Urban charter school has 100% graduation in first class

[JointStrikeFighter]

Probably because mike got butthurt someone would dare disagree with him and then the tireless sycophant brigade showed up. It's even funnier that for a supposedly super educated individual he couldn't admit he knows NOTHING about mining or, as demonstrated in other threads geology for that matter. Turns out actual industry exposure = more relevant than 7up dimples.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I've been at mining sites. The guys swinging the picks and filling the shovels aren't exactly MENSA members, but anyone who was a juvenile delinquent, rabble rouser, overgrown manchild, or ticking time bomb wouldn't be allowed within a quarter mile of the site. Fuck around for FIVE MINUTES and people are dead and millions of dollars are gone.

Even for west virginia coal mining where you're literally shoveling the bits that fall off the belt back onto the belt require the mental discipline to do something menial for 6 hour stretches. They say it takes 'a weak mind and a strong back', but FORCING them to do it would be absurd.

[Darth Wong]

hey hey hey mike.

I have a protip for you:

skilled labour doesn't mean university degree you fucking dipshit.

I'm aware of that, moron. I even said it myself earlier, by mentioning welders who require much more qualification than most of the grunts you actually need in heavy industry. Is this really the best point you can come up with?

Ps it means "has been trained to do a job that nobody else can do without training." maybe you should try reading a dictionary sometime. Hell maybe you can try escaping your crippling groupthink and think about things from the perspective of people who aren't fucking gods engineers.

See above. I've known a lot of skilled tradesmen. They're blue-collar anti-intellectuals, every damned last one of them. There was literally no point educating any damned one of them past grade 9, except for their ability to vote, and for the bullies and assholes, that doesn't matter either. They either don't vote or they vote based on anti-intellectualism and hate.

Sorry form but the defenition of 'Gulag' [mike's words not mine] is "A forced labor camp or prison, especially for political dissidents" sounds like slavery to me.

Oh, so your entire argument is based upon my half-joking use of the word "gulag", even though such a facility is literally illegal in our country? OMG, I used an obviously hyperbolic word: the first time anyone on sd.net has ever done this!

Typical; you're obviously desperate to claim some kind of victory here no matter how stupid. I suppose you think that when I talk about the bottom 5% of a typical high school class, I actually mean that 5% of the entire population is composed of psychopaths and murderers, and that such people should be tried by a school board instead of a court system.

[Bakustra]

Ps it means "has been trained to do a job that nobody else can do without training." maybe you should try reading a dictionary sometime. Hell maybe you can try escaping your crippling groupthink and think about things from the perspective of people who aren't fucking gods engineers.

See above. I've known a lot of skilled tradesmen. They're blue-collar anti-intellectuals, every damned last one of them. There was literally no point educating any damned one of them past grade 9, except for their ability to vote, and for the bullies and assholes, that doesn't matter either. They either don't vote or they vote based on anti-intellectualism and hate.

I really don't see how refusing to educate people will ameliorate problems with anti-intellectualism, to be honest, unless we're considering anti-intellectualism to be an inherent trait of skilled tradespeople, which cannot be removed. I mean, I've heard you complain about the scientific illiteracy of the population at large, and there are similar problems with math, history, and English. However, it seems pretty backwards to try and correct these problems by reducing the amount of education people receive, unless you plan to follow this up by disenfranchising them afterwards, in which case I must agree with the accusations of classism, especially with the problem of determining just who gets their education cut off.

[Darth Wong]

Ps it means "has been trained to do a job that nobody else can do without training." maybe you should try reading a dictionary sometime. Hell maybe you can try escaping your crippling groupthink and think about things from the perspective of people who aren't fucking gods engineers.

See above. I've known a lot of skilled tradesmen. They're blue-collar anti-intellectuals, every damned last one of them. There was literally no point educating any damned one of them past grade 9, except for their ability to vote, and for the bullies and assholes, that doesn't matter either. They either don't vote or they vote based on anti-intellectualism and hate.

