What is the point of Pythagoras?
The meaning in microbiology,
The relevance of the Romans?
I admit that it could b argued that this information “stretches your mind” & in some situations carries relevance and meaning.
But it will only stretch your mind if you actually care about what you are learning, & those situations will only occur within a small percentage of the population, such as those who aspire to be Archaeologists or Librarians or quiz show contestants.
I am not asking that this information be forgotten, but it should not be taught to every single member of the young generation, only to the small percentage of people who will put it to good use.
The present day education system could be compared to the ancient times before writing when things could only be remembered by passing the information on from adult to child.
Books, computers and the Internet have rendered passing information down in this way pointless and useless.
The information does not have to be carried on through the generations in this way.
If you ask your parents, the chances are that all they learned in chemistry was how to make paraffin & their mathematical tutoring consisted of reciting times table, & if they didn’t need all the information all are learning then surely nor do the vast majority of young people today.
Another issue is homework. Some schools seem to take the view that the more homework you give a student the more intelligent they will become. The truth is that in most cases it will have the opposite effect; there is too much pressure to get it done on time. This stressed out your brain & reduces its learning capacity; you rush the work & aren’t really focused on learning anything.
Another problem is that teachers are over-worked. This means they can become resentful & less caring about the further education of their students. They also get stressed and lose concentration in lessons, so they are less focused. For example, yesterday 25 minutes of our English lesson was wasted when our teacher forgot to come.
Why should a student waste hours working in a subject they know will pay know part in their future; a subject they know they will drop at the earliest opportunity?
Imagine yourself in this frustrating situation. You would most likely resort to keeping yourself amused by disrupting the class, & so preventing the learning of people who might actually care.
The final issue I would like to address is this; in my opinion there is not enough support from most schools for gifted and talented pupils. Very often they are made to sit through hours of lessons of things they learnt years ago when they could be learning new things.
For the moment it is probably impractical to have special classes for a small number of advanced students in various subjects, but something must be done.
To a small extent I have experienced this myself in one subject & I can tell you it is both frustrating and boring. Something needs to be done, and fast.
Schools need to cut down on pointless work such as copying out information without actually taking in what you are reading (which is what happened when students are overworked) and what appears to be attempting to teach every aspect of everything to everyone, which is of course impossible.
More effort should be put into students learning things they will actually use, and more structure is needed to prevent lessons overlapping and the same things being learned time and time again.
Just think about what I have said; education is okay but it could be better; more focused, more structured, and most importantly, more relevant.
