[OmarShehata]

> Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated

this seems like a bizarre conclusion. In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. You won't see that if you have a very narrow definition of what is it that they're supposed to be learning

kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

I appreciated hearing this echoed by Conrad Wolfram in a recent PIMA episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-still-teach-peopl...

[MarcScott]

> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated.

In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.

The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school.

School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.

[elliotbnvl]

Learning stuff is secondary? Found your problem.

School shouldn't be primarily about experiencing social interaction. It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society. You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic. Admittedly, none of them function as daycare...

School should be (and used to be) about learning to learn, building mental discipline and a base of knowledge sufficient to bootstrap whatever other studies appeal to the student, even more so than memorizing a particular list of facts. But it seems that that position has been largely abandoned.

[dash2]

Actually, until the mid 20th century almost everyone agreed that school was about building character, which can only be done in a social environment. As a British government report put it in 1846, schools should be "a little artificial world of virtuous exertion".

[elliotbnvl]

I believe we agree? Character and mental discipline are closely aligned, perhaps even the same.

[dash2]

Character was specifically moral character, which is related to how you interact with others.

[elliotbnvl]

Mmh, I have to read more about this, I'm not really familiar with British schooling models of the 19th century.

In any case, the problematic schooling model that persists to this day was introduced around the time of the Industrial Revolution, which predates your references.

[bdangubic]

Learning stuff is 100% secondary. If it wasn't these two below would have same-ish chances in life/career.

Student A: Went to College X and majored in Y. Finished all XXX number of credits and graduated with Bachelor's Degree

Student B: Went to same College X and majored in same Y. Finished all XXX-1 number of credits so is 1 credit short and never got a degree.

Student B is worthless even though she/he learned exactly the same thing as Student A. School (especially in USA) never was and never will be about learning ...

[elliotbnvl]

I agree that learning is secondary in practice, but in theory is the whole point of school, and society would be a lot better off if we managed to draw theory and practice closer together.

In your example, I would argue you haven't taken my position to its required logical extent. I don't believe in the value of college degrees at all, the way things are currently structured, and I would discourage my kids from going to college unless they had a very specific career path in mind for which the degree is required. The measurement of learning has become the goal of learning, unfortunately.

[techostritch]

This is circular, how do you propose making school about that? If you’re only goal is to maximize the folks who like to obey authority then great, and maybe that’s all you care to do, and maybe you don’t care about losing the kids who don’t have the academics to make it, but you also lose a whole mess of kids at the top end of the spectrum too.

[elliotbnvl]

I'm not sure which part of my comment would result in maximizing folks who like to obey authority. I'm more focused on improving individual outcomes in terms of functional individuals, their quality of life, and the contributions they're able to make to society as a whole.

In any case, we homeschool.

I haven't really considered how to improve schooling at scale (particularly in an affordable way), but my proposal would be to introduce a _lot_ more granularity to schooling by eliminating the idea of grades and classes and focusing more on individual assessment.

Obviously this is likely cost prohibitive, but perhaps promoting and subsidizing homeschooling and homeschool co-ops is a good start in that direction, and could give rise to more cost-effective solutions over time. Not all parents are equipped to homeschool, but homeschooling does make use of resources which could be improved and which others could leverage as well.

[techostritch]

I’m mixed, I definetly wouldn’t home school my kids and it doesn’t seem scalable and I do think there’s value in a population having a shared identity from education, but, at least from my own experience I suspect my kids will have their most valuable academic opportunities outside of school.

[simonw]

"You can learn social interaction in plenty of other settings, most of which are vastly more efficient and realistic."

What settings are those?

[afarviral]

Community gardens, sports, religious or interest groups, collectives, contributing in a large household, early work experience, hobbies/interests. It probably is a fairly finite list because societies have optimized for the individual and people are often only active within of a community at work or in education facilities. So a part of a solution in my view would be establishing more communities that are separate from the family... they might look a lot like schools though, so maybe we should just focus on those? There's more need for new communities to be established for other age ranges.

[elliotbnvl]

I pretty much agree 100%. We need more, smaller communities – and we need them offline.

Notably, this is largely an American problem, since America is built around cars, which given the capitalist nature of American society proves to be antithetical to establishing local communities.

European and other countries, whose layouts and culture were established in pedestrian days, are much better off in this regard.

[ozim]

Yes teaching how to learn is the way for schools, but it is hard to explain to kids and lots of adults.

Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."

But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.

[danenania]

If the goal is learning how to memorize, I think it would be better to have specific courses or lessons on memorization rather than making all the subjects needlessly boring and stressful just for the sake of learning memorization techniques.

Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending on one’s profession, but I don’t think it deserves such a heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has very little educational value. That time and energy would be much better spent on projects that use and integrate the knowledge.

[walledstance]

“It's an artificial environment that disappears as soon as you graduate, and which you'll never find again anywhere else in society.”

Whoa there, society functions like a school environment.

You have cliches, bullies, enforcers, popular kids, the weirdos, etc.

What are our political parties other than massive cliches?

Bullies you can meet on the road, in stores, and nearly any other place you go.

Enforcers are police, detention centers, and fines.

Popular kids you need look no further than influencers, movie stares, etc.

The weirdos are anyone that doesn’t fit into our cliches.

Also, Foucault would have a few words with you as society is also an artificial environment.

The drama of daily life that plays out just happens in a larger more chaotic scale, but when we left highschool, highschool never left us.

[elliotbnvl]

I won’t contest you entirely, but I do ask this: if society functions like a school environment, why do we need a school environment to learn social interaction? It seems at best a secondary or tertiary benefit of a structure that should primarily be focused on intellectual learning. It’s a facsimile of the real world, and facsimiles are always lacking.

Also, I think the biggest thing that present in school environments but missing from other environments is the forced segregation by age range, which prevents the more organic tribal self-organizational practices to which humans have adapted over tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

And I would also add that there are degrees of artificiality and what really matters is not so much whether we have constructed our environments so much as whether or not they have stood the test of time, and adapted to us as much as we’ve adapted to them.

[koonsolo]

How does being an employee differ so much from being a student? You still get either good or bad grades for your work. You do assignments, get rules and processes you have to follow, play well with your fellow students/colleagues, etc.

I would say it's quite similar.

[elliotbnvl]

I'm mostly talking about the rather artificial division of students into grades of equal ages without taking into account the individual's proclivities, abilities and achievements. This separation is entirely contrary to organic human self-organization (even in work places) from a tribal perspective and results in a great deal of social illnesses (bullying, cliques, etc.) that are, although found elsewhere, exacerbated by the artificiality of the group-making (which is necessary for the public school model as it currently exists today to function).

[koonsolo]

At age 12, kids get split up in groups according to their abilities, no?

[elliotbnvl]

Not sure what you're referring to, tbh. Are you talking about the occasional student being promoted or held back a grade? If so, I would say that isn't a granular enough separation to be meaningful.

[goldfishgold]

Definitely not everywhere.

[hackinthebochs]

Work environments tend to be class sorted. You also have recourse to handle people who behave horribly towards you. Disruptors are removed. Everyone is generally aligned towards the same goal. The two are vastly different.

[vundercind]

Anyone who hits someone, says truly horrible shit about others, doesn’t do the job at all, constantly distracts others while doing a poor job themselves, blatantly sexually harasses people, et c, is highly likely to get fired from a job, and may go to prison.

The same person as a student, gets tons of chances before maybe having to leave. Depending on what they’re doing, you could just be stuck with them for north of a decade. No escape.

I mean, we can joke about how actually such people still exist at work, but it’s a far less widespread problem and manifests differently.

You can look for other jobs if you want out of a bad work environment. Probably, you’ll be able to find somewhere else to go. Getting out of a bad class is way harder.

There’s a couple huge differences.

[koonsolo]

As discussed in another thread already, it seems my own Belgian system differs very much from the US system. (I basically found out with this discussion :D)

And to be honest, I have no idea how you can make the US system work, so I probably agree with you. Come to Belgium and let your kids study here :D.

[elliotbnvl]

I had no idea that Belgium has already implemented a lot of this stuff! That is amazing and gives me a lot of hope.

I wonder if there’s literature analyzing Belgian academic outcomes alongside American academic outcomes.

[bmitc]

If I made be jaded here. I did extremely well in school(s). I was never a trouble maker and was a top athlete, student, and musician. I think education is supremely important. However, school didn't teach me any of what you mentioned. Because what life teaches is that unless you're Type A, you're not going anywhere. Life teaches that hard work and determination and doing the right things does not get you anywhere. Life teaches you that thinking differently is downright discouraged and rejected.

