#US Education

[arctic-hands]

No but seriously the United States desperately needs to have a discussion about segregation against the disabled in our school systems and we can start with how anti-masking and perfect attendance policies have forced medically vulnerable kids to either put themselves at grievous risk or pull out of school all together

[wolveria]

"Certain ships should be illegal!" How does it feel to fall for the same fear-mongering, book-burning, pearl-clutching reactionary propaganda that your grandparents did.

"But it'll lead to pedophilia!" And the Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s gained momentum out of real fear for the safety of children. Didn't make it true. Strong emotions do not indicate factual accuracy.

Just because you're young and label yourself a progressive doesn't mean your critical thinking skills and media literacy are better than the generations before you. In fact, due to right-wing evangelical influence on school budgets and boards, they're probably worse.

[luulapants]

Through my public school education in the '90s and early '00s, our US history classes always ran out of time at the end of the year, somewhere around the '60s civil rights movement. We usually had enough time for a rushed, incomplete, confusing explanation of the Vietnam War. We never learned about Watergate or the fall of the Berlin Wall or Reagonomics or the Gulf War. They were in our history books, but we never got to that part.

It terrifies me to wonder what era history classes end on now. Do they make it past the Cold War era now? Past 9/11 and the War on Terror? Or are young folks today entirely uneducated on the horrific Islamophobia and civilian slaughter that occurred at the beginning of this millennium?

[would-you-punt-them]

Book Banning

[gamer2002]

https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1753951986175844734

Tax funded indoctrination before you learn to read and count? Can we call it grooming already?

[existennialmemes]

Hey maybe if public schools weren't so traumatizing, more adults would adopt an attitude of life long learning, and maybe we wouldn't see so many memes about how everyone has forgotten how to do the math we were taught while all the trauma was occurring.

[asteriskemily]

The World Ends With You is such a good game because all the music in it sounds like the Pacer Test

[doublel27]

To all of my fellow US educators reading this, you survived this week and made it to Friday.

I’m sorry we have to keep going like this, and under these conditions, but we’re not going alone.

Rest and celebrate even the the smallest pockets of joy.

[contemplatingoutlander]

America has legislated itself into competing red, blue versions of education

This is an excellent article in The Washington Post about how our school systems have begun to reflect the political divisions in our nation, with many red states legally banning discussions on racism, sexism, and gender issues, and many blue states legally requiring those kinds of discussions. This is a gift🎁link, so anyone can read the entire article, even if the don't subscribe to the Post. Below are some excerpts:

Three-fourths of the nation’s school-aged students are now educated under state-level measures that either require more teaching on issues like race, racism, history, sex and gender, or which sharply limit or fully forbid such lessons, according to a sweeping Post review of thousands of state laws, gubernatorial directives and state school board policies. The restrictive laws alone affect almost half of all Americans aged 5 to 19. [...] The divide is sharply partisan. The vast majority of restrictive laws and policies, close to 9o percent, were enacted in states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, The Post found. Meanwhile, almost 80 percent of expansive laws and policies were enacted in states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

The explosion of laws regulating school curriculums is unprecedented in U.S. history for its volume and scope, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies education history and policy...states have never before stepped in so aggressively to set rules for local schools. [...] [A] nationally representative study from the Rand Corp. released this year found that 65 percent of K-12 teachers report they are limiting instruction on “political and social issues.” “What the laws show is that we have extremely significant differences over how we imagine America,” Zimmerman said. [...] In practice, these divisions mean that what a child learns about, say, the role slavery played in the nation’s founding — or the possibility of a person identifying as nonbinary — may come to depend on whether they live in a red or blue state. [...] Almost 40 percent of these laws work by granting parents greater control of the curriculum — stipulating that they must be able to review, object to or remove lesson material, as well as opt out of instruction. [...] Another almost 40 percent of the laws forbid schools from teaching a long list of often-vague concepts related to race, sex or gender.

[...] At the college level, among the measures passed in recent years is a 2021 Oklahoma law that prohibits institutions of higher education from holding “mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling,” as well as any “orientation or requirement that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping.” By contrast, a 2023 California measure says state community college faculty must employ “teaching, learning and professional practices” that reflect “anti-racist principles.”

Some experts predicted the politically divergent instruction will lead to a more divided society. “When children are being taught very different stories of what America is, that will lead to adults who have a harder time talking to each other,” said Rachel Rosenberg, a Hartwick College assistant professor of education.

[selkies-world]

Me, in the UK, preparing to watch the USA get turned into a fully fledged Christian ethnostate thanks to the fact they willingly voted a Christian Nationalist into power:

Meanwhile, USAmericans:

Here's what's going to happen, now that the orange bastard is on America's throne.

First, it'll be trans people & immigrants that will get the brunt of it. They'll be treated worse than they have this century.

Then it'll be BIPOC and disabled people. It'll be the women & girls who get it the worst, out of these groups.

Then it'll be the gays, and marriage will be returned to the state, Roe & Wade style.

Then it'll be women.

Along the way, they'll also be taking money and funding out of education and the workforce, and putting it into the military, weapons, tech for the pet elongated muskrat, and the church. Funding for climate and science and medicine will be taken away and relocated.

Your weather reports will be privatised, and if you pay to be able to view them, they will give you false information, and will intentionally fail to mention climate change. You will not know when a wildfire is predicted, or a flood, or a hurricane. Likewise, you will not know when those events happen in other states. You will not know what the weather is like in the rest of the world because the news will be heavily censored and filtered.

