this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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What's fucked up is we (as a country) had almost fixed this like 50 years ago.
It's just public education, and we were going in the right direction till "no child left behind". But Obama nor Biden did anything to salvage public education in their terms.
I don't think people realize how many 70 year olds are walking around with zero education, so they can't understand why we started getting 18 year olds that act like Boomer maga.
It's not that they're stupid, they're just uneducated and unsocialized. A functional adult takes work to produce, and if society doesn't pay for it, no one else does except nepo babies.
And if the nepo babies only get socialized around other nepo babies...
They won't think of our kids as people.
It's been happening for a while, but we're running out of time to hit the brakes. We need to fix education/socialization/ethics while there's still some people who realize there's a problem.
How did No Child ruin education? I thought it was just national standardized testing?
I don't know nearly enough to give a comprehensive answer, but a huge factor is Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. The focus on standardized testing, and tying school funding to performance on those tests, shifted curriculum from actual education to teaching the test. Test-taking strategies become more important than knowledge, and what little knowledge remains is focused entirely on the topics that appear on the tests.
We started teaching kids how to pass tests, instead of thinking critically and annswering creatively (unless you were in certain schools). It also coincided with laptops and iPads becoming a big part of school time.
Charter schools also arrived around the same time and that’s a whole other can of beans.
Having moved from an urban to a rural area, I can anecdotally say there is more to it than just education (though that certainly may be a factor).
Universities scare the conservative faction because they think they are hotbeds of indoctrination, but in reality, the openness people and new ideas occurs largely through socialization, not from any curriculum.
Rural areas rarely encounter that degree of interaction with that variety of backgrounds and beliefs. It is embarrassing to be ignorant of the outside world when you are socialized with so many people that seem to know more than you.
Once your mind is open to the wider world, a lot of the smaller beliefs have to be shed. I believe that is one of the reasons that one of the strongest variables associated with political persuasion is a university education.
It's socialization, not indoctrination, and not just a matter of education.
I got an uncle in his 70s.
He went to k-10th (stopped there) in a one room school house, that had an outhouse.
His "grade" was him and a girl 2-3 years younger than him, then there was a few much younger kids later.
He is alive and voting, and won't miss midterms.
I think when I talk about "rural", people might not be understanding how "rural" America was and to a lesser extent still is.
Like, I don't think people realize how modern school buses as a concept are...
It's only been about 50 years, which is most likely why we saw the 90s boom than whatever the fuck Bill Clinton was doing.
1995 was 20 years after we started really educating everyone. And we saw a bunch of innovation and good times.
2003ish was No Child, and 12 years after that we got trump. Shits worse than before because now the only ones getting decent educations, are wealthy privet school kids. Which a wealth divide should obviously be worse than the prior geographical divide, but at this point I might as well mention.