We mainly teach either boring material or outright lies about how life works. Because we try to put our education on rails, teaching students that that's how life and education works, that's why it's a complete failure. The fact that students in COVID didn't respond to remote lessons is partly because they weren't even engaged prior to COVID.

We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

[glial]

> We don't teach students how to be present, to know nature, how to explore their thoughts and emotions, or how to collaborate.

Montessori schools do. Wish they were more common.

[afarviral]

I mean ... many people went to school as students for a good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.

[mrguyorama]

Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X> (things like how to fill out a check book etc"

It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc.

But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"

because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!

The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class?

Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.

[afarviral]

Agreed. There's a really specific form of nostalgia where a matured and adhd-managed person would simply LOVE to do school over again now they see the benefit and realise how absolutely fascinating and achievable learning is. Imagine how easy school would be for a mature adult! I wish being held back a couple of years was normal and encouraged, especially for boys. My life satisfaction would be way higher.

[lmm]

> It did. You didn't pay attention.

It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my class should've explained what a court case actually determines, how the process runs, because I noticed things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we did some mock jury stuff but without the right context for it to teach us anything).

> You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?"

Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of" videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about irrelevant technical details that distracted from the more important stuff the director was saying.

> But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important"

> because they didn't pay attention to what was taught!

Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most important for my education and career is stuff I was actively punished for doing at school (poking at the computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them badly.

[afarviral]

While I'm thankful for schooling for teaching me a variety of things, occasionally recognizing my passions and helping to hone them, it is amusing the disruptive and annoying things I did with the school computers that ultimately became my carreer.

[BeetleB]

> Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time.

And as a result, your experience is mostly limited to kids who are forced to be where they don't want to be. That's a hugely biased data set.

> School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority.

And yet it does a worse job at it than those who are home schooled, as most studies show.

[abdullahkhalids]

> kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

Most kid athletes are also not self-motivated to run laps, or do boring repetitive drills, when they know from experience that these activities help them win games within the next few months. Usually need a coach to force them to do them. Same for young music players. Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced.

The primary reason kids don't like running laps or playing scales or doing math drills is because they are boring.

[nsagent]

Reminds me of a recent podcast with Staša Gejo [1], a top competition climber. She basically says the same thing. At times she hated being told to do drills growing up, but really valued that later because as a kid she sometimes didn't feel like doing the hard work necessary for the outcomes she desired.

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995

[seabass-labrax]

> Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced.

The value of such exercises, or any other drill-based curriculum, must be measured with its opportunity cost. If you practise scales for an hour a day, you can indeed reliably expect to be better at your musical instrument, but it could very well be that the same hour spent on improving another skill (sight-reading, articulation etc.) would make you considerably better still at your instrument.

I think it might be more generally useful to say that, in order to develop well-rounded competency in a given field, one should expect to sometimes have to perform boring drills.

[sillysaurusx]

I think it might be worth considering whether you’ve had a privileged upbringing. Thinking back on it, the majority of people probably would have been content to play games all day. You could argue that that’s learning, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of learning that society tends to reward.

I’ve heard that kids in upper middle class circles are totally different in this regard though. Maybe they want to do more on average.

[pigscantfly]

I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation.

[1] See, most recently, Zambia

[geodel]

Not really. In my experience it is mostly effect of socio-legal pressure that kids can't be anywhere but school. In primary schools most kids are bored or miserable as hell while in school. And further parents keep pushing it because apparently education is key to future success / great career.

For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah.

[aleph_minus_one]

> For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah.

This would actually be a good business opportunity: hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs. If they are nearly as good as MBAs, you save a lot of money on this group of employees, and thus your company has a strong economic advantage.

[lmm]

> hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs.

The trouble is it's performance all the way up and down. In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos / extreme gamblers, and then you'll struggle to attract investors, your clients/suppliers will wonder why your business development folks missed their classical references...

[aleph_minus_one]

> In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos

You will (hopefully) nevertheless check whether an applicant has the necessary traits to be a decent office manager. On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that weirdos are necessarily bad office managers.

[TrainedMonkey]

> the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong

The real real answer is that it probably does, but on a much longer timescale that we generally consider and it is really hard to explain why. Something like better math skills lead to better life outcomes. Maybe due to a better model of the world and sharper thinking, but I am just guessing.

