[jimt1234]

> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education.

I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind.

Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof!

So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

[el_memorioso]

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

[estimator7292]

The law is extremely specific about this one, and this is constitutional law that overrules all other laws.

A government institution cannot promote any one religion. It's fine to have a multi-denominational non-secular common worship area. You can also promote religion as a general concept, but not a specific religion.

Whether this rule is followed or enforced properly is an entirely separate problem that we are apparently still grappling with.

[guelo]

Well our insane Supreme Court ruled a few years ago on a case involving a football coach praying at games that schools are forced to allow religious employees to do their weird religious ceremony at school events.

[ecshafer]

Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others? That seems extremely reasonable. Making students also pray would be bad,but he didnt do that.

[Spooky23]

Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.

It’s also in poor taste. Jesus himself commented on performative piety:

“Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may observe them doing so. Amen, I say to you, they have already received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees everything that is done in secret will reward you“

[twoodfin]

Fortunately for the coach, the gospels are not binding precedent.

[tbrownaw]

> Because he’s a football coach and there is almost always an implication that you toe the line or face reprisal.

This sounds like nobody in a position of power should be allowed to openly do anything that people around them have the right to not do. Which would be kinda bs.

[yepitwas]

Very much not an accurate description of what was actually happening, despite what the court’s majority claimed (egregious and surely, at least often, willful factual errors in majority opinions are a hallmark of the Roberts court)

Luckily there are both witness accounts and photos in this case, so it’s pretty clear what was really going on.

[ceejayoz]

> Why shouldnt the football coach be able to pray on the field, alone, without forcing their belief on others?

Because they're an authority figure in that context.

Same reason I can flirt with you, but your boss can't.

[TimorousBestie]

Who says you can’t find true love on Hacker News!

[ixwt]

I strongly encourage you to glance at the dissents for that case. That is very much not the case. The Supreme Court willingly ignored very important evidence that was the case.

[guelo]

Because he's an employee being paid to do what he's told and the school told him not to because it was causing a disturbance. Why does he have to practice his religion on his employer's time? Let's say he was cussing during school hours, would it violate his 1st amendment rights if the school told him to stop?

[jen20]

I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

[nobody9999]

>I don't know if "how to pray" is covered, but Texas passed legislation requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Yes. Apparently that's SB10. SB11 covers praying in school.

cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45194376

[simpaticoder]

>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray

When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.

[potato3732842]

>When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest way to keep the gravy train rolling to teach is nothing at all.

I fixed your verbiage to be more descriptive. They are teaching nothing specifically because they don't want to kill the golden goose. If there wasn't so much money at stake we wouldn't be having this discussion.

[titzer]

A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.

[simpaticoder]

True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.

[Aurornis]

Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.

> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

[nobody9999]

>> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

>Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

>Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

Actually, it is a thing in Texas. And unfortunately, it's not exaggerated at all.

From Wikipedia[0]:

"S.B. 10 requires public schools to display the Ten Commandments anywhere clearly visible. The law requires the display to be framed or a poster, and include the exact text of the Ten Commandments provided in the law without alternatives. It must also be at least 16 inches (41 cm) wide and 20 inches (51 cm) tall.[13]"

From the office of the Texas Attorney General:

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” said Attorney General Paxton. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Senate Bill 11, passed by the Texas Legislature this past regular session, allows school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts. The law requires that the board of trustees for each ISD in Texas take a record vote on whether to adopt a policy to implement these periods no later than six months after September 1, 2025. Student participation in these periods requires parental consent."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_10

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-...

Edit: Fixed typo (nor --> not).

[jjgreen]

dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built

[ThrowMeAway1618]

>dismantle the solid foundation on which America’s success and strength were built

More songs about Ken Paxton[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUqTNDJjdLw

[defrost]

Texas seems pretty medieval : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRIfsFefatg

[WalterBright]

I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.

[staticman2]

Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?

Is it possible your niece was joking?

[jimt1234]

Unfortunately, no. My niece's mom, my sister, called her school to ask wtf was going on. They gave her a lame, lawyer-approved response about their responsibility to protect children and the drills are mandated by the state, blah blah blah. So yeah, my niece said they practice how to respond (call 911, not your parents?), what to do if the teacher is shot (they don't use the word "shot", though), and they talked about tactical gear, like bullet-proof backpacks, which my niece wants now.

[netsharc]

> they don't use the word "shot", though

Can I guess.. "bulleted"? Similar to how the creators of brainrot content say "unalive" or "seggs" because they want to make sure their content can go viral, and there's the belief words like "kill", "died" or "sex" will trigger Zuck and Co.'s censorship?

2025, what a year to be alive...

[rootusrootus]

That's wild. My daughter just started public high school last week and they haven't had any meaningful talk about safety, no active shooter drills, nothing like that. They did waste several days on orientation and how class will be organized, stuff like that, but since she's a freshman I guess maybe that makes sense. This week she's been assigned homework.

