Stupid in America

[brendan]

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=9069323583494421392&hl=en

How are american schools?

[bucket]

lol wow
australia are 6th, go aussies!
i read somewhere that one of the reasons we do so much better is the competition aspect of senior years.


fuuuuuuuuck after finishing watching this, it really pisses me off, how can teachers who are supposed to be so well educated, be so stubborn.
gaahajhdsjfhdsjkfn

[avogarbro]

Do American high schools students get checked for weapons (guns,knives etc.) before they enter the school grounds? Hollywood seems to portray this view. 

[TrueLight]

omg most public american schols r dumb... i would never go to america to learn... so many problems and no choice wtf!?

[Collin Li]

omg most public american schols r dumb... i would never go to america to learn... so many problems and no choice wtf!?

Yeah, but we also have little choice too: no voucher system (so that only the rich can afford to go to private schools), and we have zoning laws that keep the poor with no choice other than the public school they are designated to.

[brendan]

omg most public american schols r dumb... i would never go to america to learn... so many problems and no choice wtf!?

u could go to a private school though: http://vcenotes.com/forum/index.php/topic,2083.0.html

[brendan]

LOL@ playing monopoly to learn about geography haha

[TrueLight]

haha that made me laugh as well

[iamdan08]

Do American high schools students get checked for weapons (guns,knives etc.) before they enter the school grounds? Hollywood seems to portray this view. 

Apparently some schools have metal detectors.

[DrowNz]

This video annoyed me in general. Parents kept repeating the same thing and they all sounded like a broken tape.

[Collin Li]

This video annoyed me in general. Parents kept repeating the same thing and they all sounded like a broken type.

It might be John Stossel's style. I didn't like him until I watched a few of his videos.

[brendan]

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/02/the-detroit-pub.html



Dutch, a kind of archaelogist of recent America, takes us through the abandoned Detroit School Book Depository.



    This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven't burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and "sadness" some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city's school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people.

    Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the "ghetto palm" grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that's left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential.