This is something I would also like to know. I’ve always loved my teachers but I’ve always hated the school system. Science is not about memorization. School should be about the joy of learning. As I see how my younger cousins are educated in school, or even younger people about 3-6 years younger than I. It is becoming ever more apparent that what we have is a system that would like to propagate society as it is. and for all the beauty and the joy that the society I am in has brought to me, I cannot but hope that society progresses and for it to progress we must learn to subvert the things that try to propagate this system I have come both to love and hate.
They say crazy is doing something again ang again ang expecting different results. So I say that we are crazy to believe that the world is not changing, and because the world is changing it is crazy to expect that the way that society progressed what starting 150 years ago up to the present is the way for us to progress even more. We need a modern system of educating people. We have sold the arts short by not teaching it well. We have sold science and math short by not showing people how beautiful it is.
I hope that by the time I have a child, I wouldn’t have to put up a herculean effort just to give my child a proper education.!
What interests me is whether the present system actually produces more success or heavily limits it.
Would a different system with less emphasis on conformity produce more of our best and brightest? Or does the annealing effect of being crushed by the system help to produce those best and brightest?
If you look at those who have commonly advanced our thinking, our abilities, our technologies, and our economy (through business sense), many did poorly in schools, yet they persisted. The persistence may have been the critical element, and it would have perhaps been lost had they been encouraged more.
So does this mean we need more of those mediocre middle school and high school teachers acting as the forge to both create the worker bees we need, as well as the best [and most successful] by trying to destroy them?
Thoughts?
Do Good Grades Predict Success? – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.