| Some pretty interesting posts come from no-name posters, though the majority are simply dumped because they're either too goofy or too misspelled for comprehension. This guy does raise a point. It's a goofy point, but still a point... |
 While the case of a student suing his school on the grounds that summer homework ruined his vacation might not be the best use of the nation's overly burdened court system, the lad does have a bit of a point.
| I'd certainly agree that it's a waste of the nation's overly burdened court system. I'd also wonder where the money for the suit is coming from. As for the child's point, I'd call it pretty infinitesimal, myself... |
| I'm just guessing here, but this young lad apparently is not growing up in a Chinese, Korean or Hindi immigrant household ... |
On what grounds, exactly, do schools have the right to compel students to complete assignments during those times of the year when students are not under the school's legal authority?
| I'd say on the grounds that the schools are charged with the responsibility of imparting an education to the little darlings. What would you say? Think real hard, now... |
The school claims these requirements are not an undue imposition since they only apply to honors courses in which the plaintiff volunteered to participate.
| Which, to my mind, would make them a less than adequate "imposition." If my child was lumped in with the dumb kids and not given anything to do that might strain his little mind, I'd be indignant... |
While that might apply to this particular Wisconsin jurisdiction in question, it does not settle the matter on a broader philosophical level as some schools such as those in Prince William County, Virginia I wrote about way back in the mid 90's do not make it an honor's only requirement but rather mandate that all students do book reports and such over the summer.
| Book reports! Quelle horreur! I can remember the agony of cranking out book reports when I was a lad in school. I would agonize over them for up to a half hour at a time! And that wasn't counting the hour or two it would take me to read the book! I can't begin to estimate the damage it must have done to my mind, if any... |
| "The subject about which this book report is about is..." |
| "And remember, kids, Mr. Google knows every word that was written about this book by someone else ..." |
In the same spirit as that motivating Bill Clinton when he said he opposed tax cuts on the grounds Americans would not know how to spend their own money properly, educrats claim students not given assignments to do over the break would otherwise allow their brains to whither. What of it?
| Educrats in this case are correct. Children are not fully formed adults, only smaller, who are capable of making their own decisions. That's why parents and the school systems are put in a position where they can make demands of the little darlings' time and attention, in the expectation of something like knowledge seeping into their little heads which will will then be available for use when they are grown up. |
Since the brains belong to the students and under the custodianship of their parents, aren't they free to do with them as they see fit when school is not in session? Besides, other than basic reading, who uses most of what they learned in school anyway?
| I'm sure that unsuccessful adults don't. Adults who're successful use all sorts of odd things they learned in school. If you compute your part of the check when you go to lunch, you're using the division skills you learned in 4th or 5th grade. If you compute the tip, you're using the multiplication tables you started to learn in 3rd grade. If you should happen to acquire a foreign language, you're using the language skills you acquired in grade school and hopefully developed through high school. And, yes, Virginia, you do use algebra when you get out of school if you take anything more complicated than modern dance in college. |
| Me, I use the calculator in my cell phone, just like all the cool kidz. Long division is for geeks. |
| The fool who wrote this clearly doesn't use anything he learned in school, assuming that he learned anything. |
Maybe if schools did not devote so many resources to intellectually dubious pursuits such as diversity appreciation, environmental awareness, and indoctrination in evolution, schools would have more than enough time to teach those essentials education propagandists insist there isn't enough hours in the day (and hence the year) to teach.
| I quite agree that there's too much time spent on diversity appreciation, environmental awareness, though not indoctrination in evolution — paleontology would seem to support the idea pretty well, from what I've read, but then I possess more than just basic reading skills. Where I disagree is in how the time should be spent. Rather than packing the three R's into the time, I'd ensure they're taught in the time allocated for them, and I'd use the time freed up to teach additional math and foreign languages, to include Latin and Greek, plus geography. I'd split the warm milk concept of "social studies" back into history and civics and spend more time on each. And I'd make sure the little treasures got enough to do that they'd have to do a bit of work over the summer, too. |
| Lucky for us, the Catholic schools already do what Fred suggests. Even that Latin part. |
For students still ensnared for whatever reasons in the clutches of the public education leviathan, these institutions serve as centers of indoctrination in the ideology of total state control.
| Actually, I think they've become more dispensers of warm milk and gooey cookies than a leviathan. The mechanics of education are becoming so watered down that the system can't even pass on the indoctrination in the ideology of total state control. |
For what other lesson do students learn from summertime homework than that, even when not on duty, their lives belong to those running the New World Order?
| There could be lots of reasons, to include bible study, if you want to go that route, which I would't. The mere fact of making them do work doesn't dictate the content. But it does give them the idea that people have to do more than just the barely required minimum to get by if they want to make a success of themselves. |
| I was being flippant before, but now I'm serious. Kids have so much MORE raw knowlege they need to know by the end of high school now, especially in the math and science areas. And it seems to me they spend much less time studying and more time "saving the whales" and producing multimedia presentations on diversity... |
| There are no short cuts. You either learn or you get left behind. This fellow got left behind and hasn't figured it out yet. |
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