Education today vs. Yesteryears

[frimmel]

As a draftsman one of the things you see is kids out of school who know how to use computer aided drafting programs but not the first thing about making a drawing a machinist needs to make a part.

I learned how to make drawings and then how to use CAD so I could make drawings faster.

There is a too much emphasis on teaching the use of tools and not enough on the concepts behind them. The spellchecker won’t catch ‘pubic area’ when you meant ‘public area.’ Sometimes you have to do things for yourself.  I’m not really sure I’m better off with the calculator than I was with the slide rule.

Jermo makes a good point about not being able to qualify, or did you mean quantify, the education now with the education of the past.

[Jermofoot]

@frimmel:

Jermo makes a good point about not being able to qualify, or did you mean quantify, the education now with the education of the past.

:lol:  Probably.  My mind is not up to par these days…

[frimmel]

I only caught it because I’d just been talking about a similar sort of misstep.  :-)

[dinosaur]

Well, first I’d like to say I sure wish I had more Frimmels to work with.  I’m an engineer.  I learned how to compute the old fashioned way with pencil and paper.  Yes I did have the use of an electronic calculator but that only made the arithmatic go faster.  Most engineers I meet from school don’t know how to compute their answers for anything harder than a “look up” by hand.  They get wrong answers from the computer because the program has a bug and they don’t know enough to figure it out.  If you take away the Internet, they would hardly be able to give you an answer to anything except which music thingy has the most storage.  They walk around with their buds in their ears and texting their friends.  I fear for when they have children.  Not all of them.  I meet 1 in 20 that are worth something, but maybe that is because I graduated well and I have high expectations.

I don’t know as much as my dad.  I’m getting closer, but I’m not there yet.  But the things I know are more “bookish” than what he knows.  My son appears to be keeping the trend toward “bookishness” but I am making sure he knows a lot of stuff, and I hope to help him surpass me by quite a margin.

But by and large, we don’t expect much of the kids these days and they are living up to it.  Kids before WWII had to be adults by the time they were 14 or 15 helping out with the family in a substantial way.

[General Turgidson]

Shoot, in the 19th century we had one of the best education systems in the world.  Foreigners would come to small American towns and marvel at 16 year old children speaking Latin.

[losttribe04]

@General:

Shoot, in the 19th century we had one of the best education systems in the world.  Foreigners would come to small American towns and marvel at 16 year old children speaking Latin.

Well we have failed to keep that legacy going.

[frimmel]

@dinosaur:

Well, first I’d like to say I sure wish I had more Frimmels to work with.

Thanks, but don’t give me too much credit. I’m mostly a librarian. I hardly ever make drawings these days mostly I just make the electornic stuff we get in ready for others to use. Maybe that is just our field though. Steel is on hard times.

But by and large, we don’t expect much of the kids these days and they are living up to it.  Kids before WWII had to be adults by the time they were 14 or 15 helping out with the family in a substantial way.

I certainly agree with you there. But in a way though that is a useful indicator that you are an adult: You don’t like kids’ music, you don’t like their clothes and you don’t like their attitude.

[frimmel]

@LT04:

@General:

Shoot, in the 19th century we had one of the best education systems in the world.  Foreigners would come to small American towns and marvel at 16 year old children speaking Latin.

Well we have failed to keep that legacy going.

It was when school stopped being about being ‘educated’ and instead became about being trained to be useful to business. Colleges are now just really expensive trade schools.

[losttribe04]

@dinosaur:

But by and large, we don’t expect much of the kids these days and they are living up to it.  Kids before WWII had to be adults by the time they were 14 or 15 helping out with the family in a substantial way.

Dinosaur thanks for your post I agree.  I would have to say it was my parent’s generation (Vietnam era) that started that with their kids.  I would have to say that I was a lucky one to have my uncle around.

He gave me homework that had nothing to do with school.  One time he had me memorize the states in the order they were admitted to the union.  He also pushed me to become an Eagle Scout.  Now I am very thankful for his influence.

If nothing else separates me from my peers I can tell a potential employer that if for what ever reason I didn’t make it to work that day the only reason he didn’t get a phone call was because I was in the ER or the morgue.

