Education is what you get from reading the fine print.  Experience is what you get from not reading it.

- Source unknown
 

Some minds are like concrete: thoroughly mixed up and permanently set.

- Attributed to the Reverend Denny Brake
 

Experience is a teacher, but here's what makes me burn:
She's always teaching me the things I do not care to learn.

- Anonymous
 

Falling through the Cracks - What could possibly go wrong?  As it turns out, plenty...

Intelligence in the Internet Age - Is all that information we have at our fingertips making us smarter?  Or is it causing us to feel that we don't have to remember anything because we can just look it up?  And why does literacy seem to be dropping, not rising?

Children as Fashion Aids - Parents are ready to treat children as "mini-adults from the age of 3" but dump them on someone else at the first opportunity because they were "an interference with getting on with life."  Potty training, table manners, meals, social skills, drug testing, before and after school care, sex and contraception advice become the responsibility of someone else.  Some parents simply see their child as a fashion item whose real needs are met by somebody else...

Great Contemporary Writing - I only have three example thus far, but there will soon be others (I hope...)

Student Writing, on the other hand, tends to fall into a very different category than "great".  It isn't, alas, just that they structure their ideas poorly - but that the ideas themselves are shallow.  Will they outgrow this?  At what age can people be considered to be "grown"?

It's My Opinion and It's True - I'm glad she got her purse back, but?  The way she told us about visiting the toilet before driving home was odd but vaguely justified since that's where she left her purse.  This is the professor who randomly told us her friend directs porn movies.  Once, after sneezing violently, she muttered, "Wow!  That felt good.  Now I feel like a cigarette and a shower."  It's really quite traumatizing...

Library Internet Censorship - the Child Internet Protection Act is one of a host of actions by government agencies, school boards and others to limit what we read, see and hear.  Censorship is nothing new but the growth of the internet, the rightward shift of the government and the "war on terror" have recently taken things up a notch...

Policing the Language - "Older people" should not be shown as physically weak, retired, living with relatives or prone to fishing, baking, knitting, reminiscing or naps; they should be not "funny, absentminded, fussy or charming" and their eyes should not twinkle.  Women shouldn't be pictured as teachers, nurses, secretaries, mothers - or as aggressive businesswomen.  ... Hispanics shouldn't wear bright colours.  Native Americans shouldn't live on reservations...

I Trust; You Obey - ...a return to the "basics" and renewed emphasis on discipline are the very things which are least likely to produce an educated citizenry.  The truth is that the number of jobs requiring extensive technical, scientific, or literary skills is shrinking...

Reading, Writing, Landscaping - Should students consider their teachers exalted figures?  (Whether they actually are or not?)

Subjects - Check out the textbooks your kids are using.  Just what does it mean to be "schooled" anyway?

Grade School Quiz - Do you know what a 12-year-old knows?

Tests vs Assessments - What, exactly, is being tested?  Public education during the last 30 years has tended against testing for knowledge of content, instead emphasizing a psychological assessment of a child's needs, background and ability to conform to the group.  A "test" objectively measures an ability to solve problems; an "assessment" speculates about environmental conditioning.

Costs - The average spent to get a student back to school is $5,033.  What it would cost if a shopper put that $5,033 in purchases on a credit card with a typical interest rate of 17.99% and paid only the minimum each month?  It would take 54 years to pay off the debt...

All Work and No Play - There is evidence that restricting play at US schools increases attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  One in 18 US school children suffers from ADHD (½ are being treated with the psycho-stimulant drug Ritalin).  Their numbers have increased by 600% since 1990 (the US has five times the cases of the rest of the world combined).

Honour - The nation's high school students lie a lot, cheat a lot, and many show up for class drunk, according to results of a nationwide teen character study.  Seven in 10 students admitted cheating on a test at least once in the past year, and nearly half said they had done so more than once...

Given the myriad ways in which our schools are failing, it may be hard to remember that public schools were intended not only to instruct children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and what it means to be American.  Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there's also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy...

The goal of educational success takes 4 years to achieve no matter what is being taught.  An economic reward is attached to the goal that seldom has anything to do with what was learned.  Large numbers of people who don't possess adequate ability are urged to try to achieve this goal.  Sometimes, after they've spent a lot of time and money, it's denied to them.  Everyone who doesn't achieve the goal is stigmatized.  The goal is a "BA"...

The Work Is Too Hard but the Grading Is Flexible - In an era of rampant grade inflation, some college students find it shocking to discover there are 26 letters in the alphabet...

Elusive Adulthood - teenagers orchestrate their own rites of passage, celebrating their power to have sex, to join a gang or a fraternity or to experiment with drugs, all without guidance from older generations - or a clue, for that matter, about what lies around the corner in true adulthood...

Rigidity - Weber contended he was wearing the pager in order to communicate with his parents.  At the trial the vice principal testified there was no legitimate reason for a student to have a pager - if a parent wanted to contact his child, he could do so by contacting the school's main office.  However, student cellphones were okay...

8-Year-Old Charged with Lewd Conduct - When a 14-year-old babysitter suggested a game of "Truth or Dare" and challenged her 8-year-old charge to touch her breast, he did it.  When his mother found out, she called police.  To her amazement, her son was charged with lewd conduct against a minor (the babysitter).  Why?  Because he "went along with it"...

Exclusion - Students participated in a group "get acquainted" exercise, and were then asked to choose two people they would want to work with on an individual basis.  Half the students were told no one wanted to work with them; the rest were told everyone wanted to work with them...

Learn to think independently!  (It entails more than simply visiting the library...)

Learn to learn independently: homeschooling

Learning not to be TOO independent: the Ig Nobel prize winners

Who Wants to Be a Genius? - Just as Dr Ericsson took people without discernible talent and made them into champions, so, in a way, did Hungarian, Laszlo Polgar.  When he began training his daughters, it was thought women couldn't play serious tournament chess.  But through a deliberate psychological experiment, he and his wife created a trio of world-class champions out of their own daughters..

Scared Sober: Death as a Deterrent - Participants in the Youthful Drunk Driving Visitation Program tour the coroner's office .  The program "makes you stop and think about who you might hurt..."

No More Teacher's Dirty Looks - Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them.  The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed...

The person who's received a real education from having constructed this website is - me.  My concluding opinion about education and those of a couple of other people as well...

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