Christopher Landry's Comments
College is not supposed to be a place to shove immature adults to keep them out of the way until they may or may not mature. Especially since we seem to be producing tons of college students like the ones in the article, who don't actually ever mature, or if they do, it's not till after 30 or so.
A better education system should have a better chance of producing adults that are actually ready for the job market. Also, the 15 yo's that get college degrees today are doing just fine. They start companies that hire the 18 yo's (and many others). Also, remember that years ago, people started working when they were 8-12 yo, whether it was on the farm or any other physical trade skill. That segues into the first solution for jobs overall: More job creation. Taking people out of the job market when we already have a ridiculous amount of unemployed is the worst thing we could do.
Chiefly, we need to remember that the money for welfare/unemployment/etc. comes from people who are working and pay taxes. This means more private industry jobs. Government jobs are a net loss, as they are still getting paid from the pool of money collected through taxation. When too few people are producing taxable income outside of the government and too many are taking from that pool of resources, a country goes bankrupt. We've been heading down that road for about as long as I can remember (I’m 34 now), and I'd rather not see us go any faster that way. Greece is a prime example of what happens if too many people are taking and not enough are producing. Taking more people out of the job market , or growing the number/paycheck size of government jobs, is the fastest way to make sure we head the same was as Greece.
So, the first solution is to encourage more private business and startup companies to get going. There are too many roadblocks right now, and too much that make keeping business local more costly than outsourcing to other countries. I don't know the regulations well enough to speak on that in specifics. I imagine one major aspect of it would involve passing laws that encourage businesses to hire locally rather than punishing them for doing so, which results in them outsourcing to other countries to stay competitive. And we had better not try to solve the problem by punishing them for outsourcing, or we’re going to see entire companies pick up and leave, and the jobs they currently provide will be lost to us as well.
Encouraging new business creation, job creation, and less outsourcing is the more immediate (<10 year) solution. Faster than the massive education system overhaul as well, which would only really show itself to be effective after an entire generation of students goes through it from start to finish. The next two suggestions are similarly long-term (10+ year minimum) solutions.
The second solution would probably produce another 2 page paper on its own in order to explain it without getting my head chopped off. Even this small summary is likely to be misinterpreted simply due to the subject matter's controversial nature. Population control, or the very unpopular word "eugenics", is necessary for the future, especially since we are on the verge of figuring out how to undo/reverse aging. Until we can start colonizing other planets, this is the only one we have, and we need to make the most of it. Part of that is slowing population growth. The important points I want to make on this subject are that population control can be done without: A) killing anyone outright, and B) forcing anyone to become infertile without their consent. Nazi Germany's method was the wrong way to do eugenics, as was (is?) Communist China's method. Unfortunately, the word has become anathema due to the horrible ways it was (is?) performed by those countries.
The last thing I can think to bring up is about utilizing the space we have on this planet more efficiently. Currently we seem to like to spread along the surface like a puddle. We should be constructing vertically a lot more, both up and down. For instance, we have the capability now to create artificial light that will trigger photosynthesis in plants as well as the sun, and for a lot of plants, ways to grow them without need for soil. Why have I yet to hear of someone making a 200 story building (100 up/100 down) that produces farm to market items as efficiently as any farmland? This farm-tower would be one way to produce quite a large number of jobs maintaining those systems, managing the crops, logistics of moving the crops around, etc. Essentially all the jobs you would find on a farm combined with building management and product distribution. The government wouldn’t keep running it long-term, of course, but once it’s proven viable they can sell to a private investor who can grow the idea beyond the initial tower and produce more taxable jobs.
That is one idea that I think will lead to our future, and a much more productive use of tax funds than adding more people to welfare/unemployment/etc.. It could be done in the middle of a big city, and save on trucking delivery costs immensely, and save fuel use/help the environment. This is the kind of thing that a government that claims to want to “save the environment” should be doing, not talking about things like Carbon Credits, which would only serve to increase the costs of energy overall. That kind of solution is as bad as the worst versions of eugenics: it punishes the poorest people the worst while the rich are unaffected. It’s not surprising that we hear ideas like this chiefly come from people who are wealthy.
A better education system should have a better chance of producing adults that are actually ready for the job market. Also, the 15 yo's that get college degrees today are doing just fine. They start companies that hire the 18 yo's (and many others). Also, remember that years ago, people started working when they were 8-12 yo, whether it was on the farm or any other physical trade skill. That segues into the first solution for jobs overall: More job creation. Taking people out of the job market when we already have a ridiculous amount of unemployed is the worst thing we could do.
Chiefly, we need to remember that the money for welfare/unemployment/etc. comes from people who are working and pay taxes. This means more private industry jobs. Government jobs are a net loss, as they are still getting paid from the pool of money collected through taxation. When too few people are producing taxable income outside of the government and too many are taking from that pool of resources, a country goes bankrupt. We've been heading down that road for about as long as I can remember (I’m 34 now), and I'd rather not see us go any faster that way. Greece is a prime example of what happens if too many people are taking and not enough are producing. Taking more people out of the job market , or growing the number/paycheck size of government jobs, is the fastest way to make sure we head the same was as Greece.
