What you call a "meat grinder" is what most call a career. No one is going to force you to choose a career or a specific career. If you want a job, take classes, learn, apply yourself and perhaps you can get it. There's nothing wrong with raising school standards, but to say school is useless is just ignorant.
Nop, what I call "meat grinder" is the entire system we agree to live in. It requires an entire post to explain what the meat grinder is but lets describe it briefly like this :
Some people waste their life working a job they do not particulary like, a job that -in the absolute- is not particulary useful for the well being of humanity, to have the right to live and purchase not so useful consumer goods to make the economical system work like some people want it to work. Some other people have less luck and live in less rich countries, work their whole life for a misery to please the consumers of richer countries, and the world wide meat grinding economical system. Some others just starve to death because rich countries consider it's ok to let them starve to buy their raw material for very cheap.
You live your life telling yourself you have to earn your scholarship and get a career, I've asked myself other questions apparently.
I never said "school is useless", I've learned some cool stuff at school, and it would be worst if we didn't have any schools at all. That doesn't make actual schools less of a pile of turd shit.
Seems to work for millions of students that graduate every year. Sound to me you're making excuses for those who don't wish to apply themselves. I see them everyday at school. Both high-school and college. Kids that think their future is entitled to them.
And seems not to work for the other millions of students. If you want someone to be taught you make him interested, if you just want someone to be able to work like an ant, you just keep the ones that follow the line.
And people doesn't necessarily think the same way, we're not all identical. Intelligence takes many form, but we're somehow all taught the same way.
Some really brilliant people were terrible students, even mediocre. Einstein for instance was dyslexic and had been considered a "dunce" for a big part of his scholarship.
Again, how do you plan on rating potential applicants?
Why should I care about rating people. Rating people makes no sense.
School is supposed to teach people, not "rate" them for their future job. Maybe post-graduation schools ye, when you specialized. But before this point it just makes no sense but preparing yourself being judged during the rest of your life.
Reform seems to be what you're after. Why not share your ideas on doing so instead of declaring the present system as garbage? Besides, there isn't any change to school because there need not be. Millions of people graduate high-school and go on to get a job or additional schooling. Why should we think the few who don't aren't lazy but just don't "fit the system".
Maybe I'll share my ideas later but that would take me a shitload of time, I'd better write a book.
"there isn't any change to school because there need not be"
That makes no sense. Changes happen when you realize it needs to be changed. Things don't just change and then you go like "
oh well, I guess it needed to be changed". You're trying to outsmart the Time itself, and put consequences before causes. It's like defying all logic. Haven't you been taught to be logic at school ? ;o
Why should we think the few who don't aren't lazy but just don't "fit the system".
Why shouldn't we ? They're human after all, ain't they aspiring for a good life like everyone else as well ?
I don't think people who fail school just tell themselves "
fuck it I want a crappy life and to be rejected"
if you can't reason between opinion and fact you're a moron. If you need teachers and parents to tell you that what they're saying isn't fact but is only an opinion, you have no hope for the world outside.
Go explain that to a 12 years old kid. Most of the things we learn under 16, we learn them without real critical thinking but mainly by heart to "succeed" school.
For exemple: the history programs are so big you only touch on all the periods, without grasping the entirety of the consequences of the events and numbers you learn. It goes the same for any discipline.
It isn't what school worries about, it's what it tests for.
It's exactly the same thing, if it tests something it's because it gives it importance.
School shouldn't be a place to rank and test (at least before you specialize and you're conscious about life, aka. being a grown up), it should just be a place to learn.
I'm confused by your logic. Earning a scholarship makes kids into hard workers, which is bad because somehow that takes away from their intellect?
Nop, that's not what I'm saying your taking it the other way around.
What's bad isn't that it makes people hard workers, what's bad is that it mainly aim at making hard workers not asking themselves too many questions.
Meaning it emphasis on the aptitude to work and please a "higher judge" (marks at school, employer at work) instead of making people conscious, responsible and educated. Being conscious, responsible and educated doesn't necessarily make you the opposite of a "hard worker", whatever that would be (a lazy bum maybe ?)
That doesn't "take away" their intellect, that sacrifices possibilities for higher intellect and "self opening up".
Because Cow makes sense. Although the way schooling is done today isn't ideal, Cow understands there is no efficient way to mass produce knowledgeable students without doing in like an assembly line.
"Production line style schooling is terrible. There's no real way to mass produce educated children."
He actually said the opposite, "assembly line" schooling is terrible and there's no way it produces educated people.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but merely pointing out that there is no other way to effectively teach the masses as of now.
There are many ways of doing so if we take the trouble to change it. Saying there's no way is just not bothering to try and think differently.
We had numerous technological advances in a brief amount of time. We can access to free infinite knowledge from anywhere now. So now that we have access to any knowledge we want it would be time to start sharpen our minds and conscious instead of passing on mindless informations.
Makes me think of Descartes "
science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme."
["science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul"]
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As for the thumb thingy, T0ribush was right is not making things up !
See it this way (i'm over simplifying) :
At first were life forms living in the sea. Then, some started living of the sea and grew legs to adapt to their environment, on millions of years. They also developped the prehensive ability (later thumbs), probably to climb on vegetation and escape their natural predators. Millions of years passed and they're still climbing vegetations, but they're now bigger and they climb trees. But food being scarce for big animals on trees, they started going back to the ground but developped the ability to walk on only 2 legs to see predators more easily in the high vegetation (no lawn-mawer back then). With their 2 free arms with prehensive ability (thumbs) and they're tiny brains, they started using tools to fight the difficulty of wild life, hunt etc... from here it's pretty easy to follow. Later we made tools to communicate and write, allowing us to keep track of a shared knowledges about our environment and educate ourselves. The very thing that separate us from the rest of the animals (knowledge and education). Our brain wasn't as big as it is now when we were apes; our skull and brain changed while we were accumulating knowledges.
That's not something we're making up, it's a thought process many had before us and that people generally simplify by "no thumbs = no conscious."
suo says: Drop the subject.
deprav says : Well, I think it was interesting for Jay to see this. It's semi off-topic but it explains how education is the base of human civilization; and how the fact that we can educate ourselves holds to some random evolution factors (we're lucky). That said, we'll stay on topic ;3
Last edited by deprav; May 11, 2013 at 02:59 AM.