Thread: The loss of basic skills in school

The only answer that I see is to let the technology take care of itself. If the American Educators are dead set going to use nothing but mind numbing devices' to educate our children then the only way to do the right thing is to make up the rest at HOME!
Thats right, teach them what's right and what's wrong, moraly and other wise.
Do the basics with your kids right from BL**dy jump street, Number, shapes, ARITHMATIC, colors and social studies world studies and why things like bullying and stealing and the rest are just PLain wrong!! They will teach what they will at school, the rest is up the the parent and guardians of our chilren and the futures.

Forgive my most pompast tirade, hit a sore point with me that's all.

From the desk of an irate citizen, tinkersd

Originally Posted by tinkersd

The only answer that I see is to let the technology take care of itself. If the American Educators are dead set going to use nothing but mind numbing devices' to educate our children then the only way to do the right thing is to make up the rest at HOME!
Thats right, teach them what's right and what's wrong, moraly and other wise.
Do the basics with your kids right from BL**dy jump street, Number, shapes, ARITHMATIC, colors and social studies world studies and why things like bullying and stealing and the rest are just PLain wrong!! They will teach what they will at school, the rest is up the the parent and guardians of our chilren and the futures.

Forgive my most pompast tirade, hit a sore point with me that's all.

From the desk of an irate citizen, tinkersd

You're asking an awful lot from the parents. My mother teaches high school in an inner city public school, and aside from everything else she has to teach, they have now added teaching about abuse in relationships. Why? A couple years ago high school sweethearts (at the time college age) had been abusing each other, then one day the boyfriend killed the girlfriend and then himself. Since their relationship started in high school it has now fallen on the teachers to teach kids about this.

I worked for the Govt and before I retired all the clerical people we hired, mostly 20 something types with High School education really couldn't do their jobs. Ask them to write correspondence of any kind and you got one big paragraph with one continuous sentence full of spelling errors and grammatical errors and just about every type of error you could imagine. The product was basically unreadable. You would have to sit with them at the computer and tell them what to write word by word.

Can anyone show a link between technology and moroniliness or is this thread just about blowing off steam about the younger generation?

I am betting if Einstein had an iPhone when he was a kid, he would still have been a genius.

Imagine what Stephen Hawking could have done if no one had made the mistake of giving him one of those mind numbing devices.
Oh... wait.

Originally Posted by HNSB

Can anyone show a link between technology and moroniliness or is this thread just about blowing off steam about the younger generation?

recent riots in the uk. We can talk to anyone anywhere on the planet instantly, we have the ability to roughly understand what anyone speaking mostly any language is saying through online translators. We can convert and understand idea's in unfamiliar unit systems and express oursleves in a million amazing and wonderful ways. And what do we chose to do with this gift?

Ram raid a dixons and nick a hi def telly..

Not many seriously believe that youngsters would be dumber than previous generations but obviously computers really change the human behavior a bit. We had to learn to use our memory to store all kinds of important and less important information, but nowadays it is so easy to store it in your laptop or phone memory. Not a big change, maybe, but how many of us really remembers that much of phone numbers or birthdays than we did before computers and laptops? This is just another example.

Now there's huge lot of scientific researches telling that your memory gets weaker if you don't use it frequently. Poor memory means certain difficulties in logical thinking and learning.
For what i think, younger generation doesn't really use it as much as we did (or they use it more selectively). Nowadays even schools doesn't force you to use your memory as much. You don't need to remember all the flowers and plants there is as you can always search it from the net. And so on.
Of course we dinosaurs do this too but kids of today have done it since they were born.

I'm not that sure about Einstein but that is a thing we can never know.

Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

I have no idea why i still remember that, but i quite like that i do.

Anyone remember their equations of motion?

Originally Posted by HNSB

I remember being young and working with old morons. Then I was older and worked with young morons.

As to the schools, there will be smart kids and there will be dumb kids. The tools used to teach them don't matter. It's more an issue of capacity and willingness for learning.

I'd say at least one other thing: scope. Even the smartest kid will still be ignorant if you only teach a narrow cross-section of the world. I was privileged to be in a special class in my public schools based on a test I wrote when I was seven or eight years old (clueless as I was, both then and now). Basically, we got more advanced lessons, more variety, and a bunch of good field trips that no one else got. It tapered off in high school and I remember my surprise when I realized everyone who hadn't been in that stream had never done a mock debate before (they were really bad at it). I'd had debates on subjects like the ethics of human genetic engineering in grade 8.

I guess my point is that even kids that don't care should be exposed to as much as possible. What we lack in specific knowledge and skill we can make up for with basic awareness of a dozen other things. It's not a small world. I never use cursive writing, and it wasn't very useful to teach it to me as a tool, but I don't regret learning about it.

I'd take a world of informed idiots over a world of ignorant ones.

Originally Posted by tekbow

Anyone remember their equations of motion?

Lagrangian, or Hamiltonian?

I'm sure sometime in 19th-20th century when public education took off there were similar discussions in the barbershops of all these youngsters being taught useless stuff, like how to read and write, instead of be skilled with the hammer (actually half of my grandparents kept telling me that I'm doing really bad tiring my brain and should give up all that schooling and take on a real work like ploughing and shepherding).
All that writing is the worst assault of just keeping things in memory that ever was.

I say lets go straight to the root of the evil, learn from that Alexandria fire and get rid of all the bad stuff!