Chopping it all down
I had a nightmarish realization last night — that American education was worse than I thought, and it was all going in the wrong direction, which will have dire consequences for the next generation. I’ve been listening to the right-wing’s plans for our schools, and they are ugly. For one thing, they hate education and want to simply shut it down; they’ve put Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education, which is scheduled for elimination, and she is a horrible, hateful dimwit. Science is mostly gone. They think math is what you do to fill out your tax forms. History is being put in the hands of PragerU, a fake ‘college’ run by a bigot who has no background in education or history. Museums are being policed to make sure they say nothing unpleasant about America. Their vision of good schools stops at putting Bibles and the ten commandments in every classroom.
This is how they will maintain power, by making sure every child is fitted with blinkers from birth onwards.
It made me think about how I would support good educational policy.
Math. No, math is not about filling out a form, or learning about spreadsheets. Math is the great enabler of ideas. Students should learn that math is beautiful and fun, and is also a foundation for sound reasoning and logic — I know that in my case, learning basic principles of algebra and geometry, and quantitative reasoning in the sciences, opened up my brain and led to a flowering of interest in all kinds of scientific subjects.
Every grade school curriculum should culminate in an introductory understanding of calculus. Maybe that shouldn’t be a requirement for graduation — I’m well aware that a lot of students are terrified of mathematics — but we should at least aspire to improve on that. We do have, in our better schools, the idea of college-tracks, a series of classes that students should plan on take if they want to go to university. Unfortunately, my experience in recent years has been that even if they fail algebra, students think they are prepared for science at the college level. They’re not.
History and Civics. History is not about smooth upward trajectories to the perfection that is America today. History is about stuttering forwards and backwards through errors and tragedies to overcome terrible human failures. One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War. More of that please. Maybe one of the lessons of history is the ability to look back and see where we went wrong, so that maybe we realize that even “Great Men” are fallible and biased.
You won’t get that with the PragerU approach to history — they even whitewashed Christopher Columbus, one of the greatest monsters of our history.
Literature. Do right-wingers even read? I don’t think so.
I think our education has been hobbled by the Western Canon, which contains what modern minds would consider real klunkers. I know, they’re well-regarded for reasons, and if we studied them harder, maybe students would warm to them, but we have limited time and we need to get them enthused about learning. For instance, Darwin’s Origin is a gorgeous piece of Victorian literature…but I wouldn’t inflict it on students. Contemporary literature removes that roadblock of historical conventions, and is going to be more engaging on subjects of modern interest. There are few 19th century texts that have anything relevant to say about the current gay or black experience.
Turn the teachers loose to discuss books they are passionate about. If a teacher has a passion for Silas Marner, go for it. The key, though, is engagement, and there are ways to do that that don’t involved dogma.
Language. This would enrage the MAGAts, but we should be teaching Spanish from kindergarten on. I had grade school Spanish myself, and it didn’t take — we memorized a few rote phrases, but learned nothing about the structure of the language, how to assemble a sentence, how to engage in a conversation beyond learning how to ask where the library is. We learned the parts of speech in our English class, but nothing of the kind in Spanish. The goal should be that every kid be able to have a simple conversation on the playground in Spanish by the time they get to middle school.
We should be beyond our self-centered focus on just one language, English. We live in a hemisphere where most people speak Spanish (OK, also Portuguese), and where growing communities in the US are Hispanic, we should be obligated to be at least bilingual. I think I was short-changed by a system that treated an entire language spoken by our neighbors as negligible.
Science. I’m going to go against my own background on this one, but a little less focus on science in grade school is OK. I generally feel like I have to start at the beginning for my college biology classes, because their understanding is mostly superficial; what they did learn seems to have leaked in through their eyes and ears and then dribbled out their noses. That sounds harsh on the students, but what I do see that is encouraging is that they come in eager and ready to learn.
This is partly my bias, because the science classes I took in high school were mostly boring, empty noise that didn’t teach anything particularly fundamental. The one exception was my high school chemistry class, where the teacher ignored the expected curriculum and taught remedial math: estimation, quantitative measurement, logarithms, all that juicy stuff which actually proved useful throughout my career. Thanks, Mr Thompson!
The right-wing perspective on education is all about compelling kids to memorize a set of facts, a simplistic pattern, that doesn’t involve thinking at all. If we let them get away with it, we’re crippling the next generation. Don’t let them.
