Although I don't have any say on the internet schooling matter, since I myself had taken a few classes just for supplement. However, I don't think being challenged by teachers to be challenged is a wrong way if you wanted to push yourself to your limit. Teachers are there to teach general knowledge to be 'literate'. That's all there's to it. But all in all, one must be self motivated in order to achieve something of higher feat. Average high schools won't motivate or expect anyone to enroll in a prestigious university. One must strive and satiate for higher education. Lest not receive any.
I must say, American education is also failing not because of the system- but also because of the general atmosphere that's present within schools. They tend to induce destructive attitudes, glorify rebellious actions, and vindicate ignorance. And for children who are easily swayed by this atmosphere, they lose the capability to learn, not only that, they lose their minds along with it- when they get some hands on white stuff and a pipe.

It's a different story in South Korea, where I live though. There's a social cliche that goes something like this. It is considered an absolute requirement to enroll in a prestigious university- lest not be able to get a good job. Failure to enroll in a 'good enough' university is failure at life. Those who fail are considered 'human trash' and are in reality, good for nothing but farming and selling McDonalds. Unfortunately for Korea, 96% are failures. Only top 4% of the pyramid succeed.

Although I do feel you, I have a very different opinion about 'tedious'.

For many Humans, to know is to not to know. What you already know is already past knowing. You will undoubtedly forget what you already knew without tedious repetition. I've learned this the hard way. The better and faster your rudimentary skills are, less obstacles there will be when you try to push yourself beyond your limits. Tedious rudimentary 'skills' are surprisingly more important as you progress toward higher education. You quoted this yourself 'persistence and determination'. What is there to persist and be determined if you're amused and are having fun just at the notion of learning and challenging yourself to new and harder materials? The hardest part is to continue repetitive and tedious work that you already knew.

So here I finally display my solution for all of the world to see. It theoretically fixes all I could see wrong within the school system, and also creates some more problems – but such is the nature of things. Out with the old, in with the new.

Classes have hardly adapted past what they have been for the past century. The material and curriculum has changed, but the overall system remains quite static. This adherance to tradition in constantly changing world is education's fatal flaw. Simply put, it is time for an upgrade.

I thought long and hard how to fix it. There seemed to be no single possible option, then I switched views and scopes. When I finally lifted myself out of the box and saw all I had at our disposal the answer became much more clear. Technology. Yes, technology was the answer to the growing education problem. How will be explained in the following wall of text.

The ultimate goal is to educate, but not just with knowledge; also with creativity and individuality. Both traits that have incredible positive effects on the ability on a student to learn and discover on one's own – and lead to an inquisitive mind. Such a an instillment can lead humankind into an age of massive exploration of knowledge. But enough of that silly business.

-----

Let's start with the actual education. In my system the education would be done on touch-screen computers, much like the iPad, or even done on whole tables. The reason for this is to engage the student. If they're forced to touch to interact it is a more intuitive and engrossing experience. Ergo, they learn better. Star Trek (J. J. Abrams) shows a good example when Spock is a child on his home planet.

Lessons would be standardized throughout the nation as software. Ever used Rosetta Stone? Think that, only more sophisticated and in depth. All of the software will be linked and quickly processed so that grading so that overall statistics of the school and individual records of a student both can be accessed from virtually anywhere with a few clicks.

What about teachers then? Well, teachers will have their role as well, offering supplementary courses, doing live demonstrations of expiriments, and helping out where students need it. They can give lectures on topics of interest and host competitions or other activities that will engage students further. They will also have the duty of making up where the software fails, such as grading essay questions. Really it gives teachers more freedom to teach and study how they choose to. Since the classes they offer are supplementary, there will be little restrictions on what needs to be taught since the software will cover the basics.

Also, the system allows for students to move as fast as slow as they want. Moving slowly means graduating later, while moving faster means graduating earlier – or at least, learning more. So it promotes individualism and includes standarization.

Now of course, there is always the issue of motivation. Students are lazy and don't want to work, so what if they just work at a snails pace or just bs their classes? I have a solution to that as well. For one, there can be a certain minimum requirement of work to be done. And it isn't like they can just skip school, they'd still be required to go.

