Slashdot Mirror
What's the Problem With US High Schools?
GrumpySimon asks: "ABC News is reporting that High School kids are dropping out of high school in 'epidemic proportions', with an estimated 2,500 kids quitting daily. What's wrong with our school system that so many kids prefer working 40 hours a week instead? How can this be fixed?"
It seems to be an America truism that "things get better after High School," and it wouldn't be surprising if most of you readers feel the same way. However, why does it have to be this way? What's the big problem with American High Schools where more and more children are feeling that it's better to risk the "real world" than to continue on with their education? Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?
It seems to be an America truism that "things get better after High School," and it wouldn't be surprising if most of you readers feel the same way. However, why does it have to be this way?
I think a lot of the reasons things "get better after high school" is because of the age you are when in high school. I didn't know who I was, took people's opinions of me too seriously, and couldn't get the girl I liked to notice me. I was definitely excited to get out of high school because of how glorious college was made out to be. I didn't read the article, I'm sure it got involved to level at which i just wouldn't care, I assume that the kids they're talking about dropping out aren't then enrolling in college but it just seems like a lot of those feelings stem from puberty and the social environment created by forcing kids of those ages to interact.
Given that most high schools are run as assembly-line institutions with often ridiculous learning-hindering schedules, policies and rules, and given the absurd amount of time routinely wasted in high school classes, this is hardly surprising. I'd estimate 20% of the time I spent in high school classes was even remotely productive.
/Practically never studied
//Graduated with a 3.9
///Didn't learn what an imaginary number actually was until college. Why the high school teacher couldn't just say "the square root of -1" eludes me. Our instructions were to use a calculator program to find it.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I think the issue of people dropping out in this day and age is more of a problem due to the expectations of what minimum education a person is expected to have. Nowadays the minimum might be approaching a college education while in 1972 the minimum might have been what a 16 year old might have gotten. If you blatantly assume that what you had at 16 in 1972 is equal to a college education today then even if the dropouts are less the impact and lack of education is more.
I was going to say -- the use of words like "epidemic" without a shred of context tells you at least as much about the problems with education in America as the free-floating numbers do. I'm not even going to get into the ironies of "Of course, another question that should be asked is: Is High School really the problem, or is it America's Educational system as a whole?"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Lowest common denominator.
What's really sad is a lot of recent grads won't understand either the math or the implication of that statement.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I think public education is severely broken in the US, for many reasons:
* single-classroom style -- many students learn in ways that do not work with a single classroom and oral lectures, which is the style almost all high schools use. Almost never are students allowed independent study, and even if they only learn from reading, they are still required to sit in class, which is a complete waste for them
* forced attendance -- by forcing people to attend, there is no motivation to make the most out of it. There is no real opportunity cost to being in the classroom, making a high percentage of people there unmotivated to learn.
* low pay -- financing education on the local level means limited funds to attract highly educated and highly functional people. While most high school teachers are extremely motivated and devoted, the simple financial reality is that jobs that pay 20-40K/year do not attract top quality people. This is part of a larger issue of simple limited resources put on education
* separation of teaching from learning -- mostly in real life, people become experts and learn things when they turn around and teach others. Almost never are high school students given the chance to teach what they learn, and almost never are their rewards for them in teaching others.
* national curricula -- teachers have almost no flexibility on what they teach or the ability to customize lessons for what students really need to learn. Learning is an interactive process that drawn a person to a new understanding from their current one. Set teaching standards eliminate the ability of teachers to understand what their students know now and customize the lessons for maximal learning.
* lack of content applicability -- most lessons in high school are useless and disconnected from real world applications. They are abstracted and meaningless for students who dont experience how to apply what they learn. Mostly, high school has become a babysitting exercise to keep people out of the work force as long as possible to remove competition for existing workers.
In sum, kids dropping out makes sense to me. High school is not helpful to them. This situation will only continue as virtual communities continue to form and become more organized and effective.