I really don't see how refusing to educate people will ameliorate problems with anti-intellectualism, to be honest, unless we're considering anti-intellectualism to be an inherent trait of skilled tradespeople, which cannot be removed. I mean, I've heard you complain about the scientific illiteracy of the population at large, and there are similar problems with math, history, and English. However, it seems pretty backwards to try and correct these problems by reducing the amount of education people receive, unless you plan to follow this up by disenfranchising them afterwards, in which case I must agree with the accusations of classism, especially with the problem of determining just who gets their education cut off.

In the early 20th century, when it was not nigh-universal for people to have high school diplomas, the uneducated louts actually realized that they were uneducated and that this was a bad thing. Today, they think they're pretty damned knowledgeable: smart enough to discuss physics, biology, engineering, etc. No, I don't really think it's productive at all to give morons the idea that they understand anything by putting them through several years of really low-grade crap education to get a high school diploma.

The "amount of education people receive" is precisely the problem: they're getting quantity, not quality. Part of the reason they don't get quality is the desire to keep the bottom-feeders in the class right up to the end. They should kick them out and make the rest of the high school students actually work for their diplomas. Right now, no high school student seriously worries about flunking out or shoved into this hypothetical "moron stream" that I'm talking about. Why should he? The whole system is set up so that this is almost impossible, and for precisely the reason I mentioned: they want to make every damned moron feel like he's somewhat educated. Nobody should feel like he's stupid. Self-esteem was the whole reason for this policy, and it's a big part of the problem with anti-intellectualism. These people don't really reject intelligence; they think they're just as smart as scientists, ie- their self-esteem is way too high.

[aerius]

Put it this way. Most people who went to university and didn't end up with some joke degree can take a training course and learn how to drive trucks, operate heavy machinery, blast rocks, weld, and do all that other stuff. It doesn't work going the other way around, most of those tradesmen and equipment operators would get flunked out of any real university program by the end of the first year. A lot of them won't even make it to the first mid-term.

[Bakustra]

In the early 20th century, when it was not nigh-universal for people to have high school diplomas, the uneducated louts actually realized that they were uneducated and that this was a bad thing. Today, they think they're pretty damned knowledgeable: smart enough to discuss physics, biology, engineering, etc. No, I don't really think it's productive at all to give morons the idea that they understand anything by putting them through several years of really low-grade crap education to get a high school diploma.

The "amount of education people receive" is precisely the problem: they're getting quantity, not quality. Part of the reason they don't get quality is the desire to keep the bottom-feeders in the class right up to the end. They should kick them out and make the rest of the high school students actually work for their diplomas. Right now, no high school student seriously worries about flunking out or shoved into this hypothetical "moron stream" that I'm talking about. Why should he? The whole system is set up so that this is almost impossible.

In the early 20th century, high school education was in its infancy and was developed for the purpose of producing many unskilled laborers, some skilled laborers, and a handful of college-educated professionals. Going back to that model seems a bit outdated, seeing as unskilled labor is a far tinier part of the economy nowadays. Reforming the schools to produce mostly skilled laborers and college-graduates would do almost exactly the same thing, by making classes more difficult and increasing the quality of the education in general, rather than simply cutting people off at age fourteen, particularly as that increases interclass strife.

The "bottom-feeders", meanwhile, if you are using the definitions that you used previously, will be a problem no matter what you do. Putting them to work will just give you demotivated, nigh-useless workers, who will also cause accidents in dangerous situations. Probably the best thing you can do is investigate the causes (since not all of it is just laziness), try to address the actual causes, and try to help the kids find something that they like to do (even if it's something as horrible, frightening, and unscientific as arts or physical education. If you are literally proposing that the bottom 5% of the class be simply kicked out, why not adopt tracking like the German Hauptschule, which still provides about a modern US/Canadian high-school education for the bottom 10% of students?

Put it this way. Most people who went to university and didn't end up with some joke degree can take a training course and learn how to drive trucks, operate heavy machinery, blast rocks, weld, and do all that other stuff. It doesn't work going the other way around, most of those tradesmen and equipment operators would get flunked out of any real university program by the end of the first year. A lot of them won't even make it to the first mid-term.

What does that have to do with anything? I'm not suggesting that everybody go to university (that would be impractical), so your post makes no sense.

