On Sunday, 5 October 2014 at 20:37:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
forbidden from advancing at their own level (thus boring the shit out of them and seeding quite a few additional problems).
Yeah, I've always wondered if the motivation for keeping kids locked up in schools is to prevent them from doing mischief in the streets and teach them to accept hours of pointless boredom so that they will eventually accept doing boring pointless stuff when they later join the workforce as bureaucrats. :-/
Obviously US teachers have no idea what the word "fair" actually means. But then, in my experience, there's a LOT that US teachers don't know.
The status of teaching has gone downhill. It used to be viewed as highly skilled work, then you got some idealistic teachers of the 1968-generation, but after the yuppie period in the 80s it has become the easy path to higher-education when you don't know what you want to do except that you aren't good with theory and you want to work with people. I think the same can be said about psychology, the field you enter if you don't know what to study and find science too difficult… (or am I being unfair?)
statement on unions in general, BTW) and the complete and total lack of "logic" being part of the curriculum *they* were taught as kids (which is still inexcusably absent from modern curriculums).
"logic" is theory. Theory does not belong in schools. Too difficult. You are only supposed to learn things that you don't have to figure out, otherwise finding qualified teachers will become impossible.
US has a few of those too. They're constantly ridiculed (leave it to the US to blast anything that isn't group-think-compatible), but from what I've seen Montesorri's are at least less god-awful than US public schools.
We have a few Montesorri and a few more Rudolph Steiner schools. Which I believe are better at motivating kids and at least not killing the fun of learning. Learning that figuring things out and doing things your own way is fun is a very important lesson.
The government says that the public school system has changed and is kind of incorporating those methodologies too, but that is not what I see. And how can a single teacher handle 27 kids in a class, with only 2 minutes per kid per hour and a rigid plan for what you are supposed to teach?
Btw, did you know that the majority in Norway voted against joining EU, so we did not, but since the majority of politicians were pro EU they got us in the backdoor by signing away our freedom in treaties instead? And even when the treaties do not apply we "harmonize our laws to EU" because we "just have to". So thanks to bureaucratic maneuvers we are now 99% EU regulated, have shittier consumer laws than we used to, have next to no control on the borders and are flooded by romanian beggars and criminals from every corner of Europe and beyond, in return we get no vote in the EU decision making process since we are "independent"… You gotta love democracy…
On a positive note: the IOC managed to demand that the norwegian King ought to hold a party for the IOC leaders and additionally demanded that he should pay their drinks. It was part of their 7000 page olympics qualification requirements document. It is so heavily regulated that it explicitly specifies that the personnel in the hotels MUST SMILE to the IOC leaders when they arrive. I kid you not, even games and past times are heavily bureaucratic down to minuscule details these days. So, due pressure from the newspapers/grassroots and the royal insult the politicians eventually had to turn down the ~$10.000.000.000 winter olympics budget proposal. Good riddance. Live monarchy!
I am personally looking forward to Beijing hosting the winter olympics 2022. I am sure they will mange to fake a smile after the politicians have demolished their homes to make space for the ski-jumping event.
In the meantime Norway should not even think about hosting any sporting event until we can avoid being ranked as the worlds most expensive country: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp 'Cause, we all know that a $10 billion budget turns into at least a $30 billion budget before the games are over. That would have been $6000 per capita. I'd say that royal insult paid off.
Was this off-topic?