While there is plenty, at least arguably, wrong with our schools, the most likely reason people would drop out of high school to work is that there is something wrong with our economy where increasingly families can't adequately provide for children while they are in school; the economy that has been doing well in aggregate terms hasn't been doing well in distributional terms.
That's the problem. It really isn't about education.
In high school you are surrounded by people who either a) don't give a shit, or b) are spineless fools doing whatever necessity to get marks. The a)'s should be allowed (if not encouraged) to leave, and the b)'s are a product of the education system gone wrong. In their eyes, something is right if it is marked right, and vice versa. The actual truth is irrelevant. Neither the a)'s nor the b)'s care about learning.
High school is more about social control than anything else. "Do as we say or you have no future," is what is told, and there's sadly too much truth to it. The people who simply want to learn away from the fast majority of idiots are pretty much SOL.
I definitely agree here. A high school education certainly doesn't provide the opportunities that it used to (nor does a BA or BS for that matter). If we are to get in a discussion around the education levels of Americans as a whole, I'd probably agree with the use of the word "epidemic" in describing our average level of education ... particularly if measured by the average person's knowledge and competence rather than degree earned.
Whenever I have traveled to foreign countries, I always find it amazing that the average foreigner seems to know far more about American culture, government, and history than the average American. This isn't just a reflection of our schools, but of our society and families as well. I also believe the problem has gotten so bad that our leadership in industry and technology cannot possibly be maintained unless we make a large-scale concerted effort to fix education, not just concentrate on statistics such as dropout rates.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
When you show up and work 40 hours a week and try to do a good job, people actually appreciate it. They'll even thank you for being helpful and doing a good job. It's rewarding and satisfying. Work is an accomplishment. And they pay you.
No one thanks you for going to school. You're forced to go there. No one appreciates your contributions. There are no rewards. School is a process that a person goes through. No one cares about you at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the process.
I don't think a big increase in funding so the teachers can have a lower health-care co-pay is the answer.
Are you sure you are really interacting with average foreigners?
As far as the U.S. leadership goes, kiss it goodbye no matter what, there are 5.5 billion people not living in the U.S., the numbers will catch up with us sometime.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
They'll just try to teach you a bunch of evil stuff about Darwin and other Godless Commies.
Content aside, the problem is that actually teaching has become really difficult these days in schools. With the (non-funded) requirements put on schools by "No Child Left Behind", Bush has recreated nationally the same mess he made as Governor of Texas. Kids aren't being taught in school, they're being made to memorize, and they're trained to take a specific test, which hasn't even been proven a valid metric.
Maybe if the teachers were actually allowed to teach the kids, they could actually engage them appropriately and keep them in school.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Unfortunately there is nothing particularly "current" about that zeitgeist.
It is isn't the schools, it's American culture. The schools reflect the anti-intellectualism of the culture. Our schools suck because parents and communities are willing to blame everything but their own disinterest in education, and therefore do nothing to fix the problem.
Let me start this with a thesis statement: I go to school to learn, not to do work.
The main problem I see these days with the US educational system is the fact that students are graded upon how much work they do, rather than how much they know, or how much effort they put forth to learn.
All too often I've come close to failing in my classes because I didn't do some useless assignment, and yet, still I have a perfect grasp of the concepts that were "taught". That's not right. Theoretically, if I failed, I shouldn't know the material, right? Wrong.
Also, assignments should only be given as necessary. I have one particular math teacher who, even after every person in the class has shown that they get the material, still gives out work on it. If they've shown they can do it, then what's the point in giving out more work, and wasting time that could be spent on teaching the next concept?
Now let me move on to incompetent teachers. Any teacher who needs to rely on a book as a primary source of teaching, need not be teaching. If you can't teach the concept yourself, with minimal help from a book, then you need to go back and learn it some more yourself.
All your reading ability are belong to me.
