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Author Topic: Perspective on Academia... (mmm rant..)  (Read 7363 times)
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Angst
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« on: 2003-09-16, 17:45 »

Now, today during a self-paced mathlab course, I had a bit of a revalation that I'm surprised hasn't hit me before today:
A school, particularly a Tech school such as the one I am currently enrolled in, is first and foremost a BUISNESS. A school that does not produce happy customers (students) will fail and close it's doors, laying off staff, etc..

Therefore, as an academic establishment is in the buisness of providing a service, this service must be met with a level of quality in accordance with it's cost. More specifically, the staff in this particular math lab are there to provide their expertise in the field in order to help students with any questions they may have, and to facilitate the taking of tests when said students feel they are sufficiently ready to do so. As for a definition of quality, it has been said, and is general buisness practice, that an employee of a buisness operate appropriately. "Service with a smile," is a simple statement that is held in high regard in the lowest of positions. So when a staff member in a self-paced class walks up and nudges a sleeping student in order to tell them to "work on math or leave, this isn't a study hall," one questions their investment. Now, as I have a particular class entitled Foundations of Quality later today (a discussion class involving common buisness practice), the thought occurred to me that I have already paid for this service, and a service this has not been. This train of thought took me back through the experiences I've had in the Wisconsin school system, and I realized that the vast majority of the staff in Wisconsin schools are either completely unaware that they are providing a service, or don't care that they are.

When a buisness takes it's customers for granted, the quality of the products that company makes will suffer, and so will any and all services that company produces. And yet, statistics produced by the Wisconsin school system state that Wisconsin is ranked as one of the best systems in the United States. If this is as good as it gets, I'd hate for it to get any worse..

So, in ending, my simple question is this:
Why do we accept this level of shit?
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Lilazzkicker
 

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« Reply #1 on: 2003-09-16, 17:50 »

Why, we, as human beings tend to go along with whats normal, or has been going on for a long time, while alot of us would like it to change, while most generally think it is fine the way it is even if it should be better, or there are problems they put up with it, because this is the way its been going on for years.
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Angst
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« Reply #2 on: 2003-09-16, 17:53 »

Simply stated, you're saying it's accepted because "noone" has ever experienced better.

This means we're not holding academia responsible for DOING IT'S JOB. And as such, we're simply throwing money at them and awarding incompetence. This is self-defeating..
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« Reply #3 on: 2003-09-16, 18:01 »

Yep, self-defeating till enough people realize it has to change.
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« Reply #4 on: 2003-09-16, 18:46 »

I'm not going to go on a full-scale rant about the American Education system, but I'll say this.

Any society that pays its plumbers more than its teachers has a problem. A big one. And until we make teaching a job that is rewarding financially as well as personally (and almost any teacher will tell you they're in it for the kids, not the money), our education system will continue to suck.

Colleges are a bit better than public schools in this regard, but colleges also make their own revenue. Public schools are tax-funded.

Many public school teachers are overworked and underpaid. They're far too constrained by rules and regulations. The moment they try to teach something outside of the book, they're in trouble. They often have to buy their own matierals for classes.

Teachers not only teach, they help raise our children. They have our children for 8 hours a day, five days a week. That's a third of every day. And yet they're on the far lower end of the fiscal curve.

This has been a "I didn't get enough sleep last night" mini-rant by con.
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Angst
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« Reply #5 on: 2003-09-16, 23:59 »

heh, I was about to say, that's a bit tame for a rant Slipgate - Tongue
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« Reply #6 on: 2003-09-17, 00:45 »

This isn't a very startling rant to me. Of course Tech schools have a heavy lean on preparing kids to go into business. Normal public high schools tend to give a general eduaction to let kids go in about any direction they want when they get out. Private schools can offer more flexible and wider-spectrum training because they don't have to rely upon the public to tell them how to teach (because the public doesn't control their funding). Education is a business in itself, otherwise no one would want to do it.

There are benefits to being a teacher that compensate for the low pay though. All offical school vacations are paid (including summer & winter break), dental, medical, unions and more. It's still all about the kids, but just because they get paid less than a plumber doesn't mean they all live like a plumber. Hell, I'd rather deal with a few hundred kids per day than dig through someone else's pipes finding god-knows-what clogging a toilet in the middle of a heatwave in July.

Think of schools like Lawyers. You've got a few different kinds... Public Defenders (akin to public schools), special-case lawyers that handle racism, sexism, insurance claims, work for businesses and whatnot (tech schools) and hirable attorneys (private schools). The quality you get is what you pay for, plain and simple. Both of my parents are full-time teachers, just a few years away from their retirement, so I often get to peek into the educational system, even when I'd rather not. This rant doesn't shock me one bit.