Grades will decide a number of things that would be very appealing to the average teenager. It is called liberty. Let's face it, teenagers don't want to be told what to do and where to go. They just want to do things themselves. I know! I am one. So the theory is that if they're working hard, they can be given good things to reward them. A famous psychology study once rewarded so called, “hopeless” kids with things they enjoyed, like soda or arcade time for good grades. The results were astounding, the kids improved dramatically. I'm applying that principle here.

An example of a liberty for say, perfect grades in all classes would be given the oppurtunity to come in two hours later once a week, so long as they keep their grades up. Should it drop then they lose that privilege. I don't know about you, but I would be working my ass off in school if it meant I got to sleep an extra two hours once a week. This is on top of whatever else you get for doing well too, so you can see having perfect grades would be pretty damn awesome.

The process of learning is however the student chooses to do it. They would be able to work as long as they want on something to get it done. So if you want to go to school and work six hours straight on math you can, or if you want to split it up into one hour segments of all your classes that's fine too. Or maybe you need to spend two hours in one subject and a measily half-hour in another. This could even be a liberty gained for doing well.

There are many variables with the system, but might actually be the rough outline of something with promise and could potentially go somewhere should it ever be tested. The only problem I see with it now is cost. Technology costs money, new facilities to support all of the new stuff will cost money, and teachers need to be paid. Expensive, but with the massive amounts of money our government literally dumps onto our military this isn't what I would call out of reach.


C&C plz

@ BeDazed

I don't learn through repetition, at least not with concepts I've long since mastered. If I make you do 1000 addition problems right now, are you gaining anything from it? How about if I have you sit in a class and read a novel along with someone who takes 30 seconds to read each single line? The same logic applied for at least the first few years of my elementary school. Putting advanced children in the same class as slow children does indeed fit "No Child Left Behind," and it also unfortunately damns the system to "No Child Gets Ahead," as well.

I strove for higher education in my "formative years" but there was nothing directing me. I read tons, but nothing I'd consider serious or mind-developing today. Some contest in 3rd grade gave you a star on the wall of fame for reading 200 pages. I went to 16, no one else in the entire school even got to 8. Did I grow from reading Goosebumps or the Boxcar Children? Not really. I cleared out the Children's Fiction section at my library of every book that looked remotely interesting for my "age level." No one pointed me toward maybe an Orwell or Huxley dystopian novel.

You say this, and yet that's essentially my point. Why don't they? Could I have done more to push myself; absolutely. I tend to blame the system for my lack of drive and wish I had done otherwise with those years, but it's done with and I'll never know what could have been. For example, I took the SAT's in 7th grade and scored in the 60th percentile for graduating seniors. Then I had FIVE more years of school to sit through where I learned essentially nothing of importance until a few awesome classes senior year. In today's era, you could have sat me on Wikipedia or YouTube tutorials for just a couple of hours a day and I would have come out with ridiculously more knowledge than what I had. Or hell, just give me 100 interesting books and let me read them during school. Teachers would literally yell at me for reading an outside book during a class which I could have already taught. At some point, I just gave up and stopped doing the bullshit homework that I already knew how to do. I won't cite the author since this would just make my message all the more laughable, but it's all too relevant: "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." Well, mine won't have unless something drastic happens in the next year.

So, while all of that undoubtedly seems like just a massive ego-stroking, it's merely an in-depth case study to illustrate my point. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and with current technology it doesn't have to happen. Home school is always an option, but why isolate yourself and force a parent to stay home when you can interact with people of the same abilities, with the same natural drive, but with myriad different stimuli? If we have a teacher for a few weeks who teaches us a topic and then expands on its relevancies, we can have the same "college level" (and I use that term very loosely, because I haven't had three courses I'd consider appropriate to that level in three years) selection a liberal arts education provides while still nearly blank slates in developing our political, moral, and philosophical views. We allow and encourage them to be shaped by our own adolescence virtually devoid of the influence of our forebears. "Those ignorant of history..."

