Re: Right to Education? My Posterior!

While the schools are this bad, the chief problem is not indoctrination but monoculture.

I know someone who went to a reasonably good college several decades ago, and when the freshman class was assembled the speaker asked the students "How many of your parents taught you question your teachers?" Only two hands went up.

Schools have always had a large dose of indoctrination, but when every town had its own school district the indoctrination varied and was incomplete. When students ran into other students from other towns, they had an opportunity to compare notes and recognize that they were taught mutually exclusive things, and had to reconcile those differences. That, in itself, is a useful skill. One learns critical thinking by recognizing that intelligent people have different opinions, and that they cannot all be correct.

With the continuing trend of consolidation and standardization, students have less opportunity to run into peers with differing opinions. Fortunately, the internet came along just in time - and so I am not terribly concerned that the next generation will be more stupid than the last, only that they are required to waste a great deal of their childhood in the prison-like setting of the modern school, and that the middling ones who accept what they are taught will feel confirmed in their foolishness.