However, we put up with it because it's conveniant to. IMO Homeschooling is the best - buy your kid a book, get them started and have them finish it cover-to-cover. However this takes time and energy, and the public schools provide a less-direct, simpler, more general way of teaching kids. Instead of spending time doing it themselves, many parents simply pay taxes and ship their kids to public schools, or shell out a few extra bucks to send them to tech/private schools. Not neccesarily because they're lazy either - adults have their own life to live, and time becomes much more important as one grows older! Consider the adults who work swing shift to put food on the table, or those who crank out overtime hours. They don't have the time to teach their kids without making critical sacrifices in their daily lives (aside from taking care of their kid). So, they deal with education that they can ship their kids off to. It's the best they're willing to do.

Don't forget that just because parents accept the level of shit you speak of, doesn't mean that you have to. Hell no. You are free to pick up pads of notepaper, pencils & books and learn by yourself. Books cost about $60-150, and paper/pencils are cheap. With a part-time job and good, progressive individual studying, you can give yourself the best business and/or college prep you could ever want. (actually... college teaches you to do that anyway!) You can do anything you want, as long as you can teach yourself. That's the key - that's what needs to be taught in public schools IMO.
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Woodsman
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« Reply #7 on: 2003-09-17, 02:14 »

On the subject of teachers gettting paid more id have to say if they want higher pay they should stop producing idiots.
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« Reply #8 on: 2003-09-17, 02:32 »

Woodsman - Not everyone is capable of being a surgeon. Most of us aren't. Many people are also born without the ability to truly comprehend. Public schools get most of these people. What can you do with them? You can't make a flower out of a brick. It just doesn't happen.
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Phoenix
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« Reply #9 on: 2003-09-17, 04:30 »

The problems with education - public and college level - are deeper than you know.  The public school system today is teaching 8th graders (and sometimes below that) how to masturbate, how to use condoms, what homosexuality is and how to practice it, what heterosexuality is and how to practice it, down the line.  Kids that are too young to really grasp all this are being taught them.  What happened to the process of self-discovery?  What happened to the parents having at least some control over what their students do or do not learn?  To some parents such things as are being taught are against their religious beliefs.  Do they have recourse in the public education system?  Nevermind that children are being taught about things that should be learned at least at a later age, and certainly through a more controlled mechanism, given the fact that so many diseases abound, and that children - the result of much of this - bear a heavy burden of responsibility.  Although you can delete them before they're born if you find them to be inconvenient, after all, so why worry about them either?

Now, regarding actual education, California recently discovered that the bulk of its students failed the state exit exams.  Their solution?  Rethink the tests to lower the standards.  Consider this:  The easier your education is, the less you learn.  If you're not pushed, if you're not challenged, if you're not inspired by teachers who KNOW what they are talking about, if you are not encouraged to do better than you are doing now, will you excell?  When you have students who think it's "cool" to get an F, and anyone who makes A's in their class is a "teacher's pet" something is wrong.  Part of this is that the attitudes of the students are that learning is stupid, school sucks, and it's more cool to "score" and "get high" than learn.  A few people I know who went through this hell of public education, and described it to me, opened my eyes as to why the USA has so many idiots, couch potatoes, and why the things that are popular that are downright pathetic ARE so popular.  Nobody LEARNS anything anymore, and nobody CARES.  Math?  Science?  Art?  History?  Language?  Everything that makes a culture what it is is shunted aside.  When I heard about "Social Promotion" and what it is I could not believe people had, once again, sank so low.  That these idiots are so worried about "Hurting the feelings and emotional well-being of the child that they really should keep them together with their friends, even if they don't do so well" is lunacy!  What about teaching them what they need to know to SURVIVE in this hostile abomination that you call a society?  So you hurt his or her feelings a little, big deal!  You just taught that there is a price for failure, and not doing your best, and to TRY HARDER.  It gives them a backbone, toughens them up.  You know the price for failure in the natural world?  YOU DIE.  You either get eaten, fall off a cliff, break a bone and get eaten later, die of infection or exposure, drown, burn up in a forest fire, etc.  We animals have enough sense to survive on our own in spite of this.  There are no government safety nets, no police, fire, or hospitals.  You either learn to survive, or you don't.  Do, or do not.  There is no try, as Yoda would say.  If you want to protect the emotions of students then send the bullies off to military school, where they can get their asses chewed by a drill instructor on a daily basis.  They used to do that, and from what I understand, it worked fairly well.

