This school year I went "undercover" at my local school district. Long story short, I'm in a position in life where I don't really have to work so I can do more or less what I want (once I see to it my children are taken care of that is).
So I decided to become a substitute teacher. It's shockingly easy. They'll let anyone with a pulse do it apparently because I just applied on the website and a week later I was in a room with 40 other people in an orientation.
I went to elementary, middle schools and high schools throughout the district to get a good idea of what's going on all levels. I know we all have a basic understanding that public education is bad but what I saw shocked even me.
My district has begun a policy called "inclusion" wherein all the special ed kids are put in regular classes in the name of, well, inclusion. This goes about like you'd expect. The teachers spend all their time trying to control the screaming autistic kid while all the others play Fortnite on their school issued laptops. The gen-ed teachers told me they were given no extra training about how to deal with kids with special needs. They just got an email a week before school started letting them know of the new policy.
The lowest grade any student can be given is a 50%. If a student puts their name on a paper and turns it in blank, congratulations! Automatic 50%. This was done in the name of "equity" because certain demographics were performing poorly compared to others (you know who). The fudging of the grades serves to eliminate some of that gap and also boost graduation rates so they get that sweet, sweet federal funding.
The most shocking thing to me though was the absolute lawlessness in the high schools. Teachers told me they have no way to discipline a kid now. The admin will side with the kid every time (especially if they have a certain baseline of melanin) so the teachers don't bother. There were a minimum of two fights every day and the video was circulating on snapchat 20 minutes later every time.
Kids do basically no work and learn nothing at any time. Assignments are either ignored or the kids get the answers from a group chat.
I looked up the district's budget to see if maybe a lack of funds was causing some of this. Nope. My district's total budget for this year was 200 million (!!!) dollars. No doubt all that money is lining someone's pocket because it hasn't gone to any of the classrooms that are the same as they were in the nineties when I was in them.
The kicker? I live in one of the reddest states in the US. Get your kids out of public schools as fast as you can.
Online learning was a disaster in 2020. I used to advocate it as well, but it didn't work.
Online learning doesn't work when you try to emulate a traditional classroom session via video.
Still a better option than letting the feminists/troons/alphabet brigade near them unsupervised..
I feel like we need a mix of the ancient way of learning of more physical activities and self studying than our current indoctrination services. With tech it should be feasible somehow.
Bring back apprenticeships.
There was a guy who passed away a few years ago named John Taylor Gatto. Very interesting guy. He was a public school teacher until one day he snapped, quit his job and spent the rest of his life writing books and giving speeches about why we the public education system needs to be dismantled.
https://greathomeschoolconventions.com/blog/the-legacy-of-john-taylor-gatto
Unironically this. Well to do people on our side of this thing would do well to consider just taking young guys under their wing and training them. You don't like that universities are pozzed? Well offer an alternative where intelligent people not on board with the program can learn a trade and still feed themselves and/or their families.
The main thing we learned after 2008 is that companies expect loyalty but don't give anything in return. So offer them them that something. "If you're loyal to me, I promise I'll look out for you no matter what happens" is a deal people are desperate to find but not something the mainstream is willing to offer. So offer it.
So is leaving them at home playing Call of Duty. It's a very, very low bar.
I just think that 2020 and 2021 proved that online learning doesn't work at all, because no country recorded a benefit out of the hundreds that tried it.
As Samuel pointed out earlier, they tried copying the model of the classroom online but as ANY of us that has been through western education can testify, it was already failing way before the 2000s let alone recently.
I don't see school's being of benefit to society if all we do is chase out the freaks, there needs to be a fundamental shift if we want more kids to learn the skills required for future more technical jobs.
Schools are basically just government funded babysitters at this point.
Expecting them to train kids for the future is a mistake for a few reasons, but the most obvious is probably - what if the current AI obsession is a fad and the kids are all trained to work with something that's only used to make memes and porn now?
They also basically held students to zero standards in 2020. Friend of mine is a teacher and she was instructed to essentially give everyone an A or a B, no exceptions. Math teacher. High school. Relatively affluent school.