Should be made illegal to dropout from school?

[SpookyOkyBatGirl]

Let's face it. Education is needed. You need the basic skills they teach you to function in life. You have to go to school to get a good job where you make a great salary, such as a doctor or a lawyer. If less people dropped out, less people might be stricken with poverty because they can all get better jobs.

Then again, we need some people to do the "low-leveled grunt work" that nobody really wants to do. And if we don't let people drop out, they could take extreme measures to be expelled. Also, a few dropouts (such as Bill Gates) has made it big-time. Yes, I know he dropped out of college, but college is still school. Though you can argue that people like him were lucky and took a big chance by dropping out.

[HystericalParoxysm]

It -is- illegal to quit school before a certain age in many places in the US. IIRC in Texas, mandatory attendance in school is required until age 16. I dropped out around 15 and did a self-directed home-study program and got my GED at 18 and passed the test with flying colours. Not finishing school has never been a problem for me - I never wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, and I've never had any problems getting a job that paid the bills, though I've grown up around computers so I may have an advantage above others.

School should be strongly encouraged, but it shouldn't be mandatory past about age 15 or so. It can be great to continue going, but for some people, they aren't going to get any benefit out of it, and would be better off going into a trade program or something of that nature that fits their needs more than spending 8 hours a day at school curriculum that may not be suited to their needs.

[mangaroo]

Is there some sort of proposed legislation to extend the compulsory education age? Because most states in the US already require students to remain in school until the age of 17 unless they have already completed their secondary education requirements.

No, it should not be made illegal to drop out of college. College is a choice (an expensive one!), not a requirement, and one of the benefits of being an adult is making and unmaking your own choices. This isn't about protecting the existence of an undereducated, underpaid labor force. It's about personal liberty and responsibility.

[LadyAwesome]

Oh I am a FIRM believer in choices......
People (especially teenagers) should not be FORCED to do things, that's when rebellion starts kicking in. New Zealand has a good amount of choices available to us after we turn 16.

But for people like me, I stopped going pretty much when I was 14/15. I hadn't legally left, but I wouldn't go. I couldn't stand the people and their immature selfish BS. Plus Bullys - lets say I have one up on them now haha.

But after that I did a pre-course where I got all my levels up to 6th form cert (we went up to 7th form) and Now I am a mother and a hairdresser. Hairdressing was my dream job (if only it paid more) But, I think people need to stop worry about other peoples personal lives - and concentrate on their own. We are ALL different and have different needs.

[pinketamine]

Let's face it. Education is needed. You need the basic skills they teach you to function in life. You have to go to school to get a good job where you make a great salary, such as a doctor or a lawyer. If less people dropped out, less people might be stricken with poverty because they can all get better jobs.

Then again, we need some people to do the "low-leveled grunt work" that nobody really wants to do. And if we don't let people drop out, they could take extreme measures to be expelled. Also, a few dropouts (such as Bill Gates) has made it big-time. Yes, I know he dropped out of college, but college is still school. Though you can argue that people like him were lucky and took a big chance by dropping out.

It isn't exactly true that if more people finish school or go to uni all of them will get better jobs. Sometimes a country just doesn't have enough of those "better jobs". We are suffering from this in Spain, many students (specially in scientific areas) end university and, after looking for a job and not finding it, go to a different country.

I think it should be compulsory to attend to school until you reach certain age (16 in my country) but not later. Some people might just not have any interest on continuing attending school/college/whatever, so they should have the option to dropout. In Spain, you can't legally work if you are younger than 16, so it makes sense to me that it is compulsory to attend until you reach that age. After that... it is a choice that one should make.

[qpldmff]

Even if people who would prefer to drop out are forced to stay in school, there's nothing to stop them from flunking.

[wickedblue]

No, it shouldn't be illegal. I think it's fine the way it is now, where you are required to go until a certain age. Once a person reaches that age, they know the consequences of their choices. It may not be the best choice but it is their choice.

I dropped out of high school when I was 17, about halfway through my junior year. There have been times I wished I would have stayed but that was my choice. Making it illegal would not have helped me. I would have only been forced to stay in school while I was flunking just about every class, not because I wasn't smart or capable but because of my mental health which was Not Good. I eventually got my GED and took some college courses, which I excelled at because that environment was more suited for the way I learn.

I could speculate until the end of time about how I might be earning more if I didn't drop out, though I look to my crippling lack of ambition long before I ever look at my lack of formal education because I could be trained to do just about anything. But again, even if that is directly impacting my earning potential, that's a choice I made. I'm responsible for that. Criminalizing something that doesn't hurt anyone else isn't going to help.

[missroxor]

I don't think it should be illegal. I don't think it would deter people from dropping out if they were really unhappy being in school which means they'd end up with a criminal record for dropping out which only aggravates the situation and makes it harder for them to get a legitimate job in future. Instead I’d like to see better choices. In Scotland you have to stay in school until you’re 16 with one, to my knowledge, exception: you can leave at 15 as long as you attend college (I think that’d be like community college in America, not University).

My sister went that route, she was a trouble maker and never stayed in school, was always being expelled but at 15 they let her leave because she agreed to do a hairdressing course at college. It did her a world of good….in the end she hated hairdressing and chose a different career path but at least she gained some qualifications to do a real job and being in an environment with different expectations and challenges to school really made her calm down and mature. I’m not saying it would work for everyone but it did for her.

