Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Top academic countries 'get rid of all the faddish rubbish' and focus on the essentials" video.

  1.  @JohnWilliams-iw6oq  Home schooling isn't a panacea, although with the learning management systems of today, it's very easy for a parent to plan and execute a very rigorous curriculum for their child at low cost and without much work. The GOOD thing about home schooling is if you mess up, you just mess up for one kid or one family of kids. When the government-run schools mess up, it hurts EVERYBODY.
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  2. The education establishment defines passing as "success." The easiest way to get more "success" is to lower standards. They put all kinds of edu-babble around it, but speaking as a teacher, the downward pressure on standards is always there, no matter how they dress it up. Where I work, they now push "co-requisites" for college algebra, because students are so poorly prepared for it. So we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per pupil in k-12, and none of it matters. The college is force-feeding high-school (intermediate) algebra to students on a "just in time" basis, so now college algebra is college algebra plus all the stuff you were supposed to learn, but we know you didn't, because we know k-12 sucks. It's a horrific waste of taxpayer money. It's a HUGE duplication of effort, if you count k-12 as "effort." It increases the cost of a college education, waters down college education, and never gets at the root of the problem, which is social promotion in k-12. But at least we're brimming over with "success!"
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  3.  @Dr-Noobnackz  Kids born in the 1930s learned local history, state history, American history, and finally world history. It started at home and branched out. Now they do just the opposite, teaching about Mesopotamian civilization before kids really understand their own.
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  4.  @dickjones9207  And you can't spell "quadratic." As a math professor, myself, I think a lot of kids are sent down a classical math pathway that really isn't very relevant. Techniques of college algebra, including the quadratic equation, are tools that underly calculus, higher analysis and engineering. If you're not following one of those career paths, it's a waste of time. I hate saying this because it does broaden you, some, to take on that discipline, and the theory is very beautiful. It's just not going to be of any use to you in real life (No matter how much they claim otherwise). I'm all the time asking students "Why are you in college algebra? You're not going to use it in your career." Then I learn that it's required for their major. And in their major, it's not really something they NEED, but it's a good weeder course, to reduce the number of, for instance, nursing majors. They could learn all the proportions and percentages they will need for drug dosage, etc., with a short, 3- or 4-week course that covers those topics. One school I taught at used trigonometry as their weeder course. They knew you had to be able to think to pass trig, and it was a very easy way for them to weed out the pretenders in their biology program. It also was a way to torture math teachers, with a bunch of low-performing students who had zero motivation to understand the material. Students would be much better served, in the main, by taking statistics, because so much of our scientific and political discussions revolve around statistics. It's easy to fool the American public with cherry-picked data, or to make claims that the data seem to support but actually don't (correlation versus causation). Teach them how to use a spreadsheet, and figure things out with simple models and recursions. You don't have to understand annuities to build an amortization schedule for a loan. You just have to know how compound interest works for one compounding period and drag down! BOOM! There's all your payments and the running balance!
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  5. So you're saying teaching people to be perpetually ignorant and butt-hurt is bad?
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