Every time I see something like this, I get confused as to why people are confused. The public schools are no longer intended to educate. Students are required to be there. Schools are required to take students. In some cases, students that do not want to be there are required to be there, and the school does not want the disruptive student to be there either. If schools were more optional, more open to getting rid of students that don't want to learn, then they could focus on teaching. Instead, they are babysitting unwilling children. The easy fix is get the parents involved. However, the parents don't want that, it's too much work for them. They want the schools to fix the problem they created.
Do I have an easy solution? No. If I were put in charge of everything tomorrow, I'd probably do away with mainstreaming. We have schools for "gifted" students, why not schools to huddle the lower 10% together as well (excluding the truly special needs that are currently separated)? Get the top 10% the education that challenges them, the bell curve of the middle 80% will have them closer to together without the outliers, and the 10% that aren't as motivated or skilled will be put in separate programs designed to try to bring them back from the edge or at least get them ready for a vocation.
Which brings me back to something else that bothers me about the US. What's wrong with a vocation? There seems to be some stigma attached to trying to teach skills in high school, as if college is expected and that skills are taught there. There seems to be a decrease in automotive and shop classes in high schools. And there seems to be a stigma attached to someone that likes working with their hands. I've never understood that, but it is another thing that should change in the US.
Learn to love Alaska
No, they took care of me the next few days. They couldn't do anything to help me though, as to the rest of the story there was nothing to say I didn't start that fight. Think on it, I have many times. Just what exactly would they do? As my Dad says "you can't fight city hall on your word alone".
~R
I know this is the wrong place to get any sympathy, but what the heck, it's only slashdot karma I'll lose. What's wrong with the high schools in the US is they are all too dang liberal. I remember in high school I had one conservative teacher, and he was the band director. Of course no one wants to be in high school! With all the liberal teachers I had, one encouraged students to share their viewpoints, while all the other forced all their dogma and beliefs down our throats at best, and worse case scenario penalized students for having "wrong" beliefs. There was a valedictorian girl at one of the schools in the district that wrote this great paper on the 2nd amendment and the right to bear arms, and the teacher gave her an F, so she played the teachers game and wrote a paper on Hillary Clinton, and ended up with an A. Don't tell me that's not penalizing students with differing beliefs.
The next problem is the teachers are mostly under qualified. Many a days in Pre-Calculus I spent correcting the teacher when she did a problem wrong, or going up to the board and solving the problem when she got so tired of my correcting her all the time. It was a joke! When other students had problems in the class no one dared ask the teacher to try to explain for fear of getting more confused than they already were. And don't even get me started on the A+ Certification course. The official teacher was Mrs. Huerta, but she knew nothing about the material. The above conservative mentioned band director, my friend Chris, and I ended up running that class. Even the Teaching Assistant couldn't grasp most of the concepts in the A+ Certification book we were going through.
Sam
Parents.
Man, a lot of people sure are whining about how the high school machine is interested in cranking out thoughtless droids in order for the corporate system to maintain control over helpless consumers, ruining education by teaching to a narrow test (never mind that the majority of Americans can't keep "your" and "you're" straight), or teaching kids in a way that is not best suited to them, or teaching things that "don't matter in the real world."
These are probably the people dropping out of high school. Grow up, people!
The standardized tests test for perfectly acceptable topics: basic grammar, reading comprehension, and basic math. The majority of the kids dropping out are most likely the ones who cannot accomplish these things. So if you are getting bored in class because the teacher won't teach "outside of the box", take it upon your self to learn these things, but don't quit high school! First of all, if you can afford it, you can simply switch schools. Second of all, even though you might be convinced you are a super genius, people hiring you will be a little less than convinced if you couldn't sit through four years of high school.
