It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by Wrabbit2000
reply to post by Malcher
Replace it with something that works and I'll agree. It seems to me, people who probably hated the subjects in school when they took them, now run the schools. It's the cheater and slacker approach to education.
Math? Bahh.. Too hard! Calculators for all ..and SUE anyone who argues! (That was what it took for our college to allow them into tests and finals. A student filed law suit demanding calculators be permitted. The school lost)
Reading? Heck.. Literature is for egg heads or something. I'm starting to read the classics that date a little further back then Arthur C. Clarke. School was pulling hard away from anything like that when I was there. Now? Well, when the school has to admit that even 040 reading is TOO advanced for some to get through after 2-3 attempts??? (040 anything is 6th grade level remedial ...and many are carrying newly minted HS Diplomas).
Writing? Heck.. We don't need that. We have keyboards and touch screens. My Studies instructor showed us a precious book she's kept. It's an original school text book from 1887. In it, every page is written by hand print and in cursive writing. I believe it was a general science book, not a writing one. I was a little uncomfortable by having to focus to read some of it ....and embarrassed at classmates who couldn't follow at all.
We go to war in places a % of our citizens...and we're talking EDUCATED citizens...can't even place on a map until the war has been raging for months or more...and we suggest the system isn't totally beyond reform? I can't understand what is left to fix in some ways. It needs torn to pieces and rebuilt. The Old School way.
Originally posted by Perhaps
... we had stencils of the continents, using a map as a model we'd place them on an A3 sheet, trace around them, pencil in major nation boundries and island nations then yeah, colour them in, name them as well as the oceans/seas.
Originally posted by jiggerj
reply to post by Cabin
Probably gonna get bashed for this, but what the heck. The people giving these geography tests are probably the only ones that think geography is important. When is the last time anyone took a geography test to get a job? When did anyone need to study years of geography to find a grocery store, or factory, or hospital?
It's just not that important (if at all) in our daily lives.
I know that Iran is in the Middle East. But, why would I need to waste some brain space so that I would be able to stick a pin in its exact location on a map?
How much value is there in learning and remembering that the population of Timbuktu is 5,000 or a gazillion?
I still believe that it is not important to know stuff, rather it is exceedingly important to know how to find it when you need it. I can't tell you how many times my acquaintances go around asking questions (and not getting the answers), when they all have computers at home that are on-line!
Originally posted by beezzer
Originally posted by rickymouse
I'm not good at maps. I can never find Atlantis on a map, no matter how hard I try to find it.
Atlantis is in Georgia.