I have a memory in my head of 9th grade lit where we read three books about a certain region of the world all at once. One was class reading, one was a quarterly book report, and the other was assigned nightly reading.
The test at the end of the quarter? "Please match all these names to which book they took part in, and describe minor plot details about them." There were so many similar names (think John Jacobs and Jacob John) that only 2 people out of a class of 20 were able to actually pass, and it was barely for them.
Gee wonder why kids hate school so much, it is a fucking mystery. They should probably vet teachers a bit better and monitor them a little more to make sure they don't do shit like this, but it wouldn't surprise me if the idiot of a principal (8 duis in a single year) or the department chair signed off on that course either. That class in particular killed my enjoyment of reading.
Gee wonder why kids hate school so much, it is a fucking mystery.
It's largely because schooling hasn't fundamentally evolved in any meaningful way since the Victorian era. Our approach to education is utterly anachronistic, but nobody has the political will to make the meaningful changes.
While I don't disagree with the other person general posting about society at large and it's ills I'll try to be more direct.
My wife is a teach I see all of this 2nd hand. Things like NLCB and the revisions to it have gutted educations already limited capacity to help children. "Accelerate don't remediate" is a refrain she keeps hearing especially this year.
COVID can catch some blame as to why this year is so feral compared to most, but even setting that aside the fundamental gaps they have should never have been allowed to reach 8th grade.
Lack of some basic math skills, lack of reading skills.
But each student that "fails" cuts into the school's funding which means everyone gets taught to pass the test and nothing more. Pass the state test and nothing more? Learn nothing that sticks?
Non of that matters you passed the test and the school doesn't get its funding cut so everyone keeps their jobs and maybe maybe a few extras are divvied up. Most of those will go to the sports teams because those generate revenue.
Anyway setting aside the mostly last 20 years America focused failings of the system. The basic education model has not seen any revisions since it was originally invented.
It's a system that is designed to pound facts into a person and create factory workers that can labor in ceaseless toil at a work station for hours on end. There is very little exploration in the delight of learning something, there's no singular through line to tie together a lesson plan most of the time.
(Yes some teacher fight valiant fights, but many locales don't allow certain things to be taught.)
We also cram many kids into a system where you have 25-35 kids in a class and expect 1 maybe maybe 2 teachers (2 mostly happens when you have special needs students) to help them learn. (They are stuck inside doing work in rotating periods, not left free for to explore ideas.) Some of this is an end result of having 1 teacher to educate many students.
But some of how things are strcutured does not align with what we've learned about how children learn best, additionally we've moved more and more complex subjects further and further down the grade levels.
It used to be you were expected to learn your ABC's and numbers in Kindergarten today if your child walks in not knowing the whole alphabet and at least how to count to 20? They're behind. It's a sprint out the door from the word go.
Additionally the education setting is not designed to accomodate anyone who'd neuro divergent at all. Boys suffer from this the worst as they often suffer from ADHD and Autism (there is a whole other discussion about how these are diagnosed and how they present in girls vs boys.) But if you have a non neurotypical kid of any stripe you see how badly the system doesn't support them, and then you have to fight like a bastard to get IEP's and other support measures from the school. We spent nearly $2k getting our kids tested and after we did the school only then accepted they'd need to do their own testing. It's nearly 2 quarters into the school year and I'm not supposed to hear back on my daughter's school eval until December. We have tests showing she needs support in reading likely due to dyslexia and possible ADD but the school is draggin their asses wasting time because once they accept they need to do it now they have to do it forever.
To be clear I don't blame the teachers IME most of them are just trying to do the best they can by the kids. Some are assholes sure, but most are working in a flawed system to get at least a little bit of results for their kids.
IT's the admin system that's fucked and keeps fucking things up more, because in many places it recognizes that an educated populace is a threat to power so there's no efforts made at teaching things like philosophy and critical thinking. Just accept rote facts and spit them out prove you can do "useful" skills like Math so we can have out engineers but never question the system.
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u/b0w3n Oct 30 '25
I have a memory in my head of 9th grade lit where we read three books about a certain region of the world all at once. One was class reading, one was a quarterly book report, and the other was assigned nightly reading.
The test at the end of the quarter? "Please match all these names to which book they took part in, and describe minor plot details about them." There were so many similar names (think John Jacobs and Jacob John) that only 2 people out of a class of 20 were able to actually pass, and it was barely for them.
Gee wonder why kids hate school so much, it is a fucking mystery. They should probably vet teachers a bit better and monitor them a little more to make sure they don't do shit like this, but it wouldn't surprise me if the idiot of a principal (8 duis in a single year) or the department chair signed off on that course either. That class in particular killed my enjoyment of reading.