There's another little sinister side to this, one that people might call part of the "right wing conspiracy" as I've heard it referred to, but I've seen this before in past empires and regimes where this sort of thing has played out.  Knowledge is power, but what is more so, a thinking person is a dangerous person.  Those in power, the elites, the aristocracy, don't want the common man to be a thinking man.  They want the common man to be a slave, a peon, a peasant, with no more sense than the shovel he's digging a trench with, or the spade he's using to spread mortar for bricks.  Otherwise, this kind of man might question authority, might question the right of the aristocracy to rule and govern them, might decide to have a voice and speak out regarding how he wants to lead his life.  The thinking man can think for himself, can learn, adapt, and improve.  The thinking man can do anything he sets his mind to.  The thinking man can learn to govern his own life and not have to depend on anyone else.  The thinking man is self-sufficient.  This is why those in power desire a stupid society.  Stupidity is easy to predict, easy to govern, and easy to deceive.  If nobody learns anything then the need for the aristocracy is secured, and all the aristocracy has to do is put up a pretty face with a powerful voice and deceive the people into doing what it wants them to do.  Remember Hitler?  Remember Nazi Germany?  It wasn't just the Nazi party, it was ALL of Germany who bought into Hitler and his treachery.  Sure, individuals here and their might have disbelieved it, but dare they speak out, lest they be taken to the camps as well?  Remember the Middle Ages?  Remember how the Catholic Church only taught the priests to read, and the Lords had their children taught, while the peasants lived in squallor and didn't know anything different?  It wasn't until the Renaissance that reading and writing became part of the common man's life as the middle class expanded in Europe.  Look at the explosion of technology after the industrial revolution.  Now everything's becoming more and more automated, with less and less chance for intelligence to blossom, for learning to expand and flourish.  The love of power has brought this about, and the willingness of people to just let their rights erode away and instead settle for mediocrity and the instant gratification of modern conveniences.  People will chew out a person who works their ass off for $5.00 an our because a $0.99 hamburger is cold, yet when a $200,000 a year politican screws them out of hundreds a year in bloated government spending on programs that do no good but justify bureaucratic jobs they won't lift a finger to stop it, and as soon as someone does the politician cries out that someone's taking away their "benefits" or "depriving their children" and all hell breaks loose against the person trying to put some sanity back into society.  That's the world people live in, and are most often too blind to see, or too apathetic, since the Game is on at 7:00, or Friends has a new episode tonight.  Sad from this perch, to say the least.  Very sad.

You want another example?  Look at the music and entertainment industry.  When you compare REAL music - I mean Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Wagner - to the recycled crap that's pop culture today, the no-talent vulgarity, the repetitive, canned loops that any novice could whip up with a copy of Acid DJ, it's horrid to think that this is what makes money.  People are starting to rebel against that, in the form of MP3 trading, since they're seeing a vacuum of value.  If you get what you pay for, you should only pay for what you get.  Like Bruce Dickinson said, if you pay $20 for a CD and only 1 or 2 songs are good, don't you feel cheated?  Same goes for education.  The problem with education is that public schooling is mandatory unless you already have wealth.  Then college is unaffordable to most, so they have to find unskilled jobs and struggle to survive.  Those who manage to make it in on scholarships, and because they worked their tails off to get a higher education and a chance for a good paying job, find a completely different world.  The "college=party" mentality, the drugs, the debauchery.. from those students who's parents were rich enough to pay their kids' way in, many of whom don't know what hard work or responsibility means makes for a very bad influence, distraction, or at least a temptation.  You have towns wrecked because someone lost a FOOTBALL GAME.  Is this the sign of a civilized society?  I would expect that sort of thing from the Taliban.  Instead of higher learning, you have a lot of people more interested in drinking than anything else.  Those who do concentrate on learning, and are intelligent, find either a complete disinterest on the part of many teachers, or that they could probably learn it a lot better on their own.  Then add to that the brainwashing.  You have people come out of colleges convinced of things that are entirely untrue, or caught up in some "cause", dreaming of a utopia that cannot exist.  Again, you have a problem with elitism and aristocracy.  People who run colleges see themselves as being very important.  They live in ivory towers, cut off from the real world, and hold their little tea clubs and lecture each other about lofty, impractical ideals.  You have actual classes in colleges now to teach women how to SUE people for a living, how to use certain things as weapons to get a discrimination lawsuit out of it, that all men are useless thoughtless sex-crazed pigs, that all sex is rape, etc, etc, ad nauseum It's called "Womens' Studies".  I heard a nice report on just what went on in one of these classes, at least this particular one.  All traditional values are targetted in this manner, and those promoting things for the sake of "tolerence" are the most intolerant bastards around if you do something THEY don't like.  Yet, this is taught as what is the norm.  I know of people who come out of colleges with an MBA who know less about running a business than the company janitor.  Some of those people working menial jobs are damned smart, yet try to get a job without that degree behind your name.  THAT is why there will always be a demand for college educations.  That is why excellence will never be required of schools.  When things are mandatory and there is no oversight, or those overseeing are incompetent, then mediocrity will be the norm, and the acceptable rule.  As long as businesses put more stock in accreditation than intellect and wisdom, on a slip of paper that says someone knows something, rather than the knowledge itself, the downward spiral will continue.