[Darth Wong]

In the early 20th century, high school education was in its infancy and was developed for the purpose of producing many unskilled laborers, some skilled laborers, and a handful of college-educated professionals. Going back to that model seems a bit outdated, seeing as unskilled labor is a far tinier part of the economy nowadays. Reforming the schools to produce mostly skilled laborers and college-graduates would do almost exactly the same thing, by making classes more difficult and increasing the quality of the education in general, rather than simply cutting people off at age fourteen, particularly as that increases interclass strife.

I don't think you're getting what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about throwing them directly into the workforce at age 14. Once again, like the word "gulag", this would actually be illegal if you take it literally. I'm talking about saying "OK, you know what, there's no point giving this kid any more university-prep education" (which is what much of high school presently is) and throwing him directly into a low-grade trade school. Skilled labour does not necessarily mean "intelligent" or even "responsible"; it just means that they've taken a training course.

The current model is: "educate everyone up to the level of a high school graduate, who is prepared to go to university or trade school depending on his choice at age 18". What I'm saying is that this is a complete waste of time for the bottom-feeders, and worse yet, in order to achieve this for everyone they had to greatly dumb down the system, so that first-year university now consists of teaching kids what they were supposed to learn in high school.

The "bottom-feeders", meanwhile, if you are using the definitions that you used previously, will be a problem no matter what you do. Putting them to work will just give you demotivated, nigh-useless workers, who will also cause accidents in dangerous situations. Probably the best thing you can do is investigate the causes (since not all of it is just laziness), try to address the actual causes, and try to help the kids find something that they like to do (even if it's something as horrible, frightening, and unscientific as arts or physical education. If you are literally proposing that the bottom 5% of the class be simply kicked out, why not adopt tracking like the German Hauptschule, which still provides about a modern US/Canadian high-school education for the bottom 10% of students?

The causes are primarily bad parenting. JSF points out that this is their parents' fault, but so what? It's still out of your control, it's not going to change just because you want it to, and the result is still stupid asshole kids who grow up to be stupid asshole adults.

[Uraniun235]

Oh, so your entire argument is based upon my half-joking use of the word "gulag", even though such a facility is literally illegal in our country? OMG, I used an obviously hyperbolic word: the first time anyone on sd.net has ever done this!

Typical; you're obviously desperate to claim some kind of victory here no matter how stupid. I suppose you think that when I talk about the bottom 5% of a typical high school class, I actually mean that 5% of the entire population is composed of psychopaths and murderers, and that such people should be tried by a school board instead of a court system.

I don't see why this discussion is necessarily locked into the realm of the legally permissible. Since when has the current law actually restricted us on discussing potential solutions to problems? "It's illegal" is a dodge, because if you're proposing a change which would be illegal under present law, the implicit assumption is that you'd also propose to change the law to make it legal.


I imagine you're about to say "but I wasn't actually proposing a change", to which I say "well it sure looked like you were." I failed to see where you were joking in the following excerpts:

In my way of thinking, you want to keep the kids who are there to learn (or who are at least capable of behaving), and dump the rest. Ideally, put them on an island somewhere, like Australia. Or perhaps some kind of northern gulag, which we could set up in the frozen tundra and use as a base for mining operations in the area (the only kind of job you would want these retards doing anyway). But most teachers and administrators think they're there to "rescue" kids from themselves, not just nurture the good ones and get rid of the rest as I would tend to do if I had my way.

I've spent enough time dealing with schools, volunteering at schools, etc. to know that in every class, you have a bottom 5% which drags down the rest of the group with their consistently shitty behaviour. They should be removed from the learning environment, permanently. They will never amount to anything, they will only harm the other students in the class.

I mean, yes, obviously they will not actually be put in a gulag because Canada currently has laws against that and probably won't change them to accommodate your views on education, but the subject isn't what's actually going to happen. You said it would be ideal if the bottom 5% of the high school population was exiled to an island or a tundra gulag, and reinforced that statement with your assertion that those 5% would "never amount to anything".


It didn't come across as a joke; you seemed sincere to me, and I'd guess JSF thought so too. If you say that you don't actually want to send the bottom 5% of high schoolers to gulags and remote islands, I'll believe you, but don't be so surprised that people actually took you seriously when they know just how much you loathe the slackers and assholes of society.

