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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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OP and you lot in the comments are a very functional section within the spectrum. Unfortunately, you need severe autism or moderate with a comorbidity to attract funding.
Because our interests don't perfectly align with what they want us to learn. My main special interest when I was 20 or so what audio technology, I was lucky enough to get to go to an audio engineering trade school and for the first time ever, in my entire life I became a 4.0 GPA student. Meanwhile, the class of 12 that started with me dropped to a class of 6 within weeks and I saw multiple other students struggling and failing at the same exact classes. The same person who was barely passing most classes in high school was now helping formerly 4.0 GPA students with THEIR homework.
Fast forward to today and now I'm struggling to find work. The world is not designed for the smart to be successful, it's designed to turn the hard working into servants and the rest of us into examples.
I think schools should give more control to the students about what and how they want to learn, I always hated it that they forced me to learn things I am not interested in and will probably never use in my life
All of this resonates with me.
In addition, I had good professors overall who inspired and helped me wayyyyyyyy more than HS teachers.
Mixing that in with me knowing that I should study and actually doing it helped too lol
has less to do with schools and more to do with a society that glorifies credentials and extracurriculars within a rigid framework of acceptability.
if these positions were gained by aptitude tests you'd see a completely different makeup of society-- way less nepo-babies and more working class.
the intent is to exclude. why do you need a college degree to push paper in your local state office?
I hated math when I was a kid. I was terrible at it. Never could knock out math problems in my head like every math teacher ever assured me I should be able to.
I'm a drafter now. Math isn't hard, self-important math teachers in my past made it much more complicated than it needed to be, and then told me I wouldn't ever be able to do anything because I couldn't do math.
I design buildings now.
It's because we have to slow down so all the other morons can keep up, it's the same way with the whole world, the lowest common denominator sets the pace, meanwhile people who are intelligent and intuitive get bored and wander off
Yeah. I had one teacher in an advanced math class say that you have to treat "gifted" students as a form of special education because traditional educational techniques don't work on them. The reason why a lot of schools don't do this is because a poorly performing "gifted" student will generally meet minimum education standards even if they are performing well below their potential.
It does take a lot more work to keep an intelligent person engaged than a less intelligent one, I mean look at the current state of television and movies for that. I suppose if they are teaching by metrics it doesn't matter since that student will pass their metrics anyways. I really don't think this AI push is going to help our one size fits all education, as those things are literally fed a diet of neurotypical training
I was a mediocre student until 3rd and 4th year undergrad and the one semester of grad school I did. I responded so much better to the freedom to solve problems using the basic engineering principles instead of being tested on those principles without the context.
I know some people are going to read this as "it's not important to learn them when you can just look them up" but that's not what I mean. I agree it's important to know the basics well without having to consult with references. Over time they become second nature. But I'm going to struggle with repeating the basics back to you when they are abstract and when grading depends on my ability to do arithmetic under test conditions or remember the unit circle/special triangles because we are not allowed to use calculators.
I will never not be salty about this unit circle thing. I thought I hated math because I could not memorize this:
Turns out my brain doesn't hold numbers well and I'm actually a wizard at process modeling.
I've always loved math and sciences and could plug and chug numbers into formulae all day, but I would often feel frustrated because though I knew the formulae worked, rote calculations wasn't rewarding if I didn't know why they worked. The greatest feeling was when the connection between theory and practice would finally click. The dopamine dump would make my day, and made doing the math fun again.
Sometimes I wish I could go back and finish my degree, but I chose to ~~drop out~~ put it on hold because I couldn't reconcile going >$120k in debt for a masters degree that could not guarantee me a career that paid well enough to take care of that debt without making the rest of life feel terrible.
Solitarily with the I-couldn't-afford-grad-school lol. I knew I could not afford to go to grad school full time but I didn't realize part time enrolment meant I had to pay back my undergrad loans and I couldn't pay my loans with work that was flexible enough to let me attend class. Womp womp.
Super relatable. I have a total memory hole in my mind about what was "taught" of trigonometry back in my high school years. I know it was part of some of the math classes, but it was one of the many things I completely dismissed for being "useless" since it was 100% abstract.
Fast forward some 13 years and I see a video explaining how 3D graphics work. Lo and behold, it's trigonometry from top to bottom! Plus, when computers were much weaker, the trick was to use lookup tables with the 360 values of sin and cosin instead of calculating in real time, which is what John Carmack did in Doom.
I won't say I'd have remembered the classes better if the teachers had showed at least one fucking real life use (like measuring tall buildings based on their shadow or trying to guess a star's distance), or if any of them knew how it could apply to programming polygons, but being aware of "real world use" helps me a lot in not completely dismissing certain things.
I was put in geometry instead of trig and then I was throwing into calculus and physics. I never caught up with the sin and cos and radians and all that shit.
