[Mars]

The teacher has no incentive because he / she is underpaid


The parent has no incentive because either they want to do more with their kid, and spend quality time with them instead of helping with homework, or, more likely, they have as little to do with their kid as possible


The student has no immediate incentive to do anything because it seems like the whole world sucks all the way up and down so why bother.

Until at least some of those issues are addressed the only way for the education system to go is down.

[karajorma]

Cut child allowance and give a £10,000 bonus at the age of 18 for anyone who graduates after a test. Then we'll see motivated parents.


Seriously though I tend to agree with Mars' rather pessimistic statement to be honest.

[Colonol Dekker]

I couldn't care this is Darwinism in effect, kids with improper attitudes are destined to be the road-sweepers and trolley pushers in life if they can't be bothered to develop the foresight.

Kids that want to learn and succeed, Will.

[Mobius]

lawl no stupid wwii didn't start in 1939 world war ii started in 1935 when italy invaded ethiopia or you could get really into it and say that wwi and wwii were one war with a re-population break in the middle why are you so ignorant and uncultured

Wrong. WWII started in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles, which turned the German population into a full-of-anger one. Seriously, what are you up to?

The teacher has no incentive because he / she is underpaid

Sorry, but I partially disagree. As far as I'm concerned astronomic salaries(if compared with average ones for a given kind of job) influence the results in a bad way. I don't know why, but people tend to act strangely when their salaries are high... they become arrogant and don't give a lot of importance to their job and the people they interact with. Politicians are a superb example - incredibly rich ones are good for nothing, at least here.

[Polpolion]

And if the teachers can't motivate the students...

So if the teacher gives the student homework, and the student doesn't do it, beyond giving bad marks and calling parents there isn't anything else than can be done. To just blame this soley on the teacher is grossly irresponsible. Everyone has to do their part to make it work: parents, teachers, and students.

I've been trying to move on from the blame game for a while. Unfortunately, it seems as though you just love to do this. If you had read the paragraph in its entirety, you'd realize that although it in all probability is the students' fault, there is at this point nothing we can reasonably expect the students on their own to fix the problem. We know that we need to re-motivate the student body, but there is no way for the student body to re-motivate itself. Obviously if there was, we wouldn't be in this situation.

The teacher has no incentive because he / she is underpaid

I disagree. Like presidency, if you're doing it for money/incentives, you shouldn't be doing this job. A teacher not teaching to the fullest of his/her ability is just as unreasonable as a student not working to the fullest of his/her ability. Which is partially why I think teacher quality plays a role in this.

The parent has no incentive because either they want to do more with their kid, and spend quality time with them instead of helping with homework, or, more likely, they have as little to do with their kid as possible

That's really an unreasonable reason for 99% of all cases. My parents, and the parents of everyone that I know, would put homework and school before spending personal time with kids, however unwillingly it is. But you are right in some form; they've got to be doing something wrong here.

It's not that they don't have incentives, it's just that many of them don't know how to motivate it. I won't touch on this area much past the fact that I think that good parenting good help solve this problem, because I'm not a parent.

The student has no immediate incentive to do anything because it seems like the whole world sucks all the way up and down so why bother.

This is true, or at least in a practical sense. We must persuade the student body that an education is essential in most facets of life the career that they are going into later in life.

I couldn't care this is Darwinism in effect, kids with improper attitudes are destined to be the road-sweepers and trolley pushers in life if they can't be bothered to develop the foresight.

Kids that want to learn and succeed, Will.

That is precisely what the problem is, right there. People are starting to be apathetic about these things. Everyone is completely capable of leading a perfectly educated, rich, and full life, and everyone everywhere would be better off if they did. It's just that they're not. Look at Detroit: Do we really need a city where 3 out of 4 people are garbage men or street cleaners? No. That's doing no good to anyone at all, except for maybe the 1 out of 4 people who do graduate high school. And if it's them we're looking to please, then this thread is going to grow obsolete pretty fast.

Come to think of it, Dekker, why do you suppose people receive a public education? Is it to prepare them to get a job when they're older, and make a good living, or to just to simply learn, and grow as a person?

[Spicious]

I disagree. Like presidency, if you're doing it for money/incentives, you shouldn't be doing this job. A teacher not teaching to the fullest of his/her ability is just as unreasonable as a student not working to the fullest of his/her ability. Which is partially why I think teacher quality plays a role in this.