Also, I don’t know if they still do them but there used to be a school in my local area that was a vocational school. If you were the sort of student who struggled with academic studies you could transfer to the vocational school (I think at around 13) where you still learned basic skills like maths and English but instead of being forced to take a lot of subjects that wouldn’t be useful to you like foreign languages or geography your education was geared toward learning a trade that you could actually make a career out of such as electrician or plumber. Generally speaking, this school wasn’t for smarter kids, it was for the sort who felt out of their depth in academic studies the sort who would really struggle to get into university. At the vocational school they could learn basic education as well as a trade and leave school believing that they still had a future even if they couldn‘t go to uni like the book-smart kids.

Of course, people drop out for all sorts of reason but I think some options like the above might stop those who drop-out because they struggle with the work.

[missy harries]

Let's face it. Education is needed. You need the basic skills they teach you to function in life.

As I recall I was taught NO basic skills I now need in the real world, school is about hard facts while life is about cooking, financial management, time management and basic decision making. I had no cookery (minus fairy cakes and lets face it how useless is that?), no homemaking to teach sewing ect. and maths was about memorising times tables and pi (where was money managing?). I could go on but you get the jist.
I didn't drop out of school I was kicked out for constant non atendance (parants now go to jail for the kids not attending in the uk!) and in retrospect while I wish I had gone to help get the grades I still don't think its a loss for me, my knowledge is self taught and I've pursued my intrests in my own time.
I'm turning my hobbies into my career and the only loss at school was english (lets face it my spelling and punctuation is horrendous.....)

[Mistermook]

Although going to school is a personal choice, one needs to understand the benefits of schooling. They may choose not to go to school. They may choose to have a low education and a low income. But they must also be prepared to compete in the world.
Unfortunately without an education in the first place people sometimes don't quite understand the benefits of it. It's not entirely clear what the impact of a lot of things that school can teach you until you get either old enough to realize some of the things you've been missing or escalate your education to the point where the various things you've been studying start clicking together.

I never, for instance, quite realized just how ingrained algebra was in my thought processes until my daughter was in grade school and I was getting her incredibly upset because the way I do math in my head is all algebra and not the rote she was wanting help with. Google helps me get the dates and facts straight, but nearly every comment on politics and religion here in the Debate Room weighs in on hundreds of hours clocked in with all the schooling I've had in my college and high school education.

Have I done lots and lots of private education on my own? Sure, but it's supplemental. I'm constantly building upon my formal education, and quite frankly I don't see how you can possibly do without it for a real understanding of complex subjects. Does everyone require such an understanding? No. I've got relatives who do fairly well for themselves without really knowing how to read for instance, and my grandfather dropped out of school in 8th grade and still managed to pull together a really amazing amount of math skills simply by needing them to function in his trade. But I refuse to believe that anyone's actually functioning better without that sense of complexity that a formal education can bring to the table, if for no other reason that I'm constantly seeing the examples of people on the internet weighing heavily into discussions where they're obviously educationally outclassed trying to force credence to their opinions without quite grasping fundamental errors in their reasoning.

Simply put, human social function desires participation and if people are not intellectually equal to the task of participation that's no barrier to them wanting to. Further, a lack of education can sometimes be a barrier to understanding the potential of education: I don't know how many times I've debated with someone with a poor understanding of something who somehow translates their lack of understanding as a lack in everyone. So medical doctors become "quacks," thousands of engineering and safety hours in nuclear engineering, and hundreds of years worth of economic theory is declared irrelevant compared to "common sense" thanks to imperfections in the theory and implementation, rather than accepting that even educated people make mistakes or that accidents happen.

So anyways, I think that everyone should absolutely have a formal education. I'm on the fence whether they should be forced to, for the simple reason that you can't tell some people not to shit their pants. It's a good idea, but if someone wants to I'm just not sure how I stop them. Ideally I'd make everyone want to be better educated, but then ideally I'd have everyone suck less too. I can't, the world is what it is, and here we are. That's life, right?

[Robodl95]

Well it is illegal to drop out before age 16 I believe.... Which is a good age imo. If you drop out before the age of 16 it would be pretty hard to find a job (if money is the reason).

[paksetti]

It -is- illegal to quit school before a certain age in many places in the US. IIRC in Texas, mandatory attendance in school is required until age 16. I dropped out around 15 and did a self-directed home-study program and got my GED at 18 and passed the test with flying colours. Not finishing school has never been a problem for me - I never wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, and I've never had any problems getting a job that paid the bills, though I've grown up around computers so I may have an advantage above others.

School should be strongly encouraged, but it shouldn't be mandatory past about age 15 or so. It can be great to continue going, but for some people, they aren't going to get any benefit out of it, and would be better off going into a trade program or something of that nature that fits their needs more than spending 8 hours a day at school curriculum that may not be suited to their needs.

It's actually 17 now, when you're also legally an adult (howdy?) But you can leave as early as sixteen with a judge's permission. You can also get a job at fifteen and a restricted driver's license at fourteen under special circumstances....


I left school on my seventeenth birthday for a myriad of reasons. Aced the GED test, took a year off, then started cosmetology school. The only thing I miss is an organized art class, but even that was restrictive because I couldn't draw nudes, and I'm friggin' all about that, bro. Still, I'm so lucky I got out when I did.

Since I left, the school had violent drug-related crime, mandatory three hour reading and math (because only 20% of the students were passing the TAKS* test-- several juniors are seniors were semi-illiterate), was then converted to a remedial school for violent teens, and has since been shut down. Good times.

