People will be complaining about percentages and fractions being taught instead of teaching how to do taxes or do a budget. Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them. Other people are not idiots and they use the skills they learnt doing exercises and homework for good stuff but also sometimes for taxes and budgeting.
There is a cross section of smart people who only learned how to do school work and got straight As but failed to understand how that school work applies to real life.
I’ve been in classes with people who were in AP calculus have real difficulty in shop class trying to figure out how much square footage of whatever you needed. These are people who can figure out the area under a curve but fail to calculate a 20% tip.
Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them.
There’s a joke, once you get to college, that freshman year is about unlearning all the crap you were taught in high school.
This isn’t an issue of “stupid people” nearly so much as it is deliberately manipulated and propagandized people.
What they’re taught matters immensely. And one of the more insidious lessons of the Western education system is that schools exist to Stack Rank students, in order to segregate the Smarties from the Dummies and sort the deserving from the undeserving.
I was a bit rude here, true. And I don’t love all the testing and grading. A lot of teaching up to around seventh or eighth grade is putting material in front of kids until it clicks.
But anyway, still a bunch of people will whine that they didn’t learn this very unenjoyable, very specific thing in school while chastising schools for not being enjoyable enough. And chastising schools for teaching things that are the very basis of being able to figure out this very unenjoyable, very specific thing.
People will be complaining about percentages and fractions being taught instead of teaching how to do taxes or do a budget. Which leads to the conclusion that people are idiots and it doesn’t matter what you teach them. Other people are not idiots and they use the skills they learnt doing exercises and homework for good stuff but also sometimes for taxes and budgeting.
There is a cross section of smart people who only learned how to do school work and got straight As but failed to understand how that school work applies to real life.
I’ve been in classes with people who were in AP calculus have real difficulty in shop class trying to figure out how much square footage of whatever you needed. These are people who can figure out the area under a curve but fail to calculate a 20% tip.
There’s a joke, once you get to college, that freshman year is about unlearning all the crap you were taught in high school.
This isn’t an issue of “stupid people” nearly so much as it is deliberately manipulated and propagandized people.
What they’re taught matters immensely. And one of the more insidious lessons of the Western education system is that schools exist to Stack Rank students, in order to segregate the Smarties from the Dummies and sort the deserving from the undeserving.
I was a bit rude here, true. And I don’t love all the testing and grading. A lot of teaching up to around seventh or eighth grade is putting material in front of kids until it clicks.
But anyway, still a bunch of people will whine that they didn’t learn this very unenjoyable, very specific thing in school while chastising schools for not being enjoyable enough. And chastising schools for teaching things that are the very basis of being able to figure out this very unenjoyable, very specific thing.