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The flaw in public education that I'm trying to address is its tendency to grow to occupy any potential free time, largely because children are powerless to pre

The flaw in public education that I'm trying to address is its tendency to grow to occupy any potential free time, largely because children are powerless to prevent that. > Taking away the seeds of the arts because they might not grow into more juice for the war machine is at best a shortsighted thought and at worst the hateful demands of a small and selfish person. They didn't benefit you, but others they do. I haven't the faintest interest in taking away access to art or English or history. I don't generally believe in removing access to things. I am interested in not forcing a vulnerable and powerless group to donate their time to the cause of "keeping art/English/history alive" if they don't want to. There is some subset of knowledge that is a practical requirement for being able to navigate society. People need to know enough English to communicate, enough math to make change, enough science to have a basic understanding of the world we exist in. Those are basically untouchable if we want society to continue functioning. Art knowledge is not a necessity for living a normal life. A person can pursue an immense number of paths in their life without ever encountering a requirement to know things about art. It's honestly notable for someone to have encountered a situation where they needed or were aided by having taken art classes. Creative writing and the analysis of creative writing are much the same. If hours in the day were limitless, or children stayed children for longer, I'd agree with you. Knowledge of art has value, as does creative writing and history; I firmly believe that all knowledge has some degree of value. I do not agree in light of what we're putting children through. Something has to give, and it's either going to be the school workload or children's mental health. The teen suicide rate has nearly doubled since 2000, and I don't feel like playing a game of chicken with rising suicide rates to preserve art or ancient history or creative writing or like a dozen other things. Give the kids back their free time and I'm sure a lot of them will gravitate towards art or creative writing naturally. They naturally appeal to a lot of kids and people, if we'd just give them the room to get there themselves instead of force-feeding them a list of Baroque artists to make flashcards out of.

BizarroLand 2y ago
It seems like you would be better served in a Montessori or similar education system. I had a lot of issues with public education in my life. I don't regret the information I learned, no matter how trivial, but I do regret the time wasted, being a student who easily absorbed the entirety of the semesters knowledge for all non-stem classes by reading the book in the gap before classes started. I would have appreciated being able to go further faster rather than wait for my classmates to make it to the starting line. That being said, school isn't just about knowledge. We live in a society and we have to have a standard by which to relate to one another. Like it or not, our fellow humans are dark forests with gaping maws yearning to devour us, and we are the same to them. Without some trauma bonding, some common fountain from which we draw our waters, we would willingly or not destroy one another until only our little clans remained. Modern society has blinded us to the travails of our forefathers, where the people who live a few miles away might rise up and slay us if they have a bad harvest one year. That we have come so far as to reduce the occasional rampages down to traumatic school experiences is quite amazing from a neutral third party viewpoint, even though it definitely doesn't feel that way from someone who has experienced it firsthand, but compared to being murdered and eaten by the person who happened to be my classmate, getting picked on and feeling some long term anger over the situation is vastly preferable to me. All of that aside, we can do better. That much is obvious. We could do better easily if we could get everyone on the same page and standard, and make the standard "Maximally educated according to your individual ability" so that it would adapt to the learners potential rather than being concerned with the easier to manage yet still brobdingnagianly difficult standard of "minimally viable high school graduate".

BizarroLand 2y ago

It seems like you would be better served in a Montessori or similar education system. I had a lot of issues with public education in my life. I don't regret the information I learned, no matter how trivial, but I do regret the time wasted, being a student who easily absorbed the entirety of the semesters knowledge for all non-stem classes by reading the book in the gap before classes started. I would have appreciated being able to go further faster rather than wait for my classmates to make it to the starting line. That being said, school isn't just about knowledge. We live in a society and we have to have a standard by which to relate to one another. Like it or not, our fellow humans are dark forests with gaping maws yearning to devour us, and we are the same to them. Without some trauma bonding, some common fountain from which we draw our waters, we would willingly or not destroy one another until only our little clans remained. Modern society has blinded us to the travails of our forefathers, where the people who live a few miles away might rise up and slay us if they have a bad harvest one year. That we have come so far as to reduce the occasional rampages down to traumatic school experiences is quite amazing from a neutral third party viewpoint, even though it definitely doesn't feel that way from someone who has experienced it firsthand, but compared to being murdered and eaten by the person who happened to be my classmate, getting picked on and feeling some long term anger over the situation is vastly preferable to me. All of that aside, we can do better. That much is obvious. We could do better easily if we could get everyone on the same page and standard, and make the standard "Maximally educated according to your individual ability" so that it would adapt to the learners potential rather than being concerned with the easier to manage yet still brobdingnagianly difficult standard of "minimally viable high school graduate".