[Darth Wong]

It didn't come across as a joke; you seemed sincere to me, and I'd guess JSF thought so too.

Even the part about using AUSTRALIA as a penal colony in 2010? Come on, just fucking clueless are you that I need to spell out that something is exaggerated or half-joking? You do know that Australia is actually a normal country now and not a penal colony, right?

[Bakustra]

In the early 20th century, high school education was in its infancy and was developed for the purpose of producing many unskilled laborers, some skilled laborers, and a handful of college-educated professionals. Going back to that model seems a bit outdated, seeing as unskilled labor is a far tinier part of the economy nowadays. Reforming the schools to produce mostly skilled laborers and college-graduates would do almost exactly the same thing, by making classes more difficult and increasing the quality of the education in general, rather than simply cutting people off at age fourteen, particularly as that increases interclass strife.

I don't think you're getting what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about throwing them directly into the workforce at age 14. Once again, like the word "gulag", this would actually be illegal if you take it literally. I'm talking about saying "OK, you know what, there's no point giving this kid any more university-prep education" (which is what much of high school presently is) and throwing him directly into a low-grade trade school. Skilled labour does not necessarily mean "intelligent" or even "responsible"; it just means that they've taken a training course.

The current model is: "educate everyone up to the level of a high school graduate, who is prepared to go to university or trade school depending on his choice at age 18". What I'm saying is that this is a complete waste of time for the bottom-feeders, and worse yet, in order to achieve this for everyone they had to greatly dumb down the system, so that first-year university now consists of teaching kids what they were supposed to learn in high school.

Everybody was intended to be educated at least to the age of 16 when high schools first started, but high school classes still are only marginally different from then, especially history and civics classes. You're presuming that it's impossible to have a well-educated workforce, or at least would require an inordinate amount of effort, when the system itself is designed to produce the results we're getting. Adding trade schools would actually improve the system significantly, since the system is designed to produce a horde of semi-literate, mindlessly patriotic assembly-line workers. Reforming high schools alone won't solve the problem, since the biggest problems lie in primary education (elementary and middle), with students arriving in high school well below average in necessary skills.

The "bottom-feeders", meanwhile, if you are using the definitions that you used previously, will be a problem no matter what you do. Putting them to work will just give you demotivated, nigh-useless workers, who will also cause accidents in dangerous situations. Probably the best thing you can do is investigate the causes (since not all of it is just laziness), try to address the actual causes, and try to help the kids find something that they like to do (even if it's something as horrible, frightening, and unscientific as arts or physical education. If you are literally proposing that the bottom 5% of the class be simply kicked out, why not adopt tracking like the German Hauptschule, which still provides about a modern US/Canadian high-school education for the bottom 10% of students?

The causes are primarily bad parenting. JSF points out that this is their parents' fault, but so what? It's still out of your control, it's not going to change just because you want it to, and the result is still stupid asshole kids who grow up to be stupid asshole adults.

They're still going to be a drain on the system if they're really so demotivated and hostile to learning, so while throwing them in a trade school is a stopgap, there's no real way to deal with the problem, and they have to be accepted as a permanent loss(but I'm not really sure how prevalent they actually are; certainly they didn't make up 5% of my high school) no matter what you do with them.

[Uraniun235]

It didn't come across as a joke; you seemed sincere to me, and I'd guess JSF thought so too.

Even the part about using AUSTRALIA as a penal colony in 2010? Come on, just fucking clueless are you that I need to spell out that something is exaggerated or half-joking? You do know that Australia is actually a normal country now and not a penal colony, right?

I took "like Australia" to mean "similar to how Australia was used when it was a penal colony".

[Darth Wong]

It didn't come across as a joke; you seemed sincere to me, and I'd guess JSF thought so too.

Even the part about using AUSTRALIA as a penal colony in 2010? Come on, just fucking clueless are you that I need to spell out that something is exaggerated or half-joking? You do know that Australia is actually a normal country now and not a penal colony, right?

I took "like Australia" to mean "similar to how Australia was used when it was a penal colony".

If you honestly can't see that the use of Australia was meant as a humourous exaggeration and a dig at the Australians on the board, I can't help you.

