Why did the School System Fail?

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Public school taught me to read and do basic math; Everything else I know is the result of self-education.

I went to school in the late 60s. My mother discovered that I couldn't read. I was in the fifth grade. She frog marched me up to school to confront my teachers and demanded to know what they were going to do about it. "Nothing" was the reply. They didn't teach reading to kids my age. My mother and I did not often see eye to eye but that woman sat me down for an hour everyday after school and made me read out loud. It was a forced march but it saved me from a life of ignorance and under employment.

In my last year of high school (2016) one moment will stick with me forever and taught me just how screwed up the Canadian education system is. For English class we were given an assignment where we had to read a poem and then answer a few questions to test our reading and comprehension (ie. what are the literary devices used, what is the poem structure, what are the themes). Come the day where we got our marked papers back my teacher had stopped me to explain that she had given me a higher mark than what the grading rubric would have. Turns out that my explanation of the poem's themes was not the answer that the board of education wanted. This was odd to the both of us because for as long as I can remember themes aren't something you can standardize. Every one walks away from art with a different interpretation of the themes. Some explanations are more valid than others but the point remains. However, because my interpretation was not the "right" one I would have failed the assignment had my English teacher not gave a shit and just graded me based on the mandated paper approved by the higher-ups. It all goes to show that schools are no longer education centers, they're indoctrination centers. You are no longer expected to understand the material. You are just to parrot what you are told and never question the establishment.

The downfall of the public school system was apparent, even in the 1970s. My mother graduated from what was considered one of the better Seattle schools of her time in the 1970s and found herself completely unequipped for the adult world. Her mother never taught her anything like budgeting, civics, cooking, home ec, basic automobile care and basic carpentry and tool use. For Gen X-ers like my mom, many of them went to schools that offered none of these or barely covered these subjects, and their parents never bothered teaching them because they had been taught those things in school and assumed it would be the same. She promised herself never to put her kids through school, and so, before it was legal to do so, she homeschooled her kids, all seven of them. By the time I was born, homeschooling was recently legalized, but many local jurisdictions were unaware of the change in law, so truancy harassment was something we had to occasionally deal with. But, unlike my public schooled relatives, we went through childhood without ever being stabbed, prostituted, arrested and are not on welfare. My mom's choice to homeschool us redeemed our family line from being inner city trash, and though academics are important, we can all do math, and love to read and write, the most important thing in our day to day life was understanding how to balance the budget, civics and taxes, and how to cook, clean, and care for oneself.

I have an anecdote about our broken education system. Two years ago I graduated with a bachelors in history, and I wanted to be a high school history teacher. I got into a masters program that included teacher training, and assigned me to a local high school to be a student teacher. The master's program was of course ideological propaganda, but that's for another time. I ended up being assigned to an 11th grade US history class for one semester. My mentor teacher was a former prison guard who took me on because he wanted me to do everything, which I was honestly fine with. I liked being able to control the curriculum. I noticed that he didn't have any essay assignments planned, which I thought was odd, since reading and summarizing are pretty basic skills that have applications beyond history. So during our WWII unit, I decided to assign one. After two days of telling the story of WWII, I had the students select a country to write an essay on. They could pick any country that significantly participated in the war, and had to summarize that country's war experience in a page in a half, double spaced. Easy. When I was in highschool, I could have done this in twenty minutes. I soon learned why my mentor teacher had not planned any essays. Most of my students simply could not do it. Most of them thought research was googling something than paraphrasing the example text that appears under the search results. Most of them did not even click on an article without me pestering them. Writing quality was generally atrocious. One student thought double spacing meant pushing enter twice after each line of text. I gave them a week to complete it, and gave every one of my 120ish students some tutoring. When the time came to turn them in, only about a fourth of them submitted anything. Of that number, about half were nearly unreadable, way too short, or contained significant plagiarism. In one hilarious example, the student had pasted in an entire article next to her own fourth grade level writing, without even making sure the stolen material was the same color and font as the rest of the paper. The best papers were from the two exchange students, one from France and the other Kazakhstan. About 5 of the American students did really well. My mentor teacher realized there would be trouble, since nobody was turning in the assignment. He made the executive decision to cut its value down to 20 points, the same amount as the other throwaway assignments we were required to give out twice a week. When the students realized its low value, they stopped worrying about it, and we got maybe five more submissions. A few months later, two weeks before finals, my mentor teacher called me over to his computer. On the screen were three colored bars representing our student's grades. the first was green, representing As and Bs. The second was yellow and a bit longer, representing Cs and Ds. The third, which was longest, was red and represented Fs. This was the same year covid ended, so our students were still in the remote learning mode of not turning anything in. My mentor teacher said our mission now was to get half of the yellows to green and most of the reds to yellow. If not, we'd be investigated by the admin and have to deal with a legion of angry students and parents. Every level of the system, from the teachers to the administration to the parents to the students themselves, were incentivized to lower the standards and push everyone through the system, year after year, regardless of competency. The end result was illiterate students arriving in my class, who I was completely unable to help, and could do little for other than put my own seal of approval on their embarrassing performances and send them on to 12th grade and college beyond. My lessons on the internet age and rise of mental health problems were scrapped, and the rest of the semester would be homework makeup days. The students mostly copied late assignments, some which were due three months ago, from students who had actually completed them. I was flooded with late work that was mostly cheated, and from which the students likely learned next to nothing. We also spent a long time preparing for the final, for which my mentor teacher provided a study guide with the exact multiple choice questions that would appear on the test. No critical thinking required whatsoever. Even after all this, the red bar was still too long, so for the last week of school, my mentor teacher gave participation credit for showing up and watching movies. The amount of points the students received for one class period of sleeping through "Red Tails?" 40. Twice the maximum they could have received for my essay assignment. Multiply that by five school days equaled 200 points for watching movies, enough to shorten that red bar to the necessary level. After that I decided to quit high school and get another masters so I can teach college.