Frimmel I never looked at it that way but I would have to agree with you.  Most collages now are just big trade schools.  My fire department has been paying for me to go to school to get my degree in Fire Technology.  I does seem eerily close to a shop class setting at times.

LT

[frimmel]

What did the college graduate say at McDonald’s?

Do you want fries with that?

[Jennifer]

Here’s one for you.

School Policy District U-46 (Where I work):

Teachers are not to teach division.  Teachers may refer students to NCLB (No Child Left Behind) video #HH-5519 if the student is having problems with division problems.

The video teaches you to use your fingers and to draw objects on a page.  It’s a completely worthless piece of junk and it’s 18 minutes long.  Why can’t we just teach fractions and long division like teachers did before the Clinton then Bush administrations?

[Imperious Leader]

Lets leave out Bush and Clinton from future posts please.

[Jennifer]

@Imperious:

Lets leave out Bush and Clinton from future posts please.

Sorry, but at least they are from opposing parties, so we can’t blame one party or the other for this sh*t.  That’s what I was driving at.  One just expanded the inept program of the other, meaning both were completely inept!

When will they learn to let teachers write the teaching codes?

[frimmel]

@Cmdr:

Here’s one for you.

School Policy District U-46 (Where I work):

Teachers are not to teach division.  Teachers may refer students to NCLB (No Child Left Behind) video #HH-5519 if the student is having problems with division problems.

:-o

:?

:|

:lol:

Good one you had me going for a minute there.

[dinosaur]

I can’t tell you how much stuff like that burns me up.  Kids should be required to learn long division in or before 4th grade.  My son is being told by the teacher that is what calculators are for.  I don’t think a kid should use a calculator until they are doing trig problems.  If our kkids can’t do the math, they will never learn to budget.  But how many times do you hear about thirty year olds still living at home?  It is all part of the same problem.

[Jennifer]

@dinosaur:

I can’t tell you how much stuff like that burns me up.  Kids should be required to learn long division in or before 4th grade.  My son is being told by the teacher that is what calculators are for.  I don’t think a kid should use a calculator until they are doing trig problems.  If our kkids can’t do the math, they will never learn to budget.  But how many times do you hear about thirty year olds still living at home?  It is all part of the same problem.

Exactly!  And they are required to have the calculator for the standardized test!

None of my kids knew what the dots above and below the line on the division symbol meant before I told them yesterday (Tuesday the 14th of October 2008)!

But we’re told they don’t need to learn math.  The cash registers will tell them how much change to dole out and Quick Books will tell them how much money they have in their banks!

[losttribe04]

I try not to get involved in public education.  I know that the each state (or common wealth) has their own department of education do they coordinate (at least to some degree) at the national level?

LT

[Jennifer]

We have a national directive that states what we are allowed to teach and what we are not allowed to teach.  It was implemented in 1993 and later Ted Kennedy (Senator) wrote an act known as the No Child Left Behind Act that reinforced the legislation signed into law in 1993 by the Congress and President at that time and gave it teeth. (Now you have the audacity to slow down so the students have time to understand what you are trying to teach, the government can pull all your federal grants which will effectively shut down your school because states give matching grants.  If you match $0 then you get $0 from the fed and $0 from the states.)

Basically, we can tie the stupification of our children back to 1993.  Between 1960 and 1993 we were not really making them educated, but at least we were not actively trying to make them less educated like we are today.

[losttribe04]

My wife used to work in a day care and she said that even they felt the effects of No Child Left Behind.

That being said lets try to avoid the politics to keep this topic from getting locked.

Thanks,
LT

[Jennifer]

How can we talk about education and not refer to the Education Reform Act of 1993 and No Child Left Behind (2001? or was it 2002?)?

Those two pieces of legislation made this nation the stupidest (defined as least educated) of all first world nations!  If we had to innovate the light bulb, nuclear power, assembly lines or any of the other American innovations from 1850-1950 today, we’d all be doomed!

What changed?  The two acts listed above.

How do we fix it?  Repeal the two acts listed above.