We live in a "literate" society that is, ironically, more truly illiterate than supposedly illiterate societies. How much of your culture's literature can you quote by memory? My kid was reading without realizing he was reading. When he was 3. Just because of billboards. I spent 20 minutes explaining the parts of speech and how the English language was developed (so he would not expect all rules of grammar to be universal) when the boys in his racial group in Kindergarten demanded he could read. In three weeks, on his own, he was reading college level. We live in a literate society. You cannot avoid the printed word. Nor why would you want to? It's the only way you can communicate with generations who were dead before you were born.
As for teens, give a teenager money, an iPhone, a car (at 15??? Are you nuts?), their own wing of the McMansion (for middle-to upper middle-class people), their own TV, computer, etc. When do they see their parents? When they need money or birth control? Helicopter parents are out there in the middle class but not in the working class. Those parents do not have the time for such nonsense. They do seem to go to every sports games, which I find a peculiarly American thing. But all these kids spend most of their time doing stuff their friends (or internet acquaintances) might know about but their parents really have no clue. The incidence of porn-watching among young teens is epidemic. The drug-taking (and I'm talking about pharmaceuticals) is horrendous. Yes. These kids spend most of their waking hours with WAY too much freedom, totally unsupervised, and super vulnerable to every kind of predator you can think of. And it is the kids' parents who gave the pedators the keys to their kids' bedrooms. Horrendous. I would never give a teenager a car at 15. Mine didn't get a license until he was 23, which is how old I was when I started driving. Thankfully he did not have a cell phone until he bought one himself. In his 20's. Thank god. I have two but don't use either. I am very concerned about the surveillance state. I have seen 18-month-old babies in grocery carts with their own cell phone or other tablet. This is crazy. Their executive function doesn't develop till they're 30. What are parents thinking of? Just going along with the Jones's, is my guess. Or they're not thinking at all. Kids used to grow up in extended families. That's where they learned most of what they know. We need to go back to families being families--not disparate individuals. Indeed, social changes we're facing right now demand that we go back to focusing more on community and less on individual obsessions. Or we're not going to survive, individually OR as groups. American kids have way too much freedom and way too little parenting. I have friends whose kids are joining the military, thinking that's a guaranteed wonderful career. I'm watching what's going on world-wide and I ask them: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? DON'T YOUR LOVE YOUR KIDS/GRANDKIDS??? They say, "Oh, I want them to be happy." This is nuts. Those kids are going to come back totally mentally ill, as most vets of recent American wars are mentally ill to one degree or another. You cannot participate in mass murder without paying a HUGE price. Sacrificing your kids for the friggin' billionaires. This is nuts.
As for police unions, are you aware that quite a few of them refused PCR testing because they knew their DNA was being harvested and actually shared not just with a company in the US but also with an entity in China? I stopped donating blood because of this issue. Police need unions. People are nuts and guns are everywhere. They need protection from the public. And if we did not have police, most of us wouldn't be able to leave our homes with any guarantee of being able to return home again. I do ancillary work remotely with a police entity. I called them pigs in the 70's like most of my cohort. But cops really do need unions. So do foster parents, in my opinion. Foster parents have no protections at all and foster kids know exactly how to hurt you the most. That's what the foster care system has taught them. That's why people are leery of being foster parents, sad to say. Being a cop is a friggin scary career move. They fear the public more than the public fears them. Truthfully.
Before I go on I’d like to agree with you that left and right are horribly simplistic. It’s definitely not a two camp binary, nor a two-dimensional spectrum. It’s more of a polydimensional space in which every individual occupies a unique position. People tend to cohere in certain areas but there’s no straightforward left-right curve, and if there was, I certainly don’t think it would be a classic bell curve with most people in the centre.
I’m British so I have a different experience of state education; my only knowledge in detail of the American system comes from American friends who have been through it. Some of their descriptions are hard to believe - you really have no rigorous system of end-of-school examinations on the subjects studied? Just a multiple choice quiz?
But my suspicion is that the reason American schools are so horrific (according to former inmates) is conservatives. The British state education system, along with most of those in Europe, was designed by socialists and has mainly been managed by socialist teachers; most teachers and academics are leftist because fundamentally understanding more of how the world works tends to move people to the left. In Europe teachers and academics have been allowed to have more influence than I suspect they have in the US; accordingly the system is more tuned to the needs of the students, rather than the businesses who run the schools.
Well it was at the time I went through it. Not so much the last 20 years, essentially because of conservatives in the Labour and Conservative parties. I suspect they what we have now is a lot closer to yours than it was in say 2000.