Personal anecdote time: for some reason in high school math I worked out that I could get the grades I needed for university admissions if I ignored the trig section and focused on getting the rest right.
It worked for the immediate goal but did not serve me well in the long term lol.
That was the Microsoft Upgrade Path for me on the A+ exam. I always thought I'd learn everything I possibly could, but knowing which editions of Windows upgraded to which was just such a huge time investment for a) something that would be at most a few points on the exam and b) trivial to look up.
But, yeah, you boned yourself there.
List all the commonly used ports
/s
My problem was that everything seemed to be taught so abstract. Give me a math formula to memorize and don't explain why it's useful? It makes no sense to me. Explain how and why it's used, ok! I have context, I can begin to understand this now.
I thought I was just bad at math for most of my life. Turns out, I'm actually quite good at it once I understand how it actually fits into the real world.
Yeah I was very good at SOME math. Turns out having you dad drag you out to the garage to explain angles and geometry to you using a racecar is very helpful if you're into that sort of thing lol
"Autistic kids love learning, but they do it in a different way and that must be punished accordingly."
- The education system
When a child does not want to learn, You just have to force them to learn. But when a child is curious and wants to learn? That makes things harder, because now you first have to root said curiosity out of them before you can start coercing them into learning.
There's a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren't interesting to them.
This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It's also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.
I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren't interesting to them.
This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education
That desire is immediately dumb for reasons that any sociologist, psychologist and pedagogue can explain in much greater detail than I can, but it boils down to "people are different and even if you force them to be uniform, they'll remain different".
Sure, it's great for standardization and economics, but awful for humans.
More than once I was reprimanded in school for reading a book. You're learning wrong thing at the wrong time, you bad child!
You be surprised how many adults have 0 curiosity about the world.
What is labelled as education today is functionally employment indoctrination. Creating subservient and compliant vassal automatons is the goal.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
Is this like how I got poor marks in Trigonometry because the teacher hated that I was not showing any work even though I am amazing at math and its always easy mode and why would I waste time writing 5 steps with 1 step will do?
Infodumping is common Autistic Friendship Language. I'm pretty sure most people here have a subject they're just itching to infodump about. Imo, schools failing to account for that are a failure of education as a system, not of people with autism.
Not only schools, normies can also very clearly show something akin to disgust to being infodumped. I recall getting excited and doing one such about how the Islamic conquest in the 7th century reached the Iberian peninsula, how that led to the Reconquista and stopped around there when I realized the folks listening to me really wanted me to stfu. Their faces were an... "educated" mix of confusion and "please stop".
I love listening to flamenco because the North Africa is still in it. It's so beautiful to hear the echoes of something that happened a thousand years ago.
I also think it's cool that the Vikings left such an impact on English culture we're still singing songs about them.
We can from the land of the ice and snow...
Would anybody like a selection of Doctor Who facts by any chance
It's not that schools hate autistic people.
It's that society hates everyone who doesn't conform to the strict and narrow set of behaviours that define 'normal'.
I agree. Also we don't want to fund education. Hell half the U.S. voters voted to dismantle the department of education which helps fund schools that I'm sure the majority of Americans believe already don't pay teachers/faculty enough. Roughly 6% of public school funds came from the DOE. So inflation is up, funding down and people are going to complain when their states/counties try to implement taxes to offset the losses because they will need to cover the costs for schools.
Remember all the Republicans demanding higher taxes? I don't .. there just was no foresight in anything that was voted for.
Anyways. My original point was supposed to be that if funds are minimal, streamlined cheapest churn out education is all schools will be able to afford. Having extra time, varied curriculums that work for various groups of students just isn't going to happen without more faculty/staff/effort
Schools were never meant to be places to learn. They were primarily for the working class to learn obedience and deference for their betters, so that they might make better factory workers. They were only meant to provide just enough education for the working class to understand instructions that they were given.
According to CGP Grey, schools are basically daycare with an intense obsession with a game of Trivia
And if you're not that good at it they get really hostile to you and start making threats of ruining your future. This is probably a distraction mechanism so you're too busy trying to memorize some book to do anything useful
I'm probably AuDHD. My opinion written before I knew:
The popular Prussian education system was originally designed to stub children to submissive, obedient underlings for the owning class and productive livestock for the economy.
Most schools have never questioned the default Prussian paradigm. Why would they have - it’s been a numbing success: stratifying homogenized people into a comfortable pyramid structure has stabilized society, made top-down control easier, wasted immense human potential, damaged humanity’s natural antifragility, impaired our capacity to solve unforeseen complex problems, risking the whole planet’s life. No pain living inside the pyramid, so no problem, no change.
Only if we cared for everyone’s future more than for our present comfort, should we design a different curriculum to create a better society; less like a breakable machine, more like a resilient organism, emerged from unstubbed people free to pursue what’s important to them.
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