Current Events > It's fucked up how our education system seems designed to make kids miserable.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Ivany2008 posted...

What I don't understand, and keep in mind its been about 25 years since I was in high school, is that while in high school we had to learn the general studies(math, history, science) instead of things we should have been learning, like financial budgeting, taxes, how to grocery shop, write a resume, etc. You could elect to go into those courses, but they should have been mandatory.

Excellent point. That would have been so much more useful than learning about the history of English monarchs, for instance.

Joelypoely posted...

Excellent point. That would have been so much more useful than learning about the history of English monarchs, for instance.

History is important, but I do agree classes on finance shpuld have been a thing, and mandatory.

in my 12th grade economics class, we brushed up on credit cards a little. And when I mean a little, it's, "pick a credit card that has 0% APR, and don't use more than you have." We might have brushed up on resumes.

There was Home EC, which was not a mandatory elective I think it was in middle school to.

BlazinBlue88 posted...

This. My wife is a teacher and from her personal observations, the average 7th grader is at a 3rd grade reading level. No surprise a child at the appropriate education level is bored and acting out. The few classes I acted out in was because the material was too easy.

It's tough, because for all you know, his daughter's teacher was told, "It's your job to get these low-performing 3rd graders to score well, that's your priority #1". At the end of the day, teachers are just employees who, like all employees at all jobs, have tasks that they're told to complete even if they don't necessarily agree with them.

Kanaya413 posted...

Completely fair I just wanted it to be known that some are quite cruel for no reason

I have seen a few, but I've also seen the other side of it. I once tutored a student who claimed that her calculus teacher was so mean and threatened to fail her for no reason. Sounds like a jerk, right? But here's the kicker - I also tutored another kid in her class, and this kid told me that the aforementioned girl came to class 25 minutes late every day (40-minute class periods), never stops talking, doesn't do any actual work, and has to constantly be told to put her phone away. And he didn't "threaten to fail her for no reason", he said something along the lines of "If you have time to stop for morning coffee, you can prioritize getting to my class on time, and if you don't, you won't do well", which is a *tad different* from "threatening to fail you for no reason." Imagine that.

SAlYAN posted...

My school had a whole squad of old bats whose whole job was to monitor study halls. They all came with a permanent scowl, doled out detentions like candy, trumped up fake reasons to get kids in trouble, screamed at kids passing in the hallway for "LOOKING at my study hall," and clearly hated every student in the school. I was a fuckin teachers pet honor student loser, and I once got a detention from one of them for chewing gum. I wasn't chewing gum, and when they told me to spit it out, I literally had nothing to spit out. They screamed at me until I tried anyway, and when I pretended to spit something out, they accused me of faking it, demanded I show them the inside of my mouth, and then sent me to the office for "swallowing" it.

Was this a Catholic school? Not for nothing, but I haven't heard of too many schools with "study halls" recently - most schools have kind of realized that it's just a chance for kids who misbehave to continue misbehaving, so it's better to find something for them to do. Nowadays it's more the opposite - kids have to damn near commit a crime to get in any actual trouble. I do agree that old-fashioned school discipline was probably too extreme in one end, but now we're seeing it swing way too far in the other direction where kids who don't do any work still get rewarded for simply existing

SAlYAN posted...

To say nothing of the "coach" teachers who clearly don't give a fuck, know nothing about the subject, and are just arbitrarily teaching a class so they can coach JV volleyball in the afternoon or something. They usually get dumped on the general Ed classes, and then we wonder why so manybkids graduate having learned fuck-all. I was unlucky enough to have a teacher like that for both AP Comp Sci and AP Calculus. How the fuck the school thought that was a good idea was beyond me. But I definitely loved teaching myself those subjects while he surfed the net and shot the shit with the football players in the class.

As bad as that is, you have to ask yourself - why would the school hire a teacher like that?

And the answer, of course, is usually the parents. There are always *those parents* who care far more about their kids making the varsity football team than they do about whether their kid learns anything, and those parents have pull. This is something that is exclusive to America, and is a serious problem with our society - only in the USA would you literally see a math teacher get hired because of something not related to his or her ability to, you know, teach math. The idea of that happening would be a travesty and national scandal in most countries, where high school sports are strictly recreational. Math is usually not the subject in which that happens though...more often than not I see it in physical education teachers (whose jobs are so important with childhood obesity rates on the rise) and social studies teachers.

At the end of the day, schools are businesses and the parents are customers. If the customers want something different, they can usually get it. It's...wrong, of course...parents shouldn't run schools, but they do.