I graduated highschool in 2019 and the biggest problem I encountered is that pretty much any multiple choice quiz or test is just a bad IQ test. If you are smart enough you can brute force your way from K -12 without ever learning anything.

I have the complete opposite experience as you when it comes to being told you're smart. I was always told I was smart throughout my childhood, but my parents failed to teach me any practical skills, and the education system bored me immensely. So when I found myself unable to fuction and all, I began thinking myself stupid. I now give up on anything if I am not immediately successful at it, and I find it difficult to delevope any skills, yet I also cannot stand the education system.

What’s shocking to me is that, when I was growing up in the 80s, there was a notion that kids’ parents should take an active interest in their child’s education and the ones whose parents were decidedly not involved were “at risk.” Now parents that show serious interest and involvement in their kids’ education are labeled as potential terrorists.

Classes have been being "dumbed-down" since at least the 1970s. My mother was a Spanish teacher from 1965 to 2000, and by the end of her career, the former first-year book took a full two years for modern students to go through.

My girlfriend's father told me that he remembered a time when there were still a lot of horsemen in rural Texas, and you could tell how well a man could mentor young men and boys by how well he could lead a horse.

Hi, I went through the Bronx New York city public school system during the 1960s and early 1970s, My favorite classes were auto shop and electric classes, I never finished HS because the NY city public school system decided to start bussing in kids in from the projects, I quit because I was stabbed for a hall pass. I had a lot of jobs over the years, but I finally got a job working in an aircraft factory, I loved building jet fighters. The company paid for my collage, I graduated with 2 BS degrees in the aeronautical sciences. I retired last year as a senior principal engineer / scientist working on a major rocket program. You are correct. I saw with my own eyes how the system changed in the 70s from what you explained to, Let's all sit down and rap about social problems. Good work. Keep it up, and thank you.

There’s no such thing as a “too long” whatifalthist video. You could make a 3 hour breakdown of a historical topic chosen at random and we’ll happily watch it because we know you make quality content.

"Idiocracy" was released in 2005. Great movie by Mike Judge. Back then we thought it would take 500 years for the species to become that collectively dumbed down. I think we're already just about there. "People used to read and write books, it wasn't just for nerds. We used to make movies where you cared about whose ass it was and why it was farting. We even went to the moon." Don't know whether it's funny or sad that less than 20 years ago, that movie was considered satire. Now it's on the verge of basically being a documentary.

I learned this around Covid and luckily my mom let me drop out and get my GED. I now gobble up as much information as I am interested in and as I talk to other people interested in learning for fun, I find out about more cool topics I want to learn about. The school system almost destroyed that part of me. When my English teacher told me that the school system never evolved, my mom kept telling me to invest in things I was genuinely interested in, now we have other routes than just college, I have enjoyed learning so much more than I thought was possible and I’m only 19 and a half. There is so much to explore and enjoy. Loved most of my male teachers. I learned the most from them and found what they taught more interesting as they seemed to love what they taught more than the women.

I graduated high school class of 2017 and I noticed the zombifacation you talked about first hand and again when my younger brother went to the same school right after me and how much worse it got in the difference of a year. When I was in my senior year I got into a regional occupation program that saw a small group of other students shuttled off to the adult school to learn more trade orientated things for the first half of the day before returning to our high school and finishing out the day with normal classes. I took video game design that was taught by an experienced game developer and was very interesting and kept my attention fully while I was there. Another thing that made it stand out from my normal classes was that the ROC program was exclusive and as it took place at the adult school, we were treated like adults. Our teachers would speak to us like peers rather than as children which also helped us respect them more and be more receptive to the material. I didn’t end up going into that field as a job but I did learn some valuable skills such as team building, communication and leadership. I always remembered school outside of that being boring and just watching the clock but recently I took training to get my armed security guard permit and that was mostly classroom instruction very reminiscent of school but this time on a subject I was very interested in and was excited to learn about. I got a perfect score on my written test and finished first of my group and now have a desire to go and further my training there. I was blown away with the night and day difference it had when the classroom revolved around things I care about.

Imagine living in a world where schooling does not make you actively hate learning, but the internet still exists and you can go down any rabbit hole you desire. Imagine a world where you're in an online game lobby, you drop a reference to some obscure Chinese philosopher, and if no one else gets it at least half of them would be curious.

We standardized it. Tried applying the same system to everyone, top-down. Emphasized the teacher's conditions and the building's conditions over the students' performance (this being what "more funding per-child" boils down to). Made something that should have been personal as impersonal for the parents as we could manage.

Teachers do not chose what they teach. The managerial class does (school board via state decree), which comes from the will of the electorate. So, when people vote for better schools, we will get better schools. People have voted for what we have today. Also, unfortunately, most voters do not currently have children in school. So they vote for policies and do not deal with the consequences of their vote.