Autism

Because our interests don't perfectly align with what they want us to learn. My main special interest when I was 20 or so what audio technology, I was lucky enough to get to go to an audio engineering trade school and for the first time ever, in my entire life I became a 4.0 GPA student. Meanwhile, the class of 12 that started with me dropped to a class of 6 within weeks and I saw multiple other students struggling and failing at the same exact classes. The same person who was barely passing most classes in high school was now helping formerly 4.0 GPA students with THEIR homework.

Fast forward to today and now I'm struggling to find work. The world is not designed for the smart to be successful, it's designed to turn the hard working into servants and the rest of us into examples.

What is labelled as education today is functionally employment indoctrination. Creating subservient and compliant vassal automatons is the goal.

A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.

They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.

It's not that schools hate autistic people.

It's that society hates everyone who doesn't conform to the strict and narrow set of behaviours that define 'normal'.

I'm probably AuDHD. My opinion written before I knew:

The popular Prussian education system was originally designed to stub children to submissive, obedient underlings for the owning class and productive livestock for the economy.

Most schools have never questioned the default Prussian paradigm. Why would they have - it’s been a numbing success: stratifying homogenized people into a comfortable pyramid structure has stabilized society, made top-down control easier, wasted immense human potential, damaged humanity’s natural antifragility, impaired our capacity to solve unforeseen complex problems, risking the whole planet’s life. No pain living inside the pyramid, so no problem, no change.

Only if we cared for everyone’s future more than for our present comfort, should we design a different curriculum to create a better society; less like a breakable machine, more like a resilient organism, emerged from unstubbed people free to pursue what’s important to them.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-public-schools-in-your-country-are-designed-to-make-kids-docile-obedient-workers-for-the-upper-class/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

Infodumping is common Autistic Friendship Language. I'm pretty sure most people here have a subject they're just itching to infodump about. Imo, schools failing to account for that are a failure of education as a system, not of people with autism.

You be surprised how many adults have 0 curiosity about the world.

When a child does not want to learn, You just have to force them to learn. But when a child is curious and wants to learn? That makes things harder, because now you first have to root said curiosity out of them before you can start coercing them into learning.

I was a mediocre student until 3rd and 4th year undergrad and the one semester of grad school I did. I responded so much better to the freedom to solve problems using the basic engineering principles instead of being tested on those principles without the context.

I know some people are going to read this as "it's not important to learn them when you can just look them up" but that's not what I mean. I agree it's important to know the basics well without having to consult with references. Over time they become second nature. But I'm going to struggle with repeating the basics back to you when they are abstract and when grading depends on my ability to do arithmetic under test conditions or remember the unit circle/special triangles because we are not allowed to use calculators.

I will never not be salty about this unit circle thing. I thought I hated math because I could not memorize this:

Turns out my brain doesn't hold numbers well and I'm actually a wizard at process modeling.

OP and you lot in the comments are a very functional section within the spectrum. Unfortunately, you need severe autism or moderate with a comorbidity to attract funding.

Schools were never meant to be places to learn. They were primarily for the working class to learn obedience and deference for their betters, so that they might make better factory workers. They were only meant to provide just enough education for the working class to understand instructions that they were given.

I crave that feeling you get just after getting past the basic understanding of some new subject where it feels like you're drinking from the firehose and you're picking stuff up left and right.

It's very difficult to achieve that feeling in a structured learning environment.

We have the scholar brain

"Autistic kids love learning, but they do it in a different way and that must be punished accordingly."

- The education system

My problem was that everything seemed to be taught so abstract. Give me a math formula to memorize and don't explain why it's useful? It makes no sense to me. Explain how and why it's used, ok! I have context, I can begin to understand this now.

has less to do with schools and more to do with a society that glorifies credentials and extracurriculars within a rigid framework of acceptability.

if these positions were gained by aptitude tests you'd see a completely different makeup of society-- way less nepo-babies and more working class.

the intent is to exclude. why do you need a college degree to push paper in your local state office?

Pretty early on, I got told to stop asking 'why/how?'.

I'm not sure why they thought I was questioning them specifically and not out of curiosity.

Stopped me from Questioning things during school which I think just made me mask heavily unfortunately.

I was and had been undiagnosed my whole life until recently.

I love learning, Tinkering and Data.

A lot of schools and a lot of classes and a lot of educational systems as a whole aren't designed or intended to teach anything other than obedience and cultural mythology, exactly the sort of stuff many autistic people instinctively hate and don't believe in.

Good for us, frankly. Autodidacticism to the rescue. The problem for propaganda is that reality is always hiding underneath, no matter how much they try to paper their agenda-driven nonsense overtop of it, and once you know how to look for it and that you have to look for it, the whole system built on top of it gets called into question.

More ADHD than Autism.

Due to not doing my homework and not remembering many physics and geometry theorems, I ended up regularly reverse engineering them to fit given values to given answers. My scores were a random spread of numbers, depending on the test and my capabilities at the moment. I am a bit sad that I stay dull in that department when I read news about EVs, space, et cetera, because it always feels I could've mastered it but just never had enough attention (could I, in that system, me?!). I'm thankful to lemmings explaining things and correcting me in threads under posts, I'm not sure I would remeber these facts but I'm feeling pure joy digesting them.

I hated math when I was a kid. I was terrible at it. Never could knock out math problems in my head like every math teacher ever assured me I should be able to.

I'm a drafter now. Math isn't hard, self-important math teachers in my past made it much more complicated than it needed to be, and then told me I wouldn't ever be able to do anything because I couldn't do math.

I design buildings now.

"Ugh, just get in the same box as everyone else so I can push you through the system without resistance." - abusers, not teachers.

Difference is that they move to a totally different subject every hour whennI'm still in the mood to learn about pan-slavic ideology

I managed to score more than 100% with extra credit for years, then I moved back to the US and failed high school entirely due to boredom. I didn't learn a goddamned thing the entire four years. I ended up earning a GED through just taking the test and getting 100%. It was entirely busywork bullshit with no thought whatsoever put into actually teaching children not only knowledge, but how to thirst for knowledge.

1/10 would not recommend.

There's a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren't interesting to them.

This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It's also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.

I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren't interesting to them.

I was simultaneously in gifted and learning disability classes in middle school. Apparently this was... fine?

I did quite well in school :p. Except for when online classes hit during covid

Anywho, learning about new stuff is fun :3

I love learning!