[elliotbnvl]

I would tend to agree with your last (speculative) point. The breakdown lies in communicating this to students and ensuring that each student receives adequate support at their own pace and style of learning.

[DiggyJohnson]

What is a disproportionate amount of people are claiming to require a slower pace and visual-only learning style?

[elliotbnvl]

They very well may! Unfortunately, since our approach to teaching how to learn is flawed to the core, it results in peoples' ability to learn being compromised from the very beginning, requiring them to build their knowledge base and learning approach on shaky foundations.

The way to correct this is by imbuing students with the confidence and skills required to learn (according to their style of learning) correctly from the very beginning, so that they build on solid foundations instead.

[DiggyJohnson]

I guess what I’m saying is that the whole learning styles stuff seems to be bunk.

[skhunted]

There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. Relying always on the calculator or a CAS leaves students confused and befuddled. I see this all the time in calc classes that I teach. The CAS loving students just don’t understand as well.

[aleph_minus_one]

> There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion.

My opinion differs a lot here. I would not say that I have a good number sense (I guess that people who have to do "numeric calculations" or "back-of-the-envelope calculations" as daily part of their job have a much better number sense than me). On the other hand, I find it rather easy to learn really abstract algebraic concepts (think Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry or similarly abstract mathematical topics), which many people (most of them with much better number sense than me) tend to find insanely difficult.

[skhunted]

The number sense I talk of is not being able to do numerical calculations easily or in your head but rather understanding how to operate with numbers and their different representations. A person who can understand algebraic geometry doesn’t have trouble understanding things like simplifying x + 5/3 x. People workout any number sense have a hard time with this. Knowing that 8/3 is just a different way of writing 1+5/3 is confusing to them.

[aleph_minus_one]

Textbooks about "abstract nonsense" rarely require you to do such routine calculations/simplifications - they rather require you to be capable of making sense of definitions that are (at a first glance) insanely far removed from anything you have seen in your real life: I would rather liken it to taking strong, dangerous hallucinogenic drugs, and making sense of the world that you now see (which is something that only some people are capable of); by the way: I don't understand why hallucinogenic drugs are illegal, but textbooks about very abstract math are not. :-D

On the other hand, textbooks about, say, analysis and mathematical physics (both in a broader sense) - which can also be very complicated - have a tendency to demand a lot of (also long, tedious) "routine" calculations from the reader (often to do by his own). For these areas of mathematics your argument surely makes sense.

[skhunted]

I studied commutative algebra in graduate school which is an adjacent subject to algebraic geometry. People capable of understanding Hartshorne have number sense.

[aleph_minus_one]

I just wrote down how I feel about this topic.

Textbooks about particular areas, in particular specific topics in physics (including mathematical physics), teach me a lot about number sense (and let me feel that mine is not really good or perhaps badly trained). On the other hand, these very abstract topics feel like a quite different activity to me that is only barely related to number sense.

> People capable of understanding Hartshorne have number sense.

This can also be explained by the hypothesis that people with a strong number sense love to feel themselves challenged - thus they attempt to understand this nontrivial textbook (even though understanding it may in particular require different skills).

[lmm]

> There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions.

Evidence that it's causative? That would be utterly bizarre and I'd love to see a citation, because doing algebra has nothing to do with fractions. I'd think it's far more likely that there's a strong correlation between the two because they're both determined by the ability to understand and follow the rules of an abstraction/notation system, and if you taught people algebra first and then fractions afterwards you'd say that ability to understand fractions was determined by whether they could do algebra.

[skhunted]

Whether it is causative or not it is still the case that someone who doesn’t know fractions will have a hard time in algebra. It would be bizarre to teach someone how to add rational functions before they can add fractions.

[lmm]

> Whether it is causative or not it is still the case that someone who doesn’t know fractions will have a hard time in algebra.

Doubt. Do you have any evidence at all for this claim?

> It would be bizarre to teach someone how to add rational functions before they can add fractions.

Sure, rational functions obviously sit at the intersection of algebra and fractions and require both. But they're hardly some deep foundational piece of algebra; I'm not sure my classes even covered them.

[skhunted]

Do you have any evidence at all for this claim?

Only anecdotal evidence. I’ve taught beginning algebra courses at a community college for 23 years. Students who don’t know fractions have a very hard time in algebra. Those who can’t understand that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have a hard time understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x + a)y.

