2. American high-schools are some of the most toxic environments you could ever be in, and would give the most "hostile workplaces" a run for their money. They suck for the nerdy kid who wants to be left to his / her own devices. They suck for the middling kids who don't want to be on the perpetual status treadmill.
Probably positive for self-esteem and growth. Perhaps schools now are too focused on academic scores alone and too ignorant of negative social dynamics.
I don't necessarily agree 100% with this view but I'm sure it has some grain of truth.
The cynical view is that school is there to manufacture good workers for 18th century Prussia. Serving the modern economy would be a major step up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/iy9do9/for_me_ba...
You sit at your desk most of the time in your classroom. The same way you do at home in an online class.
But home is relatively more comfy. You are allowed to eat, stretch, sit anyway you like, take a walk, go to washroom as many times as you want, and play a game on the side in an online class.
Less chances for kids to bully each other and if they did, digital evidence of it is available.
Some teachers behave better.
I wish some sort of hybrid will come. Activities that require sitting in a classroom should be shifted to remote while others can be built into a separate school.
Indians (and Chinese too I think) for example, generally have some amount of implicit respect for 'education' (there is a goddess of learning and education in India) and for teachers. Parents-from-hell exist but at least when I was growing up, discipline was expected, teachers were given the benefit of doubt instead of always siding with the kids, kids actually used to be somewhat scared of teachers and the principal (I mean sure they would make fun of them behind their back but at least there was some amount of deference to authority) and the overall environment kept kids in line.
The kind of bullying that passes for normal in American schools would never fly. I mean it doesn't fly in American workplaces either. It's the kind of bullshit we only tolerate in schools for some reason.
I can confirm this is true of Chinese.
I went to a school where I got an all-rounded experience, but was fortunate and it's an elitist institution ( akin to a prep-school here), so out of reach of many.
You can criticize the American school system as much as you want, but for the most part it does a pretty good job.
Bullying can get bad, but some of it is also teaching you critical life skills. There is plenty of workplace bullying too, you know what you do, you grow some balls and stand up to the bully.
Which part of implementing this in American schools needs them to be the hell-holes they are?
A strict environment might be good for education, but I don't think helps reduce bullying.
In Asia kids actually respect their teachers as some honorable adults or even role models, it's a culture thing. The teachers are also graduated from good colleges and earning a decent pay. It's a whole different scenario.
by the way, as for the skin-color-based and gender-based AA admission policies, that does not exist at all in Asia.
In general I have heard of much more people being bullied in middle school compared to only one or two in high school.
I appreciate the sentiment here, but what??? I went through the biggest high school in my state. It was a meat grinder. But it absolutely pales in comparison to the nasty experiences I had in corporate America. I could write a book on all the nasty legally questionable shit I saw.
Going through high school now in my 30s would be trivial to my mental health, but to my underdeveloped teen brain, it was overwhelming and couldn’t have been more serious. Now of course I am not saying that means those problems aren’t important or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve them. I think we should specifically because of the unique mentally vulnerable position the teenager is in.
Furthermore, for self-directed kids, there's always the possibility of simply going mostly asynchronous, watching lectures and reading textbook at their own pace (which might be faster than regular class now that most distractions are removed!).
Here in my country, most start at either 8 or 9.
As they get older of course, they want to sleep a lot later.
It's pretty likely they're not actually sleeping all those 13 hours. If they were, I would be suspicious of some other underlying cause.
(We started at 7:00 and it was... fine? Quite possible to imagine?)
Between 5 AP courses and after school activities that kept him there until 9pm a few times a week, he was burning himself out last year. We'll be doing remote school until at least February and it's been great (for him).