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Comment by shrimp_emoji | Hacker News Reader

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But if (in the U.S.) you hollow out and defund the public education system

This has not happened: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending

If it's increased, it hasn't scaled with population. Reagan was well known for cutting the Department of Education's budget[0], and the public school system in Florida is abysmal. In places like that, it's implied that, if you remotely care about your kid's education, you enroll them into a private school[1]. A lot of those are Catholic, too. No wonder the right likes them.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/14/education/reagan-record-i...

1: https://time.com/5885106/school-reopening-coronavirus/

If it's increased, it hasn't scaled with population.

This is just not true: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a.... One might call it "misinformation".

That's a grossly distorted, partisan, and inconsistent view.

The US spends a huge amount on education and the amount has increased over time.

https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart....

Considering that textbooks now ship with software licenses, I'm not surprised. The education vendors are all-too-quick to find reason to soak up any available gubmint cheddar.

For the expense, where is the value? My kids' online curriculums are a nightmare. They're expected to keep track of arbitrary assignments across a litany of broken "apps" without any sort of cohesion. One of them is taking chemistry-- online!

And naturally, we need to redefine the way we teach things like basic math for every generation. Forced obsolescence rears its ugly head here too. My parents could never figure out my math homework. I can't figure out my own kids'. Thankfully we have Pearson's successive suites of books and erratic ActiveX plugins to show us what the ancients haven't.

Government spending should not be considered an indicator of progress.

Censoring ideas doesn't make them disappear. It only drives them to places where they can't be countered by other ideas.

just out of curiosity, have you ever made any effort to actually interact with the qboomers or is your view of them entirely based on the opinioneering of your preferred media personalities?

it's hard for me find them particularly threatening to democracy when really they're just a different partisan stripe of the burnouts who would tell you to 'just watch zeitgeist maaaaaaaaaan' in the early 2000s.

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