One of my American friends describes never bothering with school in her teens, but just turning up for the SAT and passing it easily. If this is a fair description then homeschooling is a viable alternative. But the fundamental problem as a widespread strategy is that parents can only teach their children what they know. My mum cannot understand maths. I can. This has only been possible because I was taught it by trained professionals. Same for the French and German languages. Same for various other subjects. My parents did however teach me to read before I started school, so I would have been miles ahead of my peers in a homeschooled society - but again, why should I get this massive advantage over other kids who weren’t so lucky? I didn’t earn it.
So homeschooling as a widespread option would ensure that the children of the uneducated remain uneducated. It’s not a child’s fault if their parents can’t do maths; it’s not fair to deny them life opportunities as a result. The only way to ensure that all children have the opportunity to better themselves through education is for the state to step in. And leaving education in the hands of businesses will ensure that the profit motive comes before the educational one every time. This ultimately is why leftists are generally behind state education - it’s the only way to guarantee a good minimum for everyone.
If you think you can do better than the state you should absolutely be entitled to try, with suitable monitoring to ensure that you are actually teaching the child something (otherwise it’s child abuse). But I struggle to see how you’re going to replicate the social experience, and the fact that a huge amount of what any student learns is from their peers. Most of the homeschooled people I know are significantly socially inept (even worse than me); in some cases they were like this before and were withdrawn from school due to bullying. I can understand this, but the thing is that the world does contain other people, you are going to have to deal with them so they should really be a central part of your education. I’m guessing though that modern homeschooling communities have ways round this, again I’m comparing with Britain in the 90s.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give my opinion as to why leftists like state education.
Not sure how much most Americans know about your system but I've had many British friends who came here (illegally, a lot of them, which is possible if you're Caucasian with minimum worry) because of how rigid and class-based educational opportunities are in Britain. My own nieces were in Oxford when they were 14 (their father had a sabbatical at Oxford University) and were put in the local school. Of course, they had not taken the exam to funnel them towards university or vocational school when they were 11 and their parents were appalled by your educational system. The majority of teachers in the US do lean left because they're "educated" (although I don't think a major in Education is an education). And I do know there are multiple opportunities in the US system to get back on track if, for example, you lose a parent to death or divorce or addiction sometime in your youth, or you decide you prefer a different career, etc. That's why a lot of Brits come here. To get back on track educationally. As a young reader you would have been ahead of some homeschoolers and way behind others. Homeschoolers tend to be 2-4 years ahead of their peers intellectually. They also get along with adults phenomenally well. And many have gone from homeschooling to Ivy League institutions (which I don't recommend for anyone). Much of the socialization you get in school from other kids is dysfunctional. Probably why so many people took the jab when it was clearly not an intelligent move. I wasn't strong in math either as a kid, but that was because of the math system my school was using in high school. Many years later I needed more math for an allied medical degree and found I have a marked ability in math. In fact, I just thought it was common sense and getting what I needed was a breeze. I just do most of it in my head. And they wanted to see every step on paper in high school, which they called "New Math". My kid taught himself math, which is easily done. His (homeschooled) math skills were so strong that he was made the Math Teacher's Assistant in college for classmates who had both public and private educations and had many more years of math than he did. That says it all, really. He only had Algebra I but had stronger math skills than kids with Advanced Calculus. I wanted to be home educated by my father (who was very well-educated degree-wise) because I admired the way John Stuart Mill was educated. (He declined.) I have worked with homeschooled kids of parents who lack much formal education. Some of them did no better in formal education than they did at home, although I did teach them to read at grade level. They knew how to garden and hunt and build things with their hands which are skills formally educated people often lack, and which will come in handy in the near future, I expect. But standardized education is a waste of time. I know I was pretty bored during school (inside the classroom--I learned international politics outside class but my school was in an unusual place with an extremely international population--because rather than focusing on subjects that riveted me (in which I tested off the charts, as do many kids with specialized interests) I had to waste my time plodding along at what was considered my agemates' level.
Test results do not indicate what you know and, ESPECIALLY, they do not indicate if you know HOW TO LEARN. Your teachers in school had no idea what kind of world you would be facing today, I think we can both agree. So their primary responsibility, whether they were homeschooling parents or in a state or private school, was to TEACH YOU HOW TO LEARN. NOT what to learn. Ideally, you should be learning every day of your life. That's how we evolved. And it is essential for our survival as individuals and as a species.
