Winston Churchill was black

Peter Rideout wrote: That's sad, but not unusual.    Can't name three European countries (That was an entire -- geography -- class of "bright" grade nine kids.)

The American school system is, for the lack of a better term, f**ked up.
There are high school students who don't even know where Iraq is or even the Middle East.




Edited by king of Siam - September 02 2006 at 17:20

We got as far as the Cold War and the Cuban Missle Crisis, but it wasn't covered in great depth though.

Minimalist777 wrote: Yupp its especially frustrating being part of that generation. It seems like nobody can talk about anything but sex, drugs and rock n roll (not even good rock, just crap like Green Day ugh)

Edited by Dreamer - September 02 2006 at 17:04

Well... lets see
2 years of preschool
1 year of kindergarten
8 years of gradeschool
4 years of high school
1 year of college and counting...

Never once learned about:
The Vietnam War
The Gulf War
Iran Contra
The Constitution
The Cuban Missile Crisis

It seems that the schools love spending time on the civil war WWI & WWII and ancient civilizations. You usually get to around 1945 near the end of the year and by that time you'll be lucky if you learned anything new. I never actually touched on the Constitution of the United States until the last year of high school where we briefly touched on it in a college level class that you had to pay extra for. A good 10 years of my life was wasted picking out adjectives and verbs in sentences and trying to multiply two digit numbers. The standard 8 grades should be condensed into 4 and high school from 4 to 2 with an emphasis on math and science. 80% of the material taught in schools is repeated from the first grade.



Edited by Hierophant - September 02 2006 at 17:16

I once heard from a friend of an interview with a member of "New Kids On the Block" way back in the '80s and he didn't know where England was!

Maybe it's an urban legend, but I somehow think it could be true.  I'll try and find out.


Edited by Geck0 - September 02 2006 at 16:42

Yupp its especially frustrating being part of that generation. It seems like nobody can talk about anything but sex, drugs and rock n roll (not even good rock, just crap like Green Day ugh)

Edited by Minimalist777 - September 02 2006 at 16:25

Dreamer wrote: ^^^ Smart words peter! I agree with you.

Edited by Peter Rideout - September 02 2006 at 15:43

I see that Mr Rideout is the voice of reason here. The ongoing depredation of our sociaty is one of the sadest and scariest worries for the future.

Henry Ford famously said "History is bunk...", but i firmly believe the mistakes of the past can be learnt for the future. Most people i know fall into two camps - those that don't care or don't want to know what happened in the past, or how we got here, and those that must know...thankfully i fall into the latter category, i can't bear not knowing what went before !!