>These days I wish education had a bigger emphasis on history and history should be looked at from different angles, like how the same thing is being taught from different angles.
It does. In higher education.
You cannot force someone to learn something. The mean-spirited bully not paying attention in high school history class and barely getting a C- to graduate didn't exactly learn anything about nuanced topics like "The Nazis didn't start the holocaust right away" and "Fascism is inherently incompetent, and that makes it so much worse"
If parents raise their kids to not consider education important (and millions of parents in the US have always done just so, we have an insane level of anti-intellectualism in this country), you won't get educated kids.
Every time someone says "I wish school taught <X>", plenty of schools EXPLICITLY DO THAT, and it doesn't work, because the person complaining was one of the kids crying "When will I ever use this" instead of paying attention.
The same adults who complain that school didn't teach them "critical thinking" are upset that school didn't walk them through the process step by step, as if you can't balance a check book with fucking basic algebra you learn by 4th grade. Meanwhile, 90% of the uproar about "new math" ends up being parents who can't even manage to understand basic word problems, you know, things which take critical thinking to work through?
I've had people complain that school should teach them how to calculate a mortgage, which is funny, because those people sat next to me in Precalculus as we literally did mortgage calculation problems.
The USA is struggling with multiple generations of people who have insisted that education is not only useless, but a liberal agenda, or even a devil-run plot to distract you from god. It's insane.
It does. In higher education.
You cannot force someone to learn something. The mean-spirited bully not paying attention in high school history class and barely getting a C- to graduate didn't exactly learn anything about nuanced topics like "The Nazis didn't start the holocaust right away" and "Fascism is inherently incompetent, and that makes it so much worse"
If parents raise their kids to not consider education important (and millions of parents in the US have always done just so, we have an insane level of anti-intellectualism in this country), you won't get educated kids.
Every time someone says "I wish school taught <X>", plenty of schools EXPLICITLY DO THAT, and it doesn't work, because the person complaining was one of the kids crying "When will I ever use this" instead of paying attention.
The same adults who complain that school didn't teach them "critical thinking" are upset that school didn't walk them through the process step by step, as if you can't balance a check book with fucking basic algebra you learn by 4th grade. Meanwhile, 90% of the uproar about "new math" ends up being parents who can't even manage to understand basic word problems, you know, things which take critical thinking to work through?
I've had people complain that school should teach them how to calculate a mortgage, which is funny, because those people sat next to me in Precalculus as we literally did mortgage calculation problems.
The USA is struggling with multiple generations of people who have insisted that education is not only useless, but a liberal agenda, or even a devil-run plot to distract you from god. It's insane.