Les Sleeth said:
You are quite wrong about this. People can be taught to think with the right program and the right teacher. Your Niels Bohr story doesn't prove anything except that ONE SINGLE PERSON wasn't willing to think. Why do you think there are schools? Is it because we just want to waste our time trying to teach all the morons to think?
Who do you believe is most at fault for why education fails to teach people to think? Aside from the fact that there are no courses teaching it early on, it couldn't be because all the genius thinkers who design education courses haven't figured out that people don't learn very much through rote memory, competition, and test taking could it?
It's easy to act superior. It takes a lot more intelligence to understand the human condition in relation to human potential, and then design a solution to make things better.
Actually Bohr was the one who was thinking. So your comment there makes no sense.
Schools are there to impart information. However the schools in this country are a systematic failure. They are assembly line style education that tries tofit everyone into one model, and in so doing fails almost everyone. It fails the people who are too stupid to get it, because they just fall farther and farther behind, and it fails the people who are smart enough because it holds them back (i've got a real anger issue with that right now since high school was a complete waste of my time, much ranting and ravinglately).
Schools are not designed to teach us to think, they are designed to cram information down our throats, and they fail at even that. The fact of the matter is there are incredibly few teachers qualified to be teaching despite whatever standards they do meet,mostof them are not any good. This is simply because the people teaching are the ones who enjoy not, and those arenot necessarily the ones who are good at it.
You cannot take a class in 'thinking.' The only to learn that is by example. Notice how the best phycisists learned from the best physicists. Feynman was a student of Wheeler. Nash was at princeton with einstein. The best minds learn from the best minds by example. The average teacher isno where near being the best mind, and is not qualified to teach people how to think. The education system is not oriented to teach people how to think, only to teach them information, and as i have said it is a failure at that.
A complete reform of the education system would be necessary for it to be even worth half of the money that is wasted on it. but the problem would remain that there virtually no qualified teachers in this country. Every school has one or two out of 30. And those are of the schools I've seen, which were all in middle/upper class suburbs. in the inner cities, there are even fewer good teachers. The educational system, asdictated by politicians is a failure, and always will be as long as it is dictated by politicians.
There are too many people from the leve intellectual mediocrity who are unqualified to understand what they're talking about running the educational system. Add to that problem the liberal idea of progress by limiting disciplinary power of teachers, talking control away from the ground level and giving it too administrations, and there is no hope of even the faintest light at the end of the tunnel.
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