How America Keeps Its Citizens Uneducated

For a democracy, the important subjucts are;
Civics, knowing how the government actually works. from comments some elected officials would fail this.
Financial literacy and basic economics
Critical thinking skills.

Those are the subjects that seem to get cut with the arts and other 'electives'.

Did that kid even get breakfast? Big assumption there is even bread in the house.

 

Yeah tough call. At least the kids sleep at home. Messed up world.

 

Very true and this is something that was happening decades and decades ago, not just in the 2000's. Back when Mendel was a pup.

The problem is white flight to the suburbs in the 60's and 70's left many kids out there wearing rose colored glasses.

 

I remember a kid coming to school not well taken care of, a long time ago. For whatever reason, there they are, and helping is the right thing to do. When there is an opportunity to help someone, or look away.

 

These are the types of things the democrats lost the election on.
You have to pick your fights, because if you are out of office, you lose all of them

 

Regarding the school lunchs, then there's the rationale, that "if you're going to do something, do it right", Which escalates it, from a box of pre-made sandwiches, to a full-blown wing for a cafeteria, pro-staff, and so on. I guess.

 

Every government program escalates, more is always better

 

Most US schools always had a cafeteria and low cost meals. However some kids did not have the money and might have peanut butter and jelly on white in a bag and a dime for a coke.

 

I understand that some in this studio audience have aged out of the kid thing, but don't any of y'all have grandkids??????
My SIL's mom is a for-real, hair-net wearing, lunch lady for an elementary school in the next town over.
They stopped dealing with the whole 'lunch thing' after the 60's.

Now?
They NOT ONLY provide after school feeding but also summer and 'backpack' meals.
OH....and this is on top of the fact that every church in the county (including and especially MINE) has a robust pantry programme.

WHY?
Because they give SNAP benefits to PARENTS - SOME of whom use them to buy and sell Red Bulls and other 'necessities' with their SNAP benefits for drug money.
Those tend to be the ones begging their teachers for money to feed the vending machines in the more horribly run schools that still allow them.

Free breakfast, summer, and after school meals are widely available - sometimes without any paperwork or questions because Hungry kids, as it turns out, will often EAT THE FOOD!

SNAP is an HHS thing - and the 52 flavors of feeding kids in the classwooms and after school tend to be STATE and/or COUNTY administered things that occur IN SPITE OF, not BECAUSE of the feds.

Example of a programme flier in my beloved home state.
My current school district FEEDS kids three times a day every school day and they have summer programmes.

 

they don't deliver meals over the weekend?

 

Now that we have diverted on to meal delivery, I return to the thread title. Any country might aspire to keep its citizens uneducated in the following ways:

Preventing or impeding literacy.
Preventing or impeding numeracy.
Preventing or impeding rational decision-making processes.

There were (medieval) times when countries (that were not 'all that') could do and did do such things. With whatever motives. But now is not then, and every country does support the 'big 3' above. There are some stragglers but USA is not one of them. The plausible knock against USA as an educating country is that while it is among the highest-spending on education, it achieves not-the-highest outcomes. Funding is apparent to quantifying, while outcomes are more qualitative. Complexity is like that.

I claim countries work towards this in their own ways, and if exceptions exist, USA is not among those. USA education has obvious room for improvement. Concerns that it is dismal are made without evidence, and with motivations not clearly stated.

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But more to the point: I claim that benefits of 'uneducation' are to mould citizens into compliance, even to the extent that they have been educated in rational decision-making processes. Motivations are immediately clear - someone is trying to sell you (vote for) a bill of goods. Dissimulation, propaganda, and distraction interfere with rational decision-making processes. I make no claim that one USA political party hold a monopoly here. One ought to seek reality and benefit from knowing it.

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For literacy and numeracy, the genie has been out of the bottle for a century or more. Information on which to base rational decision-making is more recently on Internet, but it is not alone there. Uneducation depends now on providing more compelling and comforting spin than reality can provide.

 

Empiricism - Wikipedia

 

Unfortunately, the op being a video, I don’t know what the premise is.
I can only judge by experience.

 

Oh dear...

I've been tasked with school lunches for the grandkids:



They're not that photogenic when they come out of wax paper wrapping, but almost taste better.

 

If any others are living without Wikipedia, here's another:

Empiricism - Rationalism, Locke, Hume | Britannica

It's a structured view of reality, and good as far as it goes. Reality in empiricism was originally limited to that can be sensed by the 5 senses. That would be an unacceptable limitation in a technological world.

 

In elementary school my lunch money was stolen by bad boys a few times. That stopped when I took my first 'job'.

Misbehavior in class (by approx. the same bad boys) was punished by being required to copy pages out of some book during recess. I offered to do copying for them, for a small fee. Teachers knew of that and did not interfere. As I had become 'a friend of the cartel', I was no longer losing lunch money; in fact I had a bit more.

I mention this to agree that school meals are important. Also, for a few here concerned about my ethos, notice how early I began cooperating with evil forces

 

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye........

 

basically boils down to focal length

 

If so, and if geometrical optics are not now taught in secondary schools as they were when I was a pup, that would be bad. More broadly, not teaching many things would be bad.

But is that what has happened? SAT scores is US have gone down a bit over decades and I do not propose a cause. I would strongly oppose an idea that teaching DEI (for example) could have caused it, because that (if it happens) happens in other classrooms.

Global education including in US is weak on critical thinking, including rational assessment of sources of evidence. SAT among other tests wave at that, but cannot test it. Short testing hours don't allow...

==
So let's just suppose global secondary education including in US is weak teaching critical thinking. Great if it is better in some places, but how could we know? NOW the problem presents itself. Now there is internet with rife with misinformation both fascinating and comforting. Consequences seem unequal among countries because countries are unequal in forces aiming for voting or clicking gains.

By my claim this is not an US uneducation problem. Education has always toiled against ignorance, with good results, and only needing funding to prevail. Caveat that uneducation of some, along with slavery and its milder children are good for GDP. But internet (access) changed the world, and misinformation both fascinating and comforting is candy to non-critical thinkers.

Everywhere.