Arcanine2009 posted...

in my 12th grade economics class, we brushed up on credit cards a little. And when I mean a little, it's, "pick a credit card that has 0% APR, and don't use more than you have." We might have brushed up on resumes.

I mean...that's actually pretty good advice that most people should follow. I do agree that schools need to do stuff like "how to craft a resume" and "how to draft an e-mail" since kids don't know that. Or nowadays, they'd just get ChatGPT to do it for them. As a math teacher, I can say that my efforts in trying to teach about how car loans work have oftentimes been met with groans of, "Why do I need to know how they work when I can just look it up?"

Arcanine2009 posted...

Home economics should be mandatory as well, and not an elective.

This, I agree with. Learning how to cook is far more important than learning how to do a lot of other things.

SSj4Wingzero posted...

It's tough, because for all you know, his daughter's teacher was told, "It's your job to get these low-performing 3rd graders to score well, that's your priority #1". At the end of the day, teachers are just employees who, like all employees at all jobs, have tasks that they're told to complete even if they don't necessarily agree with them.

I have seen a few, but I've also seen the other side of it. I once tutored a student who claimed that her calculus teacher was so mean and threatened to fail her for no reason. Sounds like a jerk, right? But here's the kicker - I also tutored another kid in her class, and this kid told me that the aforementioned girl came to class 25 minutes late every day (40-minute class periods), never stops talking, doesn't do any actual work, and has to constantly be told to put her phone away. Imagine that.

Was this a Catholic school? Not for nothing, but I haven't heard of too many schools with "study halls" recently - most schools have kind of realized that it's just a chance for kids who misbehave to continue misbehaving, so it's better to find something for them to do. Nowadays it's more the opposite - kids have to damn near commit a crime to get in any actual trouble.

As bad as that is, you have to ask yourself - why would the school hire a teacher like that?

And the answer, of course, is usually the parents. There are always *those parents* who care far more about their kids making the varsity football team than they do about whether their kid learns anything, and those parents have pull. This is something that is exclusive to America, and is a serious problem with our society - only in the USA would you literally see a math teacher get hired because of something not related to his or her ability to, you know, teach math. The idea of that happening would be a travesty and national scandal in most countries, where high school sports are strictly recreational. Math is usually not the subject in which that happens though...more often than not I see it in physical education teachers (whose jobs are so important with childhood obesity rates on the rise) and social studies teachers.

I mean...that's actually pretty good advice that most people should follow. I do agree that schools need to do stuff like "how to craft a resume" and "how to draft an e-mail" since kids don't know that. Or nowadays, they'd just get ChatGPT to do it for them. As a math teacher, I can say that my efforts in trying to teach about how car loans work have oftentimes been met with groans of, "Why do I need to know how they work when I can just look it up?"

This, I agree with. Learning how to cook is far more important than learning how to do a lot of other things.

I was incredibly well behaved as a student due to the terror I already faced in my home life but at least three teachers were cruel to me and my peers regardless. really some people should just not be teachers

SSj4Wingzero posted...

I doubt it. Do not forget that, if high school classes start at 7:15 AM, that means the *teachers* have to be ready to teach at 7:15 AM, which means they probably have to be in the building by 6:45, which means that they're probably walking up at 5:30 AM. I guarantee that no teacher *wants* to wake up at 5:30 AM.

If your high school was in a school district that also had elementary and middle schools, it probably goes something like this:

-We need to set the elementary school dropoff at 8:25 so that parents can drop off their kids (since elementary school parents are generally the priority when it comes dropping off their kids at school) and get to work on time
-OK so what about the middle schoolers? Oh right, well, if the buses drop off the middle schoolers at 8:00, there's no way they can pick up the elementary schoolers and drop them off by 8:15, so shit...eh, guess we gotta make the middle school start at 7:45 so that the buses have time to pick up and drop off the elementary school kids
-Shit, then we gotta get the high schoolers right? Well...7:15 it is. Sucks but it's the best we got

The middle school started at 9am. Elementary I'm pretty sure was 830. 715 for the high school was just cruel. It was a smallish town so if you had multiple kids at different school you could have dropped them off at all of them easily without needing like an hour to get to all of them. If anything, having the high school start at 715 would have been really annoying for a working parent if you had a younger kid who had to get to the middle school nearly 2 hours later.

Kanaya413 posted...