The goal of "education" is to provide an "educated" populace with the ability to determine objective and informative sources and contribute intelligently to discussion or debate by bringing outside reliable information into context, doing so both succinctly and eloquently. Have you seen American media? After watching an hour of "news" that the public laps up I can't see how an intelligent person could think anything other than that we've failed utterly and completely in our schools. "Ignorance is bliss" also applies quite well, since I seem to be finishing paragraphs with quotes.

So yes, dub me as the serial malcontent, but I'm quite confident that an online school would have been brilliant for me and undoubtedly I wouldn't be here having this discussion with you if I had gone through one. I would have had it when I was 11 or 12 with other students wondering the same thing and still measuring the paths before them. Our school system will not work for my generation, of that I'm quite sure. It just may take 25 years and the fall of America in everything except obesity rate for me to show that that's truly the case. I hope I'm wrong.

Sacrieur. It's very easy to think of a good system assuming unlimited resources. It's a pointless exercise. In the real world, where governments have limited budgets, it's useless.

This is NOT A SOLUTION. This is NOT PRACTICAL. I don't want the damn government to give students iPads and replace them every few years, I don't want the government providing losers with games so they perform better in school. I want an efficient, practical system that provides for a decent education and allows students to effectively compete and get into higher education. This is what we have. It's not ideal, but the many, many people who developed the system were collectively (and probably individually) smarter than the both of us. So, again: YOU HAVE NO SOLUTION.

It's as if you said "Hey, World Peace is a cool idea!". NICE JOB.

You're assuming that each kid gets to take said iPad with them, I was thinking of it more like to be mounted at a station. Also, the goal here is to offer suggestions to fix the practical side of it. There are developments that make these things cheaper and cheaper to reproduce.

At some point, one must concede defeat. I give up. Go e-mail your grand plans to Obama.

Yeah because my ideas are so grand they're without flaw. What's the fun if you don't put up a fight?

I despise standardized learning such as this. I am the kind of person who would drop out of school because it is against "creativity and individuality".
I think it will damage critical thinking as you can probably get the answer from the last guy who took the class.
If my lesson is the same as the person at the next school, Why should I go to school at all? I want my lesson to be better than the other people. (I currently do this by buying multiple books on the same subject). I rather take a private tutor.


(also Rosetta Stone is one of the worst language learning software ever created as it is weak in teaching grammar). (For the Mandarin and Japanese ones anyway).

No. Suggest that to anyone who had the power to seriously consider that, you'd get kicked out of his office and get sent to a local psychiatrist for a sanity test. Grander ideas are more flawed. The idea itself is a flaw. You can't expect everyone to be the same. You can't expect males and females to be the same. They just aren't. You can't expect everyone to be straight or gay. You can't expect everyone to be productive. You can't expect everything to be without fault.
You can't You can't You can't You can't You can't You can't.
You can't be perfect.

Well, as I had observed with most SEN'ers absurd ideas, they are most likely impractical and impossible to be executed. Sorry, but our society cannot live with all of its members living high and top with a 100k dollar luxury sedan. Somebody has to do the dirty, filthy jobs. Who? Those who can't get ahead. It's what makes education so wonderful. It effectively dishes people into categories.

You claim it to be a flawed idea, but you haven't actually attacked it. You just say it is impractical, and thus bad. When there are aspects of it rooted in science, such as a rewards system that works for a fact and hardly requires that much extra money. To toss out the entire idea and call it flawed simply because of the cost of technology is stupid at best. At least explore the possibility of a single class like it instead of ruling it out entirely.

But what of the actual functionality of it? I'm not expecting it to be perfect, or even close. I know there are flaws, as there are flaws with everything. At least I'm bloody trying to fix a broken system. You have any better ideas?


And I despise traditional teaching methods that hold me back. How exactly will it damage critical thinking? We all ready smash that right out of their heads from grade 1.

Ha, you want your lessons to be the best? I want my lessons to be the best. We can't all have the best classes in high school - not unless you wanna shell out money for some pretentious private school.

