What can we do to make education better?

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Oddly enough, I find this topic is sometimes neglected which is interesting considering the effect it can have on a child's life.

Education has so much influence on a child, so therefore why do we accept such a lousy system?

Things we could do to make education better:

1. Broad curriculum
2. Smaller class sizes
3. Comprehensive Assessment
4. Better teachers
5. Better Facilities

A possible solution would be for the government to give a sum of money to the parents.
Then schools compete and advertise themselves to the parents. The parent chooses the school best suited to their child.
Hopefully this would address the mediocrity we put up with today and also introduce much more choice for the parents.

Never underestimate the importance of education on a child's life.

I'd appreciate your thoughts everyone!

Get the government out of the schooling business.

ruveyn

SCIENCE

Oh, sorry. Got carried away.

But seriously, not only is science good when it comes to the content.

There should also be a scientific approach to *teaching* itself. Far too many teaching strategies are based on ideologies and/or gut feelings.

Leave religious fairytales out of it.

1. Get teachers' unions and religious interests out of curriculum-planning.

2. Create separate all-male and all-female primary schools.

3. Go back to science and the "4 Rs" of reading, writing, arithmetic, and reason.

4. Teach a science-based curriculum that ignores religious beliefs.

5. Make teachers directly accountable for their students' scholastic performance.

6. Make parents directly accountable for their children's scholastic performance.

7. Draft any child that drops out of school for disciplinary or scholastic failure directly into government service.

8. Eliminate extra-curricular activities that have nothing to do with the core curriculum.

9. If any parents want their children to engage in extra-curricular activities that have nothing to do with the core curriculum, then let those parents be solely responsible for the costs to operate those programs.

Forbidden by the 13 th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You ought to read the Constitution, Fnord. Some of it would shock you.

ruveyn

Quiet, you!



Actually, I was thinking more of an automatic draft when dropouts come of age -- if you drop out at 14, you report for boot camp on your 18th birthday -- with the usual medical deferments, of course.

Move towards privatizing all schools, competition will only bring about a better cheaper product. I could of went to an amazing private school for about a 1/3rd of the price the government spent to send me to the prison/day care that I was forced to go to.

At present our military system is all volunteer.

ruveyn

My take on this subject is that the US education system was designed to train industrial-era employees, and emphasizes traits needed in factories. (Basic functional literacy and math to learn and operate machines, the ability to work in confinement all day, obedience to a bell ringing, respect and even fear of authorities, acceptance of your place in a hierarchical command-and-control structure, and so on.) Now that we're in a post-industrial society, the education system is breaking down completely, but the power structures remain in place (government, taxation, school administration, and unions) so it's hard to scrap it and start over.

Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" is required reading on the topic of education.

And I'd like to keep it that way.

Although it is fair to point out that the only reason many people stayed in college during the 1960s was to avoid the draft. Thus, the threat of military conscription might be considered a deterrent to dropping out of high school ... maybe ...

Spend more time and money on core curriculum instead of useless social BS.
Let teachers teach what they need to teach and not just teaching to past assessment tests.

Make it like Japans school system with classes based on rank.

Creativity and originality are capital crimes in the Japanese education system.

ruveyn

Ding ding ding. Model the school system after Japan, school is for studying, not socializing. 12-5- 240 should suffice.

Get rid of the Teacher's union and get religion out of the classroom.

End this charter school BS, it seems that it may be the beginning of the end of free education.

Expanding on that, "Competition" has no place in the education system.

What with Japanese students consistently out-achieving their American counterparts, maybe there is some merit to strict conformity, after all...