I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums. A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were tau

I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums. A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is. If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this. There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today. All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement. The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective). The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point. The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it. A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student. Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow. CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition. Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means. Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach. There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed. The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability). The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host. Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.