Public schools today are terribly bad at making learning interesting and engaging for students. This is because the system is set up so that every student is supposed to learn the same thing at the same time and in the same way.
Different people have different interests, and some learn faster than others depending on the subject, so in order for the class to move on, everyone has to be on the same page. This means that some students are always going to be holding the rest of the class back, which means that the faster students are going to be bored, and the slow ones are probably bored too because they have to keep focusing on a subject they’re not interested in.
Bored students are not learning anything. Some bored students resort to pranking teachers and disrupting other students, or just doodling in class. Banning the use of mp3 players and cell phones isn’t going to automatically make students more engaged in class. If each student could work through the material at their own pace, this would be less of a problem. With online high school, students can work at their own pace and take the tests when they’re ready for them. This way, nobody is being held back, and students who work fast can finish early and have more time left to do things they find more interesting, or learn about something else. They could even get into college early if they finish ahead of other kids their age.
A better option is unschooling. It’s a form of homeschooling where a person teaches themselves everything they need to know, based on their interests. They could of course still get other people to teach them something if they need some help, but for the most part, they are in charge of their own education. Since they’re in charge, they will be interested and engaged in what’s going on. Kids love learning, it’s because school is so boring that a lot of people seem to think that they don’t.
In short, compulsory schooling ruins education. Unschooling is the best solution, but online schooling is a decent enough compromise that will work well enough for almost anyone. It’ll be easier for a student to convince their parents to let them take online classes than it will be to convince them to let them unschool themselves, or be homeschooled.
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