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[Lord Shonus]

Whoa, lets get too fond of our current education system now.  The vast swathe of americans are sitting there making memes about how eager they are to forget basic algebra.

Why?

Though I once heard that you Americans don't like mathematics but it seeems strange to make memes about the basic algebra .

Tomorrow I had to catch up the school bus at 7 : 25 , today I finished a 3 kilometers' long-run test , the time I spent is 14:50 , interestingly, "1450" is a nickname for us to describe the traitors who works online to spread something harmful to our country .

I don't know how Chinese education works as a comparison, but US compulsory education (13 years from the age of 5-6 to 18-19) is deliberately built on breadth. You're expected to learn the fundamentals of all kinds of fields so that you can hit the ground running no matter what you decide to spend your life doing (and also so you have some basic literacy for just about every field). In practice, how well this works is extremely variable, but that's the intended ideal. This means that almost everybody will spend a huge amount of time learning something that is completely useless to them the minute after they've learned it, because they won't be going into a career that uses it. If you continue your future career in something that uses a given grounding then having it will be very useful to you, but if you don't the only value is satisfying intellectual curiosity. Most kids forced to sit in a room for six hours a day instead of going out to play have far more resentment about not getting to play than they have aa fascination with learning for the sake of learning. With algebra, pretty much the furthest most people are going to routinely use (and know they're using it - things like shopping or deciding if a streaming service fits into your budget or such are algebraic in nature but they don't fit into the little mental silo called "algebra") is area, something we typically learn about in second or third grade.

This results in a lot of "man, I'm so glad I learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell! That was sooooo useful!" type memes, combined with "If only they'd found time to teach us something useful like budgeting, but I guess that it was way more important to teach us how to find the volume of a sphere" ones. As it happens, most of the "real world" things people whine about not learning were in fact taught - the person complaining just wasn't paying attention to those lessons any more than their basic biology or algebra ones.

[wierd]

Basic algebra is used in almost everything modern, and basic geometry and intro trig is used in anything with construction (cabinetry, architecture, designing machinery, etc)

What REALLY happens in American education, is that the following trainwreck derails everything together:

1) The impetus to 'meet metrics!' Means under-performing students are not isolated and given remedial or supplimentary special education, because of our cultural love affair with blanket equality/fungibility. (Depending on if you are more liberal, or more conservative, roughly speaking. The more liberal embrace the lie that everyone has the same potential, whike the more conservative want uniniversally replacable cogs. Both are delusions, imo.) This results in a 'bipartisan' view that tracking and sorting children based on aptitudes and capability scores, results in disadvantaged / 'underperforming' workers later in life. More on this in 2.

2) as a result, you have kids that are just not cut out to be engineers, scientists, mathematicians, programmers, literary experts, historians, et al, all forced to 'endure' a soul-crushing curriculum that is not tailored for them, their specific needs, interests, or strengths. These kids end up hating school, and hating certain subjects especially. The society 'Does Not Care.'

3) the kids that ARE cut out to be engineers, scientists, mathematicians, et al, end up getting starved of the more details oriented education they need to actually be engaged, (impossible due to the constraints on resources, time, and 'enforced fungibility' of 'end product'), are subjected to a decade of endless tedium of rote memorization, terse and soured educators leaving them disillusioned, and a raft of other maladies.

The impetus for these enforced outcomes stem from unhealthy/delusional ideations from the leadership of society, either in the form of 'we must ensure upward mobility of everyone always!!' Or 'we must ensure a ready supply of equally abusable wage slaves to grease the wheels of the economy!' 

More on that:

Not everyone can, or should be a doctor.  Not everyone can, or should, be an engineer.

Likewise, not everyone can, or should, be a teacher.

Not everyone can or should, be a tradesman (electrician, plumber, construction worker)

Nations that DO attempt to track and customize education (Germany being a prominent example, but there are numerous others) tend to have better overall success in producing well adapted and happy citizens in their respective countries, with better respect for education as a practice, and with the sciences and knowledge work not being maligned.

They tend to be controversial, however, in that somebody slated to go down the skilled trades pathway, inherently gets 'soft blocked' from ending in a careerin academia later in life, even if that person discovers a late life love for that. (And vise versa!)

Thrown on top, is an 'elitist' notion from both ends of the spectrum, that 'trades' and other non-intellectual careers are 'lower value'.

The mathematician/theoretical physicist/doctor/lawyer is 'more valuable' than the plumber, the garbage man, or the hvac installer tech.

This results in CEOs and the like getting paid millions of dollars annually, while others cant really afford to live, and must work multiple jobs while being told they are lazy and entitled. At the same time, the very concept of 'upward mobility' implies that this delineation in value and status, is 'simply true!(tm)'.  That there is a need to pull 'the bottom' to 'the top'. The UPWARD in 'upward mobility')


It has been my observation that all of the above, and its resulting outcomes, are just the synthesis of these warring delusions playing out, with everyone else suffering for it:

CEOs are *NOT* 'more valuable' , 'more intelligent', 'more skilled', or 'more worthy' than the garbage man. In fact, numerous statistical studies have shown that RANDOM LOTTERIES for decisions OUTPERFORM human CEOs an alarming percentage of the time.

The same cannot be said for the garbage man.