I was incredibly well behaved as a student due to the terror I already faced in my home life but at least three teachers were cruel to me and my peers regardless. really some people should just not be teachers

I'm sorry to hear. I definitely agree that some people should not be teachers for a variety of reasons. This could be teachers who really just do not like students, and it can also be teachers who are so interested in "having fun" with the students that they forget that teaching is about making sure kids *LEARN* something.

sfcalimari posted...

The middle school started at 9am. Elementary I'm pretty sure was 830. 715 for the high school was just cruel. It was a smallish town so if you had multiple kids at different school you could have dropped them off at all of them easily without needing like an hour to get to all of them.

But again - if you don't like being at the high school at 7:15, do you think that your *teachers* wanted to wake up and be ready to teach at 7:15? As a teacher, you have to usually be there *at least* 15-20 minutes before your first class starts depending on the school's rules, so that means most of your teachers were arriving at the school building at 6:50. I can guarantee you that most of them did not want to be there that early.

And the issue is more about school buses. School districts have to stagger start times cause they often use the same school buses for both middle schoolers and high schoolers. After a school bus drops a group of kids off, it then has to make another run to pick up a bunch of other kids, and then do it a third time for all three schools. It's time-consuming.

SSj4Wingzero posted...

I'm sorry to hear. I definitely agree that some people should not be teachers for a variety of reasons. This could be teachers who really just do not like students, and it can also be teachers who are so interested in "having fun" with the students that they forget that teaching is about making sure kids *LEARN* something.

Thank you for your kind words
In the end I barely learned anything in school but that was due to poor education and being learning disabled

C_Pain posted...

Most people wake up at 6 am for work?

I wake up for work at 5 am so I can work on my part time job before I go to my full time job.

Simply put, school is not designed for children. It's for the convenience of adults. The children getting any benefit out of it, is coincidental at best. I thought COVID clearly exposed that & many other unpleasant little truths.

darkbuster posted...

Simply put, school is not designed for children. It's for the convenience of adults. The children getting any benefit out of it, is coincidental at best. I thought COVID clearly exposed that & many other unpleasant little truths.

What are you talking about? COVID-19 showed that our kids need school in order to learn because they are not capable of trying to "learn on their own" - prior to COVID-19 some schools were trying to experiment more with self-directed learning, but COVID-19 revealed how stupid that was and how kids absolutely cannot be trusted to learn on their own

SSj4Wingzero posted...

What are you talking about? COVID-19 showed that our kids need school in order to learn because they are not capable of trying to "learn on their own" - prior to COVID-19 some schools were trying to experiment more with self-directed learning, but COVID-19 revealed how stupid that was and how kids absolutely cannot be trusted to learn on their own

I'm referring to the people who insisted that schools needed to open so that the parents with (younger) children could go back to work; a time where COVID was still more of an unknown. The benefits to kids were not a priority at that time.

darkbuster posted...

I'm referring to the people who insisted that schools needed to open so that the parents with (younger) children could go back to work; a time where COVID was still more of an unknown. The benefits to kids were not a priority at that time.

Yes, it was abundantly clear in the UK that people wanted schools to reopen not for the benefit of the children, but as a childcare service.

C_Pain posted...

It's called 9-5 my dude

9-5 jobs are a luxury now, usually white collar. They're certainly not the norm anymore.

We make all life for those who are not well off miserable. And people vote to keep it miserable, just in case somebody benefits where they suffered previously. Like student loan forgiveness.

Special shout out to schools basically being prisons, now.

Bars on windows. Security cameras everywhere. Metal detectors. Barred and fortified doors and windows. Armed guards patrolling the halls. Supreme Court's ruled students have basically no personal or privacy rights while in school. Cafeterias getting essentially the same stuff from the same suppliers as prisons.

Can't imagine why so many students are coming out of the system totally emotionally fucked up, and uneducated.

HashtagSEP posted...

9-5 jobs are a luxury now, usually white collar. They're certainly not the norm anymore.

That's no longer the norm with white collar. Most expect you to be there for 9 hours with 1 of those hours being lunch. 8-5 is typical for white collar that doesn't offer flexible work hours.

It's so the kids can realize how the real world truly is.

BlazinBlue88 posted...

Most expect you to be there for 9 hours with 1 of those hours being lunch. 8-5 is typical for white collar that doesn't offer flexible work hours.

this. good luck finding the supposed "9 to 5" job even amongst white collar jobs

BlazinBlue88 posted...

