Oh those painful classes of practicing algorithms instead of applying math to solve problems.. still in my poor teacher memories as nightmarish times in my math life!

J. Stone

Compare this to: “I’ve come to realize that probably one reason I struggled with algebra, geometry et.al., was that it seemed to me that these were basically reactionary academic disciplines, useful for designing weaponry or potentially repressive computer technology, but not with any obvious humanistic or social positive uses.”

Yes, there really are people who think that engineers just develop weapons and “repressive computer technology”. The water and sewer system that kept them from dying of typhoid and cholera, the roofs over their heads, the cars they drive to work, and the electricity that powers their computers (repressive or otherwise) must have all come about by magic.

And many of those people work in our school systems, or worse, teach education courses.

Yeah, but what you and I think of as higher math are worlds apart. I’m not asking them to prove Fermat’s little theorem. I think they should be as versant with math as we expect them to be with English and History. That means understanding trigonometry well enough to determine the height of a building given a triangle and a measuring tape on the ground. That means knowing enough about history to understand where the British Empire came from.

Is your point really that education is strictly utilitarian? It has no value to create a better person, a better citizen? Because why have high school at all then? Send them strsight to vo tech. or be like Europe and start tracking them young and only send the high performing ones to college.

IKids aren’t interested in the Civil war, so they shouldn’t bother learning it? Your argument seems to be that for math; is it that for everything else too? Is there nothing that you think kids should be made to learn in order to be decent citizens?

Sure, GradSchoolMom, and many of us learned that a stint or two at what once was termed “honest work” was highly instructive and a positive tonic for such adolescent angst and rebellion.

Starting in 1961, I spent several summers loading trucks and rail cars in a cannery. It was phenomenal money for the time, but it also was physcial labor, 48 hours per week, and it sure dispelled any horseshit about what life might be like without the advantages of an education.

When our older son was going through the usual rebelliousness, a month or so in a garage door factory dispelled all that nonsense for him, too. He was a 19-year-old doing what was a summer job, but a dead-end job in terms of much of anything except a paycheck. And he was working with adults who were supporting families on those paychecks. The point is not to look down on those folk; the lesson is, if you have alternatives to that working life — such as college, to prepare for a career of some kind — you will be wise to explore them.

In other words, give such adolescents the chance to contemplate life without “all the education and money” — as a lifetime busboy, for instance. The experience usually provides at least a modicum of seasoning and maturity for the adolescent in question.

Although knowing charlemagne may not have impacted your life, are you saying you shouldn’t have learned any history? How do you learn only the parts of history that will matter to you as an adult? The same goes for high school level math (alegbra, geometry, trig)? I find it surprising that you didn’t take trig in high school, when I was in high school, someone at grade level would take it as a junior and we were required to take 4 years of math to graduate. It’s a lot easier to learn a forgotten subject than it is to start from scratch, and its a lot easier to understand how relearning a subject would help you if had some exposure to it. If all you have is a hammer, you better hope the world only has nails.

I think too many people go to college, and I think the standard for graduating from high school should be hard enough that the bottom 10-20% have a really hard time graduating. I also don’t think main problem with education is upper middle class burn out, I think its too low of a standard for the bottom 30-50% of students.

As for what to do about it? I would like to see more vocational training, and different levels of high school degrees, perhaps letting some people graduate after grade 10 with a lesser degree.

I believe that higher math and other classes are important for those people who are interested. But for those who aren’t, who are we to tell them that they need to be engineers? I feel that the “Expect More, Get More” philosophy is going to back fire for teens who like nothing better than to rebel. There is a rising unrest amongst our upper middle class teens that is making them determined to prove to our generation that they do not need all the education and money that we value so highly. Funny how we finally feel like we have risen above our blue collar roots and now our children are out to beat their white collar roots.

yeah, cooking recipes never ask for any math. nor do mortgage loan calculations, a calculation of the number of necessary paint gallons, understanding your heating bill, or converting celsius to fahrenheit or vice versa.

not only is it true that algebra is too hard, but i see no need for 3 years of history or 4 of english. whoever is going to need to know what a gerund is? and what person will ever need to know who Charlemagne was? surely there’s no need to know which King Henry did what. and those foreign language reqs! did you really need to know plus ca change?

why have high school at all? just go straight to daycare.