I am Canadian. Our education system, at least in my part of the country, is really good. I think we are #1 on a lot of lists for education but I've only seen a few different lists so I can't speak for all of the different studies done. I was in all the advanced classes in highschool, which basically means year 1(sometimes 2) of general University courses. (Highschool here is 10-12) They squeezed all of highschool into the first year and then year 11+12 were spent on University courses. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have passed without student collaboration. I mean being able to teach your peers and be taught by them helps with understanding the material so much.

E: if I remember correctly basically every school I have ever been in actually promoted peer tutoring programs.

I heard how bad the American system was and I thought it was a joke. Like bad but not that bad you know? No offense but every time I look at life in the USA I'm pretty glad I wasn't born there... Kind of pathetic that a country has proliferated idiocy so widely and quickly. I always liked to give America the benefit of the doubt. Like you hear something and think it is hyperbole because there is no way a first world country would let such important things like education fall behind so drastically. Guess I was wrong though.

@the show
I was thinking about it more and it honestly feels like Bill is talking down to the audience. Treating then like they are stupid, it makes me not want a season 2.

Also I'm really confused as to who the target audience is. I mean it is clearly not educated people.. Which is good I suppose, as educated people don't need to learn most of the stuff he talks about. But then the way he presents things is like... There it's no way in hell a science-skeptic it's going to watch this show and change their views, all because of how fucking condescending Bill is.

This entire show feels like an exercise in "let's do this thing so when the world goes to hell at least we can say we tried" rather than actually wanting to change something.

The part that pisses me off the most is those panels. He is such a fucking asshole to the people with opposing views it is unbelievable. Also they are way too short, the episodes should be an hour long not 30 minutes and they should add all the extra time to the panels.

I watched the astrology episode and the guy they had on the panel was like astrology isn't a science, he basically uses it for therapy. Which I mean if that works for some people then fucking sure why the fuck not. Whatever helps you with your problems if it works for you go for it (obviously don't hurt other people). But Bill and the rest of his panel weren't even listening to what the guy was saying and basically spent the entire 7 minutes or whatever insulting him. Like is this how men of science act Bill? Not able to view things from multiple angles? It is extremely ironic because he was previously talking about confirmation bias. Then decided to not listen to this guys view because of his own bias towards the subject.

Bill was cool in the 90s, nowadays he can go fuck himself.

This post was edited by Blah58 on May 1 2017 08:06pm

The problem is our society and this is what happens when capitalism gets out of fucking control. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is so fucking drastic, that it's made it impossible for the people without power to get a leg up.

We have astoundingly good schools for every level of education, but just like our top tier colleges, you have to pay to get in and the cost is not something your average American can afford.

I'm talking 20 to 30k a year for grade school. Not many people in the middle class have that kind of money just laying around to put their child into a great school that promotes the possibility of being a top earner. The system here is rigged and you have to either get incredibly lucky to get on top (and once you're there, you can stay there for generations), or even with working your fucking ass off, you'll be stuck in the middle-class or upper middle-class. You can be comfy there, but you'll probably always have debt, since you will have had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for your college degree, hundreds of thousands for your home and then hundreds of thousands for your child, who must likely won't appreciate how hard you worked to get to where you're and will then achieve far below where he could, thus starting the cycle over again for his/her children.

It's a vicious system and it's sickening how easy the people at the top have it. Look at our current President, a man who's never worked a day in his life and has literally been handed everything. A man who lost hundreds of millions of dollars that he was given for free, and that allows him to not even have to pay taxes for over a decade, even though he was given hundreds of millions more immediately after that lol. It doesn't make any fucking sense, none of it does.

We have great schools, we have everything you could ever want, but only a very small percentage of people have access to all the amenities this country truly has to offer, while the rest of us, work ourselves to death, all in the hopes of having a little bit extra by the time we retire in our late 60s to early 70s. I'll do the best I can for my child, I have a college fund setup for him (something I never had) and I'll try to ensure he wants for nothing, but he'll still go to public school and he still won't qualify for shit when it's time for college because he's a white male and if he wants to make it into an Ivy school, he'll have to be significantly better than all the other applicants. If he's not one of the best, he's got no shot,of getting in, because x amount of spots are reserved for the super wealthy and all the struggle spots will go to minorities first.

You're lucky too have been born in Canada and I'm incredibly envious. If it was at all feasible, I'd move my family to any country like your's, that actually gives a shit about all their people, not just the ones who have power, or an ethnic background, or enough money to buy their way into the game. Maybe one day we will get our shit together and education for the masses will be s valued commodity, but for now and while the rich continue to get richer, they'll do everything they can to ensure the masses don't become educated, because if they did, they'd all realize what I and the majority of educated and unfavored people realize and we'd have a fucking revolt.

This is what you get when identity politics tries to become popular. It's never funny, it's almost always cringey and it doesn't care much for reality.

