M'ris asks,
"What were the
biggest lies you were told in school? What were the biggest omissions from the
curricula you were taught? And what were the biggest mistakes your teachers made?
I was thinking of these questions primarily academically -- the Noble Savage
instead of If You Don't Bother Him, He Won't Bother You -- but academic or social
or both are welcome.
Honestly, I don't remember being
told many lies in school which is not to say there weren't plenty of omissions,
oversimplifications, and positions I'd now disagree with. This may be related to
the fact that I can't actually remember learning very much before high school that
I hadn't already picked up elsewhere. This is a reflection on my memory as well as
my school system, I suspect. But really, here are my sum total of academic
memories from grades 1-9 (that's grade school and junior high). I'm not counting
being tested or answering questions; I'm keeping this only to memories of actual
in-school learning. But it's still a bit scary that this is the entire
list:
I remember realizing I could spell words I hadn't been
formally taught, from my own reading - that almost doesn't count, since I wasn't
taught it, but it did happen in school. Various dumb songs, 1st-3rd grades.
Long division, 3rd grade. Cursive handwriting practice, 3rd grade (I'd learned the
letters outside school, but you do have to practice to really know them). The
"races" of man are Caucazoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, 4th grade alternative social
studies. BASIC, 3rd-5th grades gifted. How to assemble dodecahedrons and similar
shapes, 4th grade gifted. How to throw up a stick and catch the other end, 5th
grade. What it looks like when mice have babies, 5th grade. A totally erroneous
explanation of Browning's line, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp", 8th
grade. Chisenbop (addition and subtraction technique on your fingers), 8th grade
extracurricular. Mixing sugar plus hydrochloric (?) acid in a beaker produces a
growing pillar of carbon, 8th grade. Mathematic proofs, 8th grade
(fun!).
In high school I did learn plenty of useful things: how to
dissect a frog or a plot (not in the same class), that even English teachers
dislike some classics, why Shakespeare switches between "thou" and "you", some
very basic economics and political science, carpentry skills (I worked on the
school play sets), Newtonian physics at a precalculus level, how to take a
derivative, a bit about probability, lots of things about airplanes and planets
(it was an aerospace magnet school), the effects of the Industrial Revolution on
the actual workers in the factories.
My high school teachers were in
general pretty good. The one thing I really missed getting from was good study
skills, and I can't really blame that all on my teachers. (My principal, yes. What
was supposed to be time for gifted students to work on Independent Study projects,
he made us use for SAT practice, because he wanted the school to look good.
Phooey.)
As for omissions, there certainly were some of those. Some
of the biggest were in the area of history, where we learned almost nothing
outside Europe and the US (and not all that much in Europe). The history we did
learn was presented as a series of episodes, mostly containing wars. There was
very little on the connections between the episodes or on the long term causes
for the wars. (American Revolution: caused by mean King George III. Civil War:
caused by mean slave owners OR (never and) disagreements on states' rights. WWI:
caused by the assasssination of Ferdinand. Ferdinand who? Oh, just some aristocrat
in Sarajevo. More info please? Well, countries all over the war had lots of
entagled alliances. No one wanted to fight but they all were dragged into it.) A
related problem is the way so many fascinating subjects from history to sex were
rendered so boring by their presentation in dull outline.
The
biggest lie implied to us in college was that all engineering jobs would naturally
entail the sort of challenging technical problems we learned to solve in school.
In my first year out of school, I got to use what I'd learned in computer class a
little, and what I'd learned in my Mechanical Engineering classes exactly once. My
biggest challenge was boredom. I did eventually get to use what I'd learned in my
major, in approximately my fourth through seventh years in industry. Now my job is
fun and challenging and I very rarely use any of my technical knowledge. (Had I
majored in Systems Engineering I might use more of it, but back in college neither
I nor anyone else I knew could figure out what that department did.) What I
do use every day that I learned in my engineering classes is an attitude and an
aptitude for learning fast and solving problems in domains of knowledge that are
new to me, and those four and a half years were worth it just for that. I also
use the statistics from a class I took in grad school, though my company trained
me in that again anyway. And there were any number of classes in things like
folklore, English, and astronomy that may not help me directly with my work but
that do a lot toward furnishing my mind. To whatever degree it is furnished,
anyhow.