[Darth Wong]

Everybody was intended to be educated at least to the age of 16 when high schools first started, but high school classes still are only marginally different from then, especially history and civics classes. You're presuming that it's impossible to have a well-educated workforce, or at least would require an inordinate amount of effort, when the system itself is designed to produce the results we're getting. Adding trade schools would actually improve the system significantly, since the system is designed to produce a horde of semi-literate, mindlessly patriotic assembly-line workers. Reforming high schools alone won't solve the problem, since the biggest problems lie in primary education (elementary and middle), with students arriving in high school well below average in necessary skills.

No silver bullet will singlehandedly solve the problem. However, that doesn't mean we can't reform high schools. Turning the last few years of high school into trade school or hybrid trade school/work terms for the bottom-feeders would improve the situation by getting them away from the others and into the only thing they have any realistic chance of doing.

They're still going to be a drain on the system if they're really so demotivated and hostile to learning, so while throwing them in a trade school is a stopgap, there's no real way to deal with the problem, and they have to be accepted as a permanent loss(but I'm not really sure how prevalent they actually are; certainly they didn't make up 5% of my high school) no matter what you do with them.

Actually, kids like that probably take far better to trade school than they do to conventional academic learning. That's why they push that kind of training in prison. My uncle-in-law actually worked doing this kind of training in prisons for years; it's the only thing that really suits their temperament.

[Surlethe]

The current model is: "educate everyone up to the level of a high school graduate, who is prepared to go to university or trade school depending on his choice at age 18". What I'm saying is that this is a complete waste of time for the bottom-feeders, and worse yet, in order to achieve this for everyone they had to greatly dumb down the system, so that first-year university now consists of teaching kids what they were supposed to learn in high school.

Let me point out, that affects the whole system, not just uni. At my grad school, I'll have two years to pass initial qualifying exams to prove that I understand undergraduate mathematics. First year grad students generally spend their first year studying for the quals and taking ... senior-level undergraduate classes. You water down the high school degree, to some extent you water down everything up the chain. If we could do the opposite and strengthen the high school degree, undergraduate and graduate training would become more rigorous, if only because resources would be directed away from remedial training toward actual expansion of knowledge.

[Bakustra]

Everybody was intended to be educated at least to the age of 16 when high schools first started, but high school classes still are only marginally different from then, especially history and civics classes. You're presuming that it's impossible to have a well-educated workforce, or at least would require an inordinate amount of effort, when the system itself is designed to produce the results we're getting. Adding trade schools would actually improve the system significantly, since the system is designed to produce a horde of semi-literate, mindlessly patriotic assembly-line workers. Reforming high schools alone won't solve the problem, since the biggest problems lie in primary education (elementary and middle), with students arriving in high school well below average in necessary skills.

No silver bullet will singlehandedly solve the problem. However, that doesn't mean we can't reform high schools. Turning the last few years of high school into trade school or hybrid trade school/work terms for the bottom-feeders would improve the situation by getting them away from the others and into the only thing they have any realistic chance of doing.

Well, I went to a public high school that had a great many such programs and cooperated with other high schools to provide said programs and others, so I may not have a full picture. However, such a reform would actually be a step up in terms of intended difficulty, to be honest.

They're still going to be a drain on the system if they're really so demotivated and hostile to learning, so while throwing them in a trade school is a stopgap, there's no real way to deal with the problem, and they have to be accepted as a permanent loss(but I'm not really sure how prevalent they actually are; certainly they didn't make up 5% of my high school) no matter what you do with them.

Actually, kids like that probably take far better to trade school than they do to conventional academic learning. That's why they push that kind of training in prison. My uncle-in-law actually worked doing this kind of training in prisons for years; it's the only thing that really suits their temperament.

I think we may be talking about two different things. If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, then I agree.

[Simon_Jester]

But most teachers and administrators think they're there to "rescue" kids from themselves, not just nurture the good ones and get rid of the rest as I would tend to do if I had my way.

I have heard it said by people more qualified than me* that one of the reasons we wound up with a public school system at all was to make sure we had a general public educated to the minimum standards needed for a modern economy. Just teaching the gifted students is not going to cut it; you've got to reach the bulk of the kids who are in the middle of the bell curve. The ones who are not "good ones," or at least not unusually good.

