"I had an idyllic view of this purely meritocratic system where people were paid to explore."
I feel like our society and schooling really pushes the idyllic visions of things as well as the idea of strict meritocracy. I feel like this has left many of us jaded when we realize much of what we were told as we grew up were only half-truths concealing a bleak reality from us, and in some cases dooming us to self-inflicted issues like the one's described in the article.
School is just so much nonsense. I used to roll my eyes when I heard people say this, thinking it was a trope for rebellious teens - but, there's a huge amount of stuff you learn and do that has no real value and a huge amount you could learn that would be valuable that people don't teach.
Even obvious things like a course on how to cook or do your taxes or any of the things that people actually do in life aren't taught at all. At least they weren't for me. What's the relative utility of any K-12 lesson series compared to a series showing people how to budget or how to prepare affordable and healthy foods?
In reality we kind of expect people to learn everything they need to know outside of school and many things they don't need to know inside school.
I used to think that School was much nonsense too, so much that I spent 1 year or 2 mostly skipping it. But:
>In reality we kind of expect people to learn everything they need to know outside of school and many things they don't need to know inside school.
Yea and isn't school system aware of this? After all, if you learn how-to cook & do your taxes anyway (out of necessity, which is a stronger learning signal nevertheless) why teach it with public funding?
The opposite of your complaint is: "Ugh why are school teaching such obvious stuff that you will sooner or later learn anyway? Complete waste of taxpayer money!"
I see school as a incomplete(lazy) attempt to teach a broader populace "context" behind everything we have learned as a society so far. But that is too wide, and too deep to cover fully. Hence we cut of at some width and at certain depth, and focus on things you wouldn't learn or even know in a everyday life, the "unknown unknown" so to speak, for the young, energetic, mind.
My diastase for school mostly boggle down to how utterly incompetent they were even in this regard, in practice.
But maybe you have a more informed view on things that I missed in the short text.
> After all, if you learn how-to cook & do your taxes anyway (out of necessity, which is a stronger learning signal nevertheless) why teach it with public funding?
Plenty of people eat poorly because they can't cook, get their taxes wrong in a way that doesn't plausibly benefit anyone (unless this meant to be is a job creation program for the IRS), spend years not realising that they could start a business, have court proceedings go badly in a way that just wastes everyone's time...
School isn't going to fix the broken justice system. I've seen a trooper knowingly hold a false charge resulting in loss of liberty and then lie to the court about why he was amending it - his supervisor didn't care, IAD didn't care, the magistrate wouldn't even let us present our argument. The stuff they would teach in school about the system would be a joke because it's basically an oligarchy.
I feel like our society and schooling really pushes the idyllic visions of things as well as the idea of strict meritocracy. I feel like this has left many of us jaded when we realize much of what we were told as we grew up were only half-truths concealing a bleak reality from us, and in some cases dooming us to self-inflicted issues like the one's described in the article.