their classes are taught, with options for the same class being taught as heavily test based, group based, assignment based, etc. It didn't make sense to me why they couldn't do that in a fairly large high school that would have 3-4 of the same class running simultaneously anyway, but hey, funding I guess.

[Magistrum]

About the self teaching topic, I have my two cents.
I live in Brazil, and we have a very well developed education system here, but understaffed tough, my state's government is fucking up everything very badly and refuses to hire new teachers (or pay the existing ones).
I have never learned anything from school. I learned to read with help from my father, and then he gave me some books and told me smart people read books. I learned that was a load of bull later, but at the time I just went on and read the textbooks. A few years after I came in contact with the internet and: done. I just excelled at every task I was presented. Always first. Always right. A damn brat for all my classmates.
I had to go to school because I needed a school history in order to get jobs. I thought I was smart, to outperform my classmates by so much. But then I learned, nobody learns anything right at school. The ones who learned were not learning from classes, they were asking me an each-other what was the lesson and then getting better. School just don't go in the right pace for anyone. It is just far too slow for me, and too fast for my classmates. Nobody gets the right amount of attention or information.

TL;DR nobody learns anything from school lessons. They learn by themselves or with help of others.

[Harry Baldman]

If there's one thing I know about schooling debates, it's that they're usually perpetuated by people excessively projecting their adult, fully-developed selves (and these are usually fairly smart people at that who are virtually always possessed of a certain smugness at the inability of the school system at providing them with a challenge in the regular curriculum) with all their capabilities onto the average kid, and that this is at least part of the reason why very little of value is typically extracted from them. It always turns into a time-travel argument, trying to argue a better way for their life to have gone purely from hindsight and without respect to the initial conditions. Well, in my experience at least.

This has already been stated, and I agree, that high school is designed to give people as many options on what they can do with their life as possible and discover as many things that they could be decent at as they can. An overwhelming majority of it you won't need, that much is true, but the point is not at all to give you information you need to know or teach you a particular set of skills, but to inform you of the variety of things you could still do. And everything you learn in school (and with grading it is ensured that people learn at least a very bare minimum) opens up some form of thing you can do. There's never going to be a situation where you need algebra, but learning algebra lets you take on challenges that require it. Same with anything else, really. School is a platform for introducing you to things you may encounter in life, starting from mathematics and ending with shitheads. You have to look at it as a framing device for actual education, if that makes sense.

[Zrk2]

One thing to consider for all the people plugging simply teaching yourself; how many people will actually do it? Are you willing to shoulder the burden of all these uneducated bums being nonfunctional in society?