[Demosthenes]

CoS = Culture of Stupidity

Duh...Damn! I was hoping I'd gotcha back...

Do you have any specific ideas on how to reward academic achievement in ways that kids won't reject?

Well a start would simply be rewarding academics like sports are now rewarded. Some of you have very good points in that a good deal of this proposed change would have to be instilled by parents, who aren't all that willing to do much as it is...so that is an obstacle.

Nonetheless I see this as beatable. Just as anything is. Other possibilites might be to bring in more relevant experts in any given subject that kids can respect more then their teachers, such as business leaders or scientists. (Of course that costs more money...so that opens another can of worms, but how many sports figures visit their old alma mattars for inspiration?) I dunno exactly...I'm certainly up for suggestions...

Well, the worst thing you could do, would be to encourage a scholarship system- since by the time scholarships are being handed out (senoir years), most kids have accepted that they are always going to have low grades, so why try? What should be done instead is to create a total achievment type goal (as in, by doing well you get more then on the honor roll. And by doing realy well, you open yourself up to scholarships and the like). The point is, right now, by doing 'well' in school the rewards are having your name on a piece of paper (big deal).

Something like this certainly seems feasible but remember you can't make colleges do this. They are businesses like anything else (like it or not) and are not simply going to offer things to sophmoores just to inspire them...However if we're into encouragement, then certainly setting up classrooms to handle really advanced students who are capable of college level material at earlier ages certainly might make some difference. I agree to a point that a piece of paper isn't much but I don't want to get too far from the realm of personal responsibility either.

As Izzy stated earlier a good degree of this relates back to teaching more discipline, personal responsibility, and accountability. The other stuff would theoretically just be bonuses or incentives for being "the best of the best".

[T]

Duh...Damn! I was hoping I'd gotcha back...

Don't worry, I'm sure I've got typos and spelling errors up there somewhere. Don't think I could handle the pressure of keeping my English on point in every post.

Well a start would simply be rewarding academics like sports are now rewarded.

But athletic ability is mostly rewarded by the market. There's money in sports because people (and I'm among them) are willing to pay money watch athletes perform. Now I've been in some of them, but there's no way you'll sell me tickets to an academic competition (although maybe you could market student debate American Idol style...).

I don't think that we should play up the material benefits of hard work in school, especially since there will always be other 'role models' especially in entertainment who get richer easier. I'm starting to think we should take a counter-intuitive approach, and talk about how hard it is. Appeal to people's pride. I'm thinking here of recruitment campaigns for the Marines, who almost perversely have the fewest recruitment problems because serving in the corps is harder than the other services.

Maybe we should tell kids, "It's hard. It's not for everybody. You may not be able to handle it." Then academic achievement doesn't go unsung, because everyone knows how hard it is. What do you think?

[Cruxus]

Having graduated from high school only months ago, I can recite numerous social issues behind the "culture of stupidity." First of all, look at what is being marketed and sold to adolescents: Businesses are catering to the least common denominator and creating a teen culture devoid of any substance, all for an increased profit. Government regulation would be constitutionally and morally nearly impossible in this matter, and it wouldn't work anyway. Instead, change must come from the adolescents themselves.

The second problem is a counterproductive form of social stratification based on adherance to the values of teen culture. At the top is the school "nobility" with pretenses to "owning this place" and being better than the lower social strata for having best conformed with the values of popular teen culture. At the bottom are the sometimes academically high-achieving students and mentally and physically different who are sometimes mocked and worse by those belonging to the higher social classes. This description may make the social distinctions seem harsher than they really are, but the social distinctions definitely do exist, and the result isn't always just a smaller pool of well-educated youth: Remember Columbine, Joansboro, etc. For this to change, adolescents must reject the poisonous fantasy of popular teen culture and ignore clique/social distinctions. When teen-agers everywhere realize their imagined world was created for them so that money can be extracted from them without regard to actually improving their life, only then will the situation improve.