Philip

Steve Olson writes a very long impassioned account of his school education and how USA seems to be failing everyone nowadays with their equivalent OBE (Outcome Based Education) system. Basically, Steve recalls how his wife spent every day in a toilet stall to avoid being an outcast at lunch time. Steve himself got kicked out of a classroom in junior high school for completing the toughest Apple II assignment on the first day of class; obviously, being too smart is not a good thing. After that he decided to do his own thing and say no to the establishment; apparently the US education system only supports about 20% of the students, the rest are considered dropouts for not completing a higher education degree.

Here’s a good quote from Steve: The most valuable skill you can possess is the ability to acquire useful knowledge and apply it to solve real problems. Once you own this skill, you have all the education you’ll ever need.

Basically my take is that school is as Steve says. There is no room if you’re slightly better or worse than everyone else, it’s like a microcosm of intolerance, racism, sexism and pretty much every other -ism you can think of. Support for peoples differences are woefully lacking in school, and pretty much education up until University is almost completely useless. About the only thing I learnt from school that I still use on a regular basis was how to read, write and spell, but even now I question how much school had an influence on that. The rest of the skills I developed myself, if they were that easy to teach to other people things would be a lot better.

Read about it here. What does everyone else think about the differences between school and University and how schools treat people these days?