Although I attended a private international school of much higher standards than my American peers in university (who attended both state and private schools in the US and other countries), what I really learned was two-fold: How to learn what I felt *I* needed to learn, and international politics. By that I include intelligence services whose kids I went to school with, all the backroom machinations that are hidden behind reported political decisions, real lived international history (from my classmates' families' experiences) etc. I use that second form of education every day. In fact, I am pretty well-equipped to analyze what's going on right now. And I engage people online because that is probably the most effective form of activism I can engage in. I don't have money, getting my passport renewed would involve ridiculous machinations because of my complicated heritage, and I refuse to be vaccinated so it's pretty much pointless anyway. But I am very grateful that I know enough not to be frightened of what's going on, and being really well educated in dealing with authoritarianism and propaganda. I grew up with this stuff in the street--NOT in the classroom. Colonialism and imperialism? Been there. Watched it up front and personal.
The human juvenile brain cannot do but to learn. That's how it works. Just as I am very careful with what I do in front of my extremely bright horse, I know kids "learn" from everything we do in front of them. You have no idea what your kids' teachers do in front of them or what holes they have in their education or what serious emotional or social deficits they have. You don't even know what happens when their classroom door is closed.
I don't think homeschooled people are socially inept. I think they have not been forced into conformity. You can look at it as a weakness; I consider it a strength. In fact, it is a real adaptive asset right now and will be more so in the future. The entire planet is moving into a very difficult time. Your degrees will not protect you. In fact, they are likely to blind you to what is going on. And you will learn the skills your "uneducated" mates have are extremely valuable.
Leftists like state education because a lot of them make a living through it. Although I don't really know what you mean by "leftist". I don't think many of my public school teachers in the US (where I was in school for a total of 4 years) were leftist in the least. The union people defend the public school system because they earn nice money, have great benefits, a LONG summer vacation, and a reliable pension after they retire. Though I think that last bit is about to be flushed down the toilet, in the UK as well as in the US, thanks to those populations' penchant towards conformity. I suggest you read up on the history of the development of public (state) education, as well as private education. In this country it is not about education. Nor is it in yours. It's more about class--keeping people in the class their parents were born into. There's more class mobility here but not as much as people think. I think you call private school "public". If you look at the intellectual background of your royal family, even the most privileged kids in the U.K. apparently have pretty poor "public" education. I do not like your elitism at all. Ours is bad enough but yours is over the top. And is very much related to your long history of colonialism. But that's another subject entirely. Or is it? How does a degree in Art History prepare a kid to be King?
We live in a "literate" society that is, ironically, more truly illiterate than supposedly illiterate societies. How much of your culture's literature can you quote by memory? My kid was reading without realizing he was reading. When he was 3. Just because of billboards. I spent 20 minutes explaining the parts of speech and how the English language was developed (so he would not expect all rules of grammar to be universal) when the boys in his racial group in Kindergarten demanded he could read. In three weeks, on his own, he was reading college level. We live in a literate society. You cannot avoid the printed word. Nor why would you want to? It's the only way you can communicate with generations who were dead before you were born.
As for teens, give a teenager money, an iPhone, a car (at 15??? Are you nuts?), their own wing of the McMansion (for middle-to upper middle-class people), their own TV, computer, etc. When do they see their parents? When they need money or birth control? Helicopter parents are out there in the middle class but not in the working class. Those parents do not have the time for such nonsense. They do seem to go to every sports games, which I find a peculiarly American thing. But all these kids spend most of their time doing stuff their friends (or internet acquaintances) might know about but their parents really have no clue. The incidence of porn-watching among young teens is epidemic. The drug-taking (and I'm talking about pharmaceuticals) is horrendous. Yes. These kids spend most of their waking hours with WAY too much freedom, totally unsupervised, and super vulnerable to every kind of predator you can think of. And it is the kids' parents who gave the pedators the keys to their kids' bedrooms. Horrendous. I would never give a teenager a car at 15. Mine didn't get a license until he was 23, which is how old I was when I started driving. Thankfully he did not have a cell phone until he bought one himself. In his 20's. Thank god. I have two but don't use either. I am very concerned about the surveillance state. I have seen 18-month-old babies in grocery carts with their own cell phone or other tablet. This is crazy. Their executive function doesn't develop till they're 30. What are parents thinking of? Just going along with the Jones's, is my guess. Or they're not thinking at all. Kids used to grow up in extended families. That's where they learned most of what they know. We need to go back to families being families--not disparate individuals. Indeed, social changes we're facing right now demand that we go back to focusing more on community and less on individual obsessions. Or we're not going to survive, individually OR as groups. American kids have way too much freedom and way too little parenting. I have friends whose kids are joining the military, thinking that's a guaranteed wonderful career. I'm watching what's going on world-wide and I ask them: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? DON'T YOUR LOVE YOUR KIDS/GRANDKIDS??? They say, "Oh, I want them to be happy." This is nuts. Those kids are going to come back totally mentally ill, as most vets of recent American wars are mentally ill to one degree or another. You cannot participate in mass murder without paying a HUGE price. Sacrificing your kids for the friggin' billionaires. This is nuts.