[Robodl95]

As I recall I was taught NO basic skills I now need in the real world, school is about hard facts while life is about cooking, financial management, time management and basic decision making. I had no cookery (minus fairy cakes and lets face it how useless is that?), no homemaking to teach sewing ect. and maths was about memorising times tables and pi (where was money managing?). I could go on but you get the jist. I didn't drop out of school I was kicked out for constant non atendance (parants now go to jail for the kids not attending in the uk!) and in retrospect while I wish I had gone to help get the grades I still don't think its a loss for me, my knowledge is self taught and I've pursued my intrests in my own time. I'm turning my hobbies into my career and the only loss at school was english (lets face it my spelling and punctuation is horrendous.....)
Maybe you could have invested your electives into teaching yourself those things? I don't know about all schools but most in my area have required sewing/cooking/financial skills classes in middle school for a couple of weeks, enough to get the basics. You then can go into Highschool and take several years of electives for those things (I believe my school offers 4 years of sewing, at least 3 cooking classes and a couple more basic real world classes like "Living on my own" and "Skills for success")

[paksetti]

While some schools may have those sorts of electives I think that, especially these days, when many are struggling to keep their doors open offer only the bare minimum core classes and maybe athletics, because hey, FOOBAW, right?

[Oaktree]

Unfortunately without an education in the first place people sometimes don't quite understand the benefits of it. It's not entirely clear what the impact of a lot of things that school can teach you until you get either old enough to realize some of the things you've been missing or escalate your education to the point where the various things you've been studying start clicking together.


I honestly don't think even college fully clicks things together. There are classes few and far between that do, but much of what you learn in college is also memorization, with maybe a bit of explanation, but no deeper connection. For example, I am inclined to think that every field of human knowledge is connected. I jump to take interdisciplinary classes, but there is a sad lack of them. Much of my interdisciplinarity comes from personally making connections between science and philosophy, and other subject areas. I think that, at least in our current educational climate, those deeper connections have to be pursued by interested individuals learning on their own.

I can maybe see formal education as a matter of foundation, though. It is silly to jump into interdisciplinary study without having a fundamental understanding of the subjects involved. In that sense, school is useful, but in order to use it, one must be a self-motivated learner.

Simply put, human social function desires participation and if people are not intellectually equal to the task of participation that's no barrier to them wanting to. Further, a lack of education can sometimes be a barrier to understanding the potential of education: I don't know how many times I've debated with someone with a poor understanding of something who somehow translates their lack of understanding as a lack in everyone. So medical doctors become "quacks," thousands of engineering and safety hours in nuclear engineering, and hundreds of years worth of economic theory is declared irrelevant compared to "common sense" thanks to imperfections in the theory and implementation, rather than accepting that even educated people make mistakes or that accidents happen.

Mandatory schooling won't make people smarter. People have to be willing to learn to get anything from education. I don't know how much you remember of public school, but the kids who were only there because they had to be just caused trouble and flunked their classes. The presence of people who are too irresponsible and ignorant to make informed political decisions will always be a plague on any true democracy or republic. Every system of government has its flaws; that is the flaw of rule by the majority.

EDIT:
Maybe you could have invested your electives into teaching yourself those things? I don't know about all schools but most in my area have required sewing/cooking/financial skills classes in middle school for a couple of weeks, enough to get the basics. You then can go into Highschool and take several years of electives for those things (I believe my school offers 4 years of sewing, at least 3 cooking classes and a couple more basic real world classes like "Living on my own" and "Skills for success")

My school was pretty well-funded and had lots of science and technology classes, but very little in the life skills department. Life skills classes just aren't in vogue right now.

[whiterider]

I think this discussion is happening on two levels.

On the first, I completely agree with Mistermook. Having an advanced education makes the world so much richer - I'm just heading towards the end of my first year of university, and already everything I see and hear makes more sense. International recognition of the Libyan Rebel Council as a government? I know why that matters, and I also know why it doesn't matter, and I understand the give and take, and why it has such stonking political consequences compared to its puny legal consequences. The government is putting interest rates up? I know why, I know how, I know what they plan to achieve and why it should end up being good for the economy, and I also know the mechanism that leads to that improvement, and I know what might go wrong, and what will happen if it does go wrong. Alright, I couldn't write a paper on it off the top of my head, but even if I've largely forgotten the knowledge, I still have the understanding - and I can apply it to totally different fields, too. I understand more about medicine, about psychology, about engineering, about business - education really does open up such fantastic depth in the world. I believe that the world would be a better place if everyone was privileged enough to have the kind of education I have, and I believe that those people would be happier, and that society would function better.

On the second level, though, we live in the real world. Perhaps if 50% of the population were teachers, we could manage to educate everyone: but they're not. Educational institutions need to stay afloat: many people can't afford to attend them. Many people wouldn't be able to learn in a place where there is one faculty member to every 40 students, per course. We can't achieve the ideal of everyone being highly educated.
So, why does it make such a difference, whether people leave education age 16, or 18, or 20? I would keep a limit: it would be a restriction against teenagers, those too young to reliably make a good choice that they won't regret, dropping out, doing something they will probably not be able to take back. Anyone old enough to decide for themselves should be allowed to do so: education is valuable, but it's only one factor, and we can't hold it up high like the magic cure-all it truly isn't.

That said, I "dropped out" of school when I was 15, in that I stopped going to school because I couldn't cope with it. I hadn't been learning anything for months (it's hard when you fail so much at auditory processing that you can't even tell whether or not your teacher is talking), and I got sick of it. I figured I might as well not learn at home on the sofa rather than at school, which I hated. I slobbed around the house for six months, given that all my teachers continually ignored my requests to have work emailed to me, did a few weeks of revision and passed my GCSEs, with 9 As and 3 Bs. Then I continued on to college, obtained three A2s and two AS levels (bloody college cancelled my 4th A2 course midway through...), and moved to university. My decision to drop out was not a bad one - in fact I think it was a good one - and while I know my situation was exceptional, I'm hardly the only person I know who dropped out of school and ended up happy and successful and intelligent anyway. It's harder, perhaps, but dropping out is not an intellectual death sentence.