So you would take advantage of teachers' desire to help students by underpaying them?

Everyone is completely capable of leading a perfectly educated, rich, and full life, and everyone everywhere would be better off if they did.

No, the planet doesn't have the resources for that to work.

[Polpolion]

I disagree. Like presidency, if you're doing it for money/incentives, you shouldn't be doing this job. A teacher not teaching to the fullest of his/her ability is just as unreasonable as a student not working to the fullest of his/her ability. Which is partially why I think teacher quality plays a role in this.

So you would take advantage of teachers' desire to help students by underpaying them?

Personally, I would give them a very livable salary, given the pivotal role they play in society. I don't know how others do it, though. Given the amount of complaining, though, it's clear that some people are.

Everyone is completely capable of leading a perfectly educated, rich, and full life, and everyone everywhere would be better off if they did.

No, the planet doesn't have the resources for that to work.

Okay, you got me there. Let me change what I said with that information in mind: Most people are reasonably capable of utilizing the information received in their education in a worthwhile, effective manner. Whether they do or not is completely up to them.

[NGTM-1R]

The teacher has no incentive because he / she is underpaid

Pet peeve. Teachers should be paid for their performance. California is a state run by the teacher's union more or less, which has resulted in the schools turning to ****. Giving the teachers more money is worthless, and we've proved it quite thoroughly by now. They're not held to any accountable standards because nobody's ever figured out a reasonable means of doing so.


Back to the first page; their conception of "illiterate" and "not being able to read" are not the same thing, folks.

[Kosh]

I've been trying to move on from the blame game for a while. Unfortunately, it seems as though you just love to do this.

Didn't look like it to me. Mars and I were pointing out what should be obvious fact that so many people seem to miss.

[Polpolion]

I've been trying to move on from the blame game for a while. Unfortunately, it seems as though you just love to do this.

Didn't look like it to me. Mars and I were pointing out what should be obvious fact that so many people seem to miss.

Oh sorry, it looks like you disregarded the post where I had a plan that eliminates this entire issue and all of my other posts past the first two sentences. My bad.

Let's say this for a moment: You're right. It's the student's fault. The poor teachers and parents were doing reasonably fine*. (If I'm understanding you correctly, this is where you leave off) Now what?

The student should try harder? Why should he? Because people all over the world think he's stupid? He knows he's stupid and he's already stopped caring. So we need to make him care, right? Obviously. But how? This is where I'm at, or where I was trying to be. I sketched out a preliminary solution that it seems like all but a few ignored, and while in retrospect it was fairly vague on the most concerning issue (a very bad thing indeed), it was bounds past everyone else's ideas.

So picking up where I left off, we have the most troublesome apathetic students in extremely low student-teacher ratio situations, allowing for much more personal attention. Furthermore, we have them there all day, allowing the teacher much more freedom and opportunity to fully work with the student on a dynamic level. That means the teacher can get to know the student, and completely base the schedule off of that. Now the issue with the student is that they don't pay attention, don't do homework, don't think, let their mind wander, etc. This is where the teacher gives the student some ownership of his/her education. The teacher offers the student a clear, poignant, reasonable list of things to work on, perhaps not all focusing completely on academics. Some would be discussions of current events, foreign affairs, others would be geometry, logic, American literature, writing, and so on and so forth. All in all, ideal conversation in the group would be about 60% teacher talking, 40% student talking. The teacher would make the student reply and think, and if need be, do the homework right in front of the teacher just to make sure it's getting done.

They'd continue on this course of action until they found some specific area that the student was particularly interested in, and the teacher and the student would teach each other about it, subject permitting. They'd focus probably the largest chunk of their time on that subject, just to have at least one specialty area, one thing the student could be "good at". They'd continue focusing on other areas, and eventually with enough focus and time, the student should get it and start working, and eventually be re-integrated to everyone else. Like I said before, it'd be expensive, but IMHO an education is one of the most important thing a society can give future generations, and it would be worth it.


*aside from the fact that the teacher's students are failing and the parent's children are being delinquents. Part of being a teacher and part of being a parent is knowing how to effectively deal with that, and it's evident that they don't know how (or they just plain aren't).

[Spicious]

Where would you get enough teachers for this to be anywhere near plausible?

