State education is indoctrination

I'll try to keep this short. The notion that the teacher's union has no power is not being supported by you, as you've provided no unbiased sources. I will gladly show that at my old high school, the site council (which is in charge of how extra money is spent within the school, including but not limited to donations, fundraisers, and ticket revenue) is 4/9 school staff, 3/9 parents, 1/9 students, and 1/9 community members[1]. Now, I fully realize that this is just a single school, but I can show that this trend (giving almost all voice to the school staff and parents, and very little to "community", which basically means business) is common in many schools. This ratio was actually worse back when I was on the site council from 03-05. The community was 1/11 and even the students out numbered them with 2/11. Most of what we did was a battle between the parents and teachers as to implementing new teaching methods. But let's pretend to go with the conspiracy theory. If we are making the assumption that the schools and their classes are dictated by big business interests and their goal is to make a horde of mindless obedient zombies, then it leaves quite a few questions that need to be asked. 1) If schools were trying to teach us to obey authority without question, then why would they allow for experiments in science classes, or questions in general? Instead of doing experiments on various chemicals in testing solubility, why not just tell us things and have us "trust them"? The initial answer would be to build that trust through proofs so we don't doubt them later, which kinda makes sense, but not when you think that they would be "trying to built trust" at the ends of our educational requirements (high school). This would make sense if they were doing this at the elementary level and then implementing and testing that trust at the high school level. But to try to build that blinding trust on people just as they leave school seems like poor planning on the big business. A far more likely reason for this? To let us find out for ourselves that certain things are true and to show us how to test things so that we can learn for ourselves and not have to relay on others to tell us info. 2) If schools were only preparing us for a future of dull work in a cubicle jungle, then why wouldn't they actually teach us anything about working in a cubicle or doing office jobs or anything like that? Having to train us at the actual employment site, only wastes time and money for the company. The likely argument is that they (the big businesses) don't want the students and people to catch on to what they are doing, they are hiding their hand. But this only makes sense if they plan on using their hand later in the "game" (which you just lost). Like in texas hold 'em, if you have the winning hand, you slow play so your opponent doesn't catch on that you've already won, but by the end you try to make the most out of it. You wouldn't check after the river card if your opponent also checked. And so a business may try to hide their hand and not make it obvious acts to let people know what they are doing, but they also aren't going to do nothing to achieve their goals. What is more likely, is that the schools are not actually trying to prepare us for cubicle life. While they do have a responsibility to prepare us for working in the real world (since getting an education, then not being able to get a job would kinda piss people off), it is not their sole responsibility or goal. 3) If schools were trying to conform us into a "one size fits all," then why offer AP classes and advanced classes? Or any extra curricular activities? Or even allow us to us (on the high school level) choose our own schedules? Giving students such freedoms and options to customize and individualize their schedules for their futures, seems to contradict the idea that they want us all to be the same man in the grey flannel suit. One might try to explain this as, it is a false sense of freedom that they bestow on kids to allow them to think they are individualizing when, in fact, they aren't. They are more likely to accept the conformation if they falsely believe that they are getting an individualized education. But while this explanation seems to hold true when people go from high school directly to the work force (since employers don't really care what classes you took in high school), it falls apart when a student tries to go to college. Those AP classes (or IB classes) and extra-curricular classes are very important when trying to get into a college and degree program. A 4.0 GPA is not going to get you into MIT or Caltech if you didn't take calculus or physics (same thing applies to pretty much every Ivy league school too). And that degree from Harvard looks so much better on a resume then a degree from so and so State University. And so, on that standpoint, those AP classes and extra-curricular classes ended up making a huge difference on the job you can get. A more likely reason, just like how schools try to prepare you for the real working world, they also try to prepare you for college and getting into the best one of those that you can. Really, what they do is to try to prepare you for whatever you want to do (be it college, trade school, or working). And because people often change their minds a lot about what they want to do, the schools have to go with a more rounded out base of knowledge to go from as a launching pad. [1] http://www.sherwood.k12.or.us...