Who said anything about "gifted"? ...

Ah. I seem to have misunderstood the underlined passage. I'm sure you can see why I did, and it's a relief to find out that I did.

That said, I still think you have to make an effort to teach the bottom 5% somewhere, even if it's under very different, harsher conditions. A lot of those people are capable of getting their shit straight, even if they're not going to do it under the normal conditions of their life. Some of them are a lot smarter than you seem to think; they act like retarded chimps because someone else taught them to behave that way, not because they are retarded chimps.

Don't you get it? Yes, dumb-shit training courses do take up hours, but they do not require much of an education beforehand. A dropout can take such a course just as easily as a high school graduate, so why make the morons go all the way through high school?

Because disaffected angry stupid people who didn't pay enough attention to pass high school are high-risk candidates for remaining disaffected, angry, and stupid? And not paying enough attention to learn all the stuff in the training courses, and therefore pancaking a couple of smaller vehicles and/or buildings when they mess up while driving heavy machinery?

I mean, if you're going to put disaffected angry stupid people in charge of something, I would suggest it not be heavy machinery.

It is harsh, but not inaccurate, to describe a job as "Unskilled" if anyone can master it, and reasonable to describe a job as skilled if talent is required. Put simply, that bottom 5% might, might, make crappy technicians one day. They could never be engineers or other really skilled labor.

Most of the other 95% won't be, either. In fact, most of them would probably be far better suited to what you call "unskilled" trades than to something you can't do without a four year degree (like physics or medicine or literary theory).

On top of that, there's a huge problem with your definition of "unskilled:" do you mean that anyone can master it? Because if that's your standard of "unskilled," and we're talking about a profession that has even the slightest technical aspects, I can probably find some man-child who just cannot get the hang of pushing buttons in the right order. He can't do it; does that make it skilled labor?

If not, then where's the cutoff point? Is it when a job is so easy that you have to be three standard deviations below the mental average to be unable to do it? Two standard deviations? One standard deviation (at which point 15% of the population is too stupid to do "unskilled labor")? Where do we draw the line?

And what about people who are very good at a few things, but hopelessly inflexible? They might make brilliant mathematicians and utterly fail as, say, a salesman. Does that make being a salesman "skilled" or "unskilled?" Remember, there are people who can't do it...

Because you want people with anger management issues working in retail, where they can...er...no. Or the medical field, where they can...er...no, definitely not. Oh, grunt work in the chemical industry, where they'll be surrounded by deadly substances that can cause major accidents if people arn't care...mmm...no.

There is no real work that's safe for stupid, bitter people with anger management problems. None. So unless you want them to permanently form a dangerous underclass (like we have now), it's only adventagous to put them in an environment that can be designed with this problem specifically in mind.

I'm not sure mining is one of those, though, because the tools in that environment are so lethal by nature. They must be used correctly or they kill people, even with the best will in the world. Mining is a really dangerous line of work; there's a reason you hear about mine collapses killing dozens of people more often than you hear about Wal-Mart collapses doing the same. There are much better and more logical places to send hard-labor candidates than to a modern mine.

Come to think of it, JSF has a point about this amounting to permanent enslavement of an underclass on grounds that they didn't do well in elementary school or whatever. I mean, yes, you've "it wouldn't really be enslavement," but then you have to face the fact that most of these people don't actually want to work in a mine.

I don't know what they'd rather be doing, but angry sullen stupid people are not famous for having high job satisfaction anywhere you send them. What do you do if they want to quit and move back to the city, where according to you they will predictably wind up becoming petty criminals? Do you let them, which defeats the purpose of isolating these people from society and putting them to hard labor? Or do you refuse to let them, which amounts to enslaving them?

[Darth Wong]

(sigh) the forced-relocation to Australia or the Gulags was my idea of a joke, tacked onto a serious idea about kicking non-academic students out of mainstream high school so that they stop harming the other students. In future, I'll try to make sure I add smiley-faces so that pedantic fuckwits or people with nonexistent social IQ don't need to be explicitly told otherwise. Obviously, you can't actually force families to relocate just because their kids suck at school. To say that such a thing is outside the legal authority of the school board would be the height of understatement.

