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Sophomore, you make some good points. Unlike InquilineKea, however, I still think school is alright. Better than the alternatives anyways. I'm pretty self motivated, but even still I wouldn't want to sit in front of a screen all day - schools might not give you an "education", but they do let you develop some social skills. We should be rebuilding the sense of community that is being taken away through technology, and not in the context of secondlife or something crazy like that.</p>
<p>It's weird if you think about it - but our generation is the first to grow up with a form of communication (instant/text messaging, etc) that doesn't involve any of the five senses. This is especially disconcerting if you believe (and I think this is a reasonable claim) that a good part of communication comes from body language and voice tone.
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<p>Please cite examples of communication from body language and voice tone that cannot be replicated through the Internet. **. In addition to this, cite examples of **academic knowledge from body language and voice tone that cannot be replicated through the Internet. </p>
<p>People learn unconsciously how to communicate with body language and voice tone. Some people are better at unconscious learning than others. In fact, those with autism cannot learn such communication skills unconsciously. They can only learn how to communicate consciously. Moreover, there are unconscious neuromechanisms that allow for the recognition of faces. The destruction of such neuromechanisms leads to [url=<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia%5DProsopagnosia%5B/url">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia]Prosopagnosia[/url</a>]. This is a form of absorbing information about other people (just as communication is), and just like body language, is a skill that one learns unconsciously, not through school. </p>
<p>Moreover, you claim that you are self-motivated. You imply that your level of self-motivation is representative of the level of self-motivation that others have. Is that such the case? How do you know that it is such the case if you only have a limited subgroup of people to compare your level of self-motivation with?</p>
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Better than the alternatives anyways. I'm pretty self motivated, but even still I wouldn't want to sit in front of a screen all day - schools might not give you an "education", but they do let you develop some social skills.
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<p>Your argument testifies to your lack of imagination about the "alternatives." Perhaps it testifies to your lack of experience of how homeschoolers are able to develop social skills. I can point out to a number of homeschoolers who have developed adequate social skills in lieu of not going to school. Please, post this in the homeschooling forum, as well as the parents forum. Tell the homeschoolers that they have had inadequate opportunities to develop their social skills. Your ability to jump to this conclusion so rapidly is a clear example of intellectual arrogance. Of unwarranted conclusions based on limited research. You assume that school "allows you to develop social skills", and phrase it in a way such that you assume that this conclusion applies to most people.</p>
<p>Tell me, why are schools a superior mechanism of developing social skills?</p>
<p>Moreover, your lack of imagination extends to historical records. Public schooling for the masses is an industrial age invention. *People had adequate communication skills (and natural languages) far before the advent of pubic schooling. Schooling is completely unnecessary for learning how to communicate. Body language came far before the advent of public schooling. *</p>
<p>Schooling in the upper grades is often used as a means of standardizing units of knowledge according to state and federal standards. These units of knowledge can be easily learned by means of books or better yet, the Internet. The main issue with the Internet is that the student must be able to distinguish between the knowledge that is helpful, and the knowledge that is not helpful. Until the government can tag such websites (the criteria of tagging should involve a professional review of the material), libraries may be more helpful than the Internet. Of course, people who know how to search well do not need libraries. Searching is another skill important for the info age.</p>
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We should be rebuilding the sense of community that is being taken away through technology, and not in the context of secondlife or something crazy like that.
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<p>Schools are a mechanism of constraining people to interact only with other similarly aged students who live in the same region. The Internet is liberating in how it allows people to communicate with others all over the world, people who are more likely to share similar interests with each other.</p>