That's no longer the norm with white collar. Most expect you to be there for 9 hours with 1 of those hours being lunch. 8-5 is typical for white collar that doesn't offer flexible work hours.

Well, right. I didn't mean it's a norm there, either. I just meant it's the only type of job you see it in, anymore.

The worst is English curriculums being actively designed to make the populace hate reading. Nobody gives a flying fuck about Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc., and its a very rare person who would voluntarily read anything theyve written in 2025.

PraetorXyn posted...

The worst is English curriculums being actively designed to make the populace hate reading. Nobody gives a flying fuck about Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc., and its a very rare person who would voluntarily read anything theyve written in 2025.

This is a bad post and you should feel bad.

PraetorXyn posted...

its a very rare person who would voluntarily read anything theyve written in 2025.

Yeah, I'd call that rare.

Not sure where I'd even find works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc. written in 2025.

HashtagSEP posted...

Well, right. I didn't mean it's a norm there, either. I just meant it's the only type of job you see it in, anymore.

Ah sorry. Misread.

HashtagSEP posted...

This is a bad post and you should feel bad.

Nah. Boring is boring.

DrizztLink posted...

Yeah, I'd call that rare.

Not sure where I'd even find works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc. written in 2025.

If you read more works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc. you'd probably not make those sorts of writing errors.

HashtagSEP posted...

This is a bad post and you should feel bad.

Yeah, agreed.

DrizztLink posted...

If you read more works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc. you'd probably not make those sorts of writing errors.

I didn't make a writing error. If you think I should have included an unneeded comma for something that wasn't a clause to avoid your pedantry, take it elsewhere.

Nah, the pedantry is the only fun part of this conversation for anyone.

darkbuster posted...

I'm referring to the people who insisted that schools needed to open so that the parents with (younger) children could go back to work; a time where COVID was still more of an unknown. The benefits to kids were not a priority at that time.

True, but we're starting to see that kids *really* need school as well. COVID-19 did open many parents' eyes to the fact that, no matter how much you love your child...your child can still be difficult to be around all day, and teachers don't get paid enough to deal with them.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I'm glad, and I oftentimes think that this goes so understated.

People complain about school all the time and I get that school isn't perfect, but for every kid who complains that school sucks and they don't like it, there's another kid who yearns to be in school because school is a reprieve from a traumatic home life, and there's another kid for whom school is a way out of their shitty situation. Of course, if educators are doing their jobs well, oftentimes you don't hear about it, so perception is skewed.

PraetorXyn posted...

Nobody gives a flying fuck about Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc., and its a very rare person who would voluntarily read anything theyve written in 2025.

People obviously care about F. Scott Fitzgerald because adaptations of The Great Gatsby are made every few years and they're almost all successful - the 2013 movie grossed 353.6 million dollars, so clearly people *do* care about F. Scott Fitzgerald's work

Also it's pretty funny that you somehow spelled *two* of the authors' names wrong

PraetorXyn posted...

I didn't make a writing error. If you think I should have included an unneeded comma for something that wasn't a clause to avoid your pedantry, take it elsewhere.

This is a dumb post and you should feel dumb.

PraetorXyn posted...

The worst is English curriculums being actively designed to make the populace hate reading. Nobody gives a flying fuck about Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc., and its a very rare person who would voluntarily read anything theyve written in 2025.

Speak for yourself. Some of Dickens's books, at least, are as good today as they ever were, and quite readable by a modern audience (more so than many of today's 'literary' novels).

DrizztLink posted...

Yeah, I'd call that rare. Not sure where I'd even find works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, etc. written in 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DC9xez5pxU

Enclave posted...

My kid is in a 3/4 split and is bored out of her skull. She says that it's not different from 3rd grade. The school is wondering if she's gifted.

I know she's a bright kid but I don't think she's gifted, I think the teacher isn't teaching the 4th grade kids fully 4th grade material.

Yeah, as someone who was in a 3/4 split for 4th grade back in the 90s (and in Canada), that's basically what it was like. We'd have Math and Science with the main 4th grade class, and maybe go off to learn French twice a week, but everything else was basically repeating what we did in 3rd grade. All with a teacher who really didn't give half of a fuck about the older kids being bored out of their minds.

C_Pain posted...

Most people wake up at 6 am for work?

5:00am for me, make coffee and the day's breakfast/lunch. Leave my place and 6:15am to walk 3 miles through gang infested, homeless tweakers with bats/machetes knives etc, and loose full grown dogs just roaming around everywhere.

