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Sunday, August 25, 2013

Back to school

Yup! It’s time to get ready for school, even if it’s bad news for my teenage son also on my wallet. Just like every year, we start with a lot of new things. No exception this year.

The Hungarian education system is the same as every other ex-communism countries. A well-known Prussian education system that has been slowly changing to western style system. Well, we  are not quite there yet, but as I see my son’s education at least it looks promising – foreign languages for instance, German and English are the most commonly thought, but you can find schools which are also teaching French and Spanish. Today our schools require at least one foreign language otherwise you have no chance to get to a collage. In my days we were forced to learn Russian and guess what? It's also becoming trendy again.

Talking about new and trendy  - IT became essential, a subject of its own at schools.

But what school can teach a 13 years old boy anything they don’t already know? - Because he’s already an extensive computer user - as  I’m thinking about the enormous amount of time he spends on Facebook or Minecraft, etc it's amazing- I find whenever I try to help him out on the computer it turns out I need the help and not him. So the more he uses it the better expert he becomes... I guess. Does the skills he is learning require some basic programming skills? or it’s simply an ongoing self-development?
Is it possible that he has learned computer languages already? Does the computer have its own language in the first place? Some guys think computers do have languages, because if you don’t give the right command it won’t understand you. And you must communicate with it, right? does that meet the foundation of a language? Wikipedia definition of a language would agree!

Of course there are two sides of the coins. If schools want to give some space and time for the increasing IT subjects something has to be reduced, as well. This case Hungarian grammar becomes the loser.

I just wonder how my boy is going to write an official letter. Abbreviations and emoticons :) ?



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