An American public school?

There you go, then. American public schools are frighteningly bad, which is what I was originally referencing.

I haven't spent time in the Italian public school system, so I'll refrain from commenting on its quality.

In some of the Euro countries - Belgium at least - they assign the money to the student rather than the school and the parents decide where they go so the public schools have to stay good to compete.

Which I think is a fine system, by the way. I was full of shit in that debate we.... sort of.... had.

You did as well as anyone could on that side of the debate.

I think when you reach the age of 12 or 14 depends on the regions you can decide for yourself in which school you want to go. But yes the money is attached to the pupil.

If you're poor, even private school will get paid for the children. Less money you have, more money for your children's education can be requested.

Also the languages you learn and when you learn them is different from country to country and from region to region.

Where I live right now, you begin learning French in the second grade, English 4th or 5th grade (not sure) Spanish in the ninth and Latin somewhere.

I've to ask my niece, she's in the 10th grade.

I think you can choose whether to learn the 3rd and 4th foreign language or something more scientific.


I had to take Latin classes when I was in school though, German and English were mandatory and French if you liked to, which I did.

I think a second language should be mandatory, and should begin right from the start. Second grade is OK, but I'd start in the first. Language learning is just so much easier at a young age. If I were in charge, I'd probably have them start a third language around 4th or 5th grade. I'd pick the first one for them, and the kids could pick their own (of the ones offered anyway) for the other one.

In the U.S., I'd do it this way. If English is your first language, then you learn Spanish beginning in the first grade. If English is not your first language, then you learn English. Around 4th or 5th grade, you begin one of two or three, depending on available qualified teachers. It would be nice to be able to offer French, German, Russian, and at least one non-Indo-European language. Yes, I think language learning is that important.

I would also cut out some things. I see no reason to teach history and science in elementary school. They can wait until middle school. Math, reading/writing, and foreign language are the only things I see a use for in elementary school. And I think we can fill up the time with those if we take the trouble to do them right. By the time a kid gets out of the 5th grade, he/she should be able to balance a check book, read Moby Dick, and write a 10-page research paper on any given topic.

Beginning in middle school, I would teach world history. U.S. history should be taught here, but it needs a context of the entire history of the world. Otherwise it means nothing. I certainly wouldn't repeat what I went through---year after year after year of 1500-1800 U.S. history. How many times do I need to learn the same friggin thing?

Every child needs a year each of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. It's up to the kids what order they want to take them.

They need math, but probably not every year. Everyone needs a certain level of math, and I'm not sure how long it would take to get there.

Things like economics, government, etc. can probably be incorporated into the history curriculum.

Sorry for the OT rant.

You're a mod, just split it...

Hmm how is history taught in the US?

We started with the cave men in sixth grade and worked our way up to recent history over the grades.

I think we learned US civil war and other US stuff in the 8th class. 9th class, the last mandatory class in an "ordinary" school, was about WW1,WW2 and the rebuilding of Europe and Japan.

Classes were rather neutral nato/soviet wise.

I think we began politics classes in the 7th or 8th grade. Starting with Greek and Roman law. One grade after we were taught about their in History

I would have got around to it eventually
Badly?

Umm, I remember learning U.S. history about 8 times. If your lucky you can get a year of western civ. Maybe a year of politics.

nearly everything is taught badly in the us at the moment
I hate the system

My kid is in elementary school - I have to pay to send him to a tutoring class after school so he can do better at math. Then, just today, I ask him what he's been learning in school. He starts telling me about all these Hawaiian religions and myths and whatnot.

They suck at teaching him math so bad I have to pay someone else to do it, but they have time to fill his brain with useless bullshit fairy tales about the fire god Pele?

Maybe I'm an oddball, but I've never wanted to learn natural languages ... even English. I'm actually more a visual thinker.

As far as there being more than one language, I think ... geesh ... can't humans just pick one friggin standard and go with it?! I'll learn one additional language if I have to (I know some Spanish), but I'd prefer it if everyone could just get together and pick one standard first. The whole idea of multiple languages is because people aren't really communicating to begin with.

I don't care what language it is ... although personally I think English is a bastardized and inconsistent language ... and I hope it dies quickly. And here's how I'd like to kill it:

If you've ever studied toddlers' speech, they use a very logically consistent grammar and more sensible spelling than what's considered "correct". Teaching kids language, I think, is partly backwards and what propagates all these bad designs in a particular language, like special cases, non-phonetic spelling and outright inconsistencies in grammar. A kid will say something that follows the rules of the game like "I runned." Adults will say "that's not correct ... it's 'I ran'" Of course, the second is just a special case, and less logical than the first grammer. Loosinging up what's considered "correct" in language would de-evolve it into a different and more logical system. Granted no one will ever do this, but rather will keep pure Franken-English alive. It's tradition to teach people to teach the bad system!

Note, all the non-phonetic spelling here ... it's just ridiculous. I'm really blown away by how lousy a language English is.

my $.02

How can you tell it's a lousy language if it's the only one you know?

It's the only language I know and I can tell its basically crap too.

Depends on the school district. At mine, up until middle school it seemed they were more interested in spending my time on PE and home economics than they were on history.

I ended up taking "general world history" at least once, though. General world history seemed to be a European history class which started with the fall of Rome, with a short segment on the Middle East as it related to Europe and a page dedicated to the Taj Mahal.

In elementary school they just told you the usual fluff about American history. ("Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin! George Washington was the first president!")

I can't speak to high school because I got the hell out of the public system at that point.

Well, i wouldn't say it's a bad language, but it's by far the easyest language to learn, from my point of view at least.

My six year old kid just started in what you might call pre-scool, and he's already talking a little english, and understands even more than he can speak.

As far as i know, or feel, for that matter, english is a basic language, the grammar is very easy to learn and to remember, with almost no effort. Compared to german it's no problem.

In denmark we have two mandatory languages, besides the native danish. We're tought english and german, but as we live in scandinavia, we have to know how to understand swedish and norwegian too. And the funny thing about that is, that we are not really tought how to.

I really want to say english is like c++, but I don't know much about cpp, so I can't, really

That is very interesting to me. I'm no linguist but I wonder if danish and english don't have a common ancestry of some sort as languages go? My grandparents spoke danish to each other, and my father knew it as well, but times were different back then immigrants assimilated so they didn't speak danish around those who didn't.

I'm pretty sure, for people who speak languages like Spanish, or even Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc, English is a difficult language to master. We do our sentences backwards and have too many words that mean the same thing.

As far as i know, danish and english have a great deal of roots in latin, allthough not in the "common" sence. but the grammar is whole lot different, and yes, english IS spoken backwards.

Back in the 19th century and way further back for that matter, the danish language had a lot of german words, in fact, the danish language is a combination of nordic and german i think, that have evolved to a single language. Many say that danish is very hard to learn, and i think that they're absolutely right. We don't hear many people from other countries learning danish.

In fact, often i get the "danish..... ain't that something you eat" thrown at me

No, neither English nor Danish has latin roots. They both have some latin influence, but they are germanic languages.