My take on this is my take on school in general: it's manipulative, coercive, and overall bad for you. I say this having considered becoming a teacher, and having chosen to become a librarian instead precisely because I refused to lend my energy to the school system.
Teachers have a disproportionate influence over the lives of basically everyone. School being compulsory, and most people* not even understanding that alternatives exist let alone having the resources or wherewithal to pursue them, the influence of teachers is very nearly inescapable, and yet they always demand more. More hours, more days, more ceaseless undivided attention (regardless of the quality of their content or the interests of their captive audience), all in direct contradiction to mounting evidence that all of those things are bad for you.
Studies from Europe indicate that homework, for example, at best does nothing at all, and more likely is actively bad for you. (This doesn't really require modern science -- John Holt and John Gatto were writing about this in the 80s -- but modern science confirms it.) Students nowadays are subjected to levels of anxiety that would've gotten their grandparents hospitalized. The pandemic largely disbanding in-person schooling resulted in a noteworthy drop in student suicide rates. And still, the school system demands more control, more influence, more access to more of young people's waking lives, seemingly not content until every conscious breath is scheduled and supervised.
And then there are teachers' unions. Considering how badly teachers are paid and what utter trash their benefits are, it can be observed that the only significant function teachers' unions serve is to keep bad teachers from being fired. I know it's only anecdotal, but I have in my own experience observed teachers who re-use the same test papers for literally decades without changing a thing. This might be acceptable in math -- math doesn't change much -- but I've seen history teachers do this. Fuck's sake, man. Unions certainly do little enough to guarantee the quality-of-life of teachers making any effort to do their best.
The combination of artificially insatiable demand and utterly dogwater compensation means that the system has an incentive to churn out an unholy number of mediocre teachers, and then never let them be removed no matter how mediocre their service is. This is leaving aside the problem of teachers forgetting that the people across the desks from them are their employers, not their subjects, and the authoritarian attitudes that comes with that.
(I have to include an asterisk * above because when I say "most people" I mostly mean "most parents" -- the people actually affected by the failures of the school system are routinely denied any voice whatsoever in the management of that system, and as a matter of course denied any choice about their own education, so we can only talk about the knowledge and ability of people who are at least one step removed from even being involved in the situation, which is it's own problem, as you might imagine. In no other aspect of life does leaving decision-making in the hands of people unaffected by the consequences of their own decisions lead to good outcomes...)
There's more I could go into here. The failures of 'zero tolerance,' for instance; the root causes of school violence; the almost comedically cruel euphemism that is 'bullying'; the entire concept of the school-to-prison and school-to-military pipelines. There's a lot wrong with the idea of giving teachers more influence over people.
I am explicitly not saying that social media is the answer, but I am saying that I can very easily understand the desire -- the need -- of young people to claw back a few minutes at a time of their own waking lives for themselves.
I kind of wish you'd posted this before your original post, though I appreciate it was significantly more effort to type. You've made a number of well laid-out points that I largely agree with, but I'm not sure your original post indicated anything other than teacher and/or union bashing, which was difficult to get on board with!
I really appreciate the response. There are many good points you have. Though I would place much of the blame on school administrators, districts, and politicians that are meddling in the education system rather than teachers. I have family that are teachers and some I wouldn’t trust to teach basic arithmetic.
I personally would weigh teachers opinions heavier than those of the school and district administration as they are front line and see what our children are experiencing directly. I do agree that much of our education system could use reform to be more holistically focused on children’s general life and well-being. Though I consider that an extension of a general reform of our society with a greater push towards better work/life balance, improved social services, infrastructure, housing, etc.
As you’ve eloquently presented, teacher pay and benefits are abysmal. I would rather spend more time and taxes to improve those work conditions rather than condemn the union. I was regularly in classes of over 30 students (mind you, this was 2 decades ago) and decreasing the student:teacher ratio has always been an active topic they are working towards. Whether it’s better to have a lower ratio vs firing bad teachers is up for debate. There have been plenty of studies that show high student:teachers ratios are detrimental to students.
I haven’t spent a lot of time exploring the different schooling theories and styles like Montessori but perhaps another style may be a good change. A lot of parents aren’t aware of the options they have for their children, but that may also have socio-economic barriers that prevent them from being able to make a choice.
In another lifetime I worked for an MSP that would perform network services for local industries. One of our customers, a lumber processing plant, needed ethernet drops for some fancy new controllers for their kilns. I count that job as one of the worst experiences in my career due to the heat alone. It was the middle of July, pulling 12 hour days next to giant furnaces in tin shacks. I probably lost 30 pounds in sweat alone on that job. I could wring out my shirt and jeans at the end of each day. It was absolute misery. I have no idea how the guys who actually worked there each day could do it
Heat is no joke, and I find it appalling that we have nothing in place to protect people from it
RICO charges are no joke & are generally not used unless it's a slam dunk case. This almost guarantees that someone that was conspiring with Trump has flipped on him.
You could put a rock or something in there and use compressed fluid to propel the projectile at the dangerous animal. Maybe look into inexpensive gas canisters or chemicals that expand rapidly when struck and prepare individual containers with the rocks so you can swap them out quickly after use. Add on some small protrusions at the ends to help with getting the pipe lined up with the thing you want to hit too.
I think this idea could really catch on, will have to see whether there’s anything like that on the market already.
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