This echoes my feelings on the matter. It's infuriating how useless much of the curriculum is. Kids spend hundreds or thousands of hours of their lives sitting

This echoes my feelings on the matter. It's infuriating how useless much of the curriculum is. Kids spend hundreds or thousands of hours of their lives sitting in chairs absolutely bored out of their minds having to cram useless stuff to spill on the test and then forget. Meanwhile there's no time and place to learn reasoning skills, critical reading, actual in-depth history (not just memorising names of kings and dates of battles), philosophy (again, being able to make a reasoned argument, not cramming stuff), economics, etc. > For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning faculties. There's something very wrong when you suck out all the natural curiosity and will to learn from a group of children.