Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
You have an inherent bias against the current education system. In your view, education in the US as it is is nothing but a brainwashing-the-youth-operation? If so, how and in what ways does the brainwashing happen?
I don't think it's "nothing but". However, that is one of its core facets and is something I don't think it can escape as long as education is a tax-funded service.

What is the indoctrination? If you've been through American (or even just western) education, you'll notice a narrative and you'll notice vast swaths of thought ignored. My field of study, economics, is one of the worst. It's a giant government legitimizing program. We spend countless hours rationalizing government intervention into markets while almost entirely ignoring economics that argues otherwise. The funny thing is that economics only began making sense to me after I found the work by those economists who argue otherwise. The mainstream narrative in academics is chock full of convoluted and unexplained logic.

On history, they teach nothing remotely close to reality, and instead that which conforms to a narrative. They teach that Lincoln was GOAT and FDR saved the world and the Confederacy was evil and the Crusades were evil, all of which is false at worse and deeply misleading at best. The list here is virtually endless.

What do they teach regarding quantitative skills? Virtually none of it is personal finance at the k-12 level. This is probably the most important possible thing you can teach people when it comes to quantitative skills, yet it's eschewed. What do we learn instead? Algebra, trig, calculus, all things that don't matter for shit to 99% of those who take them. The last thing the state wants is a populace good at personal finance. Teach people personal finance and they start questioning why the government is involved in their lives. Can't have it. It's an existential crisis for the state.

Everything we are taught is filtered through the assumption that government is a necessary good. If it wasn't subtle it wouldn't work. That's why it's not obvious. A credible argument can be made that my view is delusional. That's an essential factor for why the indoctrination works.