The number of young people in  not engaged in any productive activity is increasing, figures suggest. People aged 16 to 24 not in work, education or training goes up yearly. What would you say is the best way to make education more attractive and interesting to the youth?

Sam are you sure these aren't discussion questions in a class you're taking or something?  These sound just like discussion questions for a class.  For example, who suggests that the number of young people are not engaged in any productive activity?  What is considered productive?  Where is the information coming from?  Who determined the age range of 16 to 24?

Cajun's right -- you should be coming up with your own answers for these sorts of discussion questions.

-=Steve=- 

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B.S., Info Sys, Charter Oak State College
M.A., Educational Tech Leadership, George Washington University
Doctor of Health Education, A.T. Still University, in progress

common guys, these are just statistics I read from an article, a couple of  weeks ago, Its not homework. I thought it would be good topic to discuss because there are so many kids out there who drop out of school. The discussion is still open so feel free to contribute. 

Well, then, since you brought it up, give us your thoughts  I think mine are pretty well established - I side with the kids, and we're squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pass out pink slips en masse, shut down every government K-12 indoctrination camp, and once and for all get the government out of the education business.

All right Sam, I vote we privatize education using a government sponsored voucher program thereby making schools compete for every single student they have.  Of course people always wince when someone attempts to place proven free market strategies in the realm of education.

In Canada there is a "two tiered" education system, private schools (which still get government funding) and the public school system (although there are usually two public boards, one actually public and the other Catholic).  Add in all of the "for fee" business like Sylvan Learning Centres and it gets murkier.  I personally find that the kids who make it through the public system and into college and university, despite the "lower high school performance" are better suited for the real world.

The only redeeming trait I can find for the private schools, non-unionized teachers = no strikes, = no lost years for students!

That said, the educational system (including university) is generating uneducated, unthinking automatons.  No broad sense of history, economics, philosophy, literature, or the evolution of society.  Just a focus on a narrow field of specialization.  What ever happened to the well rounded education?  Don't democracies need an educated, throughtful and inquiring voting populance?  Maybe we're doomed....

Sometimes I wonder whether kids were ever as well educated as we seem to think they were.  Was there really a golden age of K-12 education or do we just see the past through rose-colored glasses?

-=Steve=-

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B.S., Info Sys, Charter Oak State College
M.A., Educational Tech Leadership, George Washington University
Doctor of Health Education, A.T. Still University, in progress

Someone has been complaining about the current generation since at least Socrates   Reading his contemporaries, you 'll feel right at home with  what you hear and read today about the 'dumbest' generation.

Personally, I agree with the Fonz - if I had my choice it would be 1955 FOREVER!  And, like the Fonz, in less than 30 minutes: not so much.  I'd miss out on WAY too many experiences that I wouldn't give up for the world.  It truly was a kinder, gentler environment and culture; but 50 years from now, people will undoubtedly be saying the same thing about today.

I expect kids to be immature, make bad choices, do and say inappropriate things. They don't know any better, adults do, but when the adults dump the responsibility for raising the kids on the schools, electronic babysitters, etc., they have no control over what weird ideas or destructive behaviors the kids pick up.  Blaming the kids for not being well behaved, model students is just plain stupid.

 

My family's ethnically diverse, so for us 1955 wouldn't have been a kinder, gentler environment and culture.  But that just proves your point even more.

-=Steve=-

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B.S., Info Sys, Charter Oak State College
M.A., Educational Tech Leadership, George Washington University
Doctor of Health Education, A.T. Still University, in progress