Today's Youth, what are they comming to?

[Bill Gold]

Wayne C.:
Like others have said earlier in this thread… A possible reform could be to increase the base salary of public teachers, to try to draw well qualified adults from industry (or elsewhere) towards teaching jobs, no? I don't think Foto was implying that the blame for our weak school systems rests solely on the shoulders of teachers. It seems pretty obvious to me that a person can't be a spectator in their education. Yet, part of me just refuses to believe that doing homework and not understanding, or doing homework to barely understand concepts is better than or equal to understanding the same concepts the first time one encounters them. When I was in high school I would never do my homework, but I passed the vast majority of my tests in every discipline with A's. It just seems ridiculous to me that high school required so much meaningless busywork, while for the most part college doesn't seem to care about homework. It's as if high school is preparing the kids who bust their butt doing homework and getting mediocre scores on tests to fail, or at the very least do slightly worse than they expected in college. Having a worse overall grade in high school courses than other students who knew less than me was frustrating, and made me even less inclined to do homework. I also refuse to believe the notion that homework prepares students for the workforce. If this is true, why is homework valued so little in college (compared to high school)? Maybe it’s different in other states, but here in California (something like 48th, 49th, or 50th in education in the country) it’s exactly like I described. I didn’t mean to rag on teachers too badly.

As for the homes which bred these kids from the article which sparked MattK’s trigger happy posting reaction… I think it’s pretty safe to say that these kids probably didn’t come from a family resembling either the Beavers or the Brady Bunch. Like MissInformation alluded to earlier in this thread, a lot of people have children while in varying degrees of unpreparedness. While this is not a recent development in the world, I think most of us would like to see people only having kids when they can financially and emotionally care for them. People are still having children; even teenagers are still having children. It appears that the pro-abstinence policy put forth by the government for quite a few years now seems to be about as effective as the “Just Say No [to drugs]” policy suggested by Nancy Reagan in the 80’s. Maybe a “Fine… I guess sex isn’t so bad, but if you’re going to do it, be sure to wear a condom and/or use birth control” policy is in order? Also, spreading knowledge regarding the “morning after” pill, which isn’t the equivalent of RU-486, it is not an abortion (for those of you who have moral and/or religious issues with abortion), would seem logical as well. Yeah… That ought to liven this thread up a little bit.