I don’t think anyone can go into a school system in the existent west and make a difference and do anything but get exploited by that system. I don’t think the school system where I live does anything but profit-seeking and politically-motivated activities and that the part that lifted children out of poverty has long been replaced with a prison pipeline while the rich people around here go to private schools.

On an individual basis becoming a teacher in that is not a great idea. Just my own personal experience from trying. That is what this thread is about and what I was talking about. I’m not happy about this or anything, it is really sad and painful as a truth.

??? are you trying to argue they should become a teacher or trying to argue for if public schools are a good idea? i think they shouldn’t be a teacher and that public schools are a good idea, personally. and i personally think the current existence of school teachers is generally a good thing. but a comrade purposely putting themselves into the shitty situation that is the current job of teaching (the sheer difficulty of which also leads to my respect to current teachers) is not something i agree with. the fact that a significant portion of the job is teaching propaganda and / or abusing neurodivergent kids if you’re assigned to a cringe instead of a based teaching position means that i wouldn’t really think of it as much better than just sending a couple hundred bucks to a local pride org or something with a cushy job

the history aspect of public schools is currently undeniably basically just propaganda. this does not make other classes irrelevant or unimportant or bad! but there is also a lot of bad stuff in education in general right now (ESPECIALLY PRIVATE) that makes me hesitate to consider it an objective good to go into it compared to being an affluent comrade. full uncritical support to teachers trying to incorporate actually good and developed teaching theory in our hell world though

also i never advocated for teaching kids nothing? what the fuck do you think we’re talking about???

Below is a blog post from a teacher about “What if we taught art the way we taught math?”

What if we taught art the way we teach math? We start by showing students all the colors, not to play with, but to memorize. Then, after a few years of that, we give them two or three colors and permit them to only paint straight lines over and over until they’ve mastered them. Then we work on arcs and then other curved lines for a few years. Finally, after many years of this sort of drilling, we move on to shapes where we drill some more. Then comes more repetitive drilling on colors, color mixing, composition, until finally, after many tedious years, the art student, now at a university, is finally permitted to actually create something of his own. Oh, and never, ever take a peek at someone else’s paper. It’s a ridiculous, backwards idea, but in a very real sense, this is exactly how we attempt to teach math.

This is a summary of the book “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart (I have not read the whole thing, so if these people are full of brainworms I wouldn’t know). An excerpt from his book:

By removing the creative process and leaving only the results of that process, you virtually guarantee that no one will have any real engagement with the subject. It is like saying that Michelangelo created a beautiful sculpture, without letting me see it. How am I supposed to be inspired by that? (And of course it’s actually much worse than this— at least it’s understood that there is an art of sculpture that I am being prevented from appreciating).

If you graduated high school before 2010, you were taught math completely wrong. Only in 2022 were the first students graduating high school that were taught using common core, a half-cocked remedy that fixes a lot of problems, but still leaves a bunch in place. Basically, you were taught things like multiplication tables, told to memorize formulas, etc. etc. Never were you taught the proofs mathematicians used to come up with this stuff. For example, multiplication and division are shorthand methods for addition and subtraction. So when kids are taught only to memorize, when they encounter numbers they have not memorized, they don’t know what to do.

That’s not how mathematicians do things. Instead, they’re focus is on finding proofs for unsolved problems. Knowledge of formulas and how numbers interact are simply tools to go in your toolbox. It’s like arguing a court case where you cite precedents. We already have the proof for the Pythagorean Theorem so there’s no reason for you to prove it. Yet that’s what we have kids do. They practice problems using the Pythagorean Theorem while groaning about “When are we ever going to use this?” This method of teaching is great for creating a workforce that can count change or take measurements. It’s not great at creating the people that will discover a unified theory of gravity. In order to make new discoveries, it would help if children were introduced to algebra and calculus a lot sooner than 8th. and 12th. grade (respectively). More importantly, it would help if they were taught how algebra and calculus solved problems that weren’t understood (like the exact volume of a water bottle shaped like a bear).

Probably the worst culprit is homework, which is used to get children to accept being available to their employers at all times. When you’re off the clock, they want you to perform unpaid labor. Even when that unpaid labor is bullshit other people figured out 2,000 years ago.

The leadership of my district folded like wet cardboard faster than you could say “DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO I AM?”