As for police unions, are you aware that quite a few of them refused PCR testing because they knew their DNA was being harvested and actually shared not just with a company in the US but also with an entity in China? I stopped donating blood because of this issue. Police need unions. People are nuts and guns are everywhere. They need protection from the public. And if we did not have police, most of us wouldn't be able to leave our homes with any guarantee of being able to return home again. I do ancillary work remotely with a police entity. I called them pigs in the 70's like most of my cohort. But cops really do need unions. So do foster parents, in my opinion. Foster parents have no protections at all and foster kids know exactly how to hurt you the most. That's what the foster care system has taught them. That's why people are leery of being foster parents, sad to say. Being a cop is a friggin scary career move. They fear the public more than the public fears them. Truthfully.
Before I go on I’d like to agree with you that left and right are horribly simplistic. It’s definitely not a two camp binary, nor a two-dimensional spectrum. It’s more of a polydimensional space in which every individual occupies a unique position. People tend to cohere in certain areas but there’s no straightforward left-right curve, and if there was, I certainly don’t think it would be a classic bell curve with most people in the centre.
I’m British so I have a different experience of state education; my only knowledge in detail of the American system comes from American friends who have been through it. Some of their descriptions are hard to believe - you really have no rigorous system of end-of-school examinations on the subjects studied? Just a multiple choice quiz?
But my suspicion is that the reason American schools are so horrific (according to former inmates) is conservatives. The British state education system, along with most of those in Europe, was designed by socialists and has mainly been managed by socialist teachers; most teachers and academics are leftist because fundamentally understanding more of how the world works tends to move people to the left. In Europe teachers and academics have been allowed to have more influence than I suspect they have in the US; accordingly the system is more tuned to the needs of the students, rather than the businesses who run the schools.
Well it was at the time I went through it. Not so much the last 20 years, essentially because of conservatives in the Labour and Conservative parties. I suspect they what we have now is a lot closer to yours than it was in say 2000.
One of my American friends describes never bothering with school in her teens, but just turning up for the SAT and passing it easily. If this is a fair description then homeschooling is a viable alternative. But the fundamental problem as a widespread strategy is that parents can only teach their children what they know. My mum cannot understand maths. I can. This has only been possible because I was taught it by trained professionals. Same for the French and German languages. Same for various other subjects. My parents did however teach me to read before I started school, so I would have been miles ahead of my peers in a homeschooled society - but again, why should I get this massive advantage over other kids who weren’t so lucky? I didn’t earn it.
So homeschooling as a widespread option would ensure that the children of the uneducated remain uneducated. It’s not a child’s fault if their parents can’t do maths; it’s not fair to deny them life opportunities as a result. The only way to ensure that all children have the opportunity to better themselves through education is for the state to step in. And leaving education in the hands of businesses will ensure that the profit motive comes before the educational one every time. This ultimately is why leftists are generally behind state education - it’s the only way to guarantee a good minimum for everyone.
If you think you can do better than the state you should absolutely be entitled to try, with suitable monitoring to ensure that you are actually teaching the child something (otherwise it’s child abuse). But I struggle to see how you’re going to replicate the social experience, and the fact that a huge amount of what any student learns is from their peers. Most of the homeschooled people I know are significantly socially inept (even worse than me); in some cases they were like this before and were withdrawn from school due to bullying. I can understand this, but the thing is that the world does contain other people, you are going to have to deal with them so they should really be a central part of your education. I’m guessing though that modern homeschooling communities have ways round this, again I’m comparing with Britain in the 90s.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give my opinion as to why leftists like state education.