As regards life skills - yeah no. I do use maths, and I use English largely because it's so dang fun, and I consider all the other various Stuff I learned in school to be useful - after all, you can never know too much. But in the UK at least, there is a dearth of life skills. I had pretty good sex ed, which I use to this day, because I had an exceptional teacher: but as missy harries says, food tech consisted largely of desserts and pizza (and I can't blame my teacher for not wanting to let 30 bored 14 yearolds anywhere near fire), home ec consisted of drawing on tshirts with fabric pens. I don't think I caught so much as a whiff of money management from anywhere except my parents, and I'm just learning study skills for the first time now. I wish I'd spent some of the time I ended up sitting in the corner of a playing field, or learning how to do things with computers that I'd been doing since I was four years old, elsewhere: learning instead how to tell when chicken is cooked through, or what the difference is between a credit card and a debit card, or how to change a fuse, or how to keep organised notes. Hell, I learnt more of that stuff from Girls' Brigade that I ever did in school.

[Robodl95]

That said, I "dropped out" of school when I was 15, in that I stopped going to school because I couldn't cope with it. I hadn't been learning anything for months (it's hard when you fail so much at auditory processing that you can't even tell whether or not your teacher is talking), and I got sick of it.
Woah do you have CAPD? My brother has that...

[Mistermook]

Well part of me fussing about education is this whole perhaps-very-stupid notion I have that if everyone else is smarter and brighter and making better decisions then maybe things overall are better and brighter and when I make some very poor decision (and I will eventually, everyone will) then there will be plenty of people around to take up the slack. I'm not suggesting that everyone could, should, or is capable of being an astrophysicist, but mostly that school is about learning how to learn and apply critical thinking while enforcing absolutely vital skills for life like "researching a subject and discerning what sources are bullshit." Or at least that's what I hope school's about. It's a lot of what I learned there, I'd hate for everyone else to be getting something completely different out of it.

[whiterider]

Yes, indeed - my Dad always relished telling me that, when he left school and in the process told one of his teachers that he hadn't learned anything useful, the teacher responded that the point of school was to learn how to learn. Unfortunately, my school education didn't involve much of that.

Critical thinking should absolutely be taught in schools as a life skill.

[Tempscire]

Critical thinking should absolutely be taught in schools as a life skill.
Ah, but that's not something that can be easily judged on the standardized tests that determine at least some of the schools' funding, so begone with it. And then things like money management and sewing a button on and cooking aren't enshrined in education standards (and subsequently tested on), so nuts to those, too.

Not to mention that most people don't really, truly value education. (Possibly goes along with most people not really being all that smart.) They say they do, but when push comes to shove, do they vote for higher property taxes so the schools can buy more chemistry equipment? If the school had to cut either the art program or the athletics program, which one would receive more support to be kept? Hell, if it came down to chemistry vs football, the latter would still win by a large margin. [Though as a side note, many times athletics programs--especially football--bring in enough money as to be self-sustaining or even profit-making for the school. Perhaps in a more education-valuing society, music recitals and spelling/math/science/geography bees would be the big money-makers.]

Try to make home ec mandatory? Pshaw, you're wasting our tax dollars on cooking? They could learn that at home! (Not that they do.) In some ways it gets even worse when you look at what gets taught at the higher levels of education and all the people who believe that college should basically be a higher-class vocational school. Philosophy classes? English classes? Pft, what a waste, those aren't going to get you a job and/or nothing you learn in them will be used in the job you do get.

Critical thinking? Yeah, right, think the unappreciative masses. You gotta go to school to learn how to think now? I'm "thinking" right now that's B.S. and I didn't need any school to teach me to do it. (Thus unwittingly creating a nice self-illustrating point.)

[Mistermook]

[Though as a side note, many times athletics programs--especially football--bring in enough money as to be self-sustaining or even profit-making for the school. Perhaps in a more education-valuing society, music recitals and spelling/math/science/geography bees would be the big money-makers.]
Maybe we could have more coal mining classes in grade school? :D

[Tempscire]

Maybe we could have more coal mining classes in grade school? :D
It could help alleviate childhood obesity! :giggler:

[malfoya]

To be honest I love it if a student in my class that does nothing at school just drops out.. What's more annoying than people being demotivated and spreading negative thoughts around them?

[Mistermook]

To be honest I love it if a student in my class that does nothing at school just drops out.. What's more annoying than people being demotivated and spreading negative thoughts around them?
An idiot voting and trying to argue with your professional assessments because of something they saw on Oprah.

[whiterider]

Tempscire, I really do find the sports obsession which seems to exist in the US system baffling. Of course, sports (I guess) should be part of education, and competitions and tournaments within and between schools are a good thing - but I know of no other country which goes so bloody OTT over it. o.o The UK has sports events, but yes, school plays, demonstrations at open days (particularly in the sciences, kids love imploding cans and burning magnesium), media projects and so on tend to get more attention.