If your teachers or administrators are jerks, notify someone. Figure out exactly what they are doing wrong (say, not letting you leave for a medical emergency) and report them to the proper authorities. I truly feel sorry for you if you get a bad teacher that can't teach worth shit, but even if you go to a small school like I did, you'll get a different teacher next year who can explain things to you. Oh, I know, why don't expend some effort and go to a different teacher of that subject for help? When your teachers refuse to help you, provided you are putting forth an effort, go to the principal or the guidance counselor. If you don't like the way the system is being run, there are smarter ways to fix things than quitting high school.
Also, as much as you might put stock in the Great Sheeple Conspiracy, seriously, take off your tin foil hat.
I don't understand why people drop out of high school. It's free (unlike college), and it's only going to take away 1 or 2 years of your life. Even if high school is useless for you, I don't see what plans you could possibly have that would be ruined by your continued attendance in high school. It may suck, but seriously, that diploma is important.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Hello Enoent
/. is a place were most participants can be reasoned with and asked to use reason. I get a bit tired of seeing emotional and non-logical responses to actual problems
To be blunt (but hopefully not offensive) your comment appears to be based on an emotional reaction that is short circuiting your ability to think logically in this area.
Blaming religious beliefs for lack of school participation is a thin argument at best IMHO. Worse it distracts from finding a solution.
I suspect the problems are more likely a set of cultural problems that are being ignored.
Here is a little conjecture:
-If parents were more involved with the education of their children their children would see more success in academic efforts. This success would be more likely to lead to academic interest. (Cultural change: 'the teachers are supposed to teach my kids')
-If high school were designed to give children a boost into the areas of their interest we would see less wasted talent and a higher number of experts coming from our colleges. (Cultural change: 'worked for me')
-If teachers were paid better and given more resources the job of teacher would be more sought after and a higher degree of competent teachers would be the likely result (if at the very least because higher competition would allow administrators more choices therefore weeding out those who are poor teachers). (Cultural change: 'sports stars deserve a 50 million dollar contract teachers should be happy enough just teaching my kids')
-If research into improved teaching methods were well funded and the higher levels of academia were willing to teach the new methods we would see a greater number of kids 'getting it' in a given subject, which would be very likely to heavily cut down on dropouts.(Cultural change: 'it worked for me')
Those are my thoughts based on observation, problem solving and logic.
I would honestly like to hear yours.
(I apologize if the beginning is offensive to you, however I think
Thanks for your understanding.)
Some previous replies have captured many of my thoughts, but I will state them anyway. I believe that the problem is much bigger than the education system itself. It has already been mentioned that parents now expect the teachers to "parent" for them, and this is very close to the truth. I have several family members who are middle and high school teachers and they will tell you that many parents either side with the child in disciplinary situations or else they actually *gasp* ask what they are supposed to do to make Johnny or Jill do homework. (Maybe they should have thought of the answer to this one when making the decision to have children.) The main problem carries well beyond the education system - in my opinion. I have come to the conclusion that the idea of "self esteem" that stemmed from the '90s is the cause of the downward spiral. Real world example: My cousin - who is a middle school math teacher - told a student to stop disrupting other students in class. The student continued disrupting others a few minutes after being told to behave, so my cousin sternly said, ", if you do not stop disrupting the other members of the class, I'm going to have to send you to the office." Later in the day, my cousin was approached by the principal who said, "We've got a problem, showed up at my office and said that he was upset and uncomfortable with being in your class, because you screamed at him and hurt his self esteem." Without ranting about this much longer - after discussing this topic with my cousin, we have come to the conclusion that respect is no longer earned. That is, where in previous days if you wanted to goof a bit in high school, you could work hard, get exceptional grades, be involved, but every once and awhile take a break and do a prank or something and pay small consequences for it. Now, kids believe that they can do whatever the hell they want and the teachers just have to keep trying to work with them because they have fragile self esteem and are "entitled" to respect.
