"Higher order thinking"

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I think a lot of this "higher order thinking" is a bunch of BS. School basically expects me to write essays and have opinions about stuff I know nothing about. It pisses me off and it's the main reason why I dropped out in grade ten. School is teaching people nothing. It's basically teaching people to be politicians. I think it does a lot of harm teaching people to have opinions about stuff they know nothing about. I think it's better to teach students some unbiased facts and ask for their opinion way later.

Yeah, I kind of hate the idea of a "well rounded education". I see it as a wasted effort. Education should focus on career skills. If you want to learn history as well, that's just fine but it should be treated like a hobby and not made a required subject.

I'm really confused about some of the stuff that goes on in college (I've never been). I've heard of people spending hours studying subjects that don't relate to career skills (not sure whether that was optional or required) and I've heard people say several times "You don't have to pick a major until you're second year". How does that work? How does someone go through a year of college without having picked a field of study or a career? What are they studying for during that time? Not their career I guess. It seems like a waste of time.

I've also heard people say in their jobs they don't use stuff from their undergrad days, only from their grad days. In that case was their whole undergrad career a waste of time if it didn't teach them anything useful for their job? It doesn't make sense.

I've even heard people often qualify to study a grad degree even if their undergrad degree was in a totally different field. I guess that means the grad degree doesn't need any actual preqeq knowledge. They say the fact that you have an undergrad degree (even if it's in an unrelated field) proves you're a good study. What a waste of time. Someone might already be a good study and could have otherwise started their career sooner.

Sometimes it's the same for an undergrad degree. I want to get a bachelor degree in computer engineering but I chose the wrong subjects in year 12 (stupid system, I passed them but years later I found out they're not uni qualifier subjects so as far as the uni is concerned, my year 12 grade is zero (no one at school said I picked the wrong subjects yet isn't qualifying for uni the entire point of high school?)) Anyway, to get into uni I can do a two year diploma at TAFE (a local technical college). Their only requirement for entry is that I've passed year 12 with any subjects.

Now here's what I find confusing. The subjects in the diploma are not the subjects the uni says I missed out on at school. It's mostly stuff about electronics that wasn't offered at my high school to begin with (though some high schools may have that). But this raises two quesions. 1. Does this mean I can study a bachelor of computer science without year 12 English (required to get in after high school but not required for one who enters using a diploma instead)? and 2. Is the electronics stuff in the diploma really important if high school leavers are able to complete the bachelor degree without having studied electronics? Maybe that proves that you don't need any prereq electronics if someone else gets in with their high school subjects (none of which where electronics).

I find the whole education system to be not only really annoying but horribly confusing as well. I'd probably be even more annoyed if I knew fully how it works. Today I had a job interview with a woman from Delaware. She wanted to know about the previous time I was in TAFE. Not being a local she asked what TAFE was. I told her it was a technical college. She said "Oh, so it's like university except that you don't have to study English there". What? Do they make you do stuff like that in uni when your career goal is not to become a writer? Is that what she did? Just in American universities or ones down here as well? (I haven't been to either).

It seems like in both uni and high school there are wasted hours spend studying things not career related. You need your grad degree for your career (or at least to get the job, you may still end up learning half the stuff after you started the job anyway). You need an undergrad degree to get into the grad degree. You need high school to get into the undergrad degree.

I used to think that high school was just a waste of time before you learned important stuff at uni. Now I think maybe half of uni is a waste of time also. Like maybe an undergrad degree is a waste of time before you learn all the important stuff in the grad degree.

It just seems like if education was run more efficiently not only could they reduce the amount of time spent in uni but also make it start earlier and end earlier. They could eliminate senior high school and put an accelerated uni degree in it's place which would both reduce the amount of time people spend on their education and massively reduce people's college debt (if you're paying X thousand dollars per year you don't want to hear they made it take more years than necessary).

I just think the whole education system is screwed up. It's like dominoes. The mistakes you make when you're young and foolish can haunt you for the rest of your life (the domino effect).

Before getting my diagnosis (which happened for me at age 21), I was actually training to become a High School English teacher. One of the most disheartening experiences of my life. It's painfully obvious how broken the system is. We don't teach kids how to think, we teach them how to jump through hoops and follow directions without ever asking "why?", or more importantly, what they even want to learn in the first place. Your hands are tied by so many different political bands, it isn't even funny. Combine that with more ill-fitted parents producing more apathetic kids with each generation, and you're incredibly lucky to legitimately reach even one student. There are some good teachers who are truly underappreciated heroes, and the uphill battle they fight is horrendous.

As for college, it's one of the biggest scams out there. "Higher education" isn't about true education anymore, it's a business. You put yourself 10's of thousands of dollars in debt for a certificate, then you turn around and half the time the certificate can't even help with the job anymore because our grandparents still can't afford to retire. The entire education system needs to be reworked, as does the economy/job market, the government, and so on, and so forth. The whole thing's just such a mind-boggling mess, and if you actually fixed something, everything else would collapse.

Another thing that pisses me off about "higher order thinking" is that it involves a lot of brainwashing. They're not teaching you to think for yourself, they're teaching you to think the way the system wants you to.

An example was my English finals. I had to read a short story and answer some questions about it. This story was about this teenaged boy and his father. Whenever his father tried new things he always got it right.

One question was "what did the son learn when his father managed to fix something correctly for the first time?" I knew that they wanted me to say that adults are superior to teens and experience makes you get everything right. I just didn't want to give in to that. I knew that was the "moral of the story", but I don't agree with that moral. That made me feel extremely trapped. It was like they were forcing me to have an opinion that I don't have.

Right now I have a good answer, but things like this happen in school all the time. This biased BS even happens in science. When they were talking about climate change I think they had two pages talking about human causes of climate change and maybe one sentence about other causes. That's pretty benign, but that could easily be taken to an extreme.

I don't like the idea of having to form uninformed opinions either. That's a big problem with a lot of voters in this country.

And, while I agree that the master's courses I've gotten to take so far have been FASCINATING *and* APPLICABLE to work immediately, I have kind of changed my tune about the 'required' or 'gen ed' courses.

I wrote this summary of my transition from hating school to really loving it:
http://mistressofthedorkness.blogspot.c ... te-of.html
Sorry if it sounds kinda chipper, I wrote it for the student blog at my uni and we were supposed to be ambassadors of goodwill and focus on the positives.

I think a well-rounded education is important for many reasons.

It gives you the ability, for one, to recognize when somebody is "brainwashing" you.

It also gives you the ability to make a decent living.

No knowledge is every wasted - you may not use it in the way you expect, but the act of putting in the effort is a lesson in itself.

Now having said that I truly dislike the education system in the United States as it doesn't teach kids to think on their own. They are told what to do, when to do it, how to do it and mostly when they are doing it wrong.

I understand why that is as a former teacher, but as a parent I don't like it for my kids. I don't think there is an easy solution.

I agree with pretty much everything you say. My school expects every person to think EXACTLY the same. (Yes, EXACTLY. If I have a different answer to a question and give a valid argument, the teachers all say I should work with the system...). If someone doesn't like all the graduation requirements and repetitive, boring classes it is extremely hard to have the motivation to do anything. It also doesn't help if my teachers feel the same way. I don't blink an eye anymore when I see half the class cheating on a test, and this is a top high school we are talking about too.

Sometimes, being "stretched" by new knowledge could be painful--one might not see the use for this knowledge.

However, when one looks back upon the occasions when one's knowledge was "stretched," one frequently feels grateful for the acquisition of knowledge, and frequently even desires to share that knowledge with others who might feel stressed when their brains are "stretched."