Literally all of it
Public school is the chief apparatus through which capitalist ideology spreads, taking on the role the Church once held in feudal societies. The audience of the public school includes the totality of children born into capitalist societies, for five days a week, eight hours a day, from ages 6 to 18.
Succeeding in test-centered capitalist schools requires little if any critical thought, but rather discipline, memorization (i.e. tolerance for busywork), and, above all, OBEDIENCE. Those that prove themselves most obedient are allowed to join the children of the bourgeoisie in swallowing the more explicit indoctrination of the universities, where they accumulate the necessary ideology (and debt) to insure their status as loyal servants of imperialism.
The rest seamlessly transition into the workforce, having spent virtually their entire lives adapting to the strictly-regimented, unfulfilling, authoritarian paradigm of the capitalist workplace. They learn through homework–an abomination of capitalist development–that their jobs must come home with them, that they must always be at least “on call” for their employers. They learn through inane group projects that collective action is inferior to individual production. They learn through the lionization of MLK and Ghandi that non-violence is the only legitimate form of protest. They learn that America is not an empire, with school maps quietly omitting America’s various non-state “territories” (colonies). They learn that Native Americans were primitive hunter-gatherers. They learn that the civil war was about state’s rights. They learn to venerate the genocidal “founding fathers.” They read fucking Animal Farm.
So anyway, yeah. Fuck school.
They learn through inane group projects that collective action is inferior to individual production
Not being from the U.S I’d appreciate if you could extend yourself on that point.
Not OP but often group projects are used by teachers to reduce the # of things to grade and ostensibly give students a reason to “learn teamwork” but the projects are increasingly less suited to being group-orientated with the reduction in school funding and increase of class sizes.
For example, i had to do a frog dissection in biology in school, but this was for some reason a group project. Now i don’t know if you’ve seen the size of a frog, but it’s really just a 1-person job. And only one set of tools per group. So basically you just have projects where it’s 1 person doing all the work and then one person to write it down, then 2-3 others just kinda. Doing nothing. there’s a whole subset of memes around group projects.
There’s also group papers assigned frequently, which are a fucking nightmare to write. “each person just writes a section” but why? you all have to learn the same material and it’s going to make for a less cohesive paper. In the end, it always leads to one person being forced into a leadership role they don’t want (the teachers don’t pick groups based on who would be a good group or leader, or even say who WILL be the leader) and taking on the slack from people who recognize that it’s bullshit make-work that won’t teach them anything and exists soley to give the teacher some easy grading days.
Oh yeah also the topics are either assigned (boring) or the groups decide themselves, which, as all of us know, leads to a bunch of fighting and then 3/4 group being disinterested in the outcome outside of their grade. So no one enjoys them, they don’t teach you how to work together or actually complete anything interesting unless you get SUPER lucky with the assignment/group.
Grew up in Alabama. Was regularly given detention, written up, or straight up insulted by teachers and threatened by students for not standing during the pledge. This around 6th-7th grade during the Bush years.
One school I went to had a “moment of prayer” every morning where before home room they gave you like 5 minutes to pray or whatever. I used it to play with my tech decks hell yeah. This was a public school way out in the sticks in a town with a population of 1,200. Other kids used to make fun of me for being a “city boy” even though the town I moved there from only had 30,000 people.
Uh, lots of American exceptionalism. For like 2 months straight, right after 9/11 and the Afghanistan/Iraq invasion, most of our classes were just the teacher bringing out a TV and turning on the news to watch live coverage of the war. No curriculum, no teaching, just watching American imperialism distilled through talking heads on whatever news channel had the best drone footage of “combatants” being bombed from 12,000 ft.
Imperialism as taught to me: “Well, it’s a shame all that, uh, bad stuff happened, but ya know, you’ve gotta break a few eggs!”
Yeah and it’s treated as unfortunate things that happened in the past, instead of very real current US foreign policy.
If the only knowledge I had about WWII was what I learned going to school in Denmark in the 1990’s I would think that the war could be summarised in the following
- The Nazis started the war because they were evil and hated Jews
- Then they occupied Denmark
- For five years you couldn’t buy coffee
- The Danish resistance was very brave though and everyone supported them.
- The British helped them out a bit
- Americans were also the good guys
- Then the Nazis lost and Hitler shot himself
Nothing about the eastern front, the Pacific or even western Europe. Nothing about collaborators although more Danes fought for the Nazis than for the allies. Most certainly not a single word about communists being the backbone of the resistance. Nothing at all about the social and political background for the rise of Nazism. Nothing about Nazi ideology apart from being evil and hating Jews. All we learned were the glossy nationalist version of what happened in Denmark. I don’t recall them even talking about the Holocaust as more than a side note.
