Comment by mrguyorama
16 hours ago
Just because we sit them in front of textbooks and lectures for 8 hours a day for 12 years (plenty of kids drop out of highschool or take fairly nonstandard "get to work" programs that de-emphasize education.) doesn't mean they learn anything.
Plenty of kids sat next to me in precalc learning how to calculate mortgage rates and then complain that school doesn't teach useful skills like how to calculate a mortgage. At the end of the day, learning cannot be forced. You can put all the info in front of the person you want, they can just ignore it.
This is especially true after Bush Jr. made it impossible to hold kids back, which was the primary way we worked around a stubborn kid.
We are roughly one generation after No Child Left Behind, and a lot of kids have been educationally left behind. IMO this is not coincidence. Good teachers knew right away the negative effects that program caused.
Obama reformed NCLB a bit, but did not fix the part that incentivizes schools to prefer just pushing kids forward if they are struggling.
To be fair, even though I never had trouble in school and was generally a good student, I had a very poor and surface level understanding of fascism (what it is, what causes it) until I actually decided to learn about it a few years ago. I wonder how much of it is simply due to public education's incompetency (I live outside the US) or because of a willfulness to not engage with the root causes of fascism (material conditions, etc.) from fear of repercussions by the right-wing.