Dean Kamen on the issue with our schools. He says it’s not so much a supply issue (money, teachers, etc) it’s a demand issue (kids don’t care).
I'm Tal Atlas. I'm currently finishing up my masters in microelectronic materials after getting a Physics BS at Colorado School of Mines. I'm a hobbyist photographer and Rails programmer. This is a collection of random things I find intresting from across the web.
All posts tagged Education.
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best. It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other. So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country? Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
And teach it along side other creation myths.
You have not addressed the matter of why it belongs in a science class, the place where kids go to learn about how the world works, not how some Christians believe it might work.
I don’t really care where it gets taught, or mentioned. I just don’t want to ban it from schools.
this is missing the point. a religion class - any kind, on any topic or religion - has NO PLACE in a public school. if you want your children to learn about a certain religion, or religions, or a certain belief of a certain religion, then send them to sunday school, or teach it to them yourself. creationism and anything similar should absolutely be banned from public schools. -M
I completely disagree. I’m a staunch atheist but I think that a high school comparative religion class would be a very helpful and reasonable course. Such a course would not violate either the establishment or free exercise provisions of the First Amendment.
Even further, such a course would help promote understanding of others. How many of you actually know much about other religions. Whether we like it or not there are many people around us with different religions from us and it’s a school’s obligation to inform us about the world around us.
The idea is to teach them about many religions equally. A catholic family may only teach their kid about Catholicism, a jew only about Judaism, an atheist/agnostic about none. A comparative religion class would teach all to everyone.
A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
— Thomas Jefferson
I do not believe this to be accurate. Unregulated economies are what got us Standard Oil, the original AT&T, the great depression, and even Microsoft. A market left to govern itself will not benefit the consumer but rather benefit the most ruthless of businessmen.
As for the taxes issue. For a moment think that helping out other can actually benefit you; by helping the poor you can expand your client base, or customer pool. Not to mention the state of our public schools which is caused by a combination of low funding where it’s needed and an overly powerful union.
Seeing so many people flock to this quote makes me worry that next will be a swell of support for a flat tax.
40 Years of dumbing down is the only effective thing our educational system has accomplished! My kids are 21 and 17, and I basically ‘deprogrammed’ them every day after school, talking about the unbelievable things they were being taught! My kids were always one of only one or two ‘critical thinkers’ in each class, who actually questioned some of the things that were being taught. At Parent-Teacher conferences, I got one of two responses: ‘Your kids are disruptive in questioning my authority and interrupting’, or ‘I wish I had more kids like yours, who actually participate and THINK about the subjects!’ Too much of our educational system has been reduced to indocrination by rote memorization of ‘facts’, to the detriment of teaching basic critical thinking skills. Even if your kids are in public (or private!) school, many parents end up essentially home-schooling their kids, due to the dearth of REAL learning that goes on these days. When all they emphasize in school is Math and Science, as they do here in Michigan, all you get is the short shrift on all the other subjects. Also, Federal mandates force curriculums nationwide to follow narrow and sometimes illogically conflicting guidelines that confuse and bore the students, and tie the hands of truly gifted teachers who actually WANT to teach kids how to think. Instead they are reduced to teaching rote regurgitation of facts to build skills for mandated standardized tests. We reap what we sow, and we have been throwing the seeds of our futiure on barren fields, blown by the whirlwinds of ignorance…
— Digg User ‘Xtrabigg’ on Dumbing Us Down: The American Tragedy. (via livejamie)
This is the same issue I have with our system. Everyone’s being turned into sheep. Critical thinking is one of the best things I got out of school. Thats what it’s for. Like Einstein said: education is what’s left after you’ve forgotten what you learned in school.
Lack of education
A significant thing that seemed to be lacking from this debate as well as most of the other debates. Nobody but Obama spoke about education, and even worse the moderators haven’t asked any questions regarding education. This is an extraordinarily important issue which is receiving no attention by any of the campaigns.
Even though Obama’s the only one to mention education, even he doesn’t really speak to it in a general sense. He only talks about the so called “corridor of shame”. There are greater issues with American education from elementary to secondary and college education.