Alright. First of all. The world doesn't revolve around you and nobody really cares that you do a bit more than 'average'. This world doesn't care about that. As far as efficiency and output of high class education is concerned, then your system is a waste of money. Also, the system does let people who are exceptionally ahead to skip grades. Like I did when I was in 6th grade. And for high school, there are always ways to graduate early. You can prove yourself to be way ahead by doing so.
But frankly, the world won't care that you graduated early. They only care if you scored in the 0.1% of all your nation's concurrent peers.

Not simply because of the cost of technology. If you were the least bit smart, you would've considered what comes before and after.
For a system to work well, there must be an adequate output compared to the input you put in. For your system, there probably will be inconceivable amounts of input required. The only practicality I see with your system would probably work only under special circumstances, such as specialized high schools- for the gifted. But that's not the point. We see the efficiency of a system by comparing input and output. Currently, the way I see your system is not only impractical, but impossible to generalize among the entire Americas. And with costs that high, and without much proof that your system will bring 'much better results', one would be skeptical at best.
I'm sorry, but schools are struggling financially, and there are tons not receiving enough federal funds. Did you get it into your head that impractical goes out the window no matter how appeasing it sounds? Did you really think the government will cut down on military funds for a system, one would be skeptical about at best? Also, if you're blabbering about science, then provide hard facts from a reliable source. Not from some shoddy old news site. I thought you were smarter than that. Until then, I will consider it a pseudo-science, rooted within words, not actual science. Also, even if that were true, I'm skeptical about how dramatic a change some rewards can bring to hopeless kids, and how much it will be effective when tested among large masses.
Not only that, your system involves gadgets of undoubtedly high price for each individual. To provide is impossible. To buy is only for those capable. Even if a school could provide, I wouldn't be surprised if many were vandalized or stolen. Not only would schools require to replace their pricey gadgets annually, they would also need to maintain conditions of their current stock. Some systems only work when certain conditions are met.
Anyways, as I've said. Your system might work, if it were for specialized high schools. But I don't see much necessity in that either. Because students of specialized high schools generally don't require more education. More so, nearly half of them graduate high school early.

Here's my solution.
It would be much more simple and less costly then your impractical. Providing a nationalized curriculum for each grade, in orders teachers must follow. Most systems would still be standardized, except for specialized high schools, such as schools of science. That way, students and teachers alike can know easily what they will learn in what year and so on. There would be a national education ad department that provides information.

Then, for each starting year, everyone has to take a 'National Scholastic Evaluation Test 'Grade X''. One would have to score exceptionally high for all their mandatory subjects. The grading would not be based on one's score, but rather their relative score to their peers. For example, Grade A would be top 4% of the nation, Grade B would be 4% to 15%, with the largest percentile gap for C until grade F. Or it would be better to make more grading sections and grade numerically instead of alphabetically.
Then, providing an standardized acceleration system to those who scored all As in the tested subjects would get to skip a grade. But they will only be able to skip one grade each year.
Anyone who wants to get ahead could actually do something real to get ahead. Not only would they have to study, because they'd be competing with the highest and brightest of students, but because they'd have to score all As on every single subject on the Evaluations test. It would probably be Language, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies for grades 1 through 8, and for high schools, Language, Mathematics, and two subjects of choice.
Of course, the fastest anyone could complete standard education from Elementary to High is within 6 years with this acceleration program. But that's still pretty damn fast. I doubt anyone would be able to do that. Plus if people failed to advance, then that's not really anyone else' problem.

I see more con's to an online k-12 school than pro's. This is mostly due to the fact that an online class wouldn't allow for interaction with other students; learning to problem solve as a group effort and or learn to work well with others, there is a necessary communication that is essential for all stages of life; Clubs, how would this school have a Student Council, how would it promote spirit, have dances, all of the social needs that a person is required to have. In order for an overall healthy life one must have a healthy social life. There are many important life lessons to be learned from interacting with others.

