If schools were bad, but modern society can't function without them, which would you pick? If you say it can't function without them, then are they good regardless because you want it to continue to function?
Like, no matter how bad they are? Or do you draw some line or another? "It's ok if they make kids dumb and compulsive consumers, but they can't go torturing them!"
Asking questions like this seems to be more about dogma and status quo than anything else.
Even regardless of collapse, I still much prefer living (and having gone to school) in a country that has schools. At no point did it seem to me what the point of school is to make people dumb. That wasn't the US and wherever yours was, your experience may be different, but I really don't understand the level of cynicism triggered here by every discussion involving schools. Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty and I'm rather sure the vast majority of children much prefer school to hard work in the fields. I also think it's pretty clear thay on the scale of centuries schools around the world have improved tremendously. On the scale of decades and centuries, physical violence and bullying has decreased a lot, both by teachers and children, while creativity and understanding play a more important role in lessons today than was ever the case in compulsory education systems.
Sure. And if schools had anything to do with education, maybe they could do that here too. But you're also commenting in a thread where there is a link to credible (uncontested, uncontroversially attested) reports that the schools are shutting down education. Purportedly to help make everyone equal.
It's arguable what the cause of this is, the reasoning behind the decisions, etc. But that's what it says. They've started teaching less math. Not teaching it differently. Not teaching it at a different age. They just don't.
It would almost be a relief if you were to dispute the reports themselves, and claimed it was some weird conspiracy theory. This would be more compatible with the attitude that you're expressing.
In the US, schools and education started with little overlap, and have less year to year.
To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no schools had existed.
Yes, maybe the stated reasons for trying this reform were stupid and maybe it should have been obvious to people it wouldn't work. But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else. That can go a very long way given some time. And yes, that leaves us with an imperfect school system. Very different from arguing against having schools at all, a position far more outrageous to my mind than any "woke nonsense" I've been subjected to so far.
And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments.
> and how much better they think they could organize the school system
No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform, beyond fixing. It is an intractable problem. Well, if you assume that its purpose is education.
If we examine its true, unspoken purpose, it is working far better than it ever has, and improves year to year. It is a mechanism for the government to raise children from the earliest age on up through adulthood, with parents have as little influence on that process as can be cheaply afforded.
My wife and I homeschool.
> But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else.
No, they're willing to tone things down to avoid any PR backlash, and try again later when maybe those concerned are less attentive. All they have to do is be willing to try as many times as it takes, until they get lucky with the news cycle or the like.
I mean, from your perspective... why would they care if it didn't work? Do you imagine that the government (or any of its agencies or subdivisions as the case may be) loves these children? That it would grieve if a few thousand of them were permanently undereducated or miseducated by this? Would this committee cry itself to sleep every night regretting what it did wrong?
If it can't do these things, if it can't have regret or remorse of some sort when it does bad things, how can you imagine that it would ever stop doing bad things when those bad things cause it no inconvenience or problem?
>a position far more outrageous to my mind
I'd never say that about anything. There's nothing that I hold so sacred that I'd say "it's just outrageous that you want to get rid of X" or "are you mad that you'd say we should have Y?"
For me, I'd make good arguments outlining why there should be X, or that there should be a Y. And if you failed to agree, I'd try to understand what logic (or failure thereof) caused you remain unpersuaded.
When someone says something like this phrase though, all I can figure is that the status quo is important to them for irrational reasons. I've yet to hear a better hypothesis.
> Would this committee cry itself to sleep
It's possible to have working political systems achieving meaningful goals without anyone involved having to cry themselves to sleep. There's a lot of people who care about improving things (including those who implemented these policies). They really think they can make education better and they're really trying. Now, there will be disagreement about what the goals are and how to achieve any given goal. Over time, a democracy is very good at distilling these disagreements into policies that almost always aren't terrible (as opposed to "occasionally excellent" or something like that). The best way to get what you want is to take part in that process. I'm pretty sure trying to pretend "there's no such thing as society" and that you're living in an anarchy bites you in the back eventually (not that I think you're doing that).
> I'd never say [outrageous]
Maybe that word means something else to you than to me (I learned English in school). I would call a large part of this discussion and these comments here "public outrage". There is public outrage about a reform that made a few schools worse. The outrage lead to a change of policy. This is good and how a democratic process generally works. I also see "outrageous" as a spectrum, where you can of course discuss outrageous things but extraordinary claims (or proposals) require extraordinary evidence (or arguments). Arguing against schools is such an instance in my mind, comparable to arguing against medicine or rule if law (I assume at the very least 98% of people in my country would agree).
I'm aware of US education systems being called broken a lot. We call ours broken too but that only drives efforts to improve it, not giving up. My outside perspective is that the system you have is certainly preferable to no schools at all, that it's definitely possible to improve it, and that it will improve (over decades to centuries) assuming human civilization doesn't (partially) collapse.
What percentage of children are capable of learning "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What is the distribution of ideal ages for children to learn "the math" in practical conditions and circumstances?
What happens when those ages (for most) don't line up with the various social factors that will contrive to make certain they permanently lose the opportunity to learn "the math"?
Should my children have to wait years to learn it because your children aren't ready yet but the education system can't afford to teach it twice to two separate smaller groups? What if that means pushing it to the point where my children would age out of the education system, and they never get to learn it, even if they'll be better at it then yours will be?
The education system is wrong. You get that right. But what you fail to see is that it can't ever be made non-wrong. What you want out of it isn't the same thing I want out of it. Or that the other guy wants out of it. If we look at how the education system functions, it only ever had political goals. Those have shifted over the years as various factions found new uses for it. At first it was just a jobs program of sorts. And maybe a little ethnic homogenization program. Little snippets of cultural genocide here and there in problematic geographic regions. Then it became a unionized voting bloc. And now it's just a treadmill to keep children busy and stupid so they don't ever quite figure out what was done to them. It's government-funded daycare in an economy that increasingly can never afford for even one parent to be home during the day in the early developmental years.
And it has done all those things remarkably well, and reasonably cheap too. What's broken that you really need to fix? Sure, I'm a little sarcastic there... but why can't you see that this system doesn't have any mechanism that will allow for non-superficial reform? Those with the power to do that don't use the public education system anyway.