The Glade 4.0

There is some part of that, but it's also probably good to point out that learning something and RETAINING that knowledge are 2 very different things. Homework helps to cement what you've learned through repetition.

There is also the fact that just because a kid says they understand it all perfectly and don't need homework doesn't make it true. Kids are notoriously overconfident.

Some adults can't look back at their adolescence and realize they weren't as perfect and brilliant as they fancy themselves, either.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Getting A's in every test despite not doing homework or showing up for class is all the proof you need. You don't need to take the kid's word for it. The numbers hash it out for themselves in the end.

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Tangu Matraa

Exactly.

If a kid is getting perfect scores in something every time, it is up to the adults to look at the kid's situation and give them something more challenging. It is not up to the kid to just take it upon themself to decide they don't need to do this or that anymore. It is also not necessarily a good idea to let the kid have something more challenging untilt hey demonstrate the self-discipline to do the work and show up for class no matter how easy or pointless they think it is. The habits they developed of just blowing **** off will persist if they are given something harder, because it's fun to do whatever the hell you want. Kids, even older teens and young adults, are notorious for believing whatever will allow them to do what's fun in the moment is true even when facts to the contrary are staring them right in the face. If that weren't true, it wouldn't be so hard to get them to use condoms.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

That's absurd. Great job teaching the brightest among us to strive for the mundane and mediocre, though. What the US needs more than anything else is a bunch of IT guys and middle management with 160 IQs, I'm sure. I mean, for what reasons could we possibly want to teach our best and our brightest to be assertive and seek more challenging work. If the adults involved have prevented the child from being challenged, and instead have confined him to the mundane and mediocre, then they have already failed him so terribly that they deserve absolutely no say in further curiculum.

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Tangu Matraa

What's absurd is pretty much this entire line of reasoning. Nothing I said indicated anything at all about "striving for the mediocre". This is a matter of children, regardless of intelligence, being children (or adolescents). They are not in a position to decide what work they will and will not do. If you allow them to decide that any time anything is not "challenging" enough for them, that they don't have to do it, all you are doing is creating a self-centered little know-it-all that not only isn't getting the challenging education they need, they aren't getting even a mediocre education. You won't have an IT specialist with a 160 IQ; you'll be lucky to have a McDonald's clerk because the moment anything isn't "interesting" or "challenging" enough they feel they're too special to do it.

A child that has been allowed to get away with poor habits like skipping school and not turning in assignments when things are easy will continue those habits when things are more difficult. That situation can be arrested by giving them more challenging and interesting work, but in order for that to work, the child must first understand that they are expected to do the work. That kid has doubtless found more entertaining passtimes when they were supposed to be studying, and the allure of whatever that entertainment is; TV, video games, hanging out and smoking marijuana, **** their girlfriend or boyfriend, or playing football, will still be there.

Without learning self-discipline, it doesn't matter if you challenge the kid. They will ignore your challenge and go right on cutting class because that's the behavior they learned. Furthermore, the many, many kids that do not have some phenomenal IQ and for whom this supposedly mediocre material is challenging will see the smart kid getting away with this, and want to do the same thing.

Smart kids need challenging material. They also need to learn to scrub toilets, do busywork, and put up with bullshit like everyone else. If they won't learn that, their IQ is useless. Boot them and give the attention to the average kid, or even the somewhat-above-average kid that knows how to work.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not kidnapping.

State mandated education/daycare.

If you are required to do it by law, then it is no more kidnapping than jury duty.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Jury duty is probably a bad counterexample, since that really is forced labor. That said, mandatory schooling obviously isn't equivalent to kidnapping since the parents provide consent on behalf of the kid as his/her legal guaradian and have the option of home-schooling as an alternative if they don't want to give that consent.

I can't disagree with this more. Kids need to take responsibility for their own education. That's what I was trying to drive home to Elmo. Don't do your work, take responsibility. Need to be challenged, speak up (but do your work).

Sure, parents take responsibility too, but it's silly to suggest kids aren't leading the effort. Especially by high school.

State mandated showing up at your internment camps. No more kidnapping than going to school.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

And standing up to the powers that be that are actively trying to lock your time into areas you've already mastered is not taking responsibility for one's own education? I am sorry but I thought I was quite clear that busy work occupied time that could be more productively used learning new things.

Are those words hard for you to string together or is the idea hard for you to understand?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

able to recite/regurgitate for a test to get an A is *NOT* evidence that the material has been well absorbed.

We've all studied material for a test and not retained it. Repetition is perhaps the single biggest key to long term retention.

The same is true of anything. You don't think I've done my basic kata in martial arts hundreds of times? Thousands even? But even though I passed my most recent belt test for the advanced katas, those are the ones I'm struggling to re-learn now that I'm going back. But I sure as hell remember the basics. And good thing too, since the basics are the foundations of the later skills.

The same goes for homework.

Perhaps if you aren't that bright.

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Tangu Matraa

In the lower grades, it's silly to suggest kids are leading the effort. In high school, they might be, if they have developed that skill.

If a kid really is getting all A's on tests but blowing off the homework and class (which is very rare; most kids that don't do any work and don't stud and don't go to class won't be acing anything, although they might still be passing) then part of challenging them is giving them work for which they do have to study, and do have to do the homework. If they've previously learned the habit of not doing it, chances are very high that they won't abruptly start - especially for harder material they just aren't that interested in. All kids are not interested in all subjects.

You cannot get a kid to take responsibility for their education by just giving them something of appropriate difficulty and saying "have at it; it's all on you". You have to teach them the value of putting long-term gain ahead of short-term pleasure, and they don't learn that lesson if they're given veto power over any assignment they don't find "challenging."

It's all well and good to tell people "take responsibility", but that's a learned skill. A kid that has gotten away with blowing everything off is going to keep right on doing that and is going to keep right on rationalizing it because, no matter how smart they are, kids are immature and have poor impulse control. Soem kids are vastly better than others in this regard, but even late-teenage kids find it very, very hard to resist impulses. Again, teenage pregnancy would not be that high if it were that easy for kids to either A) resist the desire to **** or B) resist the desire to dispense with a condom because it feels better without one.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's a common conceit of bright people that they don't need practice. I'm quite certain that if we had a time machine, we'd find that a great deal of these claims of teenage academic prowess without studying or doing any homework are greatly exaggerated.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It is common because it is commonly so.

The very idea of being bright means one understands concepts faster than others. You just tried to make a negative statement of the equivalent of A=A. I am bright therefore I am bright.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

DE, that horseshit is nothing more than your own conjecture. You have nothing at all to support it, and beyond that, the reality of the system we have refutes you at every turn.

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Tangu Matraa

You really have never learned that you can't establish things just by saying them as loudly and obnoxiously as possible, have you? It's hilarious that you're claiming "I have nothing to support" and "reality refutes" when you have not made so much as a shred of reasoned argument.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Apparently neither did you DE.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

No, you're not taking responsibility. You're whining because you didn't get the grade you wanted, even though you CHOSE to not do the assignment.

Taking responsibility would be to say "yep, I got a zero on that homework, but I aced the tests so I got a B." Instead, you're blaming others.



Perhaps you should have done your reading homework, at least.

Calvin: I'm being educated against my will! My rights are being trampled!

Hobbes: Is it a right to remain ignorant?

Calvin: I don't know, but I refuse to find out!

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