Another article on college debts, the stagnant economy,

http://fullphaser1.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/how-do-we-sleep-while-our-beds-are-burning/

I found it interesting how they pointed out how a possible reason why a 14 y/o would kill themselves would be simply 'they research the current world and realize it's unsustainable' (oil peak etc. it IS all depressing, when I first read into it i remember it being depressing - and I remember reading into other stuff when younger and THAT being depressing. Not to mention the whole.....geesh I forgot.

EDIT: another link http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2619

edited 25th Jan '11 5:13:16 PM by BalloonFleet

How dare that article use lyrics from Midnight Oil in its title!

>14 year olds having a good grasp of the world

More like 23< year olds (e.g. the people stuck in those low-end started jobs)

edited 25th Jan '11 5:25:52 PM by BalloonFleet

Hey, more job offers for me.

Engineers will also have problems with jobs too, bro you ain't getting out of this unscathes either

I was referring to the suicides.

Our High Schools were stripped of shop class in favor classical more renaissance style pursuits. The problem with this of course is that the shop classes served a critical feature within the educational mindset.

This is something I've been promoting myself. Crush art and literature and replace it with shop class.

edited 25th Jan '11 10:10:42 PM by Deboss

To a point, I agree with this. I was in high school during the period where they were killing shop class...now, no one under the age of about 25 knows how to swing a hammer without losing a fingertip or two. When did that become a good idea?

I would have definitely appreciated being taught a practical skill or two in school. While I appreciate the existence of artists, I can't really say that being forced to take art classes has helped me in any sense at all.

artists are a luxury, builders a necessity. Art doesn't keep you warm, light the darkness or take you from point A to point B.

artists are a luxury, builders a necessity. Art doesn't keep you warm, light the darkness or take you from point A to point B.

I sorta have to disagree with you here. Art can metaphorically keep you warm, light your inner darkness, and inspire the progress from point A to point B. It also serves important cultural functions by providing depth to the culture we reside in. We, as humans, need beauty in our life, whether it be from a well-composed piece of music, to an inspiring masterpiece in architecture.

Also, keep in mind, that "art" can cover everything from paintings and sculptures, to beautiful facades on buildings. We need builders and engineers first, to create the basic structures, and we need craftsmen to enrich them.

@DG: Metaphors don't fill your stomach.

In all seriousness, I have to sort of agree with you...I just fail to see the importance of one over the other, especially considering the number of artists to whom "starving" applies and the emphasis placed on artistic pursuits in school at the expense of more practical concerns.

Or we could scrap the facades and chop a third off the construction cost.

I took shop (specifically metal shop) but still have trouble with hammers. Mostly cause I'm a klutz. But I can weld, use both gas and plasma torches and most tool sets because I've been given enough of a base to work with it. Honestly, a cool class would be a "figure out what this tool is and how to work it" since it requires less used portions of the brain.

@DS: True, but unfortunately the budget must balance. Should we drop studies like English or History? Neither of those are particularly needed for survival either.

While I do think that shop class and automotive classes are good to have, I wouldn't put any more importance on them than on any other area of study. Some people are better at art than mechanics, just as some people are better at English than Math. Ideally, we should accommodate the various talents in high school, yes.

But in today's society, if you're good at mechanics, you'll go to a trade school, just as if you're good at art, you'll go to an art institute. Nobody gets jobs out of high school any more, even if they took shop classes.

@Deboss: That would be a fun class for about five minutes. Which is the time it would take someone to loose a body part. :D

@DG: Fair enough, but as we're both finding out...knowing how to use tools can turn out to be important.

That would be a fun class for about five minutes. Which is the time it would take someone to loose a body part. :D

Yeah, but it certainly has the possibility to remove morons from the gene pool. Which might not be a bad thing either.

probably not...dumb people have this annoying habit of living through those kinds of accidents and just adding "crippled" to their resume.

Okay, that makes a good deal more sense. As a carpenter and timber framer, when people say "tool" I think "thing with spinning blades that mangles you the second you forget to respect it".

edited 25th Jan '11 11:39:39 PM by drunkscriblerian

But in today's society, if you're good at mechanics, you'll go to a trade school, just as if you're good at art, you'll go to an art institute. Nobody gets jobs out of high school any more, even if they took shop classes.

Which is why we should integrate trade and art school into high school.

You could always expand it to include computer equipment and the like. Mild electrical shocks are better than rotating blades anyway. I'm amazed at how hard most people find it to do basic trouble shooting.

Don't ruin my fantasies. :P

Tell me about it. I used to work at RadioShack, and we would get all sorts of stupid questions. Schools just need better funding in general, but it's not going to make the morons work any harder.

edited 25th Jan '11 11:42:31 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

I don't think they're so much underfunded so much as they have really shitty standards. And by "shitty" I don't mean "low", I mean "badly setup". Probably why private schools are often considered better.

As Scott Adams said in The Dilbert Future, stupidity is immune to education.

But yeah, looking back I kind of regret not taking shop class.

I know that some people would starve to play a Video Game. Or eat unhealthily low amounts of food to afford "luxuries" such as "art". So their value relative to a human's opinion is equal to that of a piece of food.

But admittedly, to keep humans alive, other things are certainly more important than art. I suppose a lot of us are sensitive to the possible insinuation or subtext that art isn't very important of of worth, when human life itself doesn't have objective worth. Really, that human annihilation happen at the hands of of a Meteor is terrible, is a subjective opinion, the Stars care not.

But anyway, yeah, people shouldn't be forced to take art. It's arguable whether people should be forced into any kind of general study instead of being asked what it is they want to specialize in and give them resources to learn it. Instead of focusing on the fact that art isn't as important to basic human survival as other more "luxurious" things, perhaps we should focus on giving people choices and resources of study and more ways to represent their learnings that will be respected in the economic world.

This person goes to 4chan /new/. This scares me, because the very existence of /new/, formerly /n/, and /int/, are proof against anyone trying to claim there isn't any honest racism in 4chan culture. Which I've heard some people actually try to claim, simply because of Hal Turner. Even though 4chan has pretty clearly one of the most Racist cultures on the internet.

@Deboss:I think that poor funding is a big part of it as well. Then again, I come from a school district that didn't get enough funding to replace destroyed books because the No Child Left Behind Act kept taking funding away when we failed to meet benchmarks. We also had things like where the History teacher was also the basketball coach, and there were 20+ kids crammed into one classroom. I certainly hope it's not like that everywhere.

@Ukon: I think that things like languages and arts should be mandated for younger children, like elementary school. But I do agree that once you get to high school, you should be able to specialize more.

edited 25th Jan '11 11:56:52 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

Wait, 20 is a lot? That seems normal to me.

^ It is when half of them are refusing to shut up, and the teacher can't kick them out because the school looses funding when students are not in class.