17th August 2006, 7:42 PM
NOOOOO! Oh for... no way do I miss that! High school is the worst place in the universe, well unless you fit into a nice social group, then from what I understand it's fine. If you, like me, just didn't get all the social stuff and your "peers" decided that meant you had to be ridiculed, then you basically SURVIVED the experience. On the other hand, college is full of people who are actually ADULTS about life. I never did gain decent social skills until AFTER getting out of high school, and anyone claiming they actually learned how to operate in society from the social interactions in school must be either confused or had a totally different environment than I had. Nothing about how those people behaved was conducive to a functional society, and what reasonable adult says "well they can learn from each other" anyway? These people are supposed to teach me how to behave in society? No thanks, stick me with mature people instead. That's the problem with that whole "school teaches kids what social groups are like". First and foremost, school kids are ANIMALS :D. They don't know anything and thus have nothing TO teach anyone about social skills. What, do they want to reinvent the progress society has made every single generation by random experimentation with the masses in a confined setting? The second issue is this is not anything LIKE society. This is on so many different levels, the first being the ignorance that high school "populars" have with how the real world works, but the arrogance thinking they do. They will either ignore or sometimes even take it upon themselves to "teach" the unpopulars the way they should act, even though in a scant few years, every single thing they ever did in high school will be utterly meaningless except, gasp, the actual studying. Being queen of the dance won't impress anyone, and with every one of your friends spread thin throughout society, it becomes clear that being popular in school does not translate at all to the masses who just don't care at all about you (nor should they).
Instead, kids need to be taught how to behave by being put out in the real world. There's a lot out there to learn and the real world isn't as "dire" as I painted it above (except to those who think that high school is the best form we've got for it). The world's a great place, it's just that an individual needs to fully come to terms with the fact that they aren't the "main character of the story" and they are working together with everyone but don't actually need to impress all of them and make them acknowledge that they exist to do good things. Take kids to the library, or to the park, or maybe even to work if it's allowed (unless you are one of those poor parents working at a bottom rung job, because taking your kid there is child cruelty, and probably unsanitary in a cooking setting, and this comes from me actually seeing some kid brought to a frickin' burger joint to see what his mom doesn't do for a living because she thought popularity in school was more important than learning how society in the real world actually works). Teach the kid to behave, and that bullying in the real world usually results in jail time as a direct result of most of society agreeing they would rather not be bullied and to have such elements removed so they can go about their business.
School society resembles something closer to Oz than an MIT lab.
(On a lesser note, gym should have always been, from the start, an elective. Kids excercise on their own running around like maniacs, exactly like I do... um used to do (yeah, I don't suddenly sugar spaz and flail around my room pretending to be some sort of dancing ninja acrobat and scaring my cat... at least when someone else is in there). What possible use could climbing a rope or fluffing up a parachute or dodgeball actually have? I've heard the fluffy hypothesis that it "builds character" but the evidence seems to be totally lacking. Any teamwork skills they are supposed to build can be just as easily built in a setting like a TEAM PROJECT that actually does what school is meant to be about. Plus, they waste money on a lot of pointless junk that could be better spent on UP TO DATE BOOKS.
That said, I did enjoy the chance to learn at least, when the other stuff didn't hinder the experience. You may get the impression that I'm rather opinionated about the way school operates these days, well yes, yes I am. The entire K-12 experience was an aweful time and I'm glad it's over, and I'm a little upset that I know there are better ways to go about it and that current methods could easily be abandoned, like gym, and replaced with better ones but aren't. The adult world has it's problems but even at the worst times I've had in recent years, it was nothing like that. The most I can say is that I had a loving home and that the few teachers that apparently didn't have the same experience I had in school saying things like "these are the greatest times you'll have in life" must be real losers because my life right now is a LOT better.
Instead, kids need to be taught how to behave by being put out in the real world. There's a lot out there to learn and the real world isn't as "dire" as I painted it above (except to those who think that high school is the best form we've got for it). The world's a great place, it's just that an individual needs to fully come to terms with the fact that they aren't the "main character of the story" and they are working together with everyone but don't actually need to impress all of them and make them acknowledge that they exist to do good things. Take kids to the library, or to the park, or maybe even to work if it's allowed (unless you are one of those poor parents working at a bottom rung job, because taking your kid there is child cruelty, and probably unsanitary in a cooking setting, and this comes from me actually seeing some kid brought to a frickin' burger joint to see what his mom doesn't do for a living because she thought popularity in school was more important than learning how society in the real world actually works). Teach the kid to behave, and that bullying in the real world usually results in jail time as a direct result of most of society agreeing they would rather not be bullied and to have such elements removed so they can go about their business.
School society resembles something closer to Oz than an MIT lab.
(On a lesser note, gym should have always been, from the start, an elective. Kids excercise on their own running around like maniacs, exactly like I do... um used to do (yeah, I don't suddenly sugar spaz and flail around my room pretending to be some sort of dancing ninja acrobat and scaring my cat... at least when someone else is in there). What possible use could climbing a rope or fluffing up a parachute or dodgeball actually have? I've heard the fluffy hypothesis that it "builds character" but the evidence seems to be totally lacking. Any teamwork skills they are supposed to build can be just as easily built in a setting like a TEAM PROJECT that actually does what school is meant to be about. Plus, they waste money on a lot of pointless junk that could be better spent on UP TO DATE BOOKS.
That said, I did enjoy the chance to learn at least, when the other stuff didn't hinder the experience. You may get the impression that I'm rather opinionated about the way school operates these days, well yes, yes I am. The entire K-12 experience was an aweful time and I'm glad it's over, and I'm a little upset that I know there are better ways to go about it and that current methods could easily be abandoned, like gym, and replaced with better ones but aren't. The adult world has it's problems but even at the worst times I've had in recent years, it was nothing like that. The most I can say is that I had a loving home and that the few teachers that apparently didn't have the same experience I had in school saying things like "these are the greatest times you'll have in life" must be real losers because my life right now is a LOT better.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)