I agree with you. Learning to think REQUIRES factoids. Thinking doesn’t occur in a vacuum. What that teacher didn’t realize…or decided to ignore…was that in order to think, you have to have something to think ABOUT.

Mirka, I also wish I had had your educational opportunities.

Richard

Good to hear from someone with an overseas perspective. Not only are you correct in all of your observations, I would suggest that it’s now at the point where your 8 years in a Czech school system could easily rival 16 years in the U.S.

Only a few years ago, I went to dinner with a college professor and he told me point blank that it was to my advantage not to have attended college. Why? Because, he said, colleges had become nothing more than job training centers. It used to be that students went to college to “find themselves” and frequently didn’t have any idea as to what they wanted to major in or even do for a living until their second or third year. Not so any more.

Worse is the fact that colleges no longer taught students to think. Instead, they teach them how to solve problem the way the teacher wants them to do it and forget all other methods…EVEN IF THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM. As I’m sure you know, that type of approach destroys analytical thinking along with creativity. And we wonder why we’re falling behind in science and technology?

Again, thanks for your very illuminating comments.

Richard Marmo

Thank you for your own diatribe and confirmation of the deterioration in the public educational system. There are still quality public schools left, but we’re rapidly losing them.

Incidentally, another factor in this decline is the constantly increasing numbers of students identified as having ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder), with the possessor of these newly identified problems being put on Ritalin. Do some children legitimately have these disorders? I won’t argue that because those problems are real. But in many…if not most… cases, it’s because the child is either bored, hasn’t been properly raised by their parents or is simply being a kid. Ritalin in forced on them by the authorities as a means of controlling their behaviour in the classroom.

Regards,
Richard Marmo

I was very fortunate to attend the very best public schools in Chevy Chase MD during the 50′s to early 70′s and to then go on to a very academically rigorous college. Just as I was entering Bethesda Chevy Chase HS in 1969 at the height of the antiwar drug culture wave it had been identified as in the top 10 high schools across the country including private! By the time I graduated in 1972 you could hear the newly “trained” (meaning indoctrinated) school administrators at the Montgomery County School District Offices saying “ohhh don’t give Johnny failing grades. Just because he sat around the hallways and didn’t go to class at all, smoked pot, and failed all his test. It would hurt is sense of self worth. And; after all; who are we to judge? This is howJohnny is learning what is relevant about the world around us; aren’t you Johnny?”

“Yeah man! It’s all cool.”

And the above is not fiction. I personally witnessed this exchange between a teacher insensed over having to allow Johnny to pass to the next grade and some person with an “advanced” degree from central office. Four years later upon returning to visit with my teachers they (those who were left) all agreed that the new wave of students had serious psychiatric problems and many were overtly uncontrolable because they had little upbringing or discipline in earlier grades. They had actually opened a trade school to accomodate these students! The percent going off to college dropped of dramatically and it took another 15 years before the school began to graduate a fair number of students even half prepared for what, in my day would be college but in their day would be 13th through 16th grade in extended day care…I mean highschool.

Have a good day.

Gus