I had no notable injuries from the "fight", so no, those weren't on the chart. You can be hit across the back with a baton and have nothing of value to show for it. Kicking my knee out from behind didn't cause any damage either, at least nothing that was noted by a hospital. Did it hurt? Yea. I fell in the parking lot and got clubbed across the back -- of course it hurt. However, she was obviously well trained, and I have no doubt that her technique was taught to her explicitly so it wouldn't show anything of value if she got in trouble. It probably didn't take a whole lot to subdue me either, as I was already using all of my energy just to stay focused enough to walk.
I look back on that day with the most extreme of hatred. I try and imagine a situation where I had the strength to fight back, could I have defended myself? What if I had brought a gun to school? I would give up every bit of money to a charity for home schooled kids if I could see that rent-a-cop go to jail.
If we can really be honest with ourselves -- I am a product of that prison of a school. Still to this day and probably for the rest of my life, I do not believe that anyone in any position of authority will assist me in any fashion. This may have been an extreme example, but it wasn't isolated. The purpose of high school is to break your spirit and turn you in to a drone who doesn't question authority. No amount of intelligent knowledge or discussion can change the fact that that is how I feel inside now.
~R
Studying at a college campus has yielded some insights. I noticed foreign students breezing through our classes like nothing, and that always amazed me. How can someone with English as their second language do so much better in class than the rest of us? I naively assumed it was because they were the "best and brightest" in their country and were "privileged" enough to come to the US to get a real education. It seems however, that the truth is much simpler and the solution much easier.
These students learned calculus while I was drawing triangles. With a more advanced math background you can go much more in depth with physics, and understand how formulas were created rather than be given a function to plug numbers into. You can understand why taking the derivative equal to zero of a function can yield the maximum of a trajectory, instead of being given a formula to find the apex. After you get through these particularly boring subjects you can have enough math to touch on some basic quantum, just so that you know there is more to physics than pushing blocks around and conserving momentum.
Now of course I'm biased towards physics and math, but even with the other subjects the issues were similar. English seemed more to me like vocabulary memorization and forcing students to read books instead of teaching them how to appreciate the literature. We were given no background on why we would ever want to learn a foreign language, but instead were asked to memorize yet more words. Had I known that learning German would open up doors to engineers and physicists alike I would have been more motivated.
So yes, while the world does need ditch diggers and this work can be rewarding (I worked construction through high school), the world needs competent and innovative scientists and engineers more than anything. The educational system as i've seen it in the US is dry, unchallenging, and unmotivating. Major change needs to be implemented to keep our competitive edge.
The worst part is, at least in my neck of the woods, they provide ridiculous amounts of support to the "special-needs" children, but have absolutely nothing in place for "gifted" or above-average kids. I thought maybe things had improved since I went through school, but some recent localevents have proven me sadly mistaken.
Don't get me wrong, I feel for the special-needs kids who require the extra attention, but the burden they pose on the educational system cannot be overlooked.
Oh, and I may be in a minority here as well, but back in high school, my school spent more money on our athletic teams (uniforms, coaches, facilities, etc.) than they spent on any kind of specialized education materials or programs. When it comes to education, they want all kids to be "equal" so that no one's self esteem is hurt, but god forbid they apply that same criteria to their precious sports teams.
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
Meanwhile the teachers have been 'educated' by the same system. They care nothing about teaching the students but if, God forbid, one of your actions should appear (in their fantasy world) to be an infringement of their constitutional rights, they'll scream like hell about it. The teachers of course think nothing of dressing like hookers and wearing T-shirts with obscenities emblazoned across them. (Of course not, they work for a government establishment and so their freedom of speech can't be restrained.)
Every morning the students all chant the Pledge of Allegiance. And periodically through the day they're encouraged to chant bizarre things like "I must express who I really am", "I have the right to be whoever I want" or some such American-style psychobabble. You probably think I'm making things up at this point. Maybe my wife is making this stuff up when she comes home from work, but I doubt it. This is what it means to be educated in California.
I also do voluntary work with kids in the area, trying to encourage an interest in science. The sad thing is that there are plenty of younger kids who have great potential. But so many of these kids have next to no chance of going anywhere with that potential.
