• aidan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    1 year ago

    If it were about minimum knowledge than you would be able to test out of it, and those not meeting minimum requirements wouldn’t be able to graduate. But as it stands the top 10% of 8th graders know more than the bottom 30% of highschool graduates.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I got at GED. I also got a perfect score. Not because I’m some sort of genius, because there was not one single thing on it I hadn’t learned by the end of middle school.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        In my state and in many states you had to be at least 18 to be out of education. In many others its 16. Do you know of any examples lower than that?

        • exohuman@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          No. When you go under 16 you are talking about a child that is too young to make executive decisions in the outside world that would be expected of an someone with a GED. High school and GED are culturally signs of being ready for adulthood. Under 16 is too young.

          • aidan@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            No, being 18 is the sign of that. There are 40 year olds without highschool degrees or GEDs, they’re still adults.

    • DarthBueller@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be about knowledge anyway, it should be about the ability to think and exercise sound judgment.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Agreed, but I’m not convinced school teaches someone that anymore than daily life does.

        • DarthBueller@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Where do people learn critical thinking skills? I was taught about propaganda and rhetoric in public elementary school (though, sadly, schooling in such matters was only in the “gifted” program). Though to be fair, I learned about pyramid marketing and the attraction of woo from my mother, queen of the pyramids, and experienced the targeted devaluing of education from my youth group pastor who was trying (with limited success) to keep from losing college kids “to the world.” The cognitive dissonance when I started college was extreme, to say the least.

          • aidan@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            In life, from family, from teachers(I’m not asking to defund public schools…), from the internet, self-taught, from books, etc. Many ways- clearly public schools aren’t effective for all students, so why are they condemned to it?