That's just it. We need to change the "average" to what people actually are today. Which is ever evolving at their own pace. And promote that for everyone so we can step out of dark ages. Much better than standardization which only promotes the pharmaceutical industry.
Schools for the most part are just a babysitters club that only promote unsustainable backwards habits like self denial, herd mentality,
Wage slavery, poverty thINC.
The current way is "slacking off" and THE way of "below average", while taking the whole planet w it. Bully culture. The future we are talking about here. Might as well make it win win. Diversity and common sense. Seeing the benefit in allowing people to grow into who they actually are, is a big step into trust yes.
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In laymen's terms, school sucks and I would never do that to anyone. Knowing what I went through. Trauma, bully/ victim programming for a death culture.
Agreed.
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iPad or no iPad is irrelevant, and now you've flipflopped from your previous statement.
In my first statement I was talking about some real educational apps, say for learning languages for 10+ year olds, while in my previous one I was talking about some play with letters for 3 year olds. Sorry for not clarifying that.
How about playing instruments? And why isn't history of any relevance to you?
Playing instruments? You did that in school? Here in the CZ in school you only do singing and later some history. (at least that's what I did) If a child wants to play on an instrument, he/she will start attending a "krouek" (I'm sorry, I don't know of any good English translation... Basically it's that the child's parents pay for it and their child then attends some lessons in the afternoon. There are "krouek"s for sports, martial arts, playing instruments, and many more, these are just the most popular ones. Schools often open their own "krouek"s, but these are still paid.) or get a private tutor, if their parents can afford it.
Say the past three generations have not had to study any history what so ever. What do you think the current extremist right wing winds that are blowing through Europe would mean for the political situation? Today, the simple fact of being able to point to history that everyone knows about makes people realise what will happen if you give those kind of people the power.
Well, if someone says that some extremist group/political party will do what Hitler did, then my system-educated child will say "Who the hell was that? Let me check on that." taking out his/her smartphone out of his/her pocket. Then he/she will enter "hitler" into google, click on the first link and read a wikipedia article about him. After learning about the horrors he had done, he/she will probably choose not to vote for that party.
You will probably say that most people wouldn't do that, but that's why I think learning people how and why to study on their own is so important and the current school system fails to do that, I think it actually might make studying seem to be something boring, weird and nerdy to many people. Look at how curious pre-school children are and how they are looking forward to learn something new in school, and then take a look at those who have been already are going to school for a while... There is clearly something wrong with the current educational system.
And some children might be interested in history as well, no matter if it's taught it in school or not... I used to ask my parents a lot about life in communist Czechoslovakia a long time before we studied that period in school, and based on that, I know for sure I will never vote for communists.
So we've just added two subjects by simply mentioning them. It doesn't seem like you've really thought this through...
Thinking about it, given the popularity of sports "krouek"s, I should remove PE and maybe music too. With the saved money, school-organized "krouek"s could be for free...
Do you honestly believe everybody will need to use the pythagorean theorem at least once during their lifetime?
I do. Many things are squares/rectangles and as you know, they contain two right triangles. Monitors, for example. You usually get the diagonal in inches and the sides (resolution) in pixels. What if you want to compare two monitor's pixel density? OK, perhaps the average person won't do that, but how about this one: A driver looks at a map that looks roughly like this (it doesn't have to be a perfect right isosceles triangle, just something that kind of resembles it):
He wants to decide whether to take a route on a highway going via B to get from A to C or to go directly, on a normal road. If he remembers from school that a diagonal in square is roughly 1.4 times it's side, he knows that he will have to go 1.4 times faster on the highway.
So on highway, you can drive 130 km/h, to be in C at the same time, you will have to drive 130/1.4 = 93 km/h. Since you can only drive 90 km/h on normal road and you are more likely to have to slow down on that road, he will pick the highway route. However, if he knows that there is likely to be a traffic jam on the highway and that his average speed on the highway would be only 95 km/h then, that is 95/1.4 = 68 km/h on the road. So, since he knows he can achieve an average speed of 80 km/h on the road, he will take the road.
You deem certain things absolutely necessary for all kids to learn, what makes your distinction better than say the current school system?
The current school system tries to teach children a bit of everything, while in their life they will only need to specialize in one field and leave the rest to those who specialize in those fields. So I think it's better to just teach children how to learn what they want to specialize in + what they're interested in on their own.
Children need to be introduced to subjects in order for them to develop a sense for it, and an interest in it.
Only a very few children develop an interest in a school subject... But I've heard that some have lost their interest because they had a bad teacher.
To leave that in the hands of the children will only make for a large population of people with very basic knowledge of very few subjects, and a small population of people who have specialised in something.
And that's right, isn't it? The large population with basic knowledge will have simple jobs (e.g. bus drivers, waiters, laborers, ...), the same as they do today, but without losing so much time in school studying something they'll never use in their life. And the small population of people who have specialised in something will have specialized jobs (e.g. scientists, engineers, architects, lawyers, ...) again, the same as today and again instead of losing so much time in school studying something they'll never use in their life, they will just focus on studying for their expertise.