A week or so ago, I was at the local coffeeshop and overheard a conversation. A very earnest, serious conservative was talking to a young woman about parents’ rights — how the law must not interfere with parents’ ability to instruct their children about religion and politics, that parents have a right and a duty to pass on their values to their children, and it shouldn’t matter how weird and wrong they might be.
It was infuriating to listen to, but I didn’t speak up, I didn’t bother the pair, I just got more and more aggravated to the point where I just left the coffee shop rather than make a scene. All that was running through my head was a simple question:
What about the children’s rights?
Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information, a good educational framework, an opportunity to learn about other perspectives? Every thing I see about conservative education is a denial of ideas outside a narrow ideological focus, leading to a situation now where un-American ideas (where the conservative starts with a very limited version of what is American) are on the verge of being criminalized. And one of the ways they accomplish that is by treating children as property who can be rightfully indoctrinated with whatever stupidity their parents hold sacred.
It is probably not all that bad.
By the US constitution, public education is controlled by the states.
The funding from the Department of Education is only 8% of public K-12 budgets. Sure the states will miss it but it isn’t the end of the world.
And…If the Federal government abolishes the Department of Education and diverts that 8% to the billionaires, which is who will get it, then they have no leverage towards the states education.
The Red states will do a poor job of educating, which they would do anyway. They usually anchor the bottom of whatever statistics you look at.
The Blue states can just ignore the Federal government and put the effort into educating their children.
At this point, we aren’t looking for positive news.
We are trying to salvage what we can as the GOP tries to destroy the USA.
What the GOP is planning and doing is destroying the US Federal government.
CDC dead. NIH dead NSF dead, EPA dead, Department of Education dead. Medicaid dead Social Security dead Food Stamps dead Department of Energy dead and so on.
After the US central government is dead, what do they have left to offer the 50 states.
Nothing. Except US military troops and National Guard troops wandering around doing nothing.
What do they have for leverage? Threats to randomly shoot whoever is in front of them and that is about it.
Which means the 50 states are on the way to becoming the 50 de facto countries.
It’s already happening. The west coast states have set up their own CDC equivalent. etc.
This is “soft secession” and it is where we are going.
The Blue states aren’t completely stupid or helpless.
They’ve been in “Soft Secession” since Trump was inaugurated.
The Blue states have most of the population and 70% of the GDP. California alone is the fourth largest economy in the world.
All governments including dictatorships depend to some extent on the consent of the governed. Ask the USSR, Syria’s Assad, or the Shah of Iran how that works.
FWIW, the Red states have been in “Soft Secession” since they lost the War for Slavery in 1865.
The Blue states can do a lot by simply stalling, beating around the bush, and ignoring the Federal government.
I wouldn’t mind it if the universities started offering classes in how to ignore and evade the dysfunctional Federal government.
They could start by not allowing military recruiters access to high schools, which is the current practice.
A lot of conservative thought around children and education lacks even the most basic understanding of how children learn. For example, my parents were conservative and my dad taught me chess. He stopped playing it with me when I was in third grade because I began to win fairly often. They bought me a book on it that was a little too advanced and assumed I’d just get really good at chess. But I couldn’t even play it anymore because my dad felt like losing the chess game to me was too much like losing control.
They seemed a little confused when I lost interest in chess. They lacked even the most basic understanding and empathy for my situation. If they’d had any it might have allowed them to see the why I lost interst in a two player game I couldn’t play due to no one to play it with.
I see variations of this all the time when I look at conservative ideas around kids or education.
About science, IMO the abysmal level of science education is what gets the US to the place where “trisodium phosphate in Home Depot means it’s toxic”, “there are only two genders because it’s fifth grade biology”, and also “evolution is just a theory”.
Rote memory of scientific facts is not ideal (which I have first hand experience in China) but at least people accept evolutionary theory better and laugh at someone when they says “sodium chloride is toxic because it is a chemical”.
Learning a second language should be encouraged, but it would be more enlightening for children if they learned a non-European language. Teaching the local indigenous language would be good alternative to Spanish; the contrast in ideas would be much sharper than English/Spanish. Another language gives you another way to understand the world, but the difference in worldview between English and Spanish is small compared to that between a European language and a non-European one. Plus there’s that teaching indigenous languages would help repair the Spanish and Anglo attempts to eradicate indigenous culture.
Dude, math beyond the “ancient Greek” level – exponents and logarithms, differential and integral calculus, transforms, like Fourier and Laplace transforms were like a mind expanding drug for me.
