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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

> because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools

Do you have any actual evidence of this or is this just more parroting of vibes based history?

Most of the people I know who say things like "School didn't teach me X" were just not paying attention. Turns out, if your society doesn't care about or value education, kids aren't going to pay attention.

Like, some states definitely have mediocre education in a lot of ways, but people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Or you have people saying "Why didn't school teach me how to understand a loan" as if they didn't learn algebra and how to plug a couple numbers into a calculator right next to me in class.

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Ironically enough this is a good display of critical thinking!

For what it's worth, I learned how to balance a checkbook in fifth grade. My child is not old enough for me to know the curriculum these days but my impression based on talking to my younger colleagues is that it seems to have stopped being taught around the mid-00s. It's hard not to pay attention to something like that--we spent a week with fake money, buying things and having to balance it out. It was fun.

We had a unit (~3 weeks) focused on critical thinking in my seventh grade english class. I do not know for sure if that is still taught the same way. Honestly it is hard to say how widespread it is beyond anecdotal evidence like this because every state has different standards.

The "vibes" are that the US government has been cutting funding from education since the 80's. I feel this is very well established, but if you really want a source I can fish up a few charts. As a fun fact, today we still spend about as much per student as we did in the 80's for university. The main difference is that funding cratered, so colleges need to make up for that out of pocket.

>people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Not sure I agree with this interpretation. It's like responding to "why didn't they teach CS" with "well they taught you discrete math and binary". Specialized instruction on applied mathematics is well worth pursuing. It's arguably the big reason Al many students end up thinking "I'm bad at math". They get no context on what it's really used for.

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-k-12-productivity-chart It's hard to believe that education is getting less funding. There seems to be a perception that spending more money on education will result in smarter students or higher test scores but that doesn't seem to be the case. Obviously if you spend $0 on education results will suffer, but there's a point of diminishing returns where $1 more in spending doesn't seem to have any impact on key metrics

How much we spend on school systems is not a meaningful indicator of how much we spend on education.

American teacher income has barely tracked inflation over the past 30 years, and it sure as shit didn't start high in the 90s. Teachers still have to buy their own supplies, still rely on old material, and still basically can't afford to live.

Gee, why is it so hard to get good teachers into the American school system when someone who is able to go through 4-6 years of college and is smart enough to manage and teach a room full of 30 kids can do pretty much anything else and make way more money? The money isn't going to education.

So where's the money going?

Yeah, It's one part of the equation. But if the money is being funneled by administration and the actual teachers can't afford proper resources for kids, who wins here.

>why is it so hard to get good teachers into the American school system...

I'm sure we both know the answer, but I'll give a historical account as well. Even pre 70's, teachers were dominated by women. Since this was a single income household system at the time, most jobs offered to women would pay low wages because the roles weren't expected to support a family.

At least back then, there was still respect in the profession. But that was also stripped away in the 80's with the infamous "A nation at risk". Little did we know that the administration was the risk at the time.

That's part of the system, grovelling powerless teachers that will roll that shit downhill.

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