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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

As a foreigner with kids growing up in the US, this crazy bias toward critical-everything in the US education system makes me worried that my kids will be indoctrinated in some weird speculative theory instead of educated in normal fields in a focused and rational manner. It leaves me wondering if I shouldn't send them abroad to some school system that has remained sane.

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As a public school teacher in the US, I would strongly suggest you look into the real conditions at your public school and weight those observations much more strongly than viral takes in the outrage economy.

(Not to suggest that there is or isn't nonsense going in in your district - really do get involved - think of this a Kritik of the very bad incentives which exist in substack world.)

How do I do this without being the parent of a kid that attends the school? I don't think they would enjoy that a random dude come in, they'd call the police I'm sure. We were in the SF East Bay (Berkeley) until recently which is basically ground zero for this stuff. Past tense because I don't want to stick around here too long and have my kids suffer this. In the above comment I was talking about my doubts, but we're actually acting on those doubts and my kids are going to study at an international school in Asia.

I'd talk to neighbors with kids in school, or with people who work there, graduates, go to public forums, etc. You may be entirely correct about Berkeley public schools, it would fit all my stereotypes of the area. And I'm sure Asian international schools are very good. But the point of articles like this is to dig up the worst examples one can find, and so extrapolating from this overview of worst-case debate club stories to everything about your education environment is not a good methodology.

Hilariously, I live in Emeryville, and am involved with the debate community here directly. This article is right-wing rage-bait. The Berkeley debate camp itself has *created* Cap-good arguments as part of its packets.

Debate is a tiny section of the high-school world. I'm a current Parli debater -- in class, we aren't taught anything even close to what you would see in rounds.

Homeschool your kids. No one else cares about them

In my area of the forgotten flyover country, the options are:

1) Public school for free for middle-of-the-road (in our district) results, and be at the mercy of school-board politics,

2) Do Catholic school, and we agree with the religious particulars of the Catholic school near us, but it's expensive and they may be weak in STEM and global social studies,

3) Join a home-school co-op, and use the flexibility and extra time to get it all right and fill in any gaps.

I don't know what the right answer is, but 3 is looking increasingly good.

Are US Catholic schools really that religious?

I went to a Catholic school in Ireland and religion had a very minor role in day to day activities or the curriculum.

Any religious activities that did occur were entirely optional; nobody cared if you participated or not.

They're really called Catholic schools because they used to be run by people from religious orders, but they're all dead now and have been replaced by lay people.

Ireland does have a very different relationship with the Catholic faith than the US does, especially over the last couple of decades.

I can't blame them. They've had their trust violated at every possible moment. I do not envy a priest assigned there.

I realize my experience is a small sample, but in the early 2000s all the nuns were gone but we still adhered to what would be considered pretty-left but still orthodox today,

I was homeschooled for 1.5 years, and while there were aspects of it I really enjoyed, it is absolutely rife with religious fundamentalists. My biology book used the "how many monkeys would it take to write the Bible randomly" as an argument for intelligent design. My mother didn't vet the books well because she was getting help from a Christian friend of hers.

Unfortunately, looking from the outside in, the teachers care but the administrators do not. While I would still consider public school, I think supplementing and supervising their assignments is the minimum a parent can do. Homeschool just isn't feasible for many people, and there is a reason teachers specialize in topics past grade 5.

Critical thinking and Critical Theory are not the same thing.

Critical thinking is why USA has better scientists and inventors than China and India.

I'm not sure that's the game plan here. The closest I can think of would be analytical reasoning and iteration. Perhaps schools are teaching those well, but I don't think they're transferable to critical thinking regardless. Critical thinking is more about a reasonable standard of rationality even if you aren't in your domain of experience.

By "critical-everything" I'm talking about "critical" theories, or "Critical Theory". Aka the lenses people put on that makes them see everything as some sort of struggle due to power structures. A fun thought experiment that's worthy of exploration, but a side quest, not something that should be front and center in a child's education.

Critical thinking would lead one to understanding how arrogant and historically illiterate this claim is.

The reason the US has some science/invention advantages is a lot more complicated than:

> white people randomly woke up one day and decided to be like more brain-think while everybody else sat around doing nothing all day like a bunch of dum-dums.

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