So, the first solution is to encourage more private business and startup companies to get going. There are too many roadblocks right now, and too much that make keeping business local more costly than outsourcing to other countries. I don't know the regulations well enough to speak on that in specifics. I imagine one major aspect of it would involve passing laws that encourage businesses to hire locally rather than punishing them for doing so, which results in them outsourcing to other countries to stay competitive. And we had better not try to solve the problem by punishing them for outsourcing, or we’re going to see entire companies pick up and leave, and the jobs they currently provide will be lost to us as well.
Encouraging new business creation, job creation, and less outsourcing is the more immediate (<10 year) solution. Faster than the massive education system overhaul as well, which would only really show itself to be effective after an entire generation of students goes through it from start to finish. The next two suggestions are similarly long-term (10+ year minimum) solutions.
The second solution would probably produce another 2 page paper on its own in order to explain it without getting my head chopped off. Even this small summary is likely to be misinterpreted simply due to the subject matter's controversial nature. Population control, or the very unpopular word "eugenics", is necessary for the future, especially since we are on the verge of figuring out how to undo/reverse aging. Until we can start colonizing other planets, this is the only one we have, and we need to make the most of it. Part of that is slowing population growth. The important points I want to make on this subject are that population control can be done without: A) killing anyone outright, and B) forcing anyone to become infertile without their consent. Nazi Germany's method was the wrong way to do eugenics, as was (is?) Communist China's method. Unfortunately, the word has become anathema due to the horrible ways it was (is?) performed by those countries.
The last thing I can think to bring up is about utilizing the space we have on this planet more efficiently. Currently we seem to like to spread along the surface like a puddle. We should be constructing vertically a lot more, both up and down. For instance, we have the capability now to create artificial light that will trigger photosynthesis in plants as well as the sun, and for a lot of plants, ways to grow them without need for soil. Why have I yet to hear of someone making a 200 story building (100 up/100 down) that produces farm to market items as efficiently as any farmland? This farm-tower would be one way to produce quite a large number of jobs maintaining those systems, managing the crops, logistics of moving the crops around, etc. Essentially all the jobs you would find on a farm combined with building management and product distribution. The government wouldn’t keep running it long-term, of course, but once it’s proven viable they can sell to a private investor who can grow the idea beyond the initial tower and produce more taxable jobs.
That is one idea that I think will lead to our future, and a much more productive use of tax funds than adding more people to welfare/unemployment/etc.. It could be done in the middle of a big city, and save on trucking delivery costs immensely, and save fuel use/help the environment. This is the kind of thing that a government that claims to want to “save the environment” should be doing, not talking about things like Carbon Credits, which would only serve to increase the costs of energy overall. That kind of solution is as bad as the worst versions of eugenics: it punishes the poorest people the worst while the rich are unaffected. It’s not surprising that we hear ideas like this chiefly come from people who are wealthy.
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Well, since it’s one of the Neatorama staff, and the author of the article, who asked…
We already have three-tiered system. We call it "AP" or "Advanced Placement" classes, normal classes, and “Special Needs” classes. In many schools, the AP courses grant college credit, which means a proficient AP student enters college as a Sophomore or Junior, getting their degree 1-2 years earlier. Exceptional students (about 1%) can already get their degree at 18 or younger in the current system.
An overhauled system would allow the majority of normal students to get their degree by 18.
Here are the basics of the overhaul as I see it:
First, the school day is too short and homework helps almost no one. The school day should be about two hours longer, which should to allow most parents to drop off and pick up their own children before and after normal work hours. That helps several things: parents get more time with their kids, they can be more assured of their kids’ security before and after school, and schools spend less on buses, that would only be necessary for those that aren't walking AND don't have parents that drive. Extending the day by just two hours effectively gives us another 2.2 school days per week, when compared to today. This doesn’t actually save any time after the suggestion from the next paragraph, but it means that students can actually be children (i.e. play instead of work) once they finish the school day, which is a plus.
As for homework, the majority of it only helps the slightly above average students. These are the ones that are bright enough to understand the teacher’s teaching without any need of further help, and are benefited by some extra practice to help them remember things. The top tier of students already learned the stuff in the class and have no need of the homework, so it’s just an annoyance they will likely avoid (exception being the ones that are obsessed with getting A’s). The lower tier of students, at least half if not more, need the teacher to explain things more effectively and answer questions that they will have when trying to do the homework. So, the top tier students should be in a different class altogether (AP), and the lower tier students should be doing that same work in the classroom where the teacher is available to answer questions. Thanks to the previous point of longer school days, the classes can be extended to allow for this time.
The homework that doesn’t fit this category is usually big research projects. As it happens, these can usually be done at the school library. So the class would move to the library and do the research and work on the project there during class time. This would have several benefits: the teacher is on hand to help if needed, and group projects don’t need to figure out their own time and travel arrangements to get together.