Understanding rational functions helps to understand what vertical asymptotes are and as such are a fundamental source of examples when learning limits. They also aid in understanding why tan(x) has vertical asymptotes where cos is 0. Every complete algebra curriculum includes rational functions. I say complete because algebra is usually broken up into 3 courses (2 at the pre-college level).

[lmm]

> Those who can’t understand that x + 5/3 x is 8/3 x have a hard time understanding that 2xy+ay is (2x + a)y.

Sure - but that's just as true in reverse.

> Understanding rational functions helps to understand what vertical asymptotes are and as such are a fundamental source of examples when learning limits. They also aid in understanding why tan(x) has vertical asymptotes where cos is 0. Every complete algebra curriculum includes rational functions.

Meh. x^-1 is a good example of some things, sure, but I don't remember ever doing addition of rational functions which is what you originally talked about, and I went through an extremely reputable maths degree.

[endisneigh]

I’m curious - have you ever taught in a public school?

[ugh123]

>kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

I think you are partially right in that the dryness of much of math teaching hides a lot of the underlying material's applicability to life. I think one thing AI could do is help design rich situational lessons that could are prompted, vetted, and updated by teachers and then taught to the class. It could be trivial to create incremental difficulty of problem materials tailored to each student's progress and goal.

[choppaface]

Feedback is a critical part of education as well as motivation for learning. But the act of giving feedback is very hard to scale, even for virtual learning. Enter an LLM chatbot, which is imperfect but can fill a lot of gaps in expectation. Chatbots certainly aren’t for everybody, but the large gains in accuracy in years past make them on average more effective.

[moffkalast]

Yeah if anything, current education system is so garbage that it manages to completely demotivate curious kids who want to genuinely learn. It's designed around adults that need to run the place, runs at the wrong pace for most students and focuses on PTSD-inducing high anxiety testing constantly because it's easy to do for the teachers. Not to mention piles of pointless busywork as homework that's been proven to not help with learning at all.

[koonsolo]

> In my experience

So you are a teacher?

[trod123]

There are quite a number of experts who would disagree with your conclusion.

Upon reaching a certain threshold of technological dependence, the need for rational thought (which includes calculation) is tied to the need for food. The actual yield may be low based on other factors, but it is absolutely necessary for survival.

The alternative you suggest, is where technology no longer advances.

Logically then, population growth hits a malthusian trap, the old crowd out the young since they have the most influence, and then a depopulation occurs as the old naturally die off, and replacement births cannot sustain those dependent systems used to feed the masses.

You get a dragon-king event where everyone its a free for all over food and bare necessities, farming no longer becomes possible (because of looters), and the world order collapses to pre-agrarian levels, assuming the environment isn't destroyed in the chaos (i.e. MAD and Nuclear Fallout).

There are much better ways to calculate than are currently taught in schools, Trachtenberg System and Vedic Maths have worked well in many places.

Mental math has been around for quite some time, and the principles of math are all about finding uncommon knowledge or information that is not immediately apparent (though it becomes so via various mathematical transformations).

The current pedagogy of math is all about sieving and exclusion, and rote-authority based teaching, since it is a requirement for any specialized area of science (and is only taught in relation to mathematical concepts, instead of intuitive approaches). This is why they adopted a burn-the-bridge strategy right around trigonometry at the grade school level (intended to cause PTSD/suffering/torture), to safeguard against disruptive innovators at the source.

Algebra -> Geometry -> Trig

1 -> 2 -> 3

What do you suppose happens when the passing grading criteria in 1 is changed from just following the process (but not correct answer) to 2 (separate unrelated material which is passed) to 3 (correct process and correct answer).

If they fail Trig, and the problems are from Algebra (not something a teacher paid bupkiss will bother to look at), how do they go back if they passed Geometry? The students not knowing why they are failing are simply told, well you maybe you are just not good at math and should consider other paths if you can't do it.

This structure is called burning the bridge because it makes it so you can't go back from a progression standpoint. Ironically, this structure was adopted at the request of representatives from the National Teachers Union in the late 80s/90s, and largely remains the same today.

There are several other progression sieves embedded in academia intended to make it almost impossible for us as a society to develop a large number of creative people who reach einstein-level achievements in math and science (outside-self study, or specific environments/private schools).

This broad push largely started in the 1970s in publishing, and expanded from there.