NJ created a civics mandate... then put it in the least effective place imaginable: middle school.

Yes.... Yet people are making millions pedaling answers with a lot of this ridiculous research.

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered. Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy. These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think. Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent. I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning. These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate. Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them. When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

What's funny is I've been in contact with loads of former students who believe our AP classes are actually tougher then many of these 101 level Student Mills.

It's also entirely possible that as a society we have moved on from traditional school.

Nonsense. Leave it to school to believe that the way forward is backwards.

The CEO of Palantir just said the quiet part out loud. Alex Karp — whose company builds surveillance and defense technology for the U.S. government — just openly stated that AI will deliberately shift economic power away from highly educated, often female, Democratic-leaning workers and toward vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters. He then admitted these technologies are — his word — “dangerous” and “suicidal,” and that the only justification for deploying them is the military argument: if we don’t, our adversaries will. So let’s be clear about what was just said on the record: A defense contractor CEO told you AI is being built to restructure the American class system, that it will destroy the economic power of an entire political demographic, and that the only way to sell it to the public is to wrap it in national security.

Still shocks me how much education policy revolves around "They made me do this stupid thing as a kid... And kids should do this stupid thing now."

More like: "How do we sell these to schools??"

Here's a: By the time they graduate high school, students should be able to learn practically anything, outside of the system, on their own.

This may be true for math or reading... But I believe the opposite is true for social studies. Everyone should be in the same class having the same conversations about the issues that affect their communities.

Don't question the system.

We are in an era of “pedagogical clutter.” There’s a surplus of methods, practices, and acronyms to learn—and administrations are in a hurry to implement them.  Teachers are constantly cramming new info, and retaining little.  Let’s slow down, simplify, and focus.

We’ve known this for decades yet there is an overwhelming refusal to put more recess or physical fitness into the school day.

The highest order of school is to help students make sense of their world. The worst thing we can do is block out the world.

These School Leaders Don’t Want a Statewide Cellphone Ban. Here's Why edweek.org/technology/these-…

Dr. Erica Komisar just said what many parents whisper but few say out loud: Modern schools are built for girls, not boys—and we’re paying a steep price. Little boys (ages 3–6) surge with testosterone. They need to run, jump, play, burn energy. Instead, we sit them in circle time, demand emotional regulation, and label normal boy behavior as ADHD or “behavioral problems.” Result? Marginalized, stressed, diagnosed early, and tracked that way through school. Her fix if she ran the world: Separate boys and girls in the early years. Boys get multiple recess periods, short focused bursts, and space to move. Girls get a calmer environment where they feel safe taking STEM/math risks. Both thrive when not forced into the opposite gender’s learning style. Single-gender early education: Boys try art/music without teasing. Girls try science without self-consciousness. Evidence already shows it works. Parents/teachers: Do you see boys struggling more in today’s classrooms—or is this overblown? What’s one change you’d make to education for boys right now?

I hated school history. I think school history textbooks are the most boring, meaningless artifacts of education ever created. They're designed by committees to offend no one and inspire no one. They're written at grade level, which means they're dumbed down. They're comprehensive, which means they're shallow on everything. I'm a voracious reader of history now. I read history for fun. The subject itself is endlessly fascinating. School history is garbage. Real history is wonderful. The institution takes something inherently interesting and makes it unbearable. That's almost an achievement.

This is what AI adaptive learning software is going to do.

This is probably subject dependent. Still makes no sense to track a civics class... Or anything related to social studies. It's just not reality. Unalike Learners need to have conversations too.