Chefelf.com Night Life: Frimkron - Viewing Profile

Gragh stop it - you're making me cheer up!

My own views on education are kinda the same as Yahtzee's. It's all wrong.

My experience of education has been this: primary school was fun and by year 6 I'd learnt probably some of the most important things I know today. Then secondary school.

For me this started as a couple of years of pointlessness as we were re-taught the last 2 year's worth of stuff, as clearly the primary school curriculum wasn't well enough defined that all the separate schools could teach up to the same level, and they had to acommodate the lowest common denominator. What little I learned in the remaining years at highschool was vasty outweighed by what I was denied thanks to the culture that builds up in highschools of rejecting everything that is attempted to be taught to you - if you don't do the work you get 18 different varieties of faeces kicked from you! I blame this on the way schools punish rather than reward. At secondary school the only motivation for going against the flow and trying hard was some vague promise of a better job at the end of it all. Hardly inspiring. Education at this level shouldn't be forced on people. Children of 11 upwards are capable of making that decision for themselves - surely.

Scraping enough GCSEs to go to college, things are suddenly a bit different - most of the people at 6th form actually want to be there and the general attitude is that it's ok to learn - there are no beatings involved. The stuff I learnt at college was quite interesting, I guess, but I felt there was a massive amount of pressure to go on to university after it. Right from the start of the second year at college we had to start making applications to universities - pretty much whether we wanted to or not.

And then uni. Yes its relaxed, in the first year at least. But you soon realise that the whole of higher education - and everything that preceeds it - isn't an open-ended pick-and-choose learning experience where you can bounce from subject to subject as you please, absorbing whatever you find intellectually stimulating at the time. It isnt a source of answers to the questions you have in life. It isnt a place where you can explore your true potential in whatever creative activity you like and better yourself or find who you are and what you are truely gifted at. Instead it's all a huge factory for which the raw materials are humans and the product it manufactures is worker drones. The whole system is to mold you into a neat little cog to fit snuggly into the giant corporate machine. The only thing you're taught is to obey, and that success in life is a piece of paper with an 'A' on it. And also that to suceed you must force yourself to commit things to memory for short periods of time without ever appreciating exactly what it is you're reciting parrot fashion onto that exam paper.

I suppose the worst part is they're also the best days of our lives.

These, if I'm not much mistaken:



Hot- linking images is the best, kids!

I'm starting to agree about Duke.

I mean, I'm all for game developers having the balls to continue work on their project until its perfected as a lovingly-crafted well-polished fully functioning piece of software (or art?) rather than being pressured into releasing any old bug-ridden identikit crap as long as it makes money. And even though I know Duke will never live up to the idea of this legendary mysterious uber-game that its been hyped up by some to be over the years, I think the game will probably be good in itself - ignoring the everyone's built-up preconceptions.

However,

Eight years?! Its a bit long isnt it. They could have made a lot of other good games in that time instead.

The cynic in me says that Doom III was just a big advert for the engine too. Although I haven't actually played it myself. In conclusion I should stop eating cynics.