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[Solifuge]

9~4: You should be ashamed of yourself, you terrible person you.
3: Okay, acceptable but you should do better.
2: Meh.
1: Nice, now go get the valedictorian spot

That's out of 317 students, by the way.

A tough system it sounds like. Does it encourage people to study hard, how many get burnt out?

A percentage of the lowest scoring students will just fail, no matter how well they do in class, and how much they learn. That's not tough. It's unjust, and sets up a number of kids for failure.

From folks I know who work in and around that school system, it leads to rampant Academic Elitism outside of school, polarizes students to be either cutthroat and ruthless to one another (drag other students down, so they can rise out of failing percentiles), or to give up entirely and accept failure because they will not pass, no matter how well they do.

In the 80s, they even banned After-School Tutoring, because it gave students "an unfair advantage" over others. At the point where you're making learning outside of class a punishable offense, you're no longer promoting learning. You're trying to run some kind of Academic Hunger Games.

[Helgoland]

That after-school tutoring ban makes some sense though, if you take into account that only relatively (i.e. non-poor) wealthy families can afford it...

[Descan]

So? That's one reason people dislike socialism, bro. The perception that socialists want to bring down the higher ups to be more "equal" with the lower. Instead of raising the lower to be more equal with the higher.

I never thought someone actually -thought- that way though...

Edit: So instead of banning tutoring, make it (somehow) available to other people. Not forced, just available.

[Nadaka]

Not enough money.
Two great gigs I want to go to around the city this weekend, I only have a bit over $20 in my bank account and $20 left over from last week's beer money, and I don't get paid 'til Monday... yeah this could be tough.

Then again I did withdraw $100 last week, buy a bunch of drinks and then spent even more on comic books the next day. >.> I guess I brought this on myself!

I have the same feel, I payed my next months bills early, and ended up with a $12 overdraft.

[Helgoland]

Edit: So instead of banning tutoring, make it (somehow) available to other people. Not forced, just available.

It's called public schools - I'm European, socialism (at least the way the term is used in the US) is pretty much in my blood! The problem is that tutoring provides an excuse to let the quality of public education slip while keeping the testing level the same; in my area at least, even people who don't have much money have started paying for tutoring because of this.
I'm not talking about banning classmate-on-classmate tutoring and similar stuff; but by now it has become a bit of an industry, with actual tutoring firms popping up. Nothing bad with helping your fellow man and following 1 Timotheus 5!

[GlyphGryph]

Do you want all learning from experienced folks outside schools banned, or just certain types?

[Loud Whispers]

In the 80s, they even banned After-School Tutoring, because it gave students "an unfair advantage" over others. At the point where you're making learning outside of class a punishable offense, you're no longer promoting learning. You're trying to run some kind of Academic Hunger Games.

Dwarf Fortress; South Korea; histories of equality and lobotomies.

[Helgoland]

Do you want all learning from experienced folks outside schools banned, or just certain types?

Come on, you're being unfair. And banning probably isn't the best way; but I strongly feel it should be made unnecessary.

[GlyphGryph]

Do you want all learning from experienced folks outside schools banned, or just certain types?

Come on, you're being unfair. And banning probably isn't the best way; but I strongly feel it should be made unnecessary.

I was an honest attempt for clarification. Regardless, I fully believe that public education should primarily serve to enable opportunity and provide basic skills, but any REAL education is going to need to be pursued on the students own time. Mentoring, tutoring, apprenticeships, etc. are all things I would like to see significantly more of (even if the government provides money to students to pursue it!)

But it's a terrible waste if it's just covering materials already covered in school. It should serve as an opportunity for the student to really grow and expand beyond the confines implicit in any generalized education system.

I would love it if ancillary individualized education became a regular thing, though I agree it's a pretty big cop out for a local government to use it as an excuse to not do their job while refusing to pay for it.

[Levi]

Dear Science;

Would you please use your genetic modification sciences to provide me with vegetable plants that won't die when I try to grow them.

Love and kisses, Levi.

[Helgoland]

But it's a terrible waste if it's just covering materials already covered in school. It should serve as an opportunity for the student to really grow and expand beyond the confines implicit in any generalized education system.

That's the type of tutoring I'm talking about, though. It's true, of course, that any true advanced learning can't be done in school; public schools really are meant to only teach what everyone (who's attending that school) needs, and teach that well.

[GlyphGryph]

It seems like the best way to stop that would obviously be to make it redundant. As you said, unnecessary.

If you are, however, in a school system that uses the existence of tutoring as an excuse not to do their damn jobs, that isn't going to happen. I don't trust such a school system to provide quality education whether tutoring is available or not.

[FearfulJesuit]

Update on the fever: it might be Lyme disease! (Or some sort of Brazilian bug.) We'll see when I go to a doc in the box tomorrow.

[Helgoland]

I read somewhere that snails refuse to crawl across copper - you might try to construct some sort of copper barrier around the plants. Need to make sure there are no snails within the barrier, though...

[MonkeyHead]

Eggshells they also do not seem to be able to cross.

Or, you could put a salt barrier, though thats hardly good for your soil.