> One thing that standardized education does is guarantee that the majority of people will be somewhere findable within the middle of the bell curve of the social status quo.

I’m not saying that we completely get rid of public education, just that we stop appending things to it and pretending they’re important.

Nobody remembers most of this alleged common ground anyways. Go ask around what the 5th amendment says, or what a high pH means, I’d be shocked if a quarter of people remembered.

> You feel that if you took the money out of the equation, you could rub shoulders with Biden and Bezos, Musk, Gates and Powell and not be too far out of your own depth.

Sure, if we’re talking about something covered in high school, but for any topic I’d be realistically interested in hearing them talk about, no. Why would me or Bill Gates want to discuss symbolism in Catcher in the Rye? I’m certainly not going to talk to Musk about chemistry; I’m doubtful he’s a through and through rocket engineer, but his tangential knowledge likely trumps my very limited recollection of valence bands and I have no idea how that relates to the energy density of rocket fuel.

This is just a veneer of equality we tell ourselves. Sure, we’re all equal in the sense that we’ve largely ignored our high school education and probably haven’t really advanced our biology knowledge.

That doesn’t imply that we’re all going to sit around and suddenly want to talk about that instead of rockets or operating systems or investment strategies; I am not on the same part of the bell curve for the topics that make them interesting.

> If you can show us a better path we'll start to move towards it, but until then accept the fact that there are thousands of minor and major pleasantries provided by standardized education that you get to enjoy every day as a matter of course thanks to the social conditioning it provided.

I don’t disagree there are pleasantries, but at what cost? We’re pushing children into working near-slavery workloads, with no recourse to change that, and our means of motivating them is primarily threatening their entire future if they don’t play along.

It’s like the worst job in the world; Amazons warehouses look like a vacation comparatively.

Children can’t switch schools on their own like adults can switch jobs. Children’s records follow them when they do switch, so they can’t escape even if they switch schools. I’ve never had HR records follow me across companies. And any employer that tried to control their employees by threatening to ruin the entire rest of their lives would have the NLRB crawl up their ass and build a branch office.

We’re trading the happiness of children for what? Me and my neighbor having equally shitty recall of the French and Indian war?

I still remember being in high school, and I still remember how miserable it was. I remember kids showing up with huge bags under their eyes because they had to go into “crunch time” and work til midnight because they got a bunch of big assignments at once.

I remember meeting most of my high school classmates and how bright eyed and cheery we were. I also remember senior year, and how many of those smiles had faded into blank, exhausted stares.

I remember the kids who had problems in their family lives whose personalities either disappeared or curdled into sour milk as they tried to cope with 60 hour weeks and just didn’t have the spare time and energy to try to process their parents divorce.

I remember the suicides and addiction the most though. The kids that had bottomed out so hard they would do anything they could to escape the loop of stress, failure, threats about their future, and back to the beginning. The only options we offer them are death or complete desperation, and some kids picked one because they just couldn’t do it anymore.

There were multiple suicides while I was in high school. 3 that I can recall, and one kid that ran away from home and overdosed while sleeping in a public park.

It’s awful for the kids that die, and it’s awful for the kids left behind who now have to figure out how to emotionally process a friend’s suicide while working 60 hour weeks knowing full well that college admissions won’t give 2 shits about why their GPA was low that quarter.

The highschool was ranked in the top 50 public schools in the US when I attended. This wasn’t a backwater dump wrecked by phasing out coal, this was a school held up as an example for other schools.

I don’t find nearly enough value in making a neat bell curve to put kids through that. I wouldn’t put adults through that, and the existence of unions tells me that others feel the same way. Unions would pitch a huge fit over the least egregious of our expectations of children.