I'd like to rearrange the education system of America for a bit. You see, I've come to believe that there is too much superfluous information being taught to our children. For one thing, I believe that there should be no indoctrination of any sort. This mean I want to get rid of classes that teach things like religion, gay is okay, and any sort of political ideology. A public school should not be a battleground for our children. These things should be taught at home. Anything that is actually somebody's ideology should not be taught in a public school period. I have no problem if these things are being taught in private schools. The reason for this is because these kids are a captive audience. Because they are a captive audience that makes them a popular target for people with strong ideologies, such as Christians who want to force prayer in school. Now, that's going to bad enough for some people, and of course people are going to get upset at this. And, yes, I can certainly see some problems such as some families will teach bigotry and hate and it will spill out into the school. To that I say we must be diligent and protect our children from assault and so on. Now here's what's really going to upset people. I feel that there are a lot of useless classes being taught. Three examples here are biology, history and algebra. I don't understand why they're mandatory. I believe they should be taught as electives. Because you see, I feel that school should be a place3 that trains our children to help them get a job and be a productive member of our society. Indoctrination to an ideology or some sort does nothing for this. It only encourages divisiveness, bigotry, and hate, and I feel that it could be one of the reasons that Americans are so intolerant. Because they are taught intolerance at an early age. But this is not about intolerance, but rather.... training our children with job skills and skills that will help them survive as an adult. To the best of my knowledge, schools do not do this. Now, I am not proposing that we get rid of the useless classes like algebra, biology and history, I believe they should be taught as electives for the children that do take an active interest in these fields. The reason why I feel they are useless is because, at least for the average American adult, they do not think in these terms. They are not thinking about how to dissect a frog while making a deposit in their banking account. They do not think in algebraic equations while riding a bicycle. People do not learn from history's mistakes, they keep on repeating themselves over and over again. To that end, I'd like to see a complete restructuring of the American education system with an emphasis on teaching and training our children with an eye for a job they'd be interested in, with an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic. There does need to be some skills to use our money, after all.
Sounds like you are pushing your own ideology and wanting to create drones trained specifically to meet the capitalist consumer model. Intolerance is bred by ignorance, teaching children science, math and history is of the utmost importance.
Oh I agree with the basic notion, but there still needs to be some basic classes that all students need to take. School isn't just about doing what you want to learn, it's also learning other lessons as well, like how to deal with something you don't want to do. If we give kids more chances to learn about what they want to learn, it will certainly help out, but there still needs to be consistency.
Making all kinds of assumptions here, let's assume you got your way and the so-called 'superfluous information' is removed from public school requirements. All that stuff would then become 'electives'. I will assume in most public schools in this system there would not be enough attendees in the 'electives' classes to warrant providing them? What happens if a student desires an 'elective' class along with five others...will there be classes for six students? It they are truly 'elective' then this indicates that students don't need to take any of them and therefore graduate in about 1/2 the time? Decades ago when I was in public school, I think every class I was required to take, no matter the redundancies, assisted us in becoming workers or business owners. The best employees certainly need to read and write, comprehend math and algebra and geometry, have a basic understanding of science and physics, some American and world history, and even those classes in wood shop, auto shop, metal shop, home economics, music, art, etc. all of these helped to prepare me to be a worker/business person. I don't agree with public school being focused on finding a job. But I do agree that public school needs to provide us the foundation which will allow each of us to later 'focus' on our career or business ownership or whatever it is we choose to do...