[Polpolion]

That's the thing. We can't just have public universities down the requirement for education degrees, because that would degrade teacher quality overall. Maybe we could have completely different job positions open up, have public universities pioneer new education system for these things. Maybe a new market for these jobs, while similar to a normal teacher's, would trick people into feigning interest in the area. But that wouldn't last long enough to sustain it, pretty much at all. It's not like we can randomly conscript people off the streets to do this, and the parents of these kids are probably themselves relatively uneducated, or probably busy with jobs.

If we had unlimited resources, I think it'd be a decent plan, but we obviously don't. I'd be really interested to see the results of this idea if it were attempted at just one school, though. We actually might not even have to do it at every school everywhere. I know that in downtown Detroit, there was an over-abundance of schools, all had too few students, they could consolidate those. Although it would be impossible to get all 75% of failing students through, I could easily see 25% additional passing.

Maybe we could make people working for a degree in education do an additional year of college and just have this as their final year? That would guarantee that the teacher be young and have somewhat of an understanding of where the student is coming from, attitude-wise. I'm not really sure if we could force universities to do that, though.

In fact, we very well might not need to do something as drastic as this at all. A viable solution in all probability exists at a class-group level.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Scrap the current system it doesn't work.  Go back to the good old ways of apprenticeships.  Make them pick a trade and learn how to do it by watching and doing.  After a year or so they start getting paid if they can do the job.  They can't do it then no pay.  If they don't like the jobs available then they can work to learn a new trade. 

If I learned one thing in college it's you can't learn from books you need to do it.   

[Flipside]

Apprenticeships are a good way to go in my opinion, and an encouragement to learn a trade before continuing to high education if you so wish, that way you move average University age to the mid-late 20's. Those who don't want to go for higher qualifications will have a trade that they can learn and use, and those that go to University have worked in the 'real world' and have some concept of what is required from an employer.

[Mars]

The teacher has no incentive because he / she is underpaid

Pet peeve. Teachers should be paid for their performance. California is a state run by the teacher's union more or less, which has resulted in the schools turning to ****. Giving the teachers more money is worthless, and we've proved it quite thoroughly by now. They're not held to any accountable standards because nobody's ever figured out a reasonable means of doing so.


Back to the first page; their conception of "illiterate" and "not being able to read" are not the same thing, folks.

I do agree with that, but Bush's No Child Left Behind didn't really adress this properly.

Teachers, by and large however, are paid less than your average grocery store worker, all things being equal.

Of course, I live in Colorado, which is pretty bad as far as education goes

[Ford Prefect]

Scrap the current system it doesn't work.  Go back to the good old ways of apprenticeships.  Make them pick a trade and learn how to do it by watching and doing.  After a year or so they start getting paid if they can do the job.  They can't do it then no pay.  If they don't like the jobs available then they can work to learn a new trade. 

If I learned one thing in college it's you can't learn from books you need to do it.  

I think those of us going into academia might take issue with this. For some people, reading books is the "doing."

[Scuddie]

The problem is not the teachers, the parents, or the students.  It's the teaching model.

Students in the US aren't taught, they are told.  They aren't expected to learn, they're expected to memorize.  They're not expected to analyze, they're expected to recall.

This, and only this, is what's wrong with our educational system.

[Polpolion]

The problem is not the teachers, the parents, or the students.  It's the teaching model.

Students in the US aren't taught, they are told.  They aren't expected to learn, they're expected to memorize.  They're not expected to analyze, they're expected to recall.

This, and only this, is what's wrong with our educational system.

My US military history class, writing class, band class, and programing class all beg to differ with that statement.

But you pretty much got it dead on for Math and Chemistry. And I wouldn't be surprised if it varied from class to class, or even from teacher to teacher.

[Kosh]

This, and only this, is what's wrong with our educational system.

How so?

[Colonol Dekker]

Come to think of it, Dekker, why do you suppose people receive a public education? Is it to prepare them to get a job when they're older, and make a good living, or to just to simply learn, and grow as a person?

The majority of people recieve a public education because it's the only avenue available to them.  Whether they choose to capitilise on that oppertunity is a different matter.

I chose to, i'm sure that some people here had different routes on the learning highway. But some people can't be bothered with the hike.

That's why they're stuck on the hard shoulder getting raped by the <metaphor>"truckers of poor education" <metaphor>


Quick note, i don't apply this view to all people, those with learning difficulties that acknowledge them and seek help are entitled to some lenience. THose that have learning difficulties and hide it as "bravado" are just as deserving of failure as those that are just plain lazy....