i am a teacher, presently teaching in a private high school here in mexico. i also teach and have taught at university level and teach university faculty. i cannot argue that sometimes schooling looks 'bad', but if one looks closely at what schools are supposed to do, they do not do it all that badly. though students might look askance at what they are studying in that it does not seem to make much sense to them, consider they are still children and with no experience and ability to make hard decisions. they have to learn, and that, though they do not realize it, is exactly what they are doing. learning is partly the learning of discipline, that is the ability to get down and do the hard job of thinking and making decisions; the hard job of learning tolerance for people whose opinions you hate; tolerance for those less endowed with the ability to think clearly or well; tolerance for those less well-educated or for those whose capacity is limited. recognition that we are all in this together is not easily learned, and though i have not experienced it, the best place to learn this seems sometimes to be combat. as an aside, i would recommend the book, and the hbo series ' band of brothers' and especially the last segment with the real people who took part in this, giving their views. when you realize they all at the beginning had nothing in common with one another, but they truly became brothers and lifelong friends, those that survived. you are probably far too young to really know anything about WW II, or korea, my war, or vietnam, but there are lessons to be learned from the experiences and the people who had them.
i would not be too hasty to deride the educational system as worthless, it really is not. i attempt to get my students interested in learning, but they are all different and some are not at all interested in science. people are different and the schools must attempt to teach them all. the brilliant ones will do fine eventually. the hard ones are those with limits or those so disaffected that they are quite difficult to reach. it is the job of the teacher to attempt to find a way.
i will agree with one thing--- when i went to school, starting in the sixth grade, we had mandatory shop courses to learn a little bit about carpentry, electricity, machine shop, and printing. in high school, for those who wanted it, there was a complete shop course for the three years where the students learned enough to be proficient in a specific kind of work, along with learning how to read and write. years ago that kind of training was dropped; i do not know or understand why. not everyone is made to be a scholar and the people who can be skilled in the trades are valuable indeed, but the school system does not understand that.
back to communication as mentioned in the schooling essay. good communication skills are rarely taught in school well, but that is partly because most people do not and never will be able to write well. it is a skill that needs practice and not everyone, in fact few are good at it. i am also an editor, editing scientific papers written in english by non-english speaking scientists, an author's editor. i see how poorly people write, and i certainly did in my younger days doing research. i do not think i write all that well now, but certainly better than i did. being an editor is easier, for you only have to correct what is written rather than fill the empty paper for the first time; but i have learned to write better by doing this kind of work. this gets back to your misspelling. that is really an impediment to communication. people reading what you write must or will stop every time they come to a misspelled word because it stands out so much. their train of thought is interrupted each time. communication means , among other things, smoothness in presenting your ideas so that every thing is transparent except the ideas on which the reader will then be able to focus. he does not get sidetracked.
i will continue to read your web site, now that i have it bookmarked, and probably will send more comments in future. actually, i was looking for sites that included bomb making whne i found your site, for i had heard there were many and wanted to see for myself how easily anyone who wanted to know could find them. it is easily done so that the incipient bomb maker has no trouble finding out how to do it. when we were kids, some 60 years ago, many of us did this just for fun, but we had to learn from scratch, for there were no books and of course no world wide web. we did have the advantage at the time in that, and even during WW II, we kids could go to the local hardware store and buy some explosives, black powder, smokeless gunpowder, and dynamite fuse. i suppose we could have gotten blasting caps had we wanted them. life in those days was so much simpler and so much less sophisticated. all the fbi did then was track down bank robbers, put the japanese americans in concentration camps and chase nazi spies around the east coast.
ellis glazier <eglazier@uabcs.mx>