Although, because of my low of muscle mass, my oppositional character and my complete lack of any sort of coordination, I have always strongly disliked PE lessons and tended to put the time to better use for amusing myself by antagonising the teacher, I agree that health should be important in schools, as well as in society in general.

I honestly do not feel any prejudice against overweight people though. I have always been slightly underweight myself and I don't really pay much attention to physical appearances because they are beginning to matter less and less in society. This is probably why obesity is on the rise: we don't need to be fit in order to do well in life so we are not. This is drifting away from the topic so I won't talk any more about obesity in this thread unless it is absolutely necessary.

Thank you for reading.

The first question is dependent on what you expect the educational system to accomplish. I expect that the educational system increases the number of people capable of making meaningful contributions to society. Naturally such a system benefits from assessing that capability to attempt to ensure that it is accomplishing that.

Things that are shown not to contribute to that end should be removed if they are detracting from the system's capacity to that end.

The question of accuracy is a matter of practicality. In short, a more accurate and precise measurement in any system allows you to figure out more information. There is no situation in which having that information would not be slightly more helpful. However, since the problem has an unknown number of input variable and an unknown number of output dimensions, we can only attempt to correlate whatever testing methods we have with our guesses of the quantity we are actually trying to measure. In short, we would like to measure intelligence and ability and value more accurately, but we can only barely begin to describe what they even are, and as such attempting more accurate measurements of them is completely absurd.

Fewer or more subjects should be considered against points one and two. It is too complex a question to answer without a sizable quantity of statistical data.

How much should be spent is just as complicated, since it is impossible to educate someone for free, as to educate people require resources in the form of permanent things (such as information, knowledge, space to work in, etc), disposable things (such as paper, pencils, pens, computational capabilities), and the time of other people. Equally complex is the question of who should be responsible for paying for it, but that returns to point one: To whom does the educational system hold enough value that they would be willing to pay for it?

For how long people should be educated, see points one and two again.

Of course, what the educational system is actually for is open to debate. The difficulty of applying statistics to exams to divine information about a person's potential future contribution to society is questionably open for debate if you have a decent counterpoint.

For my case, school is useless. And in my opinion it is a waste of time. I spend 8 hours a day sitting in a room reading packets. A person can learn a lot more by themselves if they just take the initiative. I have had 6 of 8 teachers tell me that what I learn in highschool will not be used outside the classroom. If a teacher is telling me this, then what the hell am I doing there. Teachers are merely there to be babysitters. At the beginning of the year, a teacher receives a bunch of books and a curriculum. Then they begin to go off of the curriculum. I have witnessed first hand this problem. My math teacher is unable to teach unless she has her computer and her textbook. How can anyone learn when the person who is "teaching" them does not know what she is doing. I feel that a child/teen should have to go to school, but they can choose what classes to go into. Personally I want to be a computer programmer, but my schools definition of programming is sitting there with the UDK engine and making games.


To answer your questions

School should not be about testing someones ability, nor should they be shunned if they don't continue school.

There are a fair amount of classes that should be removed to save money, but there are others that are necessary. Such as english/writing class. You will continually use writing skills throughout your life.

No it should not be more about the measurement of value although it is.

In ways school is about preparing children for what is to come. It is more like a program to teach people to respect their superiors and how to follow rules.

As stated above, you should learn what you really want to learn. You are playing with your own future, and if the school sees that you are picking nonsense classes then they can assign them for you.

I support some aspects of my countries education system, but I disagree with the fact that colleges/universities are businesses.

Currently a lot of money is spend on education. I feel that with the uprising of technology school should incorporate more classes that have to do with technology - Some Engineering, Computer Science, etc...

As of now in the U.S you are educated until around 16-17 years of age, which is about 13 years of school. This is an appropriate amount of time although everyone complains about it. It gives people time to develop and mature.


Everyone has a different opinion on the matter, and everyone will feel differently towards each response. Its all a matter of your own personal experiences.

Ehh im having loads of exams these days,

im studying for architecture and have the last exams to get the certification,

had 4 written test from 4 subject(statical calculating,strenght calculating,CAD and the last one was drawing architect plans),3 practical test(structure building test,setting out,and laboratory investigation)

and im gonna have 4 verbal exams about reinforced concrete structures,building investment parts,building history,structures in hungarian and the same in english

so loads of fuckin subjects i wont ever use in my life
, at least i did well on the written tests and on the practical exam , but tell me something

who the fuck will ever learn 120 items in about a week or two


(sorry i forgot that i had to write tests for graduation and gonna have verbal exam about it too)

so overall i did about 4 exams in a months and gonna have 2 left(overall subjects 16 or maybe more)

I have never really seen exams as good for anything other than two possible purposes:
-Deciding who are better and who are worse than other people so you can treat the worse people as inferiors.
-encouraging children to work by scaring then with the threat of being unsuccessful or unintelligent.

I am unsure which if these theories, if either, are correct but they are the best two suggestions I can come up with. The only other possible reason for exams which I can think of is that the educational system is outdated and that much of the organisation is illogical and pointless.

I would also like to thank all you lovely people for posting replies and being interested in a subject which many would find dull. <3

And egotistical by the looks of it.

Yes, tests exist to determine who knows the material that has been taught to them. Not to extricate the "inferiors". Regular homework means nothing, as the student can simply look up how to do whatever the subject is. A test must be completed on site, and under the watchful eye of the examiner.

There is a large discussion as to how far exams should change from testing knowledge to testing a students ability to find the necessary knowledge and apply it correctly. Thus idea was born from the realisation that now we can find most things we need in the Internet with a few clicks and don't need to have such good memory. This is why I find history source papers and geography papers so effective (although a lot of facts still need to be learnt). If someone can get and A* at iGCSE Geography they will probably not miss much in terms of what they are expected to do. Am example of the observational skills and alertness needed is how when in the mock exam we were asked "name three reasons people choose to live near volcanoes" barely anyone got a single mark (in a three mark question) because we losted why people were unable to move rather than why they chose not to which did not count on the mark scheme.

I guess school is quite usefull for finding out who can work hard and follow rules ect but often it just feels like a qualification factory.

This is a major problem with humanity as a whole now. Because we don't need to retain as much information, we also don't truly learn the material. There are many people that I know, myself included, who only learn the information for the test and forget it afterwards. This continued behavior indicates that the world is getting dumber(YouTube comments, case in point).

But would the information we learn really have spared YouTube from the terror of its infamous comments section? I know school is far from useless and I recognise how logical or is to draw a parallel between the rising popularity of the Internet and we perceived increase in idiocy, but still, morons will be morons whether they can look up the equation of a sphere's area on the Internet or have to learn it. I personally believe we see more idiots today because the Internet is good at displaying them. Before the Internet was so effective we would probably now come into contact with idiots around the world in different countries and we wouldn't be alerted of idiots by posts ridiculing them.

I don't think that the invention of the Internet is the problem, but societies ability to adapt to change in all areas.

This may be the case as well, but with the addition of mandatory school in most 2nd and 1st world countries (I live in the US, idiot central), along with the general improvement of education, I feel like our generation should be the most intelligent that history has seen thus far. Yet we waste our time complaining about how slow our phones are. We should at least be using the internet to learn as much as we can, so that when we do take tests, we can recall seemingly unrelated information that can lead us to the correct answer. I personally know most of the latin root words, so I can decipher what nearly any word means just by pairing said word with a root.