For the past fifty years, the public schools have been all about educating serfs, not a free people.
It has also been about "free" babysitting, propaganda dissemination and groupthink, the establishment of a well-paid and militant voting bloc, a perpetual straw man to cudgel the electorate, establishing a perpetually - and endlessly - funded government bureaucracy/hierarchy, and the enrichment of those who provide goods and services to public schools (think "educational/corporate complex").
The one thing it is not about is educating the children of a free people; should that occur, it is a bug, not a feature.
“For the past fifty years, the public schools have been all about educating serfs, not a free people.”
If public schools were about education, people would be able to start working/pursuing a career/starting a business around age 20 at the absolute latest.
I wish they’d start overhauling schools by gutting English classes. They’re a waste of time for many kids. There are a myriad of ways to teach reading and writing ... it is ridiculous to base those skills analyzing works that some idiot liberal with power deemed “required reading”.
I cannot stand reading fiction. I do enjoy reading most non-fiction that interests me. I remember being thrown out of an “Advanced” English class for calling “The Grapes of Wrath” “Welfare Wagons West”. I thought it was funny then :-) ... these days, I look at myself as a bored kid that shouldn’t have been in that class. The people that enjoyed that book and like to discuss literature were disrupted by my antics :-). Moreover, the teacher shouldn’t have to try and force a kid to read something they literally have ZERO interest in reading!
That was the late 80s/early 90s. After I saw what my stepson went through, I can conclude that it has only gotten worse. It seems our overlords’ solution was to preserve the existing institution, but dumbed down the curriculum. Madness!
Our schools need to quit trying to shovel everyone into some college and find ways to play to student’s strengths. This is where vouchers could come into play. I would have been in heaven if I could have gone to a private school that was heavier into math, science, and computer programming while fulfilling reading/writing requirements using topics from those subjects.
Conversely, those students that are into more of a traditional liberal arts kind of education shouldn’t have to be subjected to the stuff I love :-). There are always some that can excel at everything ... they’re rare, but our schools are set up to cater to them while virtually shoving the rest of the kids through their institution. My graduating class had a valedictorian that was accepted to a very competitive school on scholarship ... they bragged about that ... what they didn’t brag about were the 30% of the students that were basically pushed through with no idea on how to do anything.
Finally, they need to stop making trades seem like death sentences. It’s disgusting. My brother is a plumber. When he was going for his master plumber certification, he called me up in a panic asking what sine and cosine were :-) ... I showed him the basics of trigonometry and how it applies to the questions they were asking. He picked it up in no time since he could relate to the situation and understood what those functions were doing. Our public schools had him written off as “worthless” when all he needed was a different way of looking at math. There are ways to satisfy high school requirements using a trade as a means of learning.
Finally, our public schools feel that kids have to learn math as if they were all going to be mathematicians. What’s really needed are ways to teach math as it is applied in the real world for those that aren’t going through a collegiate curriculum. Sadly, they’ve pretty much ditched “applied math” and just throw kids that struggle into remedial programs that are basically a big waste of time.
Sorry for ranting & rambling incoherently about this ... I get so pissed off thinking about so much wasted time back then :-). While I certainly blame myself for a lot of it, I can see where the school system failed miserably due to a lot of bureaucratic nonsense.