What motivates you to try in school?

[BillyMc]

<p>

I want to be in the small group of students who recieved an A in the class at the end of the quarter and can watch as the other students who recieved Bs and lower stare at me with utter awe or disgust because we both started a journey together and I came out on top with an A, while you took the road most traveled and didnt get an A

Well that’s… nice.</p>

<p>*received
*received
*didn’t</p>

[Bazzle]

<p>@Davidthefat - Read this: [Against</a> School, by John Taylor Gatto](<a href=“http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm]Against”>http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm)</p>

<p>We read that in AP Lang this year, and even my teacher agreed with most of it.</p>

<p>So I see that the basic consensus is that it’s either:</p>

<ol>
<li>A cocky attitude / disdain for another person.</li>
<li>Make parents proud.</li>
<li>College.</li>
</ol>

<p>And for me… that’s just too generic. You guys are doing it, in the end (despite enjoying learning), for outside reasons. That’s kind of what bothers me. No one just goes to school anymore to learn because school has become too focused on work and grades, and not on learning. To be honest, I’d learn just as much without tests and quizzes. What I wouldn’t do as much is cramming last minute in an attempt to remember as much as I can for the next hour.</p>

[noimagination]

<p>

And for me… that’s just too generic. You guys are doing it, in the end (despite enjoying learning), for outside reasons. That’s kind of what bothers me. No one just goes to school anymore to learn because school has become too focused on work and grades, and not on learning. To be honest, I’d learn just as much without tests and quizzes. What I wouldn’t do as much is cramming last minute in an attempt to remember as much as I can for the next hour.

Maybe that’s because I didn’t choose to study what I’m studying. I make somewhat of an effort in physics because I actually care about the material there. Even gym is boring because we are “studying” sports I don’t like.</p>

<br>

<p>[Against</a> School, by John Taylor Gatto](<a href=“http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm]Against”>http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm)

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

<em>emphasis mine</em></p>

<br>

<p>And, throughout American history, many kids worked from a young age and never learned to read: [National</a> Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp]National”>National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy). Individual examples prove absolutely nothing about the overall attainment of society. The warrants in this essay are simply awful. He needs to prove that compulsory education has little effect and never does so.</p>

[Minnesotaguy]

<p>I really, really like to brag and (mentally) belittle the mass of people that can’t get grades as good as mine. It’s just a rush, feeling superior to someone else.</p>