From the perspective of someone who has been made an arrogant asshole by the education system, yes. Very much so.
yaugKids 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.
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.
chiveI think our education 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.
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.
StimpackAnd 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.
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).
Richard FeynmanI don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!