Now say you don't like your child being in the public school system.  These are your options:

1)  Pay for private schooling
2)  Homeschool the child
3)  Remove the child from the school system entirely.

Options 1 and 2 are cost prohibitive.  Option 2 is also time prohibitive.  Option 3 lands you in prison, and your child is taken by the Children's Protective Agency and put in a foster home for "neglect."  This is why school vouchers were promoted, to give poorer families the option of removing their children from failing public schools.  Many poorer, minority families were pushing for this, but again, the Teachers Union, the ACLU, and the Civil Rights groups opposed it, and made it out to be something the "evil Republicans" were using to take away money from the schools.  Who's money is it anyway?  Who's children are being taught?  Should the parents not have a say?  I thought rights were all about freedom.  Well, do your homework.  The Teachers' Union will push for higher pay for teachers, but not for better funding of facilities nor educational excellence.  Putting demands on the students to do better is not something that the schools do.  I don't think that schools should give their students 8 hours of homework every night, but the classroom is for learning, and if one is to learn, it requires something worthwhile to teach, and people committed to excellence to teach it.  Con, you say teachers should be paid more.  What about their performance?  Is that measured?  Are they accountable for what they teach?  How many bad teachers are there, who don't know half of what they are talking about?  Are the administrators above them accountable for keeping the teachers up to spec?  If one is to teach, one should love teaching, and should know what they are teaching inside and outside.  If I were to seek someone to teach me something, I would expect them to be a master of what they are professing to know.  That means knowing it outside of any books.  It means knowing it yourself.  Books are fine for a guide, but anyone can learn from a book.  I've learned much from books, but I've had to learn it on my own.  Nobody taught me how to use a computer.  Nobody taught me "C".  Nobody taught me how to make models.  There comes a point in one's learning process where they no longer need teachers, where their thirst for knowledge, and ability to learn overtakes their need for guidence.  Not everyone achieves this at the same point, but I believe it is achievable to everyone.  It is only possible if you are motivated, and have such knowledge at hand to learn.  Nothing should restrict a person from learning anything they desire, except the desire in their heart, or lack thereof (The exception being how to build a nuclear bomb from household chemicals, let's be reasonable now).  Sadly, in your world, this has never been the case.

Anyone is capable of learning anything, but the drive must be there, and with it, the availability of knowledge.  This society puts a high price tag on knowledge, and gives very little in return.  It also places wisdom on a much lower position compared to celebrity, fame, and popularity.  Being good is less important than being noticed, and being wise less important than being pretty.  Every empire and civilization suffered such declines before collapsing, or being overtaken by someone stronger and more committed to their destruction than the civilization was to its own survival; be they right or wrong for doing so, the end result was the same.  Decadence ends in decay.  It would be wise to learn this, as it has happened before, many times.  Yet history is boring, after all, and nobody likes know-it-alls.
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« Reply #10 on: 2003-09-17, 05:56 »

Hmmm, it would as though you beat me to the "school is government conditioning" speech, Phoenix  Slipgate - Sad

Another point of interest however: Home schooling is not nearly as costly or time consuming as it once was. Now, through the magic of the internet, you are provided with everything you need. The money is taken straight from the local school district, allotting you with quite a lot of spending options since the administrative fees are small. You're provided with a computer, physical material, supplies, etc. Though it is still the same old conditioning, it is far less institutionalized with fewer social distractions. I'm not sure how it is in the rest of the country, but Ohio has several of these online academies, three of which I've attended, the best so far being Ohdela.
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Angst
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« Reply #11 on: 2003-09-17, 17:05 »

Ahh, thankee pho Slipgate - Smile
A very refreshing read
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