Of course not all of California is like this. I live near an enclave of rich white-skinned people whose education district seceded from the surrounding city. House prices are through the roof there because apparently you can learn things in the few schools they have.
Still, a lot could have happened in the last ten years. Maybe it's like this in Britain now.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Crap. Utter crap. Learning, Self-esteem, respect, etc, all start at home. If the parents were parenting we wouldn't be having the problems we are today.
I didn't act up at school because I knew what would happen when I got home. I didn't want to disappoint my parents, and I also knew there would be consequences for my actions. The parenting I had dictated my actions at school. If parents did real parenting, rather than leave it to the schools, you wouldn't see these problems.
Well, if we could enforce the laws on the books, to where if you cannot prove you are a US citzen or here on a work visa...that would disqualify all the illegals taking the labor jobs, they wouldn't be pouring over into our country, and the locals that didn't want an education could make a living as they did in the past.
Not a good one, but, they could do it like the ones in the past did.
Of course, I don't expect the Dem.s in power now to have any more backbone on this issue than the Reps. did....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I, for one, agree with you. I think that our society could get its head out of its ass if we actually used the painfully acquired knowelwdge the Human Race has battled the ages for.
But no, lets throw away thousands of years of effort of the people who lived before us, who fought the ignorant masses of their day, to give us our relatively modern understanding of the world. Lets take their sacrifices and dreams of an utopian society, and smash them with our high school football team's budget.
---FourChannel---
Think about the quality of work a volunteer effort produces compared to that where the workers were enslaved into doing it. Do you think the quality, not productivity, of one is most likely better than the other?
This is why supporting the athletic teams because they make money is a bad approach in my mind - it is an efficient improvement, but entirely in the wrong direction.
---FourChannel---
One on one instruction? Heh. My mother has said that the one thing she really wishes she could have done with my education was tutoring from people who could keep up with me.
Before school, I was hot for Weird Math - I ate up all the Martin Garnder "Mathematical Recreations" collections I could find, loved playing with all the concepts. Then I went to school. My main memory of math in school is sitting out in the hall in third or fourth grade with an exercise book of dull, dull fraction drill stuff I'd gotten the hang of forever, because I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and disruptive due to being BORED BORED BORED.
I barely know a damn thing about math nowadays. By the time anything even remotely interesting got introduced I'd completely lost interest.
Some years later when the boring, slow, dull math concept of the moment was square roots and the immensely tedious process of calculating them by hand, I was so bored I just plain refused to bother with them. We got a friend in the neighborhood - a structural engineer of some kind, IIRC - to give me some idea of when they might be used, and show me how to do them, including faster ways than the show-every-boring-bit-of-work methods the school textbook had.
I would like to say I still remember how to do them, but, well, I've really never needed to do one by hand since.
Smart kids need one-on-one education as much as any other "special needs" class. They just need a really different kind - one that can keep them INTERESTED, one that can call in esoteric specialists to help them pick up whatever path they become fascinated with, and can use this to slide in other curriculum elements outside of their speciality...
egypt urnash minimal art.
All of this is caused by one thing. Private school students come from families who have committed to paying the tuition. They value the child's education. Public schools have to take everyone. A noted educator in the inner city once said that if he could expell just 50 students from his high school of thousands, he could have changed the entire dynamic of the school. Private schools get to do this - and they also don't have to because the students he was talking about don't ever come to private school. Plus, they don't have to take retards.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
. What I learned was true americans did not want the jobs, heck even I hated mine at the time. Another truth is many of the american employees were lazy, unproductive, had low self esteem and took little pride in their work.
That's because you paid them $6 an hour, in a job that has essentially no benefits and is only full time if they're willing to put everything else off and make that half-assed job a career.
There are fast food joints around here that have terrible service, and those that have great service. The ones that have great service aren't populated with spanish-speaking migrants (yes, we get illegals even in Upstate NY), they're staffed with English Speakers who are paid enough to make the job worth their while.