But this is a boring suburban town on the edge of a midsize metro in the PNW, which is not exactly the most exciting place in the country.

[potato3732842]

>call 911, not your parents?

What else do you expect government run schools to teach if not "engage the government at any/every opportunity"?

Looking back on my own education what a disservice some of those behavior patterns (not specifically that one) they tried to teach us would be in adult life.

[yepitwas]

I don’t think advising kids to make their first and possibly only call to an emergency number where someone’s all but guaranteed to pick up quickly and dispatch help instead of to a parent who might not pick up for any number of reasons and can’t personally dispatch emergency responders (but will surely just themselves turn around and call 911) is, like, a Big Government propaganda conspiracy. Seems more like plain old good advice.

[potato3732842]

While probably appropriate for a shooting, "when shit's going down, call the government first" is generally not a terrible way to handle things as an adult as it tends to reliably turn N-figure problems into much more complicated N+1 or N+2 figure problems. Running your situation by a cooler head not immediately involved is almost always better and the government is always slow enough to show up that you don't lose anything if you do go that route.

Likewise, I think it is very ill-advised to cram kid's heads full of "dial 911" at the young vulnerable age where repeated messaging goes into the kind of memory that's all but impossible to overwrite.

[lmm]

Given the recent school shooting where police waited around outside as the shooting was happening and parents were the only ones to intervene, it doesn't seem like such good advice.

[yepitwas]

Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the LE leadership at that particular, ah, event, plus maybe many of the other law enforcement folks present, subjected to some... consequences. Whatever the victims' parents want, really, I'd be pretty open to anything. I have ideas but I'd not suggest my preferences matter here, and would rather leave it to them, even if they settled on "nothing".

And ACAB, yeah, sure. Basically true, I agree.

That's still your best first move if there's a mass shooting. Anyone you call's just going to call 911 anyway (god, I hope). You do want hospitals on alert and calling in trauma surgeons, and ambulances on the way. And usually the police aren't that astoundingly useless in these cases, even if their outcomes are mixed.

I do think more often than not police are, in general, a net-benefit and force for "good", if you will, when called in for a mass shooting, and I don't think it's a particularly close call. Though yeah sometimes they are pretty bad even for that purpose (and they're often bad for other purposes, sure), and in the case of Uvalde they were disgustingly bad, and I here employ "disgustingly" with its full force and not flippantly.

Still, like... probably call 911 first if someone's shooting up a school?

[mensetmanusman]

lol, our legal system helping to destroy education via risk mitigation.

[HankStallone]

My employer has us do active shooter training once a year. It only takes a couple hours, but I'm not surprised at all that many schools would spend a whole day (or more) on it, considering the attention paid to school shootings.

(Not to mention the break from teaching/studying.)

[yumraj]

Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?

[nobody9999]

It's Texas.

[jf22]

I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.

What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.

Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.

[nosianu]

At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the next subject with little time to let anything sink in deeper). What is sine, tangent, cosine. At least a few digits of pi. Language and grammar too.

Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".

[jf22]

I didn't say all memorization was bad, just that we should understand we are comparing cultures that treat rote memorization differently.

[yoyohello13]

I wish this narrative that memorization is bad would die. Yes, understanding concepts is also important, but memorization is incredibly useful for learning and applying knowledge. The faster you can recall "trivia" the better you are able to make connections.

I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.

[dotnet00]

Yep, the most obvious example (besides language) would be of math. Despite what kids (and unfortunately, some adults) say, it's worth memorizing the tables from 1->10 despite the ubiquity of calculators because the process of memorizing them helps with seeing the patterns that provide a deeper understanding, and it's much faster than pulling out a calculator and plugging the numbers in.

There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.

[yepitwas]

Doing math without memorizing some basic arithmetic facts is like reading without knowing what the hundred most common words in the English language mean, and having to look them up every time you encounter one. Sure I guess you can do that, but… you definitely shouldn’t.

[rixed]

This contradicts my own experience.

As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.

Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.

[desolate_muffin]

Why think when your phone or the AI can do it for you? I imagine there are a few people in this forum who might have some thoughts about that.

[jf22]

Recalling math trivia is not thinking... that's why it's called memorization...

[blululu]

I find this attitude to be really frustrating. Based on my experiences teaching math a student is not going to learn how to do the impressive things that you might call thinking if they don't have a solid foundation in how to do the basics. Imagine saying that learning the alphabet or spelling rules is just rote memorization and therefore not worth doing. If a person needs to spend all of their brain power thinking through elementary operations then they will have very little left over for the things that we might call thinking. I have seen too many kids who struggle with Algebra not because they can't understand the concepts but because they cannot do basic things like multiply 3x4 without needing to add 3 to 3 to 3 to 3.

[jf22]

I didn't say learning the basics was a bad thing...

I said memorization wasn't important...

I find it frustrating people argue against points that were never made.

[ThrowMeAway1618]

That's a great question! Let me go ask Claude and get back to you..