Public school is a prison where both parents can abandon their children to be raised by strangers while the parents chase what they really love: money. We make ourselves feel better by teaching them a few worthwhile things during their minimum 13 years in lockdown, coupled with a massive public jobs program, but most of it is a waste of precious family time where parents should be teaching and loving their own children.
This is a good example of a phenomenon I see where this site in particular often seems to have an antipathy towards “public school” that’s wildly foreign to me, as someone who had a pretty bog-standard, middle-of-the-road public education in Scotland.
I sometimes wonder if it’s down to a fundamentally different experience at schools in the US that I’m not aware of?
I feel like I went in one end of the school system, and then came out twelve years later able to read, write, play musical instruments, understand the natural world, think critically, use a computer, and generally having a wide variety of other skills. Teaching quality was mostly fine, with staff who seemed to be pretty engaged. I spent plenty of time outside school with both parents, and I came out with a bunch of skills and knowledge that neither of them would have been able to teach me. My experience was far from perfect, but it was a million miles away from being “a prison”.
The “school is a waste of time” argument seems to be popular in these circles. Is it down to cultural differences? Or maybe it’s just the iceberg tip of a deeper and more earnestly held view about a fundamental restructuring of society and childhood?
Autodidacts who thought school got in the way of their learning and never really got on with most of the other kids their age are overrepresented on HN, and a lot of people not in that category don't have particularly strong opinions about schools...
I think that some of it is due to distaste towards women who are not start at home. There is extraordinary guilting going on here, I mean moms when they argue this particular point are guilting less.
For what it is worth, pandemic made me appreciate teachers more. Pandemic made my kids appreciate school more (and they explicitly stated multiple points where school is better then what went on at home).
Agree that applies for the majority of people, but for others it's purely a status competition beyond what they currently have which they've decided to engage in.
Money is just a currency. What they really love (and need), is all the goods and services that can be purchased by money, which include the things that keep their children and themselves alive.
UBI and competition between schools can fix all that.
But naked capitalism tells women to "lean in and earn $1 for every 70 cents" instead of telling men to "lean out and earn 70c for every $1" ...and spend more time with your children, family, contributing to open source software, learning science, an instrument, hobbies, sports and exercise and doing other things not valued by the market.
UBI is far superior to both a jobs guarantee, minimum wage laws and unions in rebalancing the power dynamic between the employees and employers.
Instead, today, we are brainwashed that your worth as an individual comes from working for a corporation, and the schools train the kids to sit down and shut up for 10 hours day to do just that. Look at Finland. Or http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=158
I'd argue that's a pretty essential skill in the modern world. Reading and writing are arguably the two of the most important skills we can learn since from them you can eventually do anything else.
Paperwork specifically is also pretty important. Sure you could argue that they could postpone teaching that until later but teaching how to fill out paperwork is basically just teaching how to do homework which will be essential for teaching mathematics at any reasonable scale.
Of course now things are digital but it's still the same skills but in a different shade.
I wish I had been taught paperwork or actual practical life skills (filing taxes for example) as opposed to some complex mathematical operations that I don't even remember anymore.