Finally arrive at my car which I pay a friend monthly to park at his house because at my apartment it will get destroyed muy pronto. Then drive to work.... and do it all in reverse when I leave work.

Oh and no hot water or maintenance at my apartments since January 12 2024...those ice cold showers in the middle of winter can get old but hey its starting to warm up now :D

Believe it or not life was a lot worse when I was a kid...can you say "dry dog food and an outdoor water hose to survive on?"

CTrunks posted...

Yeah, as someone who was in a 3/4 split for 4th grade back in the 90s (and in Canada), that's basically what it was like. We'd have Math and Science with the main 4th grade class, and maybe go off to learn French twice a week, but everything else was basically repeating what we did in 3rd grade. All with a teacher who really didn't give half of a fuck about the older kids being bored out of their minds.

It could be that the teacher didn't care because she was explicitly told not to. Maybe those 3rd graders were weak performers and the teacher was specifically told to do as much as possible to get those 3rd graders on grade level. I am not sure how things are in Canada, but in the US, teachers are oftentimes evaluated oftentimes on test results, and a lot of the new trends in "data-driven analysis" focus on stuff like grade-wide passing rates, so there is a lot more pressure from school leadership to make sure that the weakest of the weakest student is passing. A lot of resources (money, time, teachers' attention span) are disproportionately directed towards students who are the least motivated and least interested in education.

Now, yes, struggling students need help, but it is sad to know that a lot of intelligent students aren't really getting a fair shot at a real education because 90% of the teacher's efforts and energies are spent on the bottom 10%, many of whom really do not care and do not want to learn. A solution that education researchers love to encourage is mixing classes and expecting the smarter kids to "bring up" the weak ones, and in some cases there's merit to that, but in other cases the smart kid is bored out of his mind, or worse, sees having to help the weak kids as "punishment" for being smarter than them. In a perfect world, we'd be able to actually make sure every kid is adequately challenged, but there just isn't enough time or resources available to make it happen.

At least its not as bad as some of the Asian countries. A lot of them have cram school after their regular classes.

lcampoy posted...

At least its not as bad as some of the Asian countries. A lot of them have cram school after their regular classes.

In the US, students aspiring to top universities have to fill their afterschool time with sports, extracurricular activities, and various out-of-school stuff so that they can "stand out" as candidates. Is that really so different from cram school? At least in the Asian countries, the college admissions process is incredibly transparent and equal - you get in if you have the required score, you don't get in if you don't.

Here, in the US, we put our hard-working and aspirational students through a meat grinder of extracurricular activities, many of which are incredibly expensive (much moreso than cram school - some travel sports leagues are thousands of dollars a year just to join), all to do something that they *THINK* (you never know since college admissions in the US are opaque) will make them look better, but won't guarantee anything. I'm not sure which one is worse.

SSj4Wingzero posted...

It could be that the teacher didn't care because she was explicitly told not to. Maybe those 3rd graders were weak performers and the teacher was specifically told to do as much as possible to get those 3rd graders on grade level. I am not sure how things are in Canada, but in the US, teachers are oftentimes evaluated oftentimes on test results, and a lot of the new trends in "data-driven analysis" focus on stuff like grade-wide passing rates, so there is a lot more pressure from school leadership to make sure that the weakest of the weakest student is passing. A lot of resources (money, time, teachers' attention span) are disproportionately directed towards students who are the least motivated and least interested in education.

It's certainly possible, but I think the fact that there were only seven of us in that class likely played a part. She was, first and foremost, a third grade teacher, and had us shoved onto her since there were only two 4th grade teachers (the third one retired or got relocated at the end of 3rd grade) and just over 60 kids, so they didn't want two classes of 30+ kids, but didn't have the teachers or space for three classes of 20.

It's going to get worse

CTrunks posted...

It's certainly possible, but I think the fact that there were only seven of us in that class likely played a part. She was, first and foremost, a third grade teacher, and had us shoved onto her since there were only two 4th grade teachers (the third one retired or got relocated at the end of 3rd grade) and just over 60 kids, so they didn't want two classes of 30+ kids, but didn't have the teachers or space for three classes of 20.

I can believe that too. A lot of education decisions are made for reasons such as personnel or space - students are sometimes forced into classes they don't want to be in (or barred from classes they want to take) because there just isn't anywhere else for them to go. It's a numbers' game.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I am glad that school was a positive in your life. We teachers spend the overwhelming majority of our time dealing with the complainers that we lose sight of the fact that school actually *doesn't* make everyone miserable.