I think it would be perfectly possible to cover some life skills, at least, with tests. For critical thinking, give them a persuasive text and have them identify and explain as many logical fallacies or potentially misleading statements as they can. Money management, too - give them a fictional spending history for an average household, plus a monthly salary amount, and have them create a budget for the next month, justifying their decisions. Give them several different debt-related scenarios and have them explain which one would end up being the most costly to pay off, and which would be the least so (link to the other thread, anyone? :p ). Hell, if my bank can have little consoles in their waiting room on which kids can play a basic money management game, I'm sure 16 yearolds can be taught the same.

Rob - dunno, maybe. I went to the doctor about it, but got so sick of going 'round in circles that I just gave up. They somehow managed to be amazed anew every time I turned out to have a perfect ability to hear quiet beeps in one ear at a time.

[missy harries]

Maybe you could have invested your electives into teaching yourself those things? I don't know about all schools but most in my area have required sewing/cooking/financial skills classes in middle school for a couple of weeks, enough to get the basics. You then can go into Highschool and take several years of electives for those things (I believe my school offers 4 years of sewing, at least 3 cooking classes and a couple more basic real world classes like "Living on my own" and "Skills for success")

I did teach myself those since they were not an option in my school, but when I talk about cooking I mean food nutrition and healthy eating as well since I consider it a serious problem in our society along with major debt!
Most parents are not teaching it and we don't learn it at school.
Anyone see Jamie Olivers atempt to bring healthy food to school dinners? Mums passing burgers and chips through the bars so they're kids didn't have to eat 'god forbid' healthy food. I just think if they made these things an integral part of schooling then a lot of it could be avoided when you hit the real world. :P

[SeeMyu]

I don't think it should be illegal.. in high-school, it's time to make decisions for your future and life. What you want to do and where you want to be. And if a person decides to quit.. then that's their choice..
and plus, students who dont give a damn about their future and job, they're just wasting the teacher's time.. and could prevent other students from getting to where they want to go in life and what they want to do..

[BenC0722]

I could get into a very long diatribe about what's wrong and broken with the current education system, but I won't. At least, I will try not to.

No, it absolutely should not be made illegal to drop out of high school. There's the arguments about unmotivated students who don't care and are there simply because they are forced to.

Also, I don't know if this applies to everyone, and I say this with a great deal of trepidation because of the very many teen users on this site. I say this with trepidation because I don't want to give the message that good grades don't matter. Good grades do matter, and it's definitely a good thing to have better grades.

However, there's almost nothing I learned in high school, that actually helps me now. The very little I did learn, could honestly be taught at the middle school level. Even the grades I received back then, didn't matter.

In retrospect, I wished that I had dropped out, and just took the GED test at the earliest opportunity. My teen years would have been far happier.

What I should make clear though, is that after high school, I attended a two-year community college, which had absolutely no admission requirements. Although they do have minimum academic standards to continue taking classes there. After I graduated from there, I attended a four-year university. The university probably didn't even care what my high school grades were, because of the community college. Now that I've graduated from four-year university, I'm now attending graduate school.


Also, I noticed that WhiteRider said that she can't understand the American fascination with sports. I'm an American, and I can't understand it either. I've even lived here my entire life. I have some theories about that, but those are probably best left for another thread.

[Robodl95]

I actually just read a local article on the subject of sports.
Club vs. school? In the United States, the club sports network developed independently of the main interscholastic youth sports infrastructure. But in Europe, club sports have always been de rigeur. Cumberland Valley senior Katharina Pillok is a native of Germany who is in Pennsylvania on a yearlong exchange program. Pillok grew up playing field hockey for Blau-Weiss (Blue-White), a Cologne-based club team. The German sports system is entirely club-based, Pillok said, and there is no interscholastic competition. So playing field hockey for the CV Eagles alongside her classmates last fall was an enjoyable, new experience for her. “You get to wear the same clothes, your friends come to games after school, and you play for your school, not for a club team. I did like that,” said Pillok, who found the local cultural obsession with sports fascinating. “Everyone is going to football games. [Even] at field hockey games, we didn’t have a lot of people coming, but some were coming — more than I’ve ever seen at my games in Germany. “And also the parents were there, every parent somehow working or helping at the games.” Fresh off their quarterfinals run in the state tournament, Red Land basketball players Steve Zack and Mike Zangari also say high school sports offers a connective link to the community that’s special and irreplaceable. “In AAU ball, you’re with eight guys, your coach and whatever parents decide to come along. But in high school, we have the whole gym behind us,” Zack said. Zangari added, “It almost makes you want to win for them.” That sense of representation and belonging is uniquely a product of the American varsity-based sports model, and that, said Hershey’s Elias, will never be replicated through club sports.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/04/club_sports_thrive_during_lean.html

So yeah I don't think it has to do with "Americans being more into sports" but that the community is more inclined to be interested in the sports because it is their schools and their community. I would be sad to see HS sports disappear..... (and I'm like the most unathletic person you'll meet!). Other stuff gets a lot of attention too though, musicals are a big deal and does Europe broadcast a spelling bee? Am I the only nerd who likes watching the national spelling bee? :rofl:

[missroxor]

I did teach myself those since they were not an option in my school, but when I talk about cooking I mean food nutrition and healthy eating as well since I consider it a serious problem in our society along with major debt!
Most parents are not teaching it and we don't learn it at school. This is something I feel very strongly about too. I come from Scotland: we're known for our alcoholism and high cholesterol, high salt diet (deep-fried mars bar anyone?) In fact I recently found out my two childhood best friends have had their gall bladder removed due to their extremely poor diet….we’re all only 27! If they’re in such bad shape at this age what are they gonna be like when they’re in their 40s, 50s or older (if they make it that far?!) I do recall having a very short succession of lessons (probably about 3 hours worth) on health and nutrition at school when I was about 8 but if I’m remembering correctly it went along the lines of “eat 5 fruit and veg every day, don’t eat fatty food and do exercise”….but I don’t really feel like it was enough, it was too broad.