Because you made your example by mentioning Rosetta Stone. You would match pictures to the words. This multiple choice software does not let you critically think as you would just cheat by backward solving to the answer.
Rosetta Stone is also very similar in vocab between languages. If a class had such a software, can I just ask my neighbor for the answer?
I am not sure how you could create such software to encourage critical thinking.

There is a lot I didn't read here (most of it)

My thoughts are that online K-12 classes is for the most part the same as Home Schooling. At least most of the major issues of In-Class learning vs Out of Class learning are the same.

It very would have helped me. I'm an extremely independent learner and have always hated group projects (with, of course, doing them with friends as the exception), presentations, sharing, etc. I've always failed in school due to lack of interest and boredom ... The class always goes far, far too slow for me, so I stop caring. A common example I use is even in 12th grade English, we were still learning comma usage (and it was presented like it was something new and unheard of). We were taught comma usage in elementary school.
A more objective point would be that individual learning styles can more easily be addressed (assuming that the online classes are more like homeschooling where you just have requirements that you must meet). ...

... That just made me think of something.
Are these online classes just lists of assignments for the student to basically just do as they want (all of it or parts of it restricted to certain time frames)? If that is the case, then how is it any different than a classroom, except you are doing it at home? I took an online English class, and it was just the same as a regular classroom in that we had to read a book, write a paper, and then post it on a message board for other students to critique ... It was just as mind-numbing as ever. I still wasn't learning anything ... I was just doing the same bullshit busy work I'd've done in an actual class.
With that, I'd just stick to homeschooling.

First hand experience. Online classes are just as susceptible to boredom as any other classes can be.

I believe that online courses should supplement your education the same way Microsoft word supplements writing papers. Clearly it cannot replace traditional in-person teacher/student/classmate relationships. Clearly the largest issue with Online Classes for children is the fact that 'online' means that kids can participate on their own schedule and will likely remain home requiring supervision (for younger children). This completely neglects a students self modification, and if your not self motivated then an online class is a terrible idea. But for those above-and-beyond students or summer students online classes is a perfectly viable option.

In response to FaRTy1billion:
Generally Online classes have the goal of being the same as the class room except they are at home and on your own time. Online classes will not have individualized requirements as long as they part of a class or schooling establishment.

You can learn some stuff from text, print and examples.
You can learn some stuff from actually doing it.

You can't learn everything from learning just one way.

As someone who took some of these classes through a nearby college while in highschool, I can say I am quite grateful that they were offered, as I would not have been able to skip a year of highschool without them. That being said, school should still be required, these courses make good supplements to those that wish to reach above and beyond what the normal curriculum might teach.

I haven't been following this much, I apologize if I jump in too suddenly. ANYWAY I've been homeschooled all my life, just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

This is the BS that everyone who isn't homeschooled believes. The only reason you can expect K-12 or homeschooling to hamper social development is if the children are spending all day inside on these things, and never go outside and talk to people and leave home and have friends etc. I'm a very social person, and generally get on well with people I meet, even though I've never gone to school.


This is because most Asian cultures considered being a scholar to be the highest achievable position, whereas Western cultures generally considered being physically powerful to be the best thing (at least, as far as I know). In this modern world, the Asian idea of being a scholar is basically resulting in the Asian cultures getting ahead a lot more. China's literacy rate is higher than the USA's, for example. Even those who don't get to the top universities and are seen as being "successful" are still quite highly educated and will work hard at getting their children educated too. (this is a blanket statement that won't be correct to ALL asians or westerners of course)

I've already discussed the social aspects a little, but again, being educated at home, either via homeschooling or via K-12 etc, doesn't hamper social development, as long as you aren't forced to stay at home every day, all day, never getting to see anyone.

Why would there need to be a student council? It certainly isn't necessary for one to do well in life. Dancing, clubs, working with groups, these are all available outside the home in forms of sports, non-school clubs, etc.

I know plenty of publicly schooled people who are socially awkward, and in contrast people are surprised to find that I'm homeschooled, because I don't act according to the stereotype, which is wrong in MOST cases. Many public schoolers are socially awkward, many homeschoolers are socially skilled.