This should also help the STEM courses, especially sciences, since this means more time doing physical experiments that get students really interested in these studies, rather than being forced to spend nearly 100% of class time in lecture, which tends to bore/scare many away.
Now that we’ve improved how the actual school day functions such that students will actually be getting a proper education when they’re in school, let’s tackle the yearly schedule, or vacation time + review time. Currently many schools have about 2.5-3 months off for summer vacation, another two weeks for winter vacation, another week for spring, and another 3-5 weeks of various national and state holidays. Summer vacation is a double-punch: Not only is it eating up valuable school time, but the long break allows students to forget much of what they learned, and the first quarter of the following school year is lost to review time instead of further progress. All told, students are only actually progressing in their studies about six months, or 26 weeks, of the year.
Instead, let’s make it so that there is a two week vacation time at the end of every three month period, and no more than 15 individual holiday days off in any given year. That’s eight weeks, or two months, off for the two week vacations, and another three weeks of individual holidays, meaning the students will only be missing 11 weeks out of the 52 week year, for a total of 41 weeks of school. Compare that to the 26 weeks we currently have.
Let’s see if I can do my math correctly on this:
The current system uses about 26 weeks per year for about 16 years (1st through 12th + 4 yr degree), which comes to 416 school weeks total. College weeks/years are a bit odd, but I feel this estimate is sufficient.
Add 15 weeks per year, and the 416 weeks can be done in about 10.1 years. That means getting a degree at about age 18.
And that’s for the normal kids, which I feel safe in assuming would be the majority. The AP kids would be able to do it in two thirds that time or less, most of whom could graduate at 15 or so.
Finally, we get to the tier system. Separating students into AP, normal, and Special Needs, as is done today, is only one important divide. The other is learning style. Some students need more hands on, personal help from a teacher, while others can sit and absorb mass amounts of teaching almost passively. This means that instead of the one-size-fits-all system we have currently where the former is usually put in near-permanent detention hall for being too rowdy and the latter do perfectly fine when not distracted by the former, we would have a system that accommodates both.
On the one hand there would be smaller classes for the ones that need more attention, no more than 10 students per class (definitely not the 30+ we get now). These could range anywhere from “special needs” students to hyperactive AP students. Each group would have their own curriculum that supports their needs properly. On the other hand, the majority of students that don’t need personal attention can be placed in massive lecture halls, where thousands of students can be taught using the current methods that already fit their learning style.
This means five separate types of classrooms: Personal Attention AP, Personal Attention Normal, Personal Attention Special Needs, Lecture Hall AP, and Lecture Hall Normal. Compare this to what we have now: AP, Normal, and Personal Attention Special Needs. By adding the Lecture Hall groups, we need fewer teachers for the majority of students, freeing up more teachers for a larger variety of Personal Attention style classrooms, which we sorely need. Even the brightest students can find themselves bereft of motivation in the 30+ classrooms of today if they’re not the Lecture Hall type.
Yes, this would mean some interesting juggling to get all of these students into the appropriate classrooms. Fortunately, there are a large number of suburbs in the US that already have multiple schools for each grade level in close proximity to one another, so transport wouldn’t be too inconvenient. The main issue is the lack of lecture halls, as most schools are built to accommodate these ridiculous 30+ student classrooms and have just one theatre that might seat a couple thousand at most. That means only about two lecture halls per suburb. I surmise that about 14 per suburb would be necessary for this new system, 7-8 years of normal and 6-7 years of AP. The current school buildings could be used for all the Personal Attention classes that would be created, it would just be a lot of wasted space with 5-10 students per classroom built for 30+.
With the right education of the teachers the sorting can probably begin as early as First and Second grade, but would really be an ongoing question where the teachers and parents are always watching the students for signs that they do not fit in their current environment, and identifying which of the other environments would suit them better. The idea here is that it should not really be a classist separation at all. It should be “What style of education would most benefit this particular child?” Any parent of multiple children understands that even in a small family, the teaching/parenting style can be wildly different for each child, yet we don’t see this customized parenting as “classist”. As an example, Billy might get more personal attention than Sally because he needs it and Sally doesn’t, not because he’s the favorite (i.e. higher class tier). The same attitude should be used when deciding where to place the student in the education system, and the tiers used in the overhauled system are actually identical to the ones used in the current system. Accommodation for personal attention needs is the only new concept.
As for resources, the overhauled system would be nearly the same overall cost as the current system. Teachers would need to be paid more, since they’d be working longer hours and 15 extra weeks compared to the current system, so they’d definitely deserve it. If the resources for that should come from somewhere, we should start with the over-paid and over-staffed school administration. Most of the school districts that cost exorbitant amounts are also the ones that have the poorest education results, due in part to over-paying administrators and under-paying teachers. The reduction in the number of buses will also help. After that, if more funds are needed, the county/state legislature is making too much money as it is as well. Of course, we never hear the legislature (either side of the aisle) say “we’ll reduce our paychecks to improve the school system”, but let someone try to balance out the overspending in the budget and it’s “the children will suffer!!”