In fact, the fast-food place that's best known for its service is also the one that's best known for employee benefits. And the ones that can be ran by "managers" who hate their jobs are the ones with the worst customer service.
I think we see things like this because we are getting the cream of the crop. Whatever your opinion on immigration it's hard to argue that it doesn't take guts, determination and intelligence to cross the border and survive as an illegal. The problems with gangs seems to be a 2nd generation problem, doing too good of a job assimilating into our blighted urban centers. I think the big part of the problem is as you said, self-esteem. The kids that got stuck making $6/hr at mcdonalds have already been beaten down and don't see themselves ever making something out of themselves. Sure they need to buck up and develop a work ethic, but when many of them go to schools that look like The IT Crowd's dungeon it's hard for me not to feel a little sorry for them. Hell, they get shitty teachers that don't expect shit from them(1 or 2 can undo the work of legions of sincere ones), a shitty infrastructure, a couple shitty classmates looking to get out through the thuglife threatening them, a shitty family life (even the best parents aren't around because they're working three shitty jobs) and naturally you got kids thinking they're shitty. Maybe the top 5% of the class will get scholarships and the rest think they got a lifetime of burger flipping and toilet cleaning ahead of them. And you don't need a diploma for that. If I was in their position, and didn't grow up with a stay at home mom, a father that was home by 6 to read to me, consistently well funded schools and skilled teachers, I'm not sure I would have made it. Yes many of our high schools are screwed, but it's mostly the shit that happens outside of them that makes them hell.
Basically, you guys should get out more. It's a huge and interesting world out here, much more so than many imagine.
You're (on average) rich, you can afford to. My personal opinion is that there's few things more worthwhile to do with your money than experiencing the incredible variation that this world has to offer.
Somehow I don't think that the big companies employ them because they enjoy their poor graps of english... they employ them because illegal immigrants are willing to be paid less for the same effort - this is how capitalism works. If you went up to wal-mart and offered to work for $0.50/hour then they would hire you over any illegal immigrant - it's not that immigrants are "taking" jobs, it's that they are undercutting their prices (wages). Yes, they should seek to come to America legally, but its unlikely they were given the opportunity to - it was just luck that they were born a few (hundred/thousand) miles south of you.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
One thing that I think has a strong effect is that American culture is more 'anti-intellectual' than some other countries. In other words there is less respect given to intellectual activities, (in school and out). So, at school, kids will get little or no respect for doing well at their subjects, (being cool, being good at sports counts for more), out of school the 'clever' solution is not wanted, ('keep it simple', make it strong, tough and reliable, etc). This is obviously not a 100% correlation as I'm sure that some readers will feel that they know schools which are the opposite. However it does explain some odd things which are different between US and say, European culture. Some examples might be cars - where would a high revving V10 or V12 engine be developed - Europe. Where would a four-wheel drive electronically controlled transmission be developed - Japan. Where would a rugged off roader be developed - US. In US films, the baddy is clever and the simple 'normal guy' hero has to defeat his cleverness. In a European-style film, say James Bond, the hero is clever, the villians often stupid. French TV routinely has debates about philosophy. Ask a frenchman/woman who their favourite philosopher is - they'll probably have one and be able to debate merits of others. The US has shows which concentrate on the lesson that strength/beauty are the most important attributes. And lastly - schools are seen as less relevant. Cleverness, education is seen as necessary to get a job, not a character strength. Even the clever things people do, ("I built a nuclear reactor at home") tend to be be home made, single person activities. NASA, JPL, Caltech etc are the very examples of corporate 'cleverness' and they are taken as SOOO hard that nomal people need not apply, ("This is easy, it's not rocket science"). And don't get me started on George Bush. So to get kids to study you have to give them something out of it tht they will want, rather than being declared a "Nerd"
Unicorn Setu. "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines".