Fishing License

[Thomas Cameron]

Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 14:52 -0300, Jacques B. wrote:
>   
>> It's unreasonable to expect parents to have access to PowerPoint for
>> school projects.
>>     
>
> I think it's unreasonable that parents should have to stump with $1000+
> worth of machinery (a PC), plus proprietary lock-in software, for
> homework purposes.  And what are you going to do with it?  Use it as a
> high priced electric typewriter, and to look up dubious sources of
> information on the internet as your references, with no trained
> educators to help you as you struggle along with your project.
>
> But then I disagree with the notion of homework, anyway.  It's only
> value is to involve parents with their child's education, but most
> don't, or don't do it in a worthwhile manner.  The kids go to school to
> learn, at the end of the day they've done enough of that.  Likewise most
> parents have had enough work during their day, and don't want to spend
> several more hours doing work on something at home.
>
> It, homework, is pointless anyway.  I work in electronics, I highly
> technical field.  I've never needed anything I was taught at high school
> beyond basic maths in the first couple years, and the same applies for
> most people that I know in a wide variety of jobs.  All those nightly
> hours of grief were a complete waste of my time.  If I knew then what I
> knew now, I would have coasted school.  I would have flatly refused to
> waste my time with pointless rubbish, insisted that they constrain
> themselves to teaching things that were genuinely useful, and flatly
> refused to co-operate with any punishments meted out.  Even when I
> worked in schools I realised it was a pointless place for most people.
That has got to be the dumbest argument I have ever heard in my life.

The academic load at school is not just to teach you the fundamentals, 
the core bits of knowledge about mathematics or sentence structure or 
turning wood on a lathe.  The academic mix is to teach you about pooling 
knowledge, to be able to associate dissimilar knowledge sets, to 
(hopefully) think critically.

Learning, say, geometry might not *seem* to help you directly in your 
job, but every time you want to cut a board or navigate a curve in a 
car, you will be more likely to be successful if you understand the 
concepts of measuring and calculating the curves and angles.

School is about learning to think, not silos of knowledge.  I am 
appalled that no one ever taught you that.

Thomas