We already have three-tiered system. We call it "AP" or "Advanced Placement" classes, normal classes, and “Special Needs” classes. In many schools, the AP courses grant college credit, which means a proficient AP student enters college as a Sophomore or Junior, getting their degree 1-2 years earlier. Exceptional students (about 1%) can already get their degree at 18 or younger in the current system.
An overhauled system would allow the majority of normal students to get their degree by 18.
Here are the basics of the overhaul as I see it:
First, the school day is too short and homework helps almost no one. The school day should be about two hours longer, which should to allow most parents to drop off and pick up their own children before and after normal work hours. That helps several things: parents get more time with their kids, they can be more assured of their kids’ security before and after school, and schools spend less on buses, that would only be necessary for those that aren't walking AND don't have parents that drive. Extending the day by just two hours effectively gives us another 2.2 school days per week, when compared to today. This doesn’t actually save any time after the suggestion from the next paragraph, but it means that students can actually be children (i.e. play instead of work) once they finish the school day, which is a plus.
As for homework, the majority of it only helps the slightly above average students. These are the ones that are bright enough to understand the teacher’s teaching without any need of further help, and are benefited by some extra practice to help them remember things. The top tier of students already learned the stuff in the class and have no need of the homework, so it’s just an annoyance they will likely avoid (exception being the ones that are obsessed with getting A’s). The lower tier of students, at least half if not more, need the teacher to explain things more effectively and answer questions that they will have when trying to do the homework. So, the top tier students should be in a different class altogether (AP), and the lower tier students should be doing that same work in the classroom where the teacher is available to answer questions. Thanks to the previous point of longer school days, the classes can be extended to allow for this time.
The homework that doesn’t fit this category is usually big research projects. As it happens, these can usually be done at the school library. So the class would move to the library and do the research and work on the project there during class time. This would have several benefits: the teacher is on hand to help if needed, and group projects don’t need to figure out their own time and travel arrangements to get together.
This should also help the STEM courses, especially sciences, since this means more time doing physical experiments that get students really interested in these studies, rather than being forced to spend nearly 100% of class time in lecture, which tends to bore/scare many away.
Now that we’ve improved how the actual school day functions such that students will actually be getting a proper education when they’re in school, let’s tackle the yearly schedule, or vacation time + review time. Currently many schools have about 2.5-3 months off for summer vacation, another two weeks for winter vacation, another week for spring, and another 3-5 weeks of various national and state holidays. Summer vacation is a double-punch: Not only is it eating up valuable school time, but the long break allows students to forget much of what they learned, and the first quarter of the following school year is lost to review time instead of further progress. All told, students are only actually progressing in their studies about six months, or 26 weeks, of the year.
Instead, let’s make it so that there is a two week vacation time at the end of every three month period, and no more than 15 individual holiday days off in any given year. That’s eight weeks, or two months, off for the two week vacations, and another three weeks of individual holidays, meaning the students will only be missing 11 weeks out of the 52 week year, for a total of 41 weeks of school. Compare that to the 26 weeks we currently have.
Let’s see if I can do my math correctly on this:
The current system uses about 26 weeks per year for about 16 years (1st through 12th + 4 yr degree), which comes to 416 school weeks total. College weeks/years are a bit odd, but I feel this estimate is sufficient.
Add 15 weeks per year, and the 416 weeks can be done in about 10.1 years. That means getting a degree at about age 18.
And that’s for the normal kids, which I feel safe in assuming would be the majority. The AP kids would be able to do it in two thirds that time or less, most of whom could graduate at 15 or so.
Finally, we get to the tier system. Separating students into AP, normal, and Special Needs, as is done today, is only one important divide. The other is learning style. Some students need more hands on, personal help from a teacher, while others can sit and absorb mass amounts of teaching almost passively. This means that instead of the one-size-fits-all system we have currently where the former is usually put in near-permanent detention hall for being too rowdy and the latter do perfectly fine when not distracted by the former, we would have a system that accommodates both.
On the one hand there would be smaller classes for the ones that need more attention, no more than 10 students per class (definitely not the 30+ we get now). These could range anywhere from “special needs” students to hyperactive AP students. Each group would have their own curriculum that supports their needs properly. On the other hand, the majority of students that don’t need personal attention can be placed in massive lecture halls, where thousands of students can be taught using the current methods that already fit their learning style.
This means five separate types of classrooms: Personal Attention AP, Personal Attention Normal, Personal Attention Special Needs, Lecture Hall AP, and Lecture Hall Normal. Compare this to what we have now: AP, Normal, and Personal Attention Special Needs. By adding the Lecture Hall groups, we need fewer teachers for the majority of students, freeing up more teachers for a larger variety of Personal Attention style classrooms, which we sorely need. Even the brightest students can find themselves bereft of motivation in the 30+ classrooms of today if they’re not the Lecture Hall type.