So the parents should teach us that stuff you say, it’s not the school systems responsibility but obviously the parents don’t know this stuff either because nobody taught them - they’re too busy thinking of new things to deep fry anyway! Sadly, I’m being serious, my mum wouldn’t know a healthy meal if I smacked her in the face with it and she’s not the only one I know like that.

In a bid to get healthy I tried a couple of things in the past like weight watchers but all they really taught me was how to put a generic number on my meals and add them up. It was only really when I became a parent I decided that I needed to learn how to make a healthy diet rather than just blindly follow one without actually understanding what makes it healthy. 3 Books and about 15 healthy recipe magazines later, not to mention a tonn of internet research I definitely have a much better idea of what constitutes a healthy meal/snack and I’m more confident at reading labels on packaging but I really was shocked at how much of the stuff I was reading was completely new to me. I didn’t know that for the best part of 27 years I’ve been consuming double (sometimes triple or more) my RDA of sodium….why didn’t I know this? Maybe I’m just dumb or maybe I wasn’t interested before but I really wish somebody had told me a long time ago how much I should aim to limit myself to and the possible repercussions if I don’t.

So yes, I’m all for mandatory health and nutrition lessons for all ages*. Even if they decide to ignore it and eat whatever they want kids should at least be equipped with the knowledge of how it should be done. Not just that fruit and vegetables are healthy but how to make it into a healthy meal.

Anyone see Jamie Olivers atempt to bring healthy food to school dinners? Mums passing burgers and chips through the bars so they're kids didn't have to eat 'god forbid' healthy food. I just think if they made these things an integral part of schooling then a lot of it could be avoided when you hit the real world. :P
Unfortunately I haven’t seen his new series in America (don’t watch much telly these days so don‘t even know when it‘s on) but I did see him on The Today Show talking to Jon Stewart about how he’s been banned from entering all schools in LA. Apparently he had to ask interested parents to bring samples of school lunches to him just so he could see what the kids were eating :blink:

[malfoya]

I don't think it should be illegal.. in high-school, it's time to make decisions for your future and life. What you want to do and where you want to be. And if a person decides to quit.. then that's their choice..
and plus, students who dont give a damn about their future and job, they're just wasting the teacher's time.. and could prevent other students from getting to where they want to go in life and what they want to do..

This is very true. Of course you are able to sign up on a class and fail or find out that this is not for you. But if you are totally unmotivated to do anything school related I don't see a problem with working a year or two (though personally I could NEVER do that). I just want to finish school and start earning some real money :)

Also as I said in another post, that someone disagreed with, is that it's pretty annoying to have people in your class that never shows up and that's just spreading negativity around them all the time. When you have groups project they never show up either.. This has been a problem both in high school, and now a little bit in college aswell for my classes. The last year at high school was the worst school year EVER, since no one really cared. They spread their negativity around class and I wish some had just quit earlier since they failed several classes. For me it's hard to work with people that want nothing with their life..

[BenC0722]

There was some point I wanted to make about why dropping out of high school shouldn't be illegal. I couldn't remember what it was before, but now I do. Here it is, in two words:

"Education Creep."

Making it illegal will simply worsen this problem. This topic may even be enough to belong in it's own thread.

I'm going to guess that the term is self-explanatory, but maybe it's not. Or it makes you think of something else other that what I have in mind.

I'm talking about a trend that I've noticed over the last 100 years, though in the last 50 years, it's even worse. It's the concept where each level of education becomes progressively less significant, less special, less of a noteworthy achievement. The best way to describe this is to compare how things were done in the past, as opposed to now.

Back when my grandmother was born, Woodrow Wilson was president, so this was prior to 1920. Throughout her life, her primary occupation was legal secretary (another term is paralegal). While she did complete high school, she never completed, or even attended college. Nevertheless, she was able to perform her job sufficiently well.

During that time, dropping out of high school, followed by NOT getting the GED, was not the end of the world. It didn't mean a lifetime of working at dead-end, near-minimum wage jobs. Granted, there were a great deal more manufacturing jobs back then. But the main point is that just completing high school was "good enough" to get a reasonably decent job, even if it wasn't very high paying.

Fast forward to nowadays. For a young woman to be a legal secretary, she is now expected to go to school some more, in addition to completing high school. Just finishing high school isn't "good enough" anymore.


Other examples include trade school, and other skilled blue-collar jobs. Trade school? Whatever happened to apprenticeships? Zero tuition, and you can start working right away, learning on the job. Internships are not the same thing, since you are expected to attend school prior to starting one, at the cost of the student.

CNA? There's another job. Since when did you have to go school to learn how to clean bedpans, turn patients over, and wash sheets? I'm sure there's more to it than that, but the training required can't be so advanced, that it can't be learned on the job in a reasonably short amount of time.

Ultimately, in addition to having to wait longer, it also shifts the burden to the student, which is troublesome because what if he can't find a job in that field? Maybe even taking a job that has nothing to do with the degree, which may not even pay as well.

Additional schooling wouldn't be bad if people actually learned useful things, but I can't help but think that it could be condensed a bit.