No, I dont use these in my day to day life but that’s not the point. It’s no exaggeration to say just understanding stuff changes your perception of the world.
You’re right that at least calculus should be regarded as basic. It’s very simple. The slope of the curve; the area under the curve. At least conceptually that should be taught in high school.
Who said, “Don’t teach what to think; teach how to think”? Was that Sagan?
Anyway, yes. I was fortunate my education involved no explicit indoctrination, just learning and thinking and questioning. I would wish that for every child.
Hard agree. When I was a kid all the high school sitcoms, comedies, and so forth made me terrified of algebra. My mom had to take extra effort to convince me it wasn’t some monster outside my abilities.
Grade school is the time of life when children’s interest in science is at its peak.
Agreed. Calculus is much easier than the algebra through which one must get in order to arrive at it, though that algebra is an absolute necessity in order that calculus be done successfully and/or well. A secondary option for a higher-level terminal high-school mathematics course for which I often find myself advocating is linear algebra, but again, you need basic algebra first for that.
We had to read Frühlings Erwachen in school, and I’d say it is one of those works.
@mathman85
I might also add probability and statistics. Kids get some of it in 1-8, but a case can be made for it being both practical and easy to make engaging, because of how often students might see it outside the classroom.
(And for languages, I might offer American Sign Language. Part of taking a language should be about thinking about how language works, because even a fellow Indo-European language like Spanish does things in a different way than English. Thanks to a quirk of history, ASL derives from French Sign Language, in addition to the differences in grammar that come from using sign instead of sound as your basic unit of language. I’d be fine with it being a state or district level choice, even if they had to pick one: for instance, having Hawaii use Hawaiian as the standard second language for a cultural connection to the past, even if currently it is an endangered language.)
I saw a Tumblr post about math that had a teacher talking to a football player, and comparing high school math to the athletic training and conditioning an athlete goes through. Some of that is just to build up general physical fitness and athleticism: a football player will never need to lift static weights during a game, but muscle strength can help them play football.
I definitely agree on the language part. Learning a new language fundamentally teaches you a new way of thinking, even if you never get fluent with it. I’m Canadian, I was exposed to French all through school and through life because everything on store shelves has to be labelled in both languages, but I also took German in high school because it sounded interesting. And to this day I say that I learned more about the English language in my German class than I ever really did in my English class, which makes sense as English is basically a Danish/French hybrid. (Learning the German genitive case was how I realized why English uses apostrophe-s for possessives. It’s one of those little historical artifacts, just like there are a number of German words that pluralize just by changing the vowel sound, something which in English is only done by a few words like man->men.)
As was also in one of the other comments, fundamentally we should be more interested in teaching people how to think than what to think. Which, of course, is exactly what a lot of conservatives are trying to destroy: the idea that children might grow up to believe different things than their parents is anathema to them, and the idea that your average ‘peasant’ should need to think at all means a loss of societal control.
I, fortunately, had mostly good teachers. (Mostly. My main fifth grade teacher was… a nice enough guy, and wanted his students to enjoy learning, but he really had absolutely no idea what to do with myself and the other couple of students in the class who could probably have tested out of half the year. This was the guy who gave me a ‘B’ on an epic poem because he just couldn’t believe I had written it without outside help. But he was just useless rather than actively horrible.)
Granted, the fact that my mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father-in-law was a high school teacher and later principal meant that I had a bit of a leg up on education and my family actively encouraged exploration. It wasn’t really until I got to University that I realized how lucky I had it with that.
Geographically, you’re closer to millions who have French as their first language (between a fifth and a quarter of the Canadian population). But it’s likely less useful in the US than Spanish (or even other languages).
During WW2 the healthiest recruits came from states like Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. This was due to better nutrition and a more active lifestyle. The least healthy recruits came from states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, et al. (no surprise). One in nine recruit candidates failed their physicals in 1941 due to nutrition-related health problems.
Perhaps it’ll be education levels that will be the great leveler in the event of another major war. But, it’s a lot easier to fill recruits’ bellies with nourishing food than it is to fill their heads with the knowledge needed to build and operate complex weapons systems. That takes a solid math and science foundation that can only be achieved over time in school.
Which countries churn out the most engineers? India and China at about 1,000,000 each year. The USA only produces about 250,000. The USA doesn’t even break into the top 10 countries with the most scientists per capita in the world.