You will also lose porn. All LGBTQIA+ content, including shows and resources and books, will be classified as pornography, and banned. You will lose the general Internet, and anonymity, and privacy. Spyware will be mandatory on your devices. Anyone caught looking at banned material will be prosecuted, and labeled as a monster - someone looking at gay porn, or reading gay fanfic, or reading up on safe gay sex, will be branded as a pedophile or a sexual deviant.

You will also find that sex ed is removed from schools. Even anatomy & biology classes will be different. You can't miss something if you're never taught it in the first place, surely. Teen pregnancies will increase, as birth control becomes illegal, and pregnancy complications, child deaths, miscarriages and teen parents will be very commonplace. Sexual diseases will also become more prevalent as the medication for them will become scarce; PReP will be next to impossible to access, so a small AIDS epidemic will resurface. Antibiotics and vaccines will become rarer and rarer.

All porn will be deigned as a threat to children, and kink safespaces for adults will be hunted and shut down as being a threat to society. Gay clubs, too. Pride will be canceled, as will pride clubs in schools and colleges. Funding for therapy & mental health resources will dry up.

Families will be torn up, children will be tortured and abused, and adults will be forced to go along with it, face the same treatment, enact the abuse, or go to jail for child abuse because they tried to help their child. Gay adoptions will stop, as will family support for families with gay children.

Meanwhile, the UK will be in a political war with the USA. Palestinians will be bombed more, and so will most countries in the middle East. Egypt will become a target, and a few other parts of Africa. Russia and Ukraine will continue to attack each other, but Russia will be watching the USA and UK. So will North Korea and China.

None of you will be told if there's another pandemic. None of you will be told if there are millions or hundreds of millions of deaths. None of you will be told about loved ones in danger in other countries or states. None of you will be told the truth about anything.

Congratulations, America. You've built your walls high, and fortified your country. But you haven't just shut the rest of the world out; you've shut yourselves in.

If you don't believe me, save this post and come back to it 1 year from now. 2 years. 3 years. 4. Take a screenshot of it. And let's see which of us is right.

[musingmanor]

[imonthenoflylist]

PLEASE VOTE!! YOU MAY NOT THINK YOUR VOTE MEANS MUCH BUT IT DOES. CURRENTLY DONALD TRUMP HAS 101 ELECTORAL VOTES AND KAMALA HAS 52!!! PLEASE VOTE!!

[arctic-hands]

It's all "Kids Need To Be Back In School!!" until city schools are so underfunded that multiple schools have to close for multiple days because there's no air condition and it's still hot out, or in winter there's no heat (while the former governor and centrist darling uses state funds to install a heated driveway at the governor's mansion)

[sagaduwyrm]

Okay, so, full disclosure, I hate exercising and I fully blame the US education system for that.

It's not like I hate to move. As a kid I used to run at recess and at home all the time and I loved climbing all over the playground. I taught myself over a week to use the monkey bars. A good gym class would have taken that spark and turned it into a lifelong relationship with exercise, helping me live a healthy, happy, and fulfilling life. Instead they ran me roughshod in a program meant to produce athletes and soldiers.

So. Here's my pitch for a non-sports-based gym class designed to help the average student develop a healthy exercise habit starting at middle school.

The first week or so would be completely track focused, but instead of being forced to run a mile everyone is taken out to the track, told they can bring their phone, headphones whatever, that they can talk to their friends the whole time, but don't stop moving around the track. There will be a prize for whoever completes the most laps, but if you don't want to run or go fast it's fine. You can walk the entire time. You just can't stop moving (for a few seconds or a minute or two is fine, obviously, but this is still gym class). This is to get students used the idea that movement can be easy and non painful.

There will also be stretches at the beginning and end of class.

After a few days of this the teacher will explain that there's something new on the track: zones have been marked with flags or something. These are to help anyone who wants to start practicing to get a little faster. If you've been walking the whole time, start jogging just in these zones. If you've been jogging the whole time, start running. This is based on the principle of interval training and will be a lot easier on the body than just telling someone who hates running to start sprinting.

Crucially, why this is helpful is explained to the students, and it's also reiterated that no one has to use the zones if they don't want to. Forty minutes or so of walking a day is still a decent amount of exercise, especially compared to a lot of modern Americans.

Over time more activities start to be peppered in. A weights day where everyone is taught how to safely do basic reps, with weights low enough for them. A calisthenics day with lots of modifications, i.e. you can do pushups against the wall if you want or need to. Yoga videos from a projector. For every activity the teacher explains why it's good for you, how it will make your daily life easier, and how to do it safely.

Games are played fairly often. Not necessarily sports, but fun, silly activities that get your body moving but aren't exercise. Also, Just Dance videos.

Anytime a student doesn't want to participate in the activity of the day they're allowed to go back to walking around the track. The goal of this curriculum is to make students want to exercise, or at least be comfortable with it.

Competitions can be used, but sparingly. Think about it, in an academic focus class, you wouldn't want your students to be constantly focused on how well (or badly) they're doing in comparison to everyone else. Competition can be a good motivator, but it can also be really damaging to mental health.

There are also occasional research projects where students look up some health things and present it somehow. This can be anything from stretches for a specific body part to who can find the most delicious looking, healthy recipes.

[anaranjadanaranja]

Y'all I was NOT indoctrinating the children before (because teaching empathy and respect isn't indoctrination) BUT I'M ABOUT TO START. I am about to indoctrinate those kids so hard they're gonna come home and teach YOU about systemic inequity and justice and they're gonna have to fire me if they want me to stop