Yes, this would mean some interesting juggling to get all of these students into the appropriate classrooms. Fortunately, there are a large number of suburbs in the US that already have multiple schools for each grade level in close proximity to one another, so transport wouldn’t be too inconvenient. The main issue is the lack of lecture halls, as most schools are built to accommodate these ridiculous 30+ student classrooms and have just one theatre that might seat a couple thousand at most. That means only about two lecture halls per suburb. I surmise that about 14 per suburb would be necessary for this new system, 7-8 years of normal and 6-7 years of AP. The current school buildings could be used for all the Personal Attention classes that would be created, it would just be a lot of wasted space with 5-10 students per classroom built for 30+.
With the right education of the teachers the sorting can probably begin as early as First and Second grade, but would really be an ongoing question where the teachers and parents are always watching the students for signs that they do not fit in their current environment, and identifying which of the other environments would suit them better. The idea here is that it should not really be a classist separation at all. It should be “What style of education would most benefit this particular child?” Any parent of multiple children understands that even in a small family, the teaching/parenting style can be wildly different for each child, yet we don’t see this customized parenting as “classist”. As an example, Billy might get more personal attention than Sally because he needs it and Sally doesn’t, not because he’s the favorite (i.e. higher class tier). The same attitude should be used when deciding where to place the student in the education system, and the tiers used in the overhauled system are actually identical to the ones used in the current system. Accommodation for personal attention needs is the only new concept.
As for resources, the overhauled system would be nearly the same overall cost as the current system. Teachers would need to be paid more, since they’d be working longer hours and 15 extra weeks compared to the current system, so they’d definitely deserve it. If the resources for that should come from somewhere, we should start with the over-paid and over-staffed school administration. Most of the school districts that cost exorbitant amounts are also the ones that have the poorest education results, due in part to over-paying administrators and under-paying teachers. The reduction in the number of buses will also help. After that, if more funds are needed, the county/state legislature is making too much money as it is as well. Of course, we never hear the legislature (either side of the aisle) say “we’ll reduce our paychecks to improve the school system”, but let someone try to balance out the overspending in the budget and it’s “the children will suffer!!”
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They went through too many years of school training them that they did not need to show up every day to pass (pretty much from 7th till college graduation, so around 10 years), so it's really no surprise that they continue to do the same thing when they get a job.
I could go on for another 3-5 paragraphs at least on what I think our school system should be like instead of the ridiculous amount of wasted time we have now, but that seems awfully off topic for this article. Suffice it to say that with a complete overhaul of the system, we could be graduating with 4 year degrees at 18 easily.
I could go on for another 3-5 paragraphs at least on what I think our school system should be like instead of the ridiculous amount of wasted time we have now, but that seems awfully off topic for this article. Suffice it to say that with a complete overhaul of the system, we could be graduating with 4 year degrees at 18 easily.
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Definitely agree that, where the dates actually work out (which thanks to macintosh above, we've proved that more than just the couple I found do not), there are "post hoc ergo propter hoc" issues as well.
So what we seem to be saying is this was created by a Star Wars fanboy/girl who wants to believe that Star Wars is the Alpha and Omega of all science fiction... yeah, sorry, I like Star Wars, too, but it wasn't quite that influential.
So what we seem to be saying is this was created by a Star Wars fanboy/girl who wants to believe that Star Wars is the Alpha and Omega of all science fiction... yeah, sorry, I like Star Wars, too, but it wasn't quite that influential.
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Blade Runner is based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", 1968. SW Episode 4 aired in 1977. Perhaps the relationship is the other way around in that case. Guardians of the Galaxy (comic) released in 1969, so Grut vs Chewy is more likely the other way around, as well. Perhaps many more of the relationships here are the other way around, and that was only 5 min of research, so I can guess researching the rest would take about a day at most. It took longer to write this comment than to research those mistakes.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if talking to the directors/writers of these other franchises one could find out that instead of Star Wars being their major influence for the particular comparison the author of this project is trying to make, it was something else entirely.
I can't say I'd put much stock in someone's overblown argument that Star Wars influenced everything if they didn't take the time to do simple research on Wikipedia first.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if talking to the directors/writers of these other franchises one could find out that instead of Star Wars being their major influence for the particular comparison the author of this project is trying to make, it was something else entirely.
I can't say I'd put much stock in someone's overblown argument that Star Wars influenced everything if they didn't take the time to do simple research on Wikipedia first.
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About that last one... if there is an official position of "Camerawoman" that implies there are more than two people on this trek, so..
"Camerawoman does her job and lets the other people on the expedition do theirs" to help the person in the hole."
"Camerawoman does her job and lets the other people on the expedition do theirs" to help the person in the hole."
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All of that is true, and I don't have a satisfactory answer to it at this time. In the end, there are too many facets to the multitude of issues with both education and job availability that probably won't be solved any time soon.