Not sure how much most Americans know about your system but I've had many British friends who came here (illegally, a lot of them, which is possible if you're Caucasian with minimum worry) because of how rigid and class-based educational opportunities are in Britain. My own nieces were in Oxford when they were 14 (their father had a sabbatical at Oxford University) and were put in the local school. Of course, they had not taken the exam to funnel them towards university or vocational school when they were 11 and their parents were appalled by your educational system. The majority of teachers in the US do lean left because they're "educated" (although I don't think a major in Education is an education). And I do know there are multiple opportunities in the US system to get back on track if, for example, you lose a parent to death or divorce or addiction sometime in your youth, or you decide you prefer a different career, etc. That's why a lot of Brits come here. To get back on track educationally. As a young reader you would have been ahead of some homeschoolers and way behind others. Homeschoolers tend to be 2-4 years ahead of their peers intellectually. They also get along with adults phenomenally well. And many have gone from homeschooling to Ivy League institutions (which I don't recommend for anyone). Much of the socialization you get in school from other kids is dysfunctional. Probably why so many people took the jab when it was clearly not an intelligent move. I wasn't strong in math either as a kid, but that was because of the math system my school was using in high school. Many years later I needed more math for an allied medical degree and found I have a marked ability in math. In fact, I just thought it was common sense and getting what I needed was a breeze. I just do most of it in my head. And they wanted to see every step on paper in high school, which they called "New Math". My kid taught himself math, which is easily done. His (homeschooled) math skills were so strong that he was made the Math Teacher's Assistant in college for classmates who had both public and private educations and had many more years of math than he did. That says it all, really. He only had Algebra I but had stronger math skills than kids with Advanced Calculus. I wanted to be home educated by my father (who was very well-educated degree-wise) because I admired the way John Stuart Mill was educated. (He declined.) I have worked with homeschooled kids of parents who lack much formal education. Some of them did no better in formal education than they did at home, although I did teach them to read at grade level. They knew how to garden and hunt and build things with their hands which are skills formally educated people often lack, and which will come in handy in the near future, I expect. But standardized education is a waste of time. I know I was pretty bored during school (inside the classroom--I learned international politics outside class but my school was in an unusual place with an extremely international population--because rather than focusing on subjects that riveted me (in which I tested off the charts, as do many kids with specialized interests) I had to waste my time plodding along at what was considered my agemates' level.
Test results do not indicate what you know and, ESPECIALLY, they do not indicate if you know HOW TO LEARN. Your teachers in school had no idea what kind of world you would be facing today, I think we can both agree. So their primary responsibility, whether they were homeschooling parents or in a state or private school, was to TEACH YOU HOW TO LEARN. NOT what to learn. Ideally, you should be learning every day of your life. That's how we evolved. And it is essential for our survival as individuals and as a species.
Although I attended a private international school of much higher standards than my American peers in university (who attended both state and private schools in the US and other countries), what I really learned was two-fold: How to learn what I felt *I* needed to learn, and international politics. By that I include intelligence services whose kids I went to school with, all the backroom machinations that are hidden behind reported political decisions, real lived international history (from my classmates' families' experiences) etc. I use that second form of education every day. In fact, I am pretty well-equipped to analyze what's going on right now. And I engage people online because that is probably the most effective form of activism I can engage in. I don't have money, getting my passport renewed would involve ridiculous machinations because of my complicated heritage, and I refuse to be vaccinated so it's pretty much pointless anyway. But I am very grateful that I know enough not to be frightened of what's going on, and being really well educated in dealing with authoritarianism and propaganda. I grew up with this stuff in the street--NOT in the classroom. Colonialism and imperialism? Been there. Watched it up front and personal.
The human juvenile brain cannot do but to learn. That's how it works. Just as I am very careful with what I do in front of my extremely bright horse, I know kids "learn" from everything we do in front of them. You have no idea what your kids' teachers do in front of them or what holes they have in their education or what serious emotional or social deficits they have. You don't even know what happens when their classroom door is closed.
I don't think homeschooled people are socially inept. I think they have not been forced into conformity. You can look at it as a weakness; I consider it a strength. In fact, it is a real adaptive asset right now and will be more so in the future. The entire planet is moving into a very difficult time. Your degrees will not protect you. In fact, they are likely to blind you to what is going on. And you will learn the skills your "uneducated" mates have are extremely valuable.
Leftists like state education because a lot of them make a living through it. Although I don't really know what you mean by "leftist". I don't think many of my public school teachers in the US (where I was in school for a total of 4 years) were leftist in the least. The union people defend the public school system because they earn nice money, have great benefits, a LONG summer vacation, and a reliable pension after they retire. Though I think that last bit is about to be flushed down the toilet, in the UK as well as in the US, thanks to those populations' penchant towards conformity. I suggest you read up on the history of the development of public (state) education, as well as private education. In this country it is not about education. Nor is it in yours. It's more about class--keeping people in the class their parents were born into. There's more class mobility here but not as much as people think. I think you call private school "public". If you look at the intellectual background of your royal family, even the most privileged kids in the U.K. apparently have pretty poor "public" education. I do not like your elitism at all. Ours is bad enough but yours is over the top. And is very much related to your long history of colonialism. But that's another subject entirely. Or is it? How does a degree in Art History prepare a kid to be King?
In your opinion, what is a "leftist"?