@peter

I hafta say--it was deliberately fucked a long time before that. Hell, I'd say forced schooling was deliberately fucked from the get-go. The medium is the message, it teaches punctuality and obedience. It teaches to never learn more than the bare minimum necessary to bullshit the rest, and never admit when you don't know something. Forced schooling was deliberately instituted to extend childhood, hence the age-segregation. What we consider an eighteen year old maturity level today would be a thirteen year old a hundred years ago. A lot of people never develop further, and who's easier to manipulate and control than a child? People like Dewey used to brag on that stuff. Forced schooling was implemented to destroy ethnic identities. Grandpa became a silly old guy who talks funny rather than a venerated source of cultural continuity. Forced schooling ain't a positive, but this is just the historical stuff. These days...

It was bad enough when I went through in the 80s and 90s, but after bush2 stole his election, it fell off a cliff. The very idea that phones are allowed in the classroom is absurd. They changed fucking math. I tried to help my gf's kid with her algebra homework but couldn't understand it. I can do calculus, and offered to teach her how to do algebra, but she preferred to jump through hoops to pass algebra class. And as far as I know, the children still have power over the teacher's salary, and even employment. That is an absurd power inversion. I was in a county college when I was in my mid 20's, taking classes with teenagers straight out of high school, and they were spoiled obnoxious. I saw them break a physics teacher. Nobody did the homework so homework review took the whole class so no new topics were ever introduced. Since even at the collegiate level, you're not allowed to fail a whole class despite the fact they all deserve it, after the mid term the prof gave up on teaching physics and just gave everyone a B.

LLMs simply formalized the hollowness of American forced schooling. It's great for producing amoral frat-boy salesman types and general infantry. Terrible for producing artists and scientists. And informed voters.

Education is a lifelong, self-directed process, and forced schooling exists to subvert that and replace it with a bare minimum of received wisdom.

@Uair @peter My first semester teaching philosophy 101, I realized that 80% of the class was going to fail. And not because the material was difficult, but because they wouldn’t do the work. Granted, the philosophy department had a very high failure rate, but I went to the dean and was like “um?”, and he said “yep, teaching to the test students. Your job is to teach them how to think for themselves. Have fun with that.”

I did not last long in academia.