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Posted By: H@pkid0ist 
As well it would help to make these kids comming out of highschool develop into productive adults. We expect this of them when they join the workfoce but do little to teach and foster this. | ” |
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This right here. Unlike other countries, the U.S. doing little to foster its trades and is shoving kids toward college at all costs.
Those costs include: enforcing standardized testing that takes precedent over classroom learning; cutting vocational programs in public schools in favor of college-prep programs; pressuring teachers to pass marginal or failing students so that the schools will get more funding.
I know several public school teachers and not a single one of them supports "No Child Left Behind" or their state's standardized tests. All of them spend a majority of their school year teaching students how to pass these tests -- not, how to
learn, how to solve problems, how to truly understand the material -- just tricks to pass a test.
Our country may have some fine and wonderful universities but we are funneling undereducated, underachieving, directionless kids into them -- kids who would be better served learning a real trade. Today's American students by and large are only learning to do just what it takes to get through an artificially imposed system, and nothing more. Then they get out into the real world and wonder why they can only get a job making french fries.
Our military does a really good job of taking directionless underachievers and slapping some perspective into them. Not all choose to go to college but a great many do, and they go into it with a good focus on how best to achieve their career goals and a very good awareness of how important it is to really
learn, not just repeat what the administration wants to hear. That used to be something our high schools did but that responsibility has been pretty much stripped from them.
