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Because school isn't about maximizing education; it's a daycare so that parents can work and children can come out with a uniform education that will suffice to

Because school isn't about maximizing education; it's a daycare so that parents can work and children can come out with a uniform education that will suffice to do basic things in society like read/write/taxes etc.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
This is my pet theory for why education in the US is the way it is. Socialized child care is unpalatable. So public school starts at exactly the moment that research can come close to justifying having kids in school. But parents need to work - so there is pressure once kids are in school to have a school day that matches the work day. You might be able to get away with a 3 hour school day, and have the rest be dedicated to unstructured play/exploration. But you can't have child care, so if kids are in school they need to be "doing school." So we have 8 hours of school and we need kids to be doing _school_ during that time because it can't be child care. So we create these gulags where kids move bricks from one pile to another and back all day and call it education because we've got to keep up this illusion of education. And then we pay teachers child care wages because, under the hood, it's really just child care that nobody can call child care.
mwambua 4y ago
You hit the nail on the head there. It's hard articulating everything that feels off about it - but I felt the same way about the CHIPS Act forcing companies to provide cheap childcare to workers. I think for one, it emphasizes cheap childcare over quality childcare (and this doesn’t seem like the sort of situation where the free market will sort that out). There’re also these conflicting ideas of children both a) being necessary/important enough that workers will sacrifice their own productivity for them; b) being a little like cattle and not requiring anything more than the bare minimum to develop into productive human beings.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

This is my pet theory for why education in the US is the way it is. Socialized child care is unpalatable. So public school starts at exactly the moment that research can come close to justifying having kids in school. But parents need to work - so there is pressure once kids are in school to have a school day that matches the work day. You might be able to get away with a 3 hour school day, and have the rest be dedicated to unstructured play/exploration. But you can't have child care, so if kids are in school they need to be "doing school." So we have 8 hours of school and we need kids to be doing _school_ during that time because it can't be child care. So we create these gulags where kids move bricks from one pile to another and back all day and call it education because we've got to keep up this illusion of education. And then we pay teachers child care wages because, under the hood, it's really just child care that nobody can call child care.

mwambua 4y ago

You hit the nail on the head there. It's hard articulating everything that feels off about it - but I felt the same way about the CHIPS Act forcing companies to provide cheap childcare to workers. I think for one, it emphasizes cheap childcare over quality childcare (and this doesn’t seem like the sort of situation where the free market will sort that out). There’re also these conflicting ideas of children both a) being necessary/important enough that workers will sacrifice their own productivity for them; b) being a little like cattle and not requiring anything more than the bare minimum to develop into productive human beings.