School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18. Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of their l

School is an institution that occupies every child full time from age 5–18. Even when they're not physically in school, school dictates the structure of their life. So nearly all of our population experiences their most impressionable, value forming years under the influence of schools, which almost all operate in a similar way. You'd expect this to have a profound effect of behavior, on the level that religion can have. So yes, schools make for a good "catch-all scapegoat" because the impact that they have on society is so large that for any given problem with society, you can probably find a quite reasonable causal link from schools. The term "armchair expert" is used to make anti-intellectual arguments. It's usually not hard to tell the difference between someone arguing a carefully considered position and someone who's just hastily defending their ideas against new information, or whatever it is that people do. Don't lose the signal in the noise. If you don't consider any of it signal, then there's no reason to be in this thread. But it's not like teachers are especially qualified in this area. Some are because they consider it a professional obligation to keep up on such literature and have an informed opinion on the issues the encounter, others simply because they're naturally inclined to care about these matters. But teachers in the US only need a bachelor's degree and a teacher's vocational training. Having a bachelor's degree doesn't make them any more qualified than the average HN commenter, and the vocational training typically doesn't bother with child psychology or pedagogical philosophy. The only factor that makes teachers any more qualified to speak on this than HN commenters is their lived experience working as a teacher. Such experience is subject to bias, for example, selection bias favoring the way thing are because the ones who disagree never became teachers or got fired. More importantly, though, it's not very exclusive experience. Everyone has a reasonable amount of experience with the education system from their 13 years in it as a student. People also get to experience working with children from an adult perspective when they become parents.