[pawarrant]

Originally Posted by cdheaven

hey! dont bash our american schools! thats not very patriotic! what are you, some sort of liberal or terrorist?
haha. jk.

with billions of dollars being spent on war, how could we get money to better schools anyway? i guess in 100 years we will own all this foreign land and everyone in america will be stupid cause we didnt have money to pay teachers, buy books, have art a nd music departments.


P.s. again, just my opinion. and i didnt spell check. if something is spelled wrong, or grammtically incorrect, that would just prove my point more..

Money does not have much to do with it. The school districts that spend the most per student often do not have the best results. I doubt we will own much more land than we do now in 100 years. If conquering land was our goal, Germany would be the 51st state, Japan the 52nd.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051700035.html

[Nikki]

Originally Posted by akhbhaat

The entire American educational system is a farce. I didn't develop so much as a modicum of respect for any of it until I reached the university level.

The real problem is that students are merely trained to regurgitate facts - deductive reasoning and logic have fallen by the wayside. Students aren't taught to think (though some are undoubtedly incapable regardless of how or what they're taught), only memorize. I've always been a huge proponent of thesis papers and essays as a replacement for the traditional regurgitative examination. Legitimate learning isn't about reciting data - data is a mere prerequisite to an actual understanding of the subject at hand. Raw knowledge is merely an enabler, not an end.

Go into virtually any major university in the US today and announce to a class of undergraduate students that their entire grade will be based upon a single essay style exam, to be taken at the conclusion of the semester. Revel in the panic. They'll all be expecting bonus points for taking quizzes or doing cute little extra credit assignments. Amusing, really.

I think that the American education system is a joke. I cannot compare it with other countries because I do not know but I really think what we have here is pathetic especially down south. I really wish that they would administer essay exams because it would really show who is intelligent and who is not.

I don't know if anyone remembers me posting about how I was tutoring a girl in my money & banking class who didn't know how to do a percent, well I got a B in that class somehow (I thought it would be slightly higher) and she got a B-! What the hell is that? She got horrible grades in the tests she took before I started helping her and she told me she didn't think she did well on the final, but she did say she talked to him during office hours about extra credit and he told her that he couldn't grant her any yet somehow she manages a B-? I don't understand. She can't do a percent, but maybe she is better at memorizing stupid finance terms than me.

And I remember time when I handed in very good papers and got a B or a B+ and a girl who I was helping because she didn't speak or write English well got a B or a B- and I read her papers, they were practically elementary, so the teacher was obviously grading papers less harshly if english was the students' second language.