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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13533 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Sometimes I sincerely wonder if our education system was deliberately sabotaged. If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia. The failures of modern pedagogy are stark and baffling, and no matter how bad it gets, somehow the pedagogues find a way to make it even worse. There hasn't been a single policy promoted by pedagogues I can think of in the last 40 years that has actually improved education. The singular exception seems to be the "Mississippi Miracle", which the expert class seems absolutely committed to explaining away as a fluke or trickery. Also cell phone bans seem to have helped, but those mostly only seem to occur due to a groundswell of popular support.

Well, that's true on its face. The long march is real. Also I'm pretty sure Common Core math was designed to tank the performance of the smarter students down to the level of those who barely pass. Same with "Whole language" learning instead of phonics.

Not sure about Common Core math, but Whole Language learning would have the opposite effect -- phonics is the system which works for almost everyone, whereas whole-language learning requires more cognitive ability. And the smarter kids would have likely been taught the "cheat code" of phonics before even getting into school.

If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.

It’s a Prussian conspiracy. The vile Hun could not beat America on the battlefield in any of their three attempts (1776, 1918, 1945) so they turned their autistic minds to devious conspiracy.

Prussia was on Washington's side in the first one of those; the British allies were Hessian.

Damned Prussians, they ruined Germany!

AP testing technically dates back to the 50s, but I don’t believe it really took off until the 90s. They certainly have their own problems.

I’m actually having a hard time naming any pedagogy newer than the 1950s. There’s the common core math, which sucks. Different learning types (kinesthetic, visual…) were introduced in ‘83; they’re still popular, maybe even useful.

Best I could find was immersion learning for languages, which spread through schools some time after 1971.

Sometimes I sincerely wonder if our education system was deliberately sabotaged. If some ancient soviet program to promote teaching precisely the wrong way took on a life of it's own in academia.

Conquest's 3rd law: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

There is also the Iowahawk restatement.

It may just be the quality of people who attend and staff education schools. In other countries, admission is highly competitive; in the US, it's close to "we'll take anyone we can get." Smart people in the US have better jobs available than teaching, while it's probably one of the better careers available in other countries. And so we get some of the duller crayons in the box becoming teachers, doing research, and deciding education policy. And, since math and statistics is hard, you get much more emphasis on autoethnography and social theory than empirical research.

‘Those who can’t, teach’- except that American schools actually do very well. Once adjusted for race American schools are the best in the world.

They engage in lots of very expensive boondoggles, yes, and could improve pedagogy, but that’s just normal waste in an institution that is immune from criticism and oversight.

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