[SuicidiaParasidia]

Let's face it. Education is needed. You need the basic skills they teach you to function in life. You have to go to school to get a good job where you make a great salary, such as a doctor or a lawyer. If less people dropped out, less people might be stricken with poverty because they can all get better jobs.

simply attending school isnt good enough. doing well in school; good grades, good attendance, snapping-to when the teacher/principal/neighborhood bum tells you to, is whats really required.


heres a bit to think about;

not everyone wants to be doctors or lawyers.

not everyone has the attention span for school. (be it because its too challenging, or not challenging enough, or simply a mental condition of some sort that interferes with their daily life.)

you cannot grade something like INTELLIGENCE in any solid, absolute way by using a system of only 5 letters. ( A B C D F )

attendance isnt always a realistic goal. for example, i had one friend who was always hauled before the firing squad because he was always absent, because he had a long line of genetic diseases that required many, many visits to the hospital (as well as hospital stays that lasted up to 3 weeks sometimes), and when he COULD be there he could not perform as well as the others. was he a stupid delinquent? no. but the system doesnt plan for anything like that, so you get drop-outs.

you cannot judge how well a person will do in life--you know, life, this vast, ever-changing thing we conduct from birth to death, longer than when we go to school--based on aforementioned 5 letters. id say motivation, and keeping kids motivated and interested in their studies would go much further than forcing them to keep to a program that, in the end, doesnt determine a damn thing about that persons future depending on how willing they are to succeed.
and on the flip side, i hear of many instances where people DO go to school, DO do well, DO attend wonderfully, DO go to college, DO get their PhD or other such degree...and cant get that good job they worked so hard to attain.

thats the thing about life; no guarantees. nothing is ever guaranteed. you are not guaranteed failure after school, you are not guaranteed success, either. THAT is what should be taught, and planned for.


maybe if school were less cookie-cutter and acknowledged more the shades of gray in society, we would have less drop-outs and less poverty.

[wickedblue]

Am I the only nerd who likes watching the national spelling bee? :rofl:

Nope! :giggler:

[Robodl95]

you cannot grade something like INTELLIGENCE in any solid, absolute way by using a system of only 5 letters. ( A B C D F )
They don't grade your intelligence they grade your performance in the class... (most secondary institutions use a 0-100 scale anyway)

you cannot judge how well a person will do in life--you know, life, this vast, ever-changing thing we conduct from birth to death, longer than when we go to school--based on aforementioned 5 letters. id say motivation, and keeping kids motivated and interested in their studies would go much further than forcing them to keep to a program that, in the end, doesnt determine a damn thing about that persons future depending on how willing they are to succeed.
If someone drops out of high school/fails they will not have the opportunities that they would otherwise. You may think that grades are stupid but the rest of the world cares a lot, you cannot get into a good school with crappy grades.

on the flip side i hear of many instances where people DO go to school, DO do well, DO attend wonderfully, DO go to college, DO get their PhD or other such degree...and cant get that good job they worked so hard to attain.
They'll get a job eventually and in the mean time I'm sure that they would have an easier time getting some retail job then a highschool dropout.

[missy harries]

They don't grade your intelligence they grade your performance in the class... (most secondary institutions use a 0-100 scale anyway)


If someone drops out of high school/fails they will not have the opportunities that they would otherwise. You may think that grades are stupid but the rest of the world cares a lot, you cannot get into a good school with crappy grades.


They'll get a job eventually and in the mean time I'm sure that they would have an easier time getting some retail job then a highschool dropout.

I agree with SuicidiaParasidia, good school preformance and an abillity to memorize facts is entirely diffrent to intelligence and original thinking. I know plenty of people who made the grades but they're still pretty idiotic and have a hard time thinking for themselves.....

As for not having opportunities I think it depends on that persons life goal. Take myself, at the time I had no idea where I wanted to head so paying for futher education would have been a total waste, if I had known what I wanted to do and what I needed to achieve it then I would have made the effort (though that wasn't my sole reason for not going to school....) and it's only NOW that I'm 26 I've finally found my passion which is something that was unaccessible back then and luckily for me I don't need a dozen qualifications for it but even if I did I would happily go back to schooling, in fact I'm thinking of doing a course just for fun.
I'd hardly call my 10yrs inbetween 'disadvantaged' either, I've had no problem getting a job, I've worked at a nursing home, solicitors, call centre and at the citizens advice bureau. It's all down to whats right for who at that time :p
The only way its a serious problem is when that person has aspirations of becoming a doctor or something and still drops out in which case they probably would end up leading a pretty unsatisfying life but that would be all their own fault.

But getting a bit more back to the original topic, making something illegal won't stop people from doing it.

[DigitalSympathies]

I dropped out a few months ago at 15 (I'm 16 now) not because I was failing - let's face it, I hadn't gone a full week in three years, but that was okay with my parents - it was because I was given hell for being either too poor, too rich, too fat, or too nice. Eeeeeeeevery school I went to (mind you my parents have money so they sent me to private schools) had the same old thing - teachers hated me when I did nothing to them but be nice. Peers hated me when I did nothing to them but be nice. I never caused anyone grief and they all just attacked me - I was even told by one teacher I wouldn't graduate and I'd end up a single mother or a prostitute, and that he wouldn't teach me because I didn't have a learning disability like the rest of the kids that needed help.

The principal didn't believe a word of it so I just simply left, on my parent's encouragement, and set up my own computer building and repair service for my neighbourhood. I buy computers off of people and off Craigslist and local listings and take parts to build great computers I sell, and then repair ones with the remaining inventory I have. It's great work, great money and I love what I do. School was of no use to me - I remember going to a school when I was younger where we were taken out to the field to watch the stars. I really miss that place because they taught life skills. At the schools I went to, they taught us that we didn't need to change tires or learn to bake, oh no! Math and Science, things you can freaking Google, were everything we needed to know. I even moved countries to try a new type of school and it just got worse. Meh. I don't miss or regret my decision.