So, which is actually more valuable?

As such, I am a staunch proponent for the following INSTEAD.

1) kids SHOULD be tracked, and guided into vocations that suit them, because they ARE NOT actually fungible, and pretending that they are, actively hurts them, and society.

2) There need to be social protection laws that deny the notion of 'upwards', by having a flat society, not a stratified one. Garbage man makes the same wages as CEO. THE END.

This will result in a generally more livable society, in which people are more happy, and engaged.


That is however, NOT what the Western World has.

[Robot Parade Leader]

That's actually one of the best explanations I ever heard. I mean it's not perfect; It's pretty good. I just worry they'd toss any kid they don't like down whatever path they think is crap. But yeah, I mean, who are we kidding, I was never going to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or whatever.

[Mathel]

2) There need to be social protection laws that deny the notion of 'upwards', by having a flat society, not a stratified one. Garbage man makes the same wages as CEO. THE END.

I've been thinking about basically the same thing as this. There are more and less prestigious jobs. Be it for the money involved, for the power, whatever.
But the issue is, most people will want the more prestigious jobs.

Let's say there is a city that needs garbage collection. For that, there needs to be at least one garbage company. It assigns 100 people to this task, with 30 garbage men being the requirement if all work in one company. If they don't the efficiency gets lower, and if each company only had one garbage man, 50 of them would be needed.
A garbage company needs at least one manager and one garbage man.
But the job of manager is more prestigious than the job of a garbage man. So 90 of them refuse to be garbage men.
End result?
10 garbage companies collecting trash from 1/5 of the city and 80 unemployed "managers".

This mental experiment shows that both having varying job prestige and allowing anybody to choose what job they will do results in the less prestigious jobs (which usually need more workers than the less prestigious ones) being understaffed and the more prestigious jobs overstaffed.
The reality would be less bleak of course, since it is still more prestigious to be a garbage man than to be unemployed.

Having only one of these, either just having castes so people can't choose their job, or just having choice but no job prestige would fix the issue.

And the castes don't need to be ones you are born with. They could be assigned by testing.

[McTraveller]

These are, in my opinion, flawed analogies.  The real situation is both simpler and "worse" than what is described above.  Reality doesn't have anything to do with "prestige" of a job.

Consider this basic scenario: You have a farmer and a hired person to keep the farmer's house well-kept. Call them a "housekeeper" for simplicity.  The farmer must explicitly have more wealth than the housekeeper at least at one instant in time: the farmer must generate a quantity of farm produce sufficient not only for the farmer themselves, but also have enough to compensate the housekeeper. Until the farmer gives that produce to the housekeeper, the farmer "has" more wealth.

So in one sense, at some point in time, the farmer is indeed much more wealthy than the housekeeper: the farmer produced the goods and they are all under the discretion of the farmer.  The farmer doesn't technically have to pay the housekeeper; the farmer could just let the house idle and then tend to the house during the off-season.

This is the fundamental issue of political economics: does the housekeeper have the right to demand compensation? How much of the produce of the fields is "attributable" to the work of the housekeeper, versus the farmer?  Is it an even split? Should it all be at the discretion of the farmer ("owner")?  Should the farmer be obliged to produce enough food for everyone, simply in exchange for the same share of food as "everyone else"?

This is the tension: if you let people have "ownership" as an incentive to produce, you end up with inherent wealth inequality. If you force people to produce food without incentives simply because people need food, you essentially have forced labor and slavery.  So our political systems try to balance this somehow, the US veering more toward "unfettered ownership" where the owners control everything, and other countries veering more toward "the government" controls everything and basically forces people to produce whether they want to or not.

I don't think there's any country/society where people get an exactly even share of the total produce of that society. There is always some variation in the distribution of wealth.

Add onto this the complexities of our economy in which you have lots of people who don't "produce" anything but merely take a share of wealth while trading wealth around, and it's clear why we have so much political-economic tension.  And this doesn't even require "classes" - it just requires a universe in which energy and resources are not equally distributed across time and space.

Spoiler: Re-visiting old concepts (click to show/hide)

Which is why I'd suggest some sort of citizens dividend setup for UBI. Not some arbitrary "you get this amount" but rather something like "every taxable entity is taxed at 50%, and that 50% is distributed evenly per-capita."  This way, you still get some people who can be more wealthy than others, but everyone in the society does indeed benefit according to the success of the entire society.  And since it's tied to actual wealth generation (as much as "income" is actually associated with wealth production, rather than extracting value from trades, but that nuance may not be relevant), rather than some arbitrary number, then it should prevent many of the issues with simply printing money, and the system is implicitly progressive without having to come up with arbitrary income tax brackets.

Note that this scheme would likely need to be independent from "normal" government spending, which does have to buy particular goods and services; the goods and services government purchases are, by necessity, not "homogenous"; the government does not have a need for the same dollar amount of hamburgers as it does for roads, for example.

If we look at mean US household income, which is something like $75k/year now, then we'd have on average something like $37.5k in distributable income per household.  So your household would need to have an income of more than $75k to have an effective tax rate higher than zero, and if you make less than $75k/year you end up with a negative tax rate.

It might even be better than this, since the income should include corporate income taxes as well, meaning personal income tax rates would likely have an even higher effective standard deduction.