No offense dude, but your facilities of higher learning are infested with ideologues pushing a narrative onto children that are eager to soak up knowledge, which makes them centers of indoctrination. Hardly a nr1 position worthy. I don't care on what lists Canada's education system is ranked high, i've seen the bullshit and it's not pretty. There's a bunch of authoritarian moral busy bodies there that impose their false narratives on the students, causing alot of really weird stuff. You might want to look into it before you praise Canada's education system again. No offense intended dude, it's not a personal attack either, just trying to share a red pill here.

I was not aware of this. Any articles, preferably something accredited you could link me to that goes deeper on this subject? I'm always fascinated to learn about the shortcomings of other countries, so that I can feel a little less shitty about how horrible my own country is. I know that's terrible, but it gives me at least a little bit of solace when I can get a good reality check that truly reminds me and enforces my belief that the entire world, or at least the VAST majority of it, is shit.

That being said, while I'm not super well versed in Nordic countries, is does seem as though most of them, have a pretty good grasp on how to balance education and practical knowledge for real world application upon graduating from school. Also, some of the countries that pay students (a pittance of course, but still cool) while attending school so that they can afford day to day necessities without the need for a horrendous after school or summer job seem to have the right idea. I also wish the USA would put a larger focus on teaching additional languages from earlier on. Every public school I know of, hasn't offered a second language until freshmen year at the earliest. Learning multiple languages from an early age has been proven to me dramatically beneficial for a developing mind and it seems like an easy enough thing to work on in the states. Even if we want with something as simple as Spanish, it'd still promote growth and increased brain function in youths by offering courses starting in elementary.

I would like to point out two things.

The first being literally the first fucking sentence of my post which it's basically saying "in my experience".
The second being my fucking experience. Educational rankings are based on a number of different things including cost, difficulty of material and student grades. These are all fairly objective things, and are similar across all of Canada, unlike specific school district rules/single teacher beliefs. I'm not sure what kind of bullshit you are talking about, but I am positive your experience with the Canadian educational system is significantly less than my own.

If you want to talk about indoctrination bullshit let's look at the UK system? Where the only history you learn basically ends around the 1800-1900s after the golden era of ruling the world ended. Can't learn about anything modern, it is way more important to memorize 18 different Kings that have been dead for hundreds of years.

Or the American system where you learn about history of the last 200 years and fuck everything that previously happened in the world. Oh and all those wars America lost... Not really they just decided to stop being at war.. Cuz American​s never lose, fuck yeah 'murica.

Maybe we should talk about Japan where the work/life balance is completely fucked? I did a student exchange to Japan and have first hand experience with this issue. It is pretty fucked, talk about pushing an agenda/indoctrination.

Don't get me started on China or Russia. Or the middle east where girls have literally only been allowed in school for like 20 years if that.

You had a bad experience with something? That's cool, but generalizing an entire country (second largest in the world) that is also probably the most diverse country in the world is absurd. Look at how screwed up all my generalized statements are about other countries. It isn't hard to make a country sound fucked. And my statements actually made sense instead of being meaningless nonsensical bullshit like yours.

This post was edited by Blah58 on May 2 2017 04:27am

^ not sure what you're talking about with the USA not teaching about Wars we lost... We spent more time in my schools at least, focusing on things post WW2, like Vietnam where we got our asses handed to us. Not exactly sure where you're pulling your info from on that one....

Had a Japanese exchange student live with my grandparents for like 6 years while he finished his doctorate. Couldn't hack it and eventually became a vet (he's the disappointment in the family ofc). It was funny to me that he had no knowledge of WW2, he didn't know that they had lost that war, he didn't know that we dropped two nukes on them and he had never heard of Pearl Harbor. Seems fairly common for countries to not teach about their failures, but that seemed crazy to me because of how much that war changed their society.

This post was edited by jadeoshbogosh on May 2 2017 04:50am

I know that in USA the war of 1812 is commonly taught as the war the nobody won. My experience with talking to/hearing Americans talk about the Vietnam War basically boils down to them saying something like they didn't lose they just withdrew because there was nothing to gain or someshit. Could be isolated thoughts and not widespread belief but that was the entire point of my post so...

Oh God no... Maybe in the middle of the country or the deep South where Republicans control the curriculum, but we were taught in great detail about our mistakes with ever getting involved, public outcry, atrocities committed by our country men on direct orders and the atrocities committed against our own soldiers by our own government.

The whole thing was a fucking debacle and we got savagely butt raped, especially when you consider what we had at our disposal vs what they had. I also know a lot of veterans from Vietnam and they all speak horribly of the war and even worse of how they were treated when they returned. It destroyed so many men and we turned around and fucked our vets in the ass. The country as a whole treated them like shit and thought of them as losers and treated them as such.

Just another black mark on a country that hasn't had many positive marks since the end of WW2.

Seriously though, don't think I've ever talked to anyone who thinks we won or that we were winning when we withdrew. Crazy shit man.


Edit : not to mention every major Hollywood film that was incredibly successful at the box office while painting the war in a negative light. Seems pretty straight forward that everyone in the country or that at least every non retarded person in the country knows how that shit went down.

Once again, just confused as to who you're talking to lol. Perhaps you're getting trolled or people are being sarcastic and it's just going straight over your head.

This post was edited by jadeoshbogosh on May 2 2017 05:19am

Agreed