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I just graduated with my CS BS last year, but I agree whole heartedly that public education is awful.

But it isn't hard to see why. By being compulsory, and children living in a culture of school being a hardship and burden rather than a means to create an educated society rather than sending them to work in a coal mine at age 10, you breed indifference and hostility. The system itself being the most bogged down bureaucracy in the nation doesn't help placate that feeling.

I think the most important take away is this: it will be slow. It will take decades, not months, to fix the absolutely broken public education system in the US. It is entrenched, and has a lot of powerful figures perpetuating its execution in its current form. But one day, we will have to realize that the best way to "teach" is to let the students themselves find passion and pursue it, and that if you accentuate those passions with supplemental factual and rigorous training and teaching, you get the best education you can.

The only successful education is when you produce someone who wants to learn, has passion, and can interact with society to a similar degree of intellectual prowess. Memorizing the periodic table or knowing how to derive the Sine function don't contribute to that at all (unless of course the students want to be Chemists/Pharmacists/etc or Mathematicians / Musicians / Acoustic Engineers/etc).

But yeah, assembly line education is awful for everyone involved.




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