I kind of get the both sides of the argument. It kinda feels wrong on one hand. Lots of people agree. The other hand, it kinda, just works. Great. Everyone's hit with down-trend TFR anyway so maybe not it.

> at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.

Also, this part in GP doesn't feel exactly right to me. The problem doesn't seem to be in education, but rather lack of systematic resistance in current systems of society against humans weaponizing the system as tools to hamper progress of humanity as means to win minor inner struggles which is stupid. But the world doesn't seem to be moving in a wrong direction, only slowly.

Asian kids in 80s dreamed of bunches of permanent artificial space habitats running on fusion reactors. Still do. We've only gotten ground based fission reactors and space motor homes since then. But at least we are moving in that direction, just slower than at the ideal rate.

China's just done a humanoid robot marathon event. The winner completed the race. They're definitely in the future. US is, in a state not in line with site guideline to describe. And the latter is supposed to be more correct state than the other? How is that possible?

Because "forced history lessons" doesn't help said kids understand what history really is about, it just helps them accumulate facts, if that.

I'd say the same thing applies to math, where one can't really start understanding math until said kid is already an adolescent (unless they're a young Euler or something), so it always baffles me when I see parents filling their young kids with (fancy) arithmetics, most probably making said kids future therapy patients, all the while lauding themselves (the parents do, that is) that they're teaching their kids "maths".

Related, one of the best maths teachers I've had (this was back in high-school, in the mid-90s) was very quick to point out that we should forget almost all "maths" we had learned in elementary school, and the he very soon started to explain to us the definition of the real numbers. Or maybe this is just an Eastern-European thing, who knows? Maybe further West they do confuse arithmetics with maths until the Uni' years.

You’ve got it backwards: the future therapy patients are kids who are not taught discipline and persistence. Those who aren’t struggle as adults as the real world is harsh on vibe based living. Also, all those “useless facts” eventually build up on each other. They are prerequisites of knowledge and mastery.

You mention Eastern Europe, are you by chance familiar with the Hejný method of math education in Czechia? Because that introduces some "math beyond mere arithmetics" concepts to the elementary school education.

Sometimes, it is possible to create a less abstract version of a more abstract thing, and thus introduce the seeds of the concept to children much younger. For example, "solve the equation 2x+1=7" is abstract, but "Peter decided to use a # symbol for a specific number, and he didn't tell us which one, but we found in his notes that # + # + 1 = 7; can you figure out which number is # ?" is simple to understand for a very young child, even if the child can only solve it by trial and error.

Forced history lessons are just indoctrination and propaganda, since what you learn is dictated by the government. I wonder if there’s a single country on Earth that teaches e.g. the history of Israel-Palestine conflict in a way that even tries to approach objectivity.

All history lessons are indoctrination at the very least. There's not some "objective history book" where people can just learn "objective history" without zero doubts. Even for things that are taught more or less "objectively", no one alive has firsthand experience of them, unless they are recent. The end result of teaching critical thinking is that you shouldn't trust anyone completely, not yourself, and not your teachers. It's just that adding the layer of government propaganda makes things worse.

> piano

This is such an arbitrary and random choice. I don't give a ** if your child can play piano. It's negligible if you compare it with other hobbies.

Teach them (and me) how to pay taxes, do community service, partake in social events instead. I also don't want to live in a world where robots go to work for 40 hours, go home wasted and repeat for 40 years as they do in so many East Asian country. Its a stereotype yes, but you can't deny its unhealthy.

> Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much.

All that praise for education and yet you've fallen for the tabloid-fueled conspiracy theory that transgender science is a hoax

What do you mean by "science" in this context? For example, both biology and anthropology are sciences, but biology can tell us that people evolved from apes, while anthropology can tell us that a specific tribe believes that they were created by a flying serpent. Both of them are sciences, both of them can talk about the same topic (the origin of humans), but they take a completely different perspective on the topic.

Is the "transgender science" you talk about more like biology, i.e. describing how things are, or more like anthropology, i.e. describing what some (sub)cultures believe? Those are not the same things.

Biological and cultural/historical. There is rather strong clinical evidence on the healthcare side of things, and an understanding of intersex biology (including how the the brain develops, not just the classically understood intersexes) shows a complex picture of where various components of gender may originate from on a biological level.

But yes, much of what Foucault taught us about the arbitrariness of being a human in a culture does still ring true. No, it doesn't discount the hard evidence from biology and psychology.