As for making sullen, angry students worse by taking them out of conventional high school, I don't think it will at all. In fact, I think they will do better. As I said earlier, this is the only thing they bother trying to teach people in prison, because it's the only thing suited to their temperament. People get angry and sullen as a defensive reaction when they're made to learn things they can't do. Instead of admitting that they can't do it, they try to pretend they're too cool to do it.

[Surlethe]

It's the same mentality the US applies to terrorists. Terrorists aren't reacting to a geopolitical situation that doesn't suit them, they intrinsically hate freedom. Poor students aren't reacting to a social and intellectual environment that doesn't suit them, they intrinsically hate learning. When one oversimplifies the model of the phenomenon, one is left with stupid predictions.

[aerius]

As for making sullen, angry students worse by taking them out of conventional high school, I don't think it will at all. In fact, I think they will do better. As I said earlier, this is the only thing they bother trying to teach people in prison, because it's the only thing suited to their temperament. People get angry and sullen as a defensive reaction when they're made to learn things they can't do. Instead of admitting that they can't do it, they try to pretend they're too cool to do it.

Back when I was in high school our worst students got sent off to Central Etobicoke which was the school for all the troublemakers and students who didn't belong in a regular schools. These kids would've failed many of the classes in my school along with causing a ton of trouble for all the other students, they'd be dropouts without much hope of a future. But send'em to Central and they have a chance to pick up a trade, do some sort of learning they can handle and if they wise up in time they can go back to a regular school and get back on track. And we in the regular schools don't have to deal with their endless shit-disturbing so we can actually get some learning done.

[Edi]

Looks like reading comprehension problems abound in this thread. Especially JSF.

Mike's pretty well correct in everything he says. I'm the product of a school system where everyone is educated to grade 9 and then you pick whether you want to go vocational route or to high school. You won't be able to even apply to the university without a high school diploma and having completed matriculation examinations and you'll start off disadvantaged against high school graduates when applying to mid-level colleges, since vocational schooling (welders, electricians, construction, cooking school and a lot of other trades) have such a minimum amount of required higher education subjects.

I finished high school, then tried unsuccessfully to get into university (the entry exams are brutal to some faculties) and went to an engineering school. I failed out of there, because it was too hard. The attrition rate was pretty brutal and I got farther than many, but nonetheless, I didn't cut it. So I went to get myself a vocational degree. I am what amounts to a computer technician. I'm good at what I do, even though I'm just a skilled tradesman.

I am also fairly science minded and I have an interest in being educated, so I am even if I failed the higher degrees.

None of that anecdote in any way counters Mike's point about the kind of things I or other tradesmen do being gruntwork. It is. It also does nothing to counter the point about the attitudes prevalent among the kind of people who go through trade schools. They understand fuckall about science or more complex concepts and most of the time they have little interest unless it can be distilled into simplified soundbites. Hell, outside of their own field, this attitude was all too prevalent even among the engineering students, though the people who go to do the higher level Advanced Engineering degree (university level instead of just middle-level college) are more of what Mike talks about.

To anyone with their head screwed on straight, there's actually little controversial in what he says, because the attitudes he talks about are so prevalent and you see them every day everywhere.

[Edi]

As for making sullen, angry students worse by taking them out of conventional high school, I don't think it will at all. In fact, I think they will do better. As I said earlier, this is the only thing they bother trying to teach people in prison, because it's the only thing suited to their temperament. People get angry and sullen as a defensive reaction when they're made to learn things they can't do. Instead of admitting that they can't do it, they try to pretend they're too cool to do it.

Anecdotal as this is, I'll inflict it on the board:

My best friend in grades 8 and 9 was an intelligent, funny guy, but he couldn't have cared less for high school. Our school student counselor was of the opinion that anyone who didn't go to high school was a worthless waste of space and oxygen and was always going on about how her daughter had gone to such and such school with such and such grade average etc. That pissed off my friend and many others. Hell, it pissed me off and it pisses me off even more now that I have a better picture of many things.

My friend went to cooking school and he was good at it. He worked in some pretty prestigious places along the way, including abroad, before he came back to Finland and opened a restaurant with another guy. He was well known and a successful businessman, but all of that got cut short when he accidentally drowned two years ago.

