Nice blog post by a high-school student about what is wrong about school itself. The striving for grades and other forms of academic and extra-curricular perfection only serves to create a large set of variables which will be used to winnow kids out at college admission time. Two or three variables are no longer good enough, because it forms too coarse a filter. If the ask is to filter over ninety-percent of qualified applicants out then the filter must be very fine. To that end, kids must strive and as the blogger correctly points out, such striving does not lead to any actual learning.
Back in my day in India, the process was more brute-force. You took a very hard entrance exam on a designated day and your score in that test decided if you were in or out. The only other condition of satisfaction was having passed the 12th grade board exam. And the vast majority of the applicants did not make the cut and had to work through the more involved process of getting into liberal arts colleges and such. Every kid I went to school with went to some college in the end. We did not learn anything useful past eight grade because that was around when you had to choose your lane and start cranking on entrance exam prep if you wanted a serious crack at it.
Not much different from the high-school experience in America. The things to strive for are quite different here but the the overall idea is much the same. A sieve to filter as many kids out as possible and learning cannot co-exist with such a sieve. J was very fortunate to have had a handful of teachers who were passionate about what they taught. These teachers went way above and beyond to transcend the demands of the sieve and actually help their students learn.
Back in my day in India, the process was more brute-force. You took a very hard entrance exam on a designated day and your score in that test decided if you were in or out. The only other condition of satisfaction was having passed the 12th grade board exam. And the vast majority of the applicants did not make the cut and had to work through the more involved process of getting into liberal arts colleges and such. Every kid I went to school with went to some college in the end. We did not learn anything useful past eight grade because that was around when you had to choose your lane and start cranking on entrance exam prep if you wanted a serious crack at it.
Not much different from the high-school experience in America. The things to strive for are quite different here but the the overall idea is much the same. A sieve to filter as many kids out as possible and learning cannot co-exist with such a sieve. J was very fortunate to have had a handful of teachers who were passionate about what they taught. These teachers went way above and beyond to transcend the demands of the sieve and actually help their students learn.
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