The base principle you outline is applicable to most of life, even when washing your knickers most people know to separate the whites from the coloureds. That sounds a bit racist, maybe a better metaphor is you when you make cheese you must remove the pure curd from the inferior whey to prevent contamination of the master substance. It went a bit Nazi that time, maybe stratification based on imposed intellectual criteria always goes a bit to the right.
Comment on Does the USA have gifted schools or was Spider-Man Homecoming lying?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 11 hours agoSick burn but decades of teaching the entire class at the worst-performing student’s level has produced a generation of illiterate young adults and is probably partially responsible for the rise of Trump. Different students need different levels of learning. If you take a kid with a mind for rocket science and force them to learn the basics of algebra three years in a row because their classmate doesn’t care about learning, that smart kid is gonna die inside and you get one less rocket scientist in the world. And then that kid is gonna become an Elon Musk fan and use Grok to AI generate child porn or something. That’s the current state of America.
I sure hope magnet schools exist.
Miller@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
jerkface@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
We don’t only learn in school. Fuck, I didn’t even go to school. Children’s lives are entirely different than they were when I was a child, it’s a holistic issue.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 10 hours ago
Yeah, you’re right, kids should have educational experiences outside of school. But the problems of capitalism, which are very pronounced in America, are ruining that. Households now need to work 80 hours a week instead of 40, so children aren’t being looked after by their house-working parent. There is no house-working parent anymore. Children used to go outside to play, but the dangers of car pollution and car crashes have made outside inhospitable. So children are now more dependent than ever on school to teach them.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
But that’s never what school was for. Genuinely. We’re gradually trying to retcon it into that, but a classroom is simply not how you take a chaotic toddler and produce a teenager who’s engaged in the world and desires to learn about it.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 10 hours ago
I’d rather do a bad job of retconning a classroom into a place to teach political and media literacy, than have no such place in these children’s lives.