Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?
30th June 2021
School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.
And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.
This is primarily a result of the defective German/American university system, in which students go through courses the way a gamer goes through levels – once you level up, you can forget where you’ve been (unless you’re heading to grad school, in which case you might need to remember some of it).
The British system, in which you spend three years studying a subject under the guidance of an individual tutor and your degree depends on a single comprehensive examination at the end, is much superior–if knowledge is what you’re after, rather than just a credential that will get you a good job.
Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, and since we’re not paying parents to stay home, they need someone to take care of their kids. And yes, some may be falling behind or finding distance learning hard, but a decent system could make that up well enough.
But the idea that the kids themselves miss school, except in the sense that they can’t see their friends (which is pandemic related, and if it’s not safe to see them outside of school it isn’t safe to see them in school) is laughable.
Amen to that. Public schools are explicitly babysitting services that have long since given up the pretense of actually educating their pupils. (Look up ‘social promotion’.)