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One thing I've learned from the internet is that American schools and universities seem to love making students do large amounts of largely pointless drudgework.
this is to filter for conscientiousness
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Are other school systems any better? My experience with South American schools and everything I have read about East Asian schools suggests that both are worse.
My school in India (a prestigious one, for what that's worth) did not give us nearly the amount of homework as was expected in Western school.
Homework is hardly a thing here. You're not graded on it, you have annual and quarterly assessments, and the teachers expect you to look over the teaching material and practice till you pass them.
What is substituted, for homework, is hours of private tuition after lessons, which is not imposed on the students by the teachers, not a filter for conscientiousness (almost anyone who is not bottom 25th percentile is chucked into one of those), and is nigh a necessity if you want to be competitive for the exams that actually matter, at the end of high school.
But homework, in the American sense? Largely irrelevant. You will be tested, in a standardized manner, on your mastery of the subject, at the end of primary education, and that will change the trajectory of your life.
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Because the goal of the American school system is to justify its absolutely ludicrous amount of funding, ideally in a way which doesn't require the people staffing it to do any actual work and definitely in a way which requires even more funding.
Massive amounts of pointless drudgework is easy to evaluate and declare a thing which is a result, an output that shows the education system doing something. That it doesn't help students learn and may actually be counterproductive is besides the point; the students learning is absolutely immaterial to the education system, and in fact the students learning too well may not be a good thing from its own perspective, because that makes it harder to make the obviously false claim that schools need more money.
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I feel like schooling would be much improved by the adoption of military/FAA style PQSs and "Murder Boards" but those would require educators to actually educate, and I'm not convinced that's in the cards.
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