[whiterider]

...things you can freaking Google...Everything I have ever baked is based on a recipe I found on Google :p .

[SuicidiaParasidia]

They don't grade your intelligence they grade your performance in the class... (most secondary institutions use a 0-100 scale anyway)


If someone drops out of high school/fails they will not have the opportunities that they would otherwise. You may think that grades are stupid but the rest of the world cares a lot, you cannot get into a good school with crappy grades.


They'll get a job eventually and in the mean time I'm sure that they would have an easier time getting some retail job then a highschool dropout.

oh, but it is an attempt to grade intelligence. if you do poorly in school, or simply opt to not jump through the hoops regardless of your learning ability, you ARE judged by what grades appear on your report card. you ARE told you're stupid if you get D's and F's. just like you ARE told you're a pretty pony smart kid if you get straight A's.
(personally, my teachers tended to regard me as something of a phenomenon...straight F's, but 90-100% correctness ratio on tests and what few assignments i chose to indulge. for a while, they were convinced that i was cheating, even secluded me from the rest during one particular written test...didnt score any differently. i just mostly hated homework and the dull, repetitive work in the classroom. it wasnt that i wasnt learning; i sat there all day, id have to be a corpse to not learn anything during all the time i spent there. i just wasnt spitting it back out to them whenever i was told to.)

i suppose the logical way to regard grades is that if you're "smart", you show it. but what if you dont want to? what if the wear of constant remedial work on the mind, sleepiness and home stress are more important to address than proving to an outdated system how smrat you are? i dont know about you guys, but my toughest times in school were when they wanted me up by 7am, because i wasnt done growing and my body had other ideas.
and i know i didnt have it the worst out of my classmates, either.

so you mean bill gates didnt have any opportunities? he dropped out. steve jobs, too? he dropped out as well. i could name a few other drop-out billionaires, but i dont really have that much time to waste.
grades may be important to everyone, but who's to say that a stupid idea cant be a popular one as well? i suppose everyone should just start eating shit, after all, 20 trillion flies cant be wrong.

and i have yet to meet any person with crappy grades who wants more schooling. :P

[Robodl95]

Why would a college let you in if you got straight Fs? The point of getting good grades is to get into college (tradeschool or find a job), I know people like you who don't do any work but do great on tests. Unfortunately colleges don't know that, they look at your transcript and see that you failed everything. They have to have some way to figure who to accept and considering that college is an academic pursuit grades are pretty important. So what if you think that it's repetitive? A lot of jobs are very repetitive too (way more so than school, doing just about the same stuff for several years). I'm from the opinion that if you're stuck in school it makes a lot more sense to try than to do nothing, school is much more interesting if you actually put some effort into it.

I never said that dropouts couldn't be successful, they simply don't have as many opportunities and the chances of you being the next Bill Gates are very slim, on average HS dropouts have higher unemployment and lower income then others.

[Mistermook]

If you think you are the next Bill Gates though, feel free to impress us all.

Hint: If you are spending your time conversing with us? Probably not Bill Gates...

[missroxor]

If you think you are the next Bill Gates though, feel free to impress us all.

Hint: If you are spending your time conversing with us? Probably not Bill Gates...

Ahem, are you implying that the simming community are all poverty stricken idiots with no ambition? :jest: I reckon Bill Gates loooooves the pixel dollies!!

[Tempscire]

i dont know about you guys, but my toughest times in school were when they wanted me up by 7am, because i wasnt done growing and my body had other ideas.
We've all been there, since it's an acknowledged biological thing for teenagers. Somehow lots of other people still manage to do well despite that, even further extending their days with extracurriculars or an extra class taken before or after the normal school day.

so you mean bill gates didnt have any opportunities? he dropped out. steve jobs, too? he dropped out as well. i could name a few other drop-out billionaires, but i dont really have that much time to waste.
People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out because they were making their own opportunity. It's NOT a matter of, "Oh, if you drop out, you could still be successful like these famous drop-outs!" They were (and are) smart, innovative guys who had a plan and goals, and trying to focus on school would have slowed them down. It's not as if they decided they were bored with school one day, dropped out, and suddenly became brilliant. If someone has the ambition and drive to create their own jobs and opportunities, then good for them for pursuing it. That is not the general case, however, and it's stupid to insinuate otherwise. These are the exceptions that prove the rule.

ETA: I will also point out that Bill Gates dropped out of freaking Harvard. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, which isn't Ivy League but is very reputable. There is also a huge, huge, HUGE difference in dropping out of college and dropping out of high school.

grades may be important to everyone, but who's to say that a stupid idea cant be a popular one as well? i suppose everyone should just start eating shit, after all, 20 trillion flies cant be wrong.
Lots of stupid ideas are popular. On the other hand, even if it seems stupid that society is structured so that we all have to jump through artificial hoops, if you don't play the game, odds are you won't be very successful. And unlike what gets depicted from Hollywood, even sheer brilliance a la Dr. House in real life still isn't enough to excuse you from playing by the rules. Playing by the rules in school means getting good grades, which shows you're smart and/or hard-working to all the strangers you need to impress when you go to apply to colleges or jobs. You have to have some way of proving your abilities...grades get you in the door, and after that you have experience to point to. Not getting the grades tells those people you don't care (or you care but are too lazy or otherwise would not be a desirable fit), which is fine, but when there's 10,000 other people who do care (or bother to have the appearance of caring), well...