• kronisk @lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    This is a naive position. In a class society, the upper classes see to it that their kids get educated. If you’re the daughter of an AC repairman, and you like books with weird words in them, your chances to have a career in the field where you would thrive are slim to none. The best way to counter this is to offer a lot of education, to everyone, not just to the people “with a good head for reading” that just happens to also all have rich parents. For this noble cause, taking the risk that a few kids might be bored for a few hours seems like a reasonable prize to pay. You never know what kid is going to respond to what subject, this is why a broad education is important.

    • notanaltaccount@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      It’s SO boring to people who don’t like it.

      If we ensure everyone is able to have functional literacy, people begin to know.pretty quickly whether they do or do not like reading.

      People have limitied time and the daughter of the AC repairman may be better served by being able take “easy” physics courses as a freshman and take a two year mechanical engineering course after to see if she likes that. She may not want to spend 80 hours on Finnegan’s Wake or expend effort having to pretend to like that incoherent diatribe. Grade school and high school take a long time and the idea that intelligent people of all classes couldn’t start learning more advanced topics and no one shouod specialize in what they learn is a Polyannaish attitude towards time and resource management that has lead to our clusterfuck society of “everyone needs a college degree just to work at enterprise rent a car” and results in people putting off child birth towards ages at which they are less likely to be fertile and have babies with fewer genetic defects. (That is not eugenicism. Everyone has genetic defects and most people have 6-7.) In an Internet age in which information is readily available, strategies, strategies for educating the populace should change and try to.reduce student apathy and disengagement, which ca nbe caused by teaching boring things students don’t like. I am not against a semester or two of high school English, but 4 years is 3 too many at least for those uninterested.

      • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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        5 days ago

        Tl;dr we should stop providing well-rounded educations and once it becomes obvious that a child is uninterested in more intellectual pursuits they should be put in a trade school.

        • notanaltaccount@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Pretty much, but I think it should be a bit less limiting. Trade classes, not trade schools, but also specialized classes for different interests, without AP and Honors classes wrighted to penalize specialized courses lacking those designations.

      • kronisk @lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Those sure are some labyrinthine sentences you managed to conjure up there. Now, if only I didn’t find the task so boring, perhaps I might be able to untangle a coherent thought or two, who knows?