Mankind is a warlike species. You may not like it, but there it is. A war between the USA and China is a very real possibility. China wants us out of the Westpac. We have no intention of leaving. Having an educated populace isn’t just a nice-to-have thing. It’s essential to our national survival. I wish the anti-science, Christian nationalists could understand that. Knowing the 10 Commandments isn’t going to cut it when the missiles start flying.
The magat admin’s war on education is just one of the MANY wars they are in; using taxpayer money to screw taxpayers.
A big clue to why this war is important to them is they want to destroy Thomas Jefferson’s ‘a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.’
Putting that drooling imbecile Linda McMahon in charge of the Department of Education makes it easier to destroy and is a huge step toward the ‘dumbing down’ of the populace.
How far down the Death Spiral are we now?
@Becca Stareyes
I’m not opposed to probability or statistics—I’ve taught introductory stats dozens of times since I finished my Ph.D.—but (a) the theory of statistics is deeply calculus-based, and (b) I’m a pure mathematician, so anything too applied is automatically given side-eye by me.
But with McMahon in charge, schools could have excellent professional wrestling programs complete with advanced classes in KeyFabe…oh wait, you already mentioned Bibles. Did they say which Bible? There are several different ones, and some cults believe theirs is the only right one. That could become an area of serious disagreement among the Christ-like warriors of the Christian right. I’m pretty sure Catholics don’t use the KJV or its successors.
PZ wrote: Shouldn’t every child have the right to good information?
I reply: Obviously, not! Read http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/115076/the-mad-kings-television
Robert Reich explains that the magat-in-chief sent troops to destroy portland because he just watched a years-old video of the violent protests of George Floyd’s murder on FUX news and was so brain-dead ht thought it was current!
It’s mostly MAGAt central around here, but the husband of one of my mom’s former colleagues (an engineer) once commented on the math skills of the type of people coming in that he wouldn’t want to be driving over any bridge that they designed.
I wish I’d been able to take a foreign language in grade school. I was eager to get to 3rd grade because that’s when we got to learn cursive, and I knew that was the closest I’d get to taking a foreign language until I got to junior high. (Took 6 years of Spanish in junior high and high school, several semesters in college, and keep it up by reading books in Spanish. I get the opportunity to speak it every once in a while because I am 1 of 2 people at the animal shelter fluent enough to carry on a conversation.)
@18 robro wrote: Did they say which Bible?
I reply: It just doesn’t matter. All the versions of the bible are obscene, murderous, self-contradictory works of FICTION (except for a few documented historical events which may be true)
Shermanj @ #21 wrote: “I reply: It just doesn’t matter.”
I reply: I couldn’t agree with you more, but unfortunately for some Christians it matters very much. In fact there are some that are willing to kill or be killed for a particular version of the Bibles.
I think it’s important to teach children that they are being introduced to subjects, that just as when they first started reading they leaned mostly single syllable words and only moved on to polysyllabic words once they had mastered single syllable words, what they learn at each stage in school are the basics to any subject, there is so much more to all of them.
In reply to @22 robro, I say, Thanks for accurate amplification on the point.
I think, as already eloquently stated by others above, foreign language learning is so effective and helpful, that learning at least one foreign tongue should be obligatory in higher education. That said, motivation could be boosted by letting children chose which one they want to take up from a choice of languages, e. g. Spanish and French.
I have been very lucky, as in Germany, there was at Gymnasium-level at first English for everyone, second we had to chose between Latin and French, later you could add Latin voluntarily on top. At bigger Gymnasiums there were even additional languages to chose from. And a third language is way easier to learn than the second. Life gets so much richer, meeting other people in foreign countries becomes more fun, you can enjoy original version books and films with all of the jokes and innuendo, empathy and thinking skills get boosted, win, win, win.
“One of my high school history classes started with how the “founding fathers” done fucked up, compromising on basic human rights to get a short term victory, that led to the catastrophe of the Civil War.”
Dang, I’m kind of awed by that statement. I never had anything close to that, and I think I’m from a younger generation than you, which makes it more unusual to hear. Maybe you had better teachers than I did, or me growing up in Pennsyltucky had something to do with it.
It is getting worse.
“Christian activist David Barton will advise Texas State Board of Education during social studies overhaul”
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/24/texas-sboe-social-studies-standards-david-barton/
A fool never learns from his mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. That is why wise men study history.”