If he had been forced to go to high school and study all the things that I for example did, it'd have fucked things up for him and for those around him.

As far as the bottom few students dragging down everyone else, it does dumb things down so badly that gifted people will be bored out of their skulls, because they have no challenge. If they have no challenge, they don't need to do anything other than desultory work, which teaches them very fucking bad habits, such as being lazy and relying on just winging it, and just a few years later it'll bite them in the ass big time. They will have learned those bad habits just at the time when such things really start setting in and it'll take a crapload of work to undo that kind of ingrained bad habits out later on.

That's one of the reasons I flunked engineering. Too many bad habits picked up early on and I didn't get them straightened out in time.

[Akhlut]

As far as the bottom few students dragging down everyone else, it does dumb things down so badly that gifted people will be bored out of their skulls, because they have no challenge. If they have no challenge, they don't need to do anything other than desultory work, which teaches them very fucking bad habits, such as being lazy and relying on just winging it, and just a few years later it'll bite them in the ass big time. They will have learned those bad habits just at the time when such things really start setting in and it'll take a crapload of work to undo that kind of ingrained bad habits out later on.

That's one of the reasons I flunked engineering. Too many bad habits picked up early on and I didn't get them straightened out in time.

QFT. I never got the tests for being put into the advanced classes or moved up another grade or whatever; so, through my entire school career up until, oh, sophmore year of high school, I never had to study for a test, a quiz, or anything like that. I breezed through everything. And, even by that point of high school, the only thing I had a problem with was math, and I hobbled along in that. However, because I never learned how to apply myself to studying, my work ethic was pretty much shot until I had a kid and an actual job (luckily, my ability to quickly learn seems to apply to work ethic as well). However, it would have been a lot nicer in life if I had been challenged more as a kid. I could have had a much easier time later on in life and actually learned more about math and had it stick, as opposed ot now, where math is fuzzy for me and I have a tough time remembering it all that well.

[Thanas]

This is also why the German 3-way school system produces pretty good and very horrifying results. Because we have got one school (Gymnasium) where the best go to, a middle school level for the medium and the bottom school (Hauptschule) for the worst 10% or so. So this is already in practice in Germany.

What's horrifying about it? It sounds like it works, doesn't it?

For the top 20 percent, yes. For the last 10%, those schools are absolutely horrible and if you go to one, you might just as well write "failure at live" on your T-shirt. The problem is that those schools were specifically designed for those jobs where you do not need a lot of brains but a lot of muscles. Now, as those jobs get outsourced, the demand is no longer there - and machines take over most of those duties anyway.

[Simon_Jester]

None of that anecdote in any way counters Mike's point about the kind of things I or other tradesmen do being gruntwork. It is. It also does nothing to counter the point about the attitudes prevalent among the kind of people who go through trade schools. They understand fuckall about science or more complex concepts and most of the time they have little interest unless it can be distilled into simplified soundbites. Hell, outside of their own field, this attitude was all too prevalent even among the engineering students, though the people who go to do the higher level Advanced Engineering degree (university level instead of just middle-level college) are more of what Mike talks about.

Though if that's true... does it really somehow help to give them fewer years of school, as he implied here?

In the early 20th century, when it was not nigh-universal for people to have high school diplomas, the uneducated louts actually realized that they were uneducated and that this was a bad thing. Today, they think they're pretty damned knowledgeable: smart enough to discuss physics, biology, engineering, etc. No, I don't really think it's productive at all to give morons the idea that they understand anything by putting them through several years of really low-grade crap education to get a high school diploma.

I think the reason for this isn't that they "think they're knowledgeable," or at least no more so than they used to. I think it's that people who don't understand science are naturally reluctant to go "I abase myself before your brilliance!" to anyone with an advanced degree, or to do anything that feels like they're doing that. I don't endorse the habit of refusing to admit you're wrong or less informed than someone else, but it's definitely a common one.

If trade school students in Europe have the same basic attitude towards science as high school students in America who don't go on to college and don't learn any science to speak of... would instituting a trade school-like system in the US and booting the low-end students out of the system actually have any effect on their attitude?