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[PTTG??]

This is a continuation of the "Why doesn't PTTG?? just get a blog already" series of posts.

I was struck by an unsettling revelation today. Like, I think, most people, I figured that schools (in the USA, at least,) generally did their job about as well as could be expected, with the occasional failure or problem of failable humanity. Then I started wondering something and realized I had no way to cross the gap of contradiction.

Simply put, schools take up a massive amount of time and resources. Students, if they were to do the two hours of homework per day per class expected of them, would send about 18 hours per day in class, traveling to school, doing homework, or doing extracurricular assignments. Considering the need to eat at home, this puts students into an impossible position of losing sleep, making work less effective, meaning they have to work later to compensate...

But in speaking to college teachers about the quality of undergraduates, they tell me that they have declined precipitously. Alleged adults with third-grade literacy, or practical innumeracy. Pathetic knowledge of current events, let alone history. Inability to comprehend due-dates or professionalism. I was considering a career in teaching at the time, and quite frankly the widespread disgust my professors had scared me off. They largely believed that the institution of higher education was on the verge of a collapse -- and this was two or three years ago.

As far as I understand it, teachers are paid starvation wages to corral students into rooms. The teachers pay for pencils out of pocket and eat the further pay cut, and the students do the homework for other classes in that classroom. The homework, classes, and for that matter teachers are all irrelevant, as they only exist to prepare students to take a test which exists for the purpose of gauging how good of a job the teachers did of preparing the students for that test. No writing, practical mathematics, current events, nor historical context is taught, as these are difficult to gauge on the test. A police officer patrols the halls, arresting students who complain about bullies, but fleeing at the first sign of gunfire -- which has now replaced football as the most popular high-school extracurricular activity. Have I got all the basics?

This isn't a STEM rant, nor a charter schools rant. STEM is great in its place, but even its advocates forget that the M in STEM stands for pure mathematics, which is just as naval-gazing as any underwater basket weaving certificate you care to name. Moreover, STEM alone makes for a fine employee but a poor citizen and an impoverished human being. As for Charter schools, they are a terrible phenomenon as they segregate the poor from the rich. If all children go to the same schools, then the rich and poor alike are incentivized to improve the quality of schools. Where the rich can take their children out, public schools turn into prisons by another name.

What's my solution? Well, that's the hard part. It may be that effective teaching is an impossible problem, like P=NP. If only there was a method of exploring alternative educational systems and estimating what the consequences of these policies might be. Perhaps some kind of field of study regarding the events of the past, or perhaps comparing activities undertaken by other, foreign groups of people. Unfortunately, my education never discussed such things, so they probably don't exist.

[Iduno]

Moreover, STEM alone makes for a fine employee but a poor citizen and an impoverished human being.

I prefer "degenerate."

But in speaking to college teachers about the quality of undergraduates, they tell me that they have declined precipitously.

Yeah, they generally want to keep people from being so educated they speak up when their "betters" are wrong. Why do you think they fund them so poorly?

As for Charter schools, they are a terrible phenomenon as they segregate the poor from the rich.

And, if your city has segregated people racially as successfully as my city, they get to make sure non-white people get worse schools as well.

[Telgin]

My sister in law is an elementary school teacher, and from what she says it does sound like the school system is critically underfunded and filled with perverse incentives like teaching purely for tests and penalizing schools that do poorly by withholding more funding.

I don't know if this is a school district thing, or state thing or what, but apparently students can't make worse than 50 on an assignment anymore.  Even if they don't do it they get a 50.  I don't know if that's to keep the schools' reports from going too low and causing even more funding shortages, or if it's supposed to avoid hurting students' feelings, but either way it sounds counterproductive to me.

I don't know what to do about the situation as a whole.  Increasing funding to schools feels like an obvious and necessary part, but there needs to be more than that.  Higher education is completely screwed, but from what I understand its problems are much more monetary than anything related to their integrity.  I don't know why higher education has become so expensive, but I've seen people point fingers at the country club approach that many schools take these days, with trying to provide excessive amenities to students in an effort to win them over, but where that costs so much money they have to keep raising tuition.  Private schools also earn money by offering loans they finance, so they have an even bigger incentive to raise tuition and expenses to ludicrous levels.

What's going to fix that?  I don't know.  Government regulation would help, but it may not fix itself until the whole industry implodes when it gets too expensive to sustain, and we start over where schools are just schools and people who need them go to them instead of everyone who graduates high school.

[Cthulhu]

School funding has actually been trending upward.  I think the fundamental idea of modern education is the more pernicious problem. Kids spend basically their entire formative years in what amounts to prison, with prison social dynamics.  Basically everyone I've known intimately has lingering problems and destructive habits they picked up from their experience in school. 

If you're worried about the death of rhetoric, you'd probably be better served with an entirely different system.  Increasing the power input to a broken machine will just get you a higher garbage output

Higher education was a good but expensive way for me to jump out of working class, but only in terms of the diploma and some performative aspects.  Almost nothing I learned in college actually helped prepare me for the career I inexplicably managed to land

The core inhumanity of compulsory public education is offset by its complete failure to deliver anything of value in exchange  for twelve or more of a person's most important years of life

[Autohummer]

I was brought up on the hong kong system, which combines the worst of British style colonial education with the worst of traditional Chinese fetishes of education and scholarly pursuits.

