Business Week article on Education

[Poseidon]

http://businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2004/tc20040316_0601_tc166.htm

Sad, but true. "Leader in technology" may not remain as one for much longer...and probably closely tied with outsourcing problem.

[Lilith]

Heh. I cannot say that was unexpected. Scary as hell--for Americans (or it ought to be, anyway)--but not unexpected.

[whitecrow]

/me polishes Dunce's Cap.

That's a warning light for something that need s to be attended to.

[JakeD]

No matter how infuriating this whole situation might be, I agree with Lilly in that it's not surprising. We all know that the American educational system sucks ass. Even the private schools that people pay ungodly amounts of money for are merely on par with the public schools of other countries. This was a long time coming, and I wish everyone had noticed sooner.

We have teachers who treat their jobs as a blow-off because very few get paid enough to have any sort of incentive to teach, the schools are swamped with students who could care less about learning, and the ones that do care are ostracized/bullied/made into work-mules by the students who expected an easy ride, and it's all finally coming to light. I've had some fantastic teachers who managed to go the extra mile and work hard to make their students learn (even the ignorant ones) and then I've had teachers who had about the same level of maturity and discipline as the students. Our textbooks are outdated and have misinformative material in them (ESPECIALLY American/world history), many of our lessons are dumbed down for the sake of simpler-minded students, and most of the tests are a breeze.

When 'crow mentioned that it needed to be attended to, I sort of felt a pang of disgust and remorse, because it will more than likely be ignored.

This whole thing burns me up. I'll vent more later when I can make a coherent point without getting all mad. :(