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@Lothar: Exactly. 12 years of English classes didn't do those people any good. So we need better classes, not more classes. The junk we learn now in most English courses only matters to people who want to become an author of some type. For instance, I was never good with poetry, but I had several classes force me to try to write poetry or else fail that portion of the subject... That's not good teaching, that's simply cruel.
We should teach about poetry, certainly, but don't torture people with things that only apply to 1% of daily life.
@Miss Cellania: Part of the reason there are so few jobs for your kids is the enormous number of older-than-25 folks that work non-skilled jobs like fast food or grocery store non-management positions. If those people had gotten a proper education instead of what they did get, maybe they'd be able to do something more productive, instead of being stuck at a non-skilled job for years, or decades, in many cases.
There have been a growing number of schools and classes in the last decade or so that are geared more toward teaching a skill directly rather than teaching general education. Trade schools such as these are a great way to learn a skill so that a person can get away from their entire lives, and I'm happy to see them getting more popular and lots of use.
As long as the incredibly huge number of non-skilled positions are filled by 25+ year old non-skilled individuals, young adults will continue to have trouble finding work.
We should teach about poetry, certainly, but don't torture people with things that only apply to 1% of daily life.
@Miss Cellania: Part of the reason there are so few jobs for your kids is the enormous number of older-than-25 folks that work non-skilled jobs like fast food or grocery store non-management positions. If those people had gotten a proper education instead of what they did get, maybe they'd be able to do something more productive, instead of being stuck at a non-skilled job for years, or decades, in many cases.
There have been a growing number of schools and classes in the last decade or so that are geared more toward teaching a skill directly rather than teaching general education. Trade schools such as these are a great way to learn a skill so that a person can get away from their entire lives, and I'm happy to see them getting more popular and lots of use.
As long as the incredibly huge number of non-skilled positions are filled by 25+ year old non-skilled individuals, young adults will continue to have trouble finding work.
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"money management, law, politics, first aid, and sex education"
I'd change money management to "responsibility" and keep first aid and sex education, and those should definitely be the domain of parents.
Law and politics are so convoluted that no one person really understands them, but a teacher with a degree in such things has a better chance at teaching them then the average parent, and the parents with law degrees probably don't have the time to teach those intricate subjects.
Math is a given, at least basic math. I think our schools take too long working our way up to Algebra, though. I was doing basic Algebra in first grade: 5 + x = 10 or 10 - x = 5, those kinds of simple things. Most schools don't even try to teach Algebra until at least 6th, if not 9th. That's a terrible waste of time, waiting that long. All the math we need to know could be finished by the time we're in 6th grade, and then those extra math classes would be replaced by...
More science classes. We don't have nearly enough science. I mean, we could have way more classroom time spent doing engineering and research experiments to SHOW science to young students rather than spending almost the entirety of our science classroom time with our noses in books. Ask anyone what they loved about science, and even people who hated science classes loved the beaker experiments in Chemistry and the Egg-Crash-Car in Physics. And all that math we learned from 1st to 6th would be put to work in real conditions with the extra science class time, meaning that we'd be seeing how the math works in the real world, like calculating the ballistic trajectory of a baseball or a cannonball, rather than merely learning concepts that feel completely separated from it.
History and literature should be combined. Most of history can be taught either through books, both fiction and non-fiction, and around books. There are tons of books that are topical to their time period that would fit this perfectly. One that comes to mind is "To Kill a Mocking Bird". There is so much US History that surrounds that novel that can be taught alongside the novel itself that it makes more sense to combine the lessons rather than treat them separately.
Now, English classes... Something has to be done very differently here, because we don't need 12 years or more of English, and too many of those years seem to do nothing for a large portion of the population that appears to be remaining at a low literacy level despite all that extra effort. I'd suggest rolling those lessons into the Science and Lit/History courses. This is similar to the math classes, where the student would learn math better by applying it in science class. Science has tons of official documentation that can be taught as part of those courses, and Lit/History would be studying various kinds of things like biographies, journals, poems, epic stories, etc. Having a separate English class is overkill with the possible exception of Business Writing, specifically for things like writing a resume or an official letter. Technical documentation in general would be covered in Science class.
While I'm at it, let's fix the school year schedule. We currently have a system that wastes part of the year in a long summer break, then wastes a part of the school year reviewing the past material that the students have forgotten BECAUSE of that long break. There should be more 2 week holidays throughout the year, none longer than that, and no review periods. That would give us almost 50% more time learning new things, and could have us graduating High School by the time we're 12-14, and have a college degree at 16-18. We spend way too much time in school, when we could be working full-time in good jobs from 18 on.
Our school system is horribly broken and needs a complete overhaul. Unfortunately, it's so entrenched that I doubt what needs to be done will ever happen.
I'd change money management to "responsibility" and keep first aid and sex education, and those should definitely be the domain of parents.
Law and politics are so convoluted that no one person really understands them, but a teacher with a degree in such things has a better chance at teaching them then the average parent, and the parents with law degrees probably don't have the time to teach those intricate subjects.
