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The thing is, there is no national education system. Each state does their own thing, and even within a single state there is a huge variance based on socio-economic level.
There are excellent schools and there are awful schools all over. There is no one standard.
Kind of...
92% of American k-12 use the same textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, and they've always played to the lowest common denominator. Which is often Texas.
If Texas says they won't buy a history/science/whatever textbook that says _____ then the rest of the 92% who learned from McGraw-Hill books also never learned it from their textbooks.
With the rise of standardized testing, nothing is taught except what's on the text. If a student gets that done they're "done" and the focus is on the kids who can't pass it yet.
Shits fucked and it's 100% an institutional problem.
And that's not even getting into how involved Ghislene Maxwell's dad was with it in the 80s, and his connection to all the spy work and child rape during the same time.
To think people haven't been manipulating the American education system to get the result (idiots) that they want for generations would be woefully naive.
It's not about teaching kids to think, it's teaching them not to question authority.
That doesn't mean we stop educating, it means we start actually educating instead of indoctrinating.
Quick edit:
This is why things like:
Is ingrained in multiple US generations.
It was in all the same textbooks, all the same homework, all the same quizs, and tests, even the annual standardized tests.
We all got the same information presented in the same way with the same context/interpretations and exact phrasing.
The American education is incredibly homogeneous, even if states could technically do different things.
The real difference is private schools who usually make up the 8% not being served up the same slop.
Only in things that are objective, like 2+2=4, or CAT spells cat. That's going to be same in every school.
Things start to get different when you get to subjects with a subjective perspective like history. Then we end up with 50 different curriculums, being taught from a substandard Texas history book. So teachers in some states like to "supplement" their personal course curriculum with their personal research, and we end up with 150 years of many kids being taught that the Civil War was a war of northern aggression who wanted to take away States Rights, and Slavery had nothing to do with it, blunting the effects of the Civil War, and preserving that same systemic racism that has finally broken free and is rampaging across our nation.
You had me until you got to a private school, which is largely affiliated with a religion. Those cess pools preach mumbo jumbo to impressionable minds and pretend it's factual.
Me:
You:
Strong argument for public education...
I like to think I got the benefit of said private school, while thankfully the religion didn't stick past the age of forming critical thinking skills.
Further helped that I pursued a degree in science afterwards.
I did have a number of instances throughout my college career where I realized how many others, likely from public schools previously, struggled in classes that I saw as review from high school, so I'm also thankful for the quality of education it provided. It also gave me more perspective on christianity having read a decent chunk of the Bible over those k-12 years.. More well rounded perspective is never a bad thing. Now I'm just better equipped to recognize the bullshit.
I don't take exception to learning about religions and their histories. I took an Eastern religion class in college and quite enjoyed it. The difference is that it wasn't presented as factual but as an explanation for cultural and societal behaviors.
I mean teachers can always print their own worksheets or like make slides... you can deviate from textbooks...
I don't know how other school systems did things, but for me not every class every year was 100% straight out of the textbooks. Some certainly were, usually math subjects or science could be.
It's anecdotal but I often find the "why weren't we taught x" type of statements, I remember learning whatever thing in school. I know people will forget stuff and just say they never learned it (I mean, kids do that all the time IN school let alone a decade later) but there's got to be bigger differences than just public vs private. (I was public)
I don't know what though.
You may have been lucky enough to learn a few things not from the text or on a standardized test...
But the kids who do, what they learn isn't always right, and when it is, no one else believes them.
Example:
The civil war was about states rights.
Most kids who learn that, learn it as the South was fighting for states rights.
A very very small subset learn that it was the North on the side of states rights, because the South wanted to force northern free states to deport all Black citizens to the South so they could be enslaved.
The northern states refused because they had outlawed slavery.
The southern states wanted Lincoln to do it with the Fed.
Lincoln said he would try to outlaw it in the South, or force Free states to comply.
And that refusal is why the South started the war.
But even when it type the whole thing out, someone will eventually chime in to say "it was slavery" which is reductionist and 200+ year old propaganda that still makes it into our text books to frame the Fed and North as the aggressors. When the South started it to force slavery on the whole country.
Just like trump is using ICE in blue states, we literally fought and won a civil war over if he could be doing this
And the excellent school and awful school can only be a few miles apart.
Our schools are funded via local taxes overwhelmingly, so the wealth of your town is the biggest determiner of how good your school system is. States governments are supposed to make up this difference and give more money to poorer schools, but it has a limited affect.
The feedback loops that local funding creates are vicious too:
desirable neighborhood -> higher prices -> more taxes -> better funded school -> desirable neighborhood (for families)
undesirable neighborhood -> low prices and no population increase -> worse funded school -> undesirable for families
As you said, next to one another. By sheer luck I happened to live in an apartment building that somehow belonged to a rich school district. Next building over was in the poor school district.
I dunno, that idea you just posted sure sounds like Sociology to me…which is now banned in Florida.
Yeah, there is a 'loop' in that some people live in cheaper areas, but send their children to private schools.
But the 'tax' on really good pubic schools commands such a premier, that often it is more expensive to send your kids to a really god public school than it is to a private one. The top 10 districts in my state all have home values that are over a million dollars, but all those schools are better than most private schools.
Then you have parents that have a million in assets but refuse to spend money so their kids can go to private school...
Private school is not automatically better. I live in a million dollar house and very much intend to use the public school district here.
I mean when your public school's rating is 1/10, anything else is surely gonna a lot better.
Funny thing is: In China, the "private" school I went to was actually worse (according to mom)... its made for migrant parents whose kids did not have a Hukou where the parents worked (in cities, parents are from rural areas where there were no jobs) and since the parents want to keep their kids close to them so these "private" schools were the only options since public school didn't allow them without a local hukou.
(Cuz the other option would be to leave their kida behind with grandparents so they can go to school where their Hukou is registered... which means kids arent gonna be able to see parents for a long time... which is very sad...)
Also the house is not a million dollars, its barely like 100k, taxes are low, I'm saying they have like 1 mil in like... small bussiness investments that turns 100k profits every year...
I could've been spared the fears of getting into a fight every day...
And I did end up getting into a fight...
And I ended up just using a public defender lol...
Cuz "it's just a highschool fight, not that serious, you don't need a private defence attorney for it"
I mean sure... I had derivative citizenship from mon's naturalization so its not like they could deport me...
So I just... I felt like a burden... since I got mom having to run around to talk to the school then pick me up from the local police station... so I felt like I cause her too much trouble and didn't feel like I needed a private defence attorney...
Ended up with charges dismissed anyways...
But had I been a non citizen, I'd probably have insisted in a private defence attorney to make sure the record is as clean as possible... I mean imagine getting deported over a highschool fight when you acted in self defence lmfao...
I feel like my mom had an OBSESSION with money... like numbers go up = happiness...
The house I live in still has a lot of broken stuff...
Like... this is the OceanGate type of shit with Video Game Controllers as controls... that type of shit...
That's how they live life... like they're in the Titan Submarine... lmfao...
(Sorry if I'm rambling, I do that a lot...)
In the Des Moines area all the difference schools share the same funding. Some schools are still vastly better than others.
As I've said before the largest factor seems to be parents that don't value education teach their kids to not learn much in school.
the largest factor is how rich your parents are. parental income overwhelmingly predicts student outcome, like 90% of it.
Only about 10 percent of students are gifted or ungifted enough to significantly over or under perform the baseline their parental income establishes
That doesn't establish a cause though. well off parents teach their kids to value education.
No, they pay the schools to do that for them.