Obama wants to make our school days or years longer?

I share your views in many ways and on several points.

Yet, Obama is largely correct. It is true: we do not compare.

I do no believe that many Americans realize just how disrupted are our many systems -- education and otherwise. Sacrifices along with creativities will have to be initiated. Obama's notion is one more intimation that we are to get started in some new way.

We do observe that at the university level, America's is held to be perhaps the greatest. And, well, sure it is, because, well, at that level is where all the exotica and sexiness exists, where all the incentive, the motivation, all the money is imported.

The failing of the students in the grades K-12 rests with the teachers in a large respect. Learning has become as has been for some 100 years a sedentary experience; linked to nothing that resonates with life and learning as it is in real time. In the USA, we still take an active, viable, outrageously curious host of people -- the students -- sit them down and jam them indoors and in some four-cornered rooms and then destroy the fire.

You are correct about Algebra in that the student in the ages of, say, 5 to 10 years of age are at their most curious, most motivated of energy. It is an age range when students are peeking into everything and asking all manner of questions. This is exactly what scientists do.

The youngest students are naturals, born scientists. Yet we destroy them, bore them, render both their hearts and minds idle. And we destroy adult students as well... Think about that. Many adult students share the views of young children, because these adults see how miserable even college-level education is. It is all one big sham.

Educators, administrators, and teachers continue to plan and set-up outdated practices.

We might add here that the education system we have today was formulated during the earliest decades when the industry of the nation was Farming. But mistakes were made in effect. The schools would have been better to set up midst the farms and not have the farmers come to them. Farmers -- all -- were born scientists, artists, thinkers. They had to be in order to live! Yet they loved doing what they did. The farmer was a born meterologist, zoologist, hydrologist, climatologist, agronomist, botanist, naturalist...name it..the farmer was that! And who were their 'original' teachers but the Native Americans. Did you know that in Africa the traditional commencement in education began with the sciences? Many do not know this. They realized a young child's potential for science is at its greatest in the earliest years -- not necessarily by mind alone as by 'temperament'. Who might you think destroyed Africa's way of life?

Peculiar, isn't it?

The problems rest not with the children but with the adults, whose minds have grown uninventive and lazy and out of proportion with all time and space. Hence, we have an owerwhelming failure rate in all three segments of grades K-12. Yet the universities soar, still usually reserved for the most well-heeled among us.

Our school system is such a failure that it is in need of systemic redesign.We have a teachers union that has a strangle hold on the way things are done and keeps us from removing ineffective or poorly performing teachers. The fact is that you can become a teacher and totally stink at it keep your job and effect the lives of thousands of kids in your career. It is appalling and should make the real teachers furious. The percentage of teachers that just come to get a check is astounding Longer school year r u kidding that has nothing to do with the problem. The fact is we should declare a state of emergency over our schools and revamp the whole system and the teachers union should have its power eviscerated!

I agree with you, increasing the time of something is not making it more efficient, but actually less.

To make the educational system more efficient, you would shorten the days (or school year) while maintaining the same results.

do you know why kids in the US dont go to school during summer?

the answer to that questions is rock solid proof the US education system is archaic......that and the fact that in Finland, the country with the top education system, teaches their kids algebra in the first grade

I do know the average public school student test scores are much lower than a private school yet you can put your child into a nice private school for less than what a public school receives in funding per student per year.

wonder why that is.

The extra days of school we be toward the reeducation of the youth. In other words brainwashing.

That's exactly why we need longer days. In schools that run about 10 hours a day, there are tutoring sessions, homework support, and other activities for kids including internships. It makes a lot of sense but is too expensive.

He is making another huge mistake. He has constantly made mistake after mistake. This is just another of his many failures.

So what paper were you reading that in?

you suck