Math is a given, at least basic math. I think our schools take too long working our way up to Algebra, though. I was doing basic Algebra in first grade: 5 + x = 10 or 10 - x = 5, those kinds of simple things. Most schools don't even try to teach Algebra until at least 6th, if not 9th. That's a terrible waste of time, waiting that long. All the math we need to know could be finished by the time we're in 6th grade, and then those extra math classes would be replaced by...
More science classes. We don't have nearly enough science. I mean, we could have way more classroom time spent doing engineering and research experiments to SHOW science to young students rather than spending almost the entirety of our science classroom time with our noses in books. Ask anyone what they loved about science, and even people who hated science classes loved the beaker experiments in Chemistry and the Egg-Crash-Car in Physics. And all that math we learned from 1st to 6th would be put to work in real conditions with the extra science class time, meaning that we'd be seeing how the math works in the real world, like calculating the ballistic trajectory of a baseball or a cannonball, rather than merely learning concepts that feel completely separated from it.
History and literature should be combined. Most of history can be taught either through books, both fiction and non-fiction, and around books. There are tons of books that are topical to their time period that would fit this perfectly. One that comes to mind is "To Kill a Mocking Bird". There is so much US History that surrounds that novel that can be taught alongside the novel itself that it makes more sense to combine the lessons rather than treat them separately.
Now, English classes... Something has to be done very differently here, because we don't need 12 years or more of English, and too many of those years seem to do nothing for a large portion of the population that appears to be remaining at a low literacy level despite all that extra effort. I'd suggest rolling those lessons into the Science and Lit/History courses. This is similar to the math classes, where the student would learn math better by applying it in science class. Science has tons of official documentation that can be taught as part of those courses, and Lit/History would be studying various kinds of things like biographies, journals, poems, epic stories, etc. Having a separate English class is overkill with the possible exception of Business Writing, specifically for things like writing a resume or an official letter. Technical documentation in general would be covered in Science class.
While I'm at it, let's fix the school year schedule. We currently have a system that wastes part of the year in a long summer break, then wastes a part of the school year reviewing the past material that the students have forgotten BECAUSE of that long break. There should be more 2 week holidays throughout the year, none longer than that, and no review periods. That would give us almost 50% more time learning new things, and could have us graduating High School by the time we're 12-14, and have a college degree at 16-18. We spend way too much time in school, when we could be working full-time in good jobs from 18 on.
Our school system is horribly broken and needs a complete overhaul. Unfortunately, it's so entrenched that I doubt what needs to be done will ever happen.
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I agree. However, you have to convince at least 90% of the other students to think the same way. Might be doable, if you have time to discuss the issue before the test. If this extra credit showed up at the time of the test-taking, though, you're basically just hoping that everyone else is as smart as you. If you're in the top 90% of intelligent folks already, that means it's not particularly likely that you'll find enough people in the class that are as smart as you.
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So, they invent this idea of "peacetime" by leaving out all the little "wars" that would have almost completely filled out all of that time period, and truncate off the Reparations time after each war "ends". Ok, that's awfully convenient....
All of the past wars involved stopping a country, as a whole, from doing something they shouldn't be doing. The "War on Terror" is about trying to stop a poorly defined group of people with poorly defined, yet clearly bad, ideas, like "let's kill all the people that we don't like". For instance, if a whole country, or the leadership of such, decides it's time to kill everyone that doesn't belong to their "group", we go to war against that country to stop them. At least, we do once they start trying to kill people in our "group". When a religious group decides they're going to do the same type of thing, we call out the police, or maybe the National Guard (which is domestic military) if it gets serious enough. In that sense, the "War on Terror" is more like police-work that takes place on foreign soil rather than a war against another country.
"Militarily-Assisted Police-Work on Terror" doesn't have the same ring to it, though.
How do they go about deciding when a war ends for this graph? They seem to use one definition for things like WWII and a different one for the "War on Terror". Specifically, the only part of the "War on Terror" that could be considered an actual war in the same sense as the previous ones (war against a country as a whole) is the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended in about 3 months, so nothing like the years and years indicated by the graph.
Reparations is what we've been doing in Iraq since the end of that war. Reparations time is not War time, otherwise we would have to consider WWII as lasting several more decades, since we were in Germany and Japan helping them rebuild for a very long time. In fact, Reparations time for Germany lasted until several years after the Berlin Wall came down in '89, and we still have a base in Okinawa, Japan, which could be interpreted as meaning that WWII is still "going on" today, 70 years after the "end", if we count Reparations time and time-till-all-troops-are-pulled-out.
The point is, what we're going through now is exactly the same as all the "peacetime" portions of the graph above, since the last actual war ended 12 years ago, and the stuff happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan are militarily-assisted police-work on foreign soil.
If there is no real "peacetime", the reality is that everyone has been in a country at war for their entire lives, they just live their lives as if it doesn't matter most of the time.
