Our education system is extremely inefficient in a lot of terrible ways. In that sense, it sucks. The problem is, there are a lot of social and political things that make it extremely hard to change.

'No child left behind'

Explains it all. When the school system starts caring about how a child might feel if they're 'left behind' because of their grades, you know they're doing something wrong.

NCLB ruined the school district where I live.

bingo
the school system that they have here you can't fail before grade 6 =/

You gotta put yourself in debt for life to get a reasonable education.

lol. i remember the Head Start Program, then came along the No Child Left Behind Act. i still find it humorous.

maybe

My high school didn't have walls, and my overall class had like a 50% drop out before graduation, so you can imagine how my high school education went.

Where I live the government sees grades going down, and continues to hire more and more "specialists" whose job it is to make random guesses about what might help children to learn and to implement new educational policies across the school boards every three months. This means students are exposed to 6-7 different ways to approach problems every year, and are given the time to learn none of them.

I find it's more about getting them out of school as quickly as possible. If there's even the slightest chance of failure they moved down into a course that really accomplishes nothing after they're done school. You don't really learn anything useful for the real world...

Leaders in education are kind of reactionary. In the present day, people are pretty much capable of giving themselves an online education for free (khanacademy,codecademy, openculture, etc.), although public schools in the U.S. never take advantage of these great resources. Even in cases with students who are advanced, there is a sense that you're supposed to follow the curriculum and never stray outside of it. Another failure in our education system is a concept I like to call "need to know," where students pretty much don't care about anything which won't be on a test. This is literally the epitome of a failed education system, where kids don't actually care about the education part, but, rather, are focused on the tests and grades.

Obviously, an ideal educational system would include economic opportunity and intriguing curricula to expose students as to why education=opportunity and why education means even more then that in many ways, although, in the current system, education=college degree, but many people fail to realize the declining economic importance of a college degree.

As long as we're focused more so on which college we'll get into after high school, education has failed.

I know it must seem retarded but being a college drop out was probably the best thing I ever did... Especially in terms of income.

And then every once in a while there's that one bullshit teacher who's obviously tenured and doesn't care at all if the students learn anything so long as they produce good-looking numbers. Sometimes, if you're lucky, these teachers also happen to either not know how to teach or are horrible people in general. If you're really lucky, they're both.

I think our edication system needs to allow students to focus more on what they are interested in. Let's face it: if you want to be an engineer, learning european history won't really help much.

I learned a lot of stuff over the 4 years, but nothing remotely close to anything I want to take with me into a career. Sure, it's great knowing whatever you can learn, but I really wish my school had courses for animation or something that leads into game design. I probably could have taken CAD via vocational, which would have given me more of an incentive to do better than how I did, but I think schools outside of vocational/college need a bigger variety of courses overall. Example being a high school class with beginner courses in animation, then when I decide to go to college for that, I'll already have some knowledge on my head.

Nice job getting into princeton, the thing about school though is even if you don't agree with the actual education part, its very helpful for being social and participating in things

Kids are not being taught how to learn. They are being taught how to memorize things and when it comes test time, they just circle the correct multiple choice question. Make the kids actually have to grasp the concept of what they are learning.

So true, it's like nobody thinks anymore.

My old CS professor is making mad bank and has already received several teaching awards and the man is still struggling to pay off his college debts almost ~15 years later.

I think two of the biggest problems are:
1. Evaluation: Teachers are evaluated based on their students' standardized test scores. This gives teachers an incentive to teach for the test instead of taking time to give their own creative inputs.
2. Compensation: Teachers are compensated based on seniority. It doesn't matter if an up-and-coming teacher is a hotshot and everyone loves him/her, the other teacher that has worked a few more years will receive a higher pay. Again, this reduces the incentive for teachers to actually teach well.

.

I took a bunch of AP classes and still hardly had to try because of how easy they graded assignments. High school definitely felt like a waste of time as far as learning goes, and it didn't really prepare me at all for college.

I'm aiming to get a masters in education in the next year or so, so hopefully I can infiltrate the school system and change it from within. That's the plan at least.

"I never let my schooling interfere with my education"
-Mark Twain

From the perspective of someone who has been made an arrogant asshole by the education system, yes. Very much so.

I cannot agree with this more. More in science classes then anything else, in my school at least, there is virtually no teaching of concepts. The students who get better grades are merely the ones who are better at memorization, with the occasional person with an aptitude for whatever the subject is and learns outside of school as a result of that. The utter lack of scaling (at least where I live) before high school makes anyone who is above-average have to learn at the speed of the slowest person in the class. Anyone below-average is coddled to death, so that when they go to where scaling starts (freshman year of HS) they get into a class above their ability and quickly drop down into a lower difficulty course.

This too. There needs to be a much heavier emphasis on people learning something that they are interested in, this renaissance-era idea that we should all be well-rounded in terms of education merely makes it more difficult for industry to progress. The simple ability to not take classes that are peripheral to what you want to be doing would be enough to make school more enjoyable and productive for students and teachers alike.

Personally, this is the most annoying thing that has happened to me in school so far. Right now, I have a teacher who takes the majority of his lessons directly from the textbook, assigns all work from the textbook, answers questions about said with "Look in your textbook", and is retiring next year.
One last thing which, surprisingly, has not been said yet: Technology. The high school I'm at is in a rich neighborhood, in a relatively rich state, in a first world country. There is no reason for the computer lab (singular) to be composed of 20 towers from 2001 with 15" CRTs. The middle school I went to used its tech budget to buy iPads. $30K worth of iPads. I'm honestly surprised as to how incompetent the tech department can be at my school (and I assume others).

Like my school is really sexist.
I have uniforms for my school and the girls wear like legit what ever they want and they get no punishment but when boys wear like 1 slight difference, we get detention.
And when i was going to take one of my finals, but the trains weren't working so i decided to take it another time. i come into the school the next day and they said i couldn't take it. then one of my friends said that some girl said that she was "sick" and had no note, but still could take it. I had my note and it was all legit but i still couldn't take it.
some fucking schools are really sexist.

The real dynamic that makes school a "joke" isn't created by NCLB. NCLB is snake oil for the disparity created by socio-economic classes and the advantages those in higher classes have when it comes to education. Large class sizes, universal standards and the lack of representation of multiple intelligences is what makes school a joke. This isn't discontinued in post-secondary education, but it is made less severe. I'd go to the effort of finding statistics on this problem if there was actually an interest. But, a lot of the children that suffer in the school system are either not challenged, not getting proper attention or at a distinct disadvantage in their home life, and those kids are the ones that should really, REALLY be getting the help schooling can give them.

Here, we have a great education system in comparison to what it used to be but the attitudes of society, individuals and teachers really impact your response to the tools at your disposal. It could be a lot better than it is...

Somewhat relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ZmM7zPLyI

I went to a very good public high school (Princeton High School)

But it was because
-the district had a lot of money
-the teachers were engaging and well-educated
-most of the student body was cool, very little bullying
-very lax security (you could walk on/off campus anytime)
-the school offered every single AP test
-lots of tie-ins with Princeton University and their resources

From what I hear, most people's high schools aren't anything like this.

Side note: College isn't for everybody. The friends I made there are invaluable to me, but dropping out was the best decision I ever made

http://i.imgur.com/TmImMey.png

HEH

but on topic my sister had 4 f's and 2 d's, plus a ton of absences (i'm talking 40ish).
she still passed.

i don't even know how.