Do You Feel Your School Years Were a Waste?

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jjstar
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14 Jan 2008, 8:01 am

Did you emerge from school *educated* and/or knowledgeable or do you feel that those years were wasted and your real education began with the advent of the internet and/or through your own discoveries and reading of books, experience etc..?


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14 Jan 2008, 8:06 am

I was homeschooled for a lot of my school years, and I learned a lot more during those years than I did while I was in school. I don't think my years in school were a waste, but I do learn better when I'm allowed to go as fast as I want, and when I'm reading and exploring on my own instead of being taught along with others, and when I don't have to deal with a complicated social environment at the same time.



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14 Jan 2008, 8:10 am

I feel educated to an extent thanks to going to school. It gave me a starting point to making my own discoveries (as well as helping me go to college and then uni of course) and helping me decide roughly which career path to take. Had I not gone to school, I may not have known what was available to me in this wide old world, but then again I might, who knows? I'm certainly glad I went to school now though as I know quite a few people who didn't and the quality of their lives isn't that great (well not in my eyes anyway, everyone's different).


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Izaak
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14 Jan 2008, 8:41 am

I learned the basics in primary school. I can't remember what I have remembered from highschool. But most of my knowledge comes from self-directed learning.



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14 Jan 2008, 8:53 am

learned better on my own. I don't even recall what I learned in school--no kidding.

I was reading way beyond school text books. School--it was such a bore. I tuned out on a daily basis. I don't know how I passed. Once in awhile, I had an interesting teacher with a neat way of dressing or presenting that caught my eye.

Ironically, I'm a hs teacher. Now, I excite myself by hearing myself speak about literature. I'm a real know it all just like those dull teachers I had for 12 years. :D

Actually, there's lots of humor in our classroom--I couldn't survive without it and it keeps the students awake. I empathize with all of them so I try real hard not to bore them. In fact, if things start getting dry, I stop the lesson and let them talk amongst themselves.

I didn't wake up until college.

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14 Jan 2008, 8:53 am

school a waste?

More than 20,000 hours of my life on learning things in the most complicated, inefficient, long winded, repetitive, uninteresting, and alienated way possible, so that I would forget most of it, and lose interest in one thing after another as a result, a waste? Why no, of course not. I loved the way I only had about 2 hours a day left to do what interested me, and how I was encouraged to believe all kinds of rubbish, and not ask questions, and to shut up, and keep still, and disguise myself.

Yes, that was really great. School; the best days of my life.

PS, Equinn; ditto to your post, except that am not a teacher ! !

8)



Last edited by ouinon on 14 Jan 2008, 9:00 am, edited 2 times in total.

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14 Jan 2008, 8:55 am

Mostly a waste. It did help me develop a good BS filter though.



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14 Jan 2008, 9:08 am

I learned far for on my own then I ever learned in a classroom. I often already knew what was being discussed in class.


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jjstar
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14 Jan 2008, 9:17 am

ouinon wrote:
school a waste?

More than 20,000 hours of my life on learning things in the most complicated, inefficient, long winded, repetitive, uninteresting, and alienated way possible, so that I would forget most of it, and lose interest in one thing after another as a result, a waste? Why no, of course not. I loved the way I only had about 2 hours a day left to do what interested me, and how I was encouraged to believe all kinds of rubbish, and not ask questions, and to shut up, and keep still, and disguise myself.

Yes, that was really great. School; the best days of my life.

PS, Equinn; ditto to your post, except that am not a teacher ! !

8)


Would you like some sugar with that irony? I feel pretty much the same way though I skipped out real early and never really looked back after the 7th grade. Still there are about 9 years of my life (including nursery school) that I will never get back. Good times, eh. I keep thinking - this only makes us stronger.....repeat mantra.....ad adfintum....


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14 Jan 2008, 9:19 am

The only thing I learned in school was how to manipulate teachers into thinking they were making a difference by cultivating a "genius" so that they would give me good grades without me actually having to do much.

It was a hard earned lesson, but I have to say that it certainly is my most useful life skill. It is a very complicated and counter-intuative concept, but it has served me well in life: What you do is far less important than how you make people feel.

Most of the time the "politics" of school just got in the way of my learning, even if I happened to be interested in the same subjects they were trying to cram down my throat.


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14 Jan 2008, 9:51 am

I think my school years were largely productive, but I learned quite a bit on my own. The years I spent in the Master's program in English were largely a waste. I was fed a lot of politically correct garbage and forced to read boring literary criticism. I wanted to read the books themselves, not what some talking head thought of them.



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14 Jan 2008, 9:56 am

Odin wrote:
I learned far for on my own then I ever learned in a classroom. I often already knew what was being discussed in class.

Same here.


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14 Jan 2008, 10:01 am

Primary school was helpful (it's as far as my formal education goes if one talks about knowledge learnt and retained). My body was there in high school, but my mind was somewhere else (I learnt nothing there). I've completed one college subject, but I didn't really learn anything there, my mind was somewhat there too; I'll see how the next one goes (probably the same I'm assuming).

All of the facts in my mind; all of my higher knowledge is due to my "interests" and logical deductions from my observations of humanity and the environment we--they dwell in.

No one has provided the answers I seek.



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14 Jan 2008, 10:16 am

School didnt help me at all, i learned much more on my own.


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14 Jan 2008, 10:25 am

Well, I have to say that I ALSO considered it a WASTE! If I had more books, etc... and just stayed at home, I would have learned SO much more!

My CAREER is built on my autodidactic learning, and inherent logic. I am up against people that have studied this stuff for YEARS in college, and they don't even know the BASICS!

It is astounding how few things I use were actually even TAUGHT in school. Some were used before I even found a school that taught them. I learned UNIX and POSIX from an AT&T book I bought at a store.



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14 Jan 2008, 10:31 am

Productive? ha! How about a waste of my frickin' time. From the, well we can't move him up grades despite the fact that he already knows all of this to the 300 level Oceonography class that used the same textbook I used to learn the material myself when I was 7, to the computer teachers that didn't know thing one but would fail me because I didnt' write programs the way they thought they should be done (it didn't matter that mine worked and theirs didn't). Or the fact that when I wanted to learn something all I'd get out of teachers was "We're not there yet. You'll have to wait until the rest of the class is ready for that material." Then after class...we're not covering that this year, perhaps you'd get to cover that in grad school. (of course I was in high school at the time).

So generally... a huge waste of time... I even took the first two years of high school "off"... I'd show up once every other week to take tests, pass them all and go home.


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