All of the past wars involved stopping a country, as a whole, from doing something they shouldn't be doing. The "War on Terror" is about trying to stop a poorly defined group of people with poorly defined, yet clearly bad, ideas, like "let's kill all the people that we don't like". For instance, if a whole country, or the leadership of such, decides it's time to kill everyone that doesn't belong to their "group", we go to war against that country to stop them. At least, we do once they start trying to kill people in our "group". When a religious group decides they're going to do the same type of thing, we call out the police, or maybe the National Guard (which is domestic military) if it gets serious enough. In that sense, the "War on Terror" is more like police-work that takes place on foreign soil rather than a war against another country.
"Militarily-Assisted Police-Work on Terror" doesn't have the same ring to it, though.
How do they go about deciding when a war ends for this graph? They seem to use one definition for things like WWII and a different one for the "War on Terror". Specifically, the only part of the "War on Terror" that could be considered an actual war in the same sense as the previous ones (war against a country as a whole) is the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended in about 3 months, so nothing like the years and years indicated by the graph.
Reparations is what we've been doing in Iraq since the end of that war. Reparations time is not War time, otherwise we would have to consider WWII as lasting several more decades, since we were in Germany and Japan helping them rebuild for a very long time. In fact, Reparations time for Germany lasted until several years after the Berlin Wall came down in '89, and we still have a base in Okinawa, Japan, which could be interpreted as meaning that WWII is still "going on" today, 70 years after the "end", if we count Reparations time and time-till-all-troops-are-pulled-out.
The point is, what we're going through now is exactly the same as all the "peacetime" portions of the graph above, since the last actual war ended 12 years ago, and the stuff happening in Pakistan and Afghanistan are militarily-assisted police-work on foreign soil.
If there is no real "peacetime", the reality is that everyone has been in a country at war for their entire lives, they just live their lives as if it doesn't matter most of the time.
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If Dad paid for those toys in the first place, son's got no leg to stand on. Dad might have gotten less back talk and needed to raise his voice less by having an alternative punishment available in case of such refusal. Maybe something like "If you don't smash them yourself, I'll invite MY friends to a console smashing party, and on top of that you are grounded for a month and get no allowance for a year."
Imagine being that kid's age and your Dad invites several of his adult friends over to smash your consoles with the sledgehammer! Either way, your consoles get smashed, and if the alternative is far more painful than smashing them yourself, you might keep your mouth shut and do it.
Imagine being that kid's age and your Dad invites several of his adult friends over to smash your consoles with the sledgehammer! Either way, your consoles get smashed, and if the alternative is far more painful than smashing them yourself, you might keep your mouth shut and do it.
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That's brilliant, only... are they using car tire rubber on the sole? If not, I'm afraid the shoe sole is likely wear out by age 7-10, long before the person can use it for 5 sizes (age 15). I tried the link and the shoe link on that page just hits a 404 error. I'd really like to think that they thought of this and planned for it with the materials used in construction of this marvel.
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I'm not going to claim that the 300:1 ratio is good in itself, it could certainly be moved a bit. It seems that this particular CEO was already running his company at about 12:1, so he was already far better than the 300:1 country average, and even significantly better than the 20:1 ratio recommendation. Basically, this guy is already cream of the crop when it comes to fair compensation for his workers vs himself, so there really wasn't any need for him to go all the way to 1:1. It also seems that, in order to make this work, he's decided to severely stunt the growth potential for his company for the immediate future. I hope it ends up paying off, but I am not so certain it will. The linked article seems hesitant to rubber stamp success on this venture as well.
Also, compare that 300:1 to the time of rampant monopolies back in the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, when it was normal to have a ~10,000:1 ratio. Maybe we've been heading in the right direction for over a hundred years now, and it takes time for this sort of thing to completely sort itself out. Perhaps in another 20-50 years it'll be down to 20:1.
Now watch as people who were somehow struggling to make ends meet at ~$50k/yr somehow manage to still struggle to make ends meet at ~$70k/yr after getting expensive new car payments and more... it's like winning the lottery. The rate of bankruptcies for lotto winners is about double the average in any given year.
Perhaps he should, instead, give everyone at the company ~$60k/yr salaries and use the rest to have private financial advisers to ensure that they're spending what they do have in a responsible manner.
Also, compare that 300:1 to the time of rampant monopolies back in the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller, when it was normal to have a ~10,000:1 ratio. Maybe we've been heading in the right direction for over a hundred years now, and it takes time for this sort of thing to completely sort itself out. Perhaps in another 20-50 years it'll be down to 20:1.
Now watch as people who were somehow struggling to make ends meet at ~$50k/yr somehow manage to still struggle to make ends meet at ~$70k/yr after getting expensive new car payments and more... it's like winning the lottery. The rate of bankruptcies for lotto winners is about double the average in any given year.
Perhaps he should, instead, give everyone at the company ~$60k/yr salaries and use the rest to have private financial advisers to ensure that they're spending what they do have in a responsible manner.
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Kinda makes me wonder how many optimists get trapped in burning buildings because they refuse to consider fire escape routes before the fire starts.