I may be overgeneralising but pretty much the only early-life goal of an Asian child is to get to the best academic institution through examination (and a healthy amount of extra-curricular achievements, if you could afford the time/money.) Thanks to Confucius and the education-based hierarchical social system he gave rise to, the society is firmly stuck on worshipping academic/non-physical/government jobs and vilifying the rest. We treat high performing students as gods and parents test their physical e-peen with the grades of their children. Carrie Lam consistently scored top rank at school, look at where she landed us today. My only lament is that Confucius is long dead and thus I cannot smite him in person. Meanwhile, reality is there are only so many "good" jobs out there. People respond by competing even harder, hence all the tutoring schools in South Korea/Japan/Hong Kong/elsewhere.

The only things I learned from my school experience are 1) how to play a battle royale game called the public exam and 2) anything you want/need to know, you'll have to figure out yourself. I only feel I was actually being taught something when I started doing university. Before that I learned stuff just to cope with examinations. You might think that given all the competition, schools would step up their game. In a way, they do, by raising the bar of admission and making students who fall behind leave the school. Teachers, meanwhile, do nothing more than administrative duty, namely placating school administration and parents.

Having experienced this, my principle is that I am against any form of examination. If I remember correctly, examination in its modern, high stakes form was invented as the Civil service examination in imperial China, which was introduced to the western world by British colonizers. I really wish the west did not copy and evolve the examination based education system. So much so that I even find myself emotionally more accepting of nepotism, cronyism and bribery over competition for positions and jobs, although I am fully aware those are pretty much the worst ways to choose a candidate and will not recommend them in any serious situation.

Edit addendum: I propose, as a social experiment, that enough funds be raised to create and certify a school in a city. This school will not provide any more than the legal minimum of education and amenities. However, its admission requirements will be as high as possible, only allowing the top 1% of the world's best academically performing students to enrol, with huge debentures as an additional requirement. I have a feeling that this idiotic international school will become much sought after by stupid parents and end up making obscene amounts of money.

[nenjin]

I'm gonna go out on a limb here....

I think we seem to believe as a society that schooling is supposed to be able to elevate everyone to a baseline of education. That, somehow, regardless of individual, intrinsic values, if a student didn't meet the base expected bar, it's a failure of the schools.

Now, I'm not trying to say that some people are just dumb and good luck, schools can do no wrong. There's plenty wrong with the education system.

But after college I realized that it's really on the individual to make the most of their education. Schools can't make that happen, it comes intrinsically from the student's desire to do well.

My parents read to me as a kid. Possible genetics aside, I think I was reading by about 4, which set me up for a life long love of literacy, and all throughout school that was the one thing I excelled at above all things, reading way higher above my expected level. Yet I was terrible at math. Just couldn't wrap my head around it, struggled with basic math skills for a while like division, etc....

I got a tutor, because it was important to both me and my parents that I at least pass the base level requirements for high school. It cost money, it took time, and I can't say it made all the difference.

Looking back, I can easily see what was going on: I really only truly applied myself to the stuff I cared about and felt good at. The stuff I didn't and wasn't.....I did but I did with this air of frustration and anxiety. And because schools aren't well equipped to spend more time with you on the things you struggle with (as opposed to the things you're good at where they can and will immediately fast track you), it takes additional time and effort from the parents, possibly outside of school, to make up the deficit.

This isn't a "blame the parents" thing either, but I do wonder in the last 35 or so years if there's been a shift in how much effort parents invest in to their kid's education and intelligence before they get to school. Do parents read to their kids as much as they used to? What values to parents instill in their kids? Do they get the talk about why schooling matters and why caring about it matters?

I wasn't a great college student, but I had aptitudes and I leveraged them. Looking back, even there, my thirst was for knowledge for its own sake, rather than learning for what it could do for my career. As a result...I was good at and rapidly completed the course work I liked, and got average marks on the stuff I didn't, and I didn't do job fairs or career fairs or internships or any of that. I didn't actually want a career, just the degree, because my thinking was the degree was all that really mattered. That somehow, ignorantly, I could do no planning or have no goals up until getting that degree, and that somehow magically, I'd land a good job after I had it. Internally, in my uh "senior year" I knew that was bullshit. I started looking into getting placed in my major at some job but by then it felt too late, and again, I wasn't sure I actually wanted that. So I went out of college kind of like a fart, rather than busting out and in to something. I don't blame anyone but myself for that. I liked learning but schooling couldn't make me give a shit about my actual future. Something I do kind of regret now.

So again. I don't think there's no problems with modern US schooling. But I think we have LONG avoided placing some blame rightly where it belongs: students and parents and the values or lack thereof. Criticizing people's kids, or their parenting, is considered taboo in America. Raising your kids how you want is sacrosanct, and everyone's an angel who has had the best preparation and motivation to do well in school, so OBVIOUSLY it's the school's fault. You can't MAKE kids give a shit, they have to LEARN and be TAUGHT to give a shit and about why they should give a shit. That is down to the parents IMO. Even with a terrible school system, a student who cares about their education will excel. College taught me that while teachers are a great resource, they're not the primary resource. There's a wealth of knowledge out there to be had so that if you ACTUALLY care about writing a well researched paper, or improving your accuracy and understanding in math, or to broaden your understanding of history, that is all out there for the taking. But most people don't view school like that. Kids view school like some adults view their dead end job: you punch in, do the minimal that you need to be considered effective, and spend most of your time thinking what you're going to do when you're not at work. That's an attitude we gotta change if we want better students, and by extension, better citizens going forward.

Another thing that dawned on me recently at my own job.....I think I do the least learning and retention when someone smarter than me is standing over my shoulder, waiting for me to understand. I saw it in college all the time, manifested in people's lack of desire to speak up in class, that glassy-eyed look of anxiety as you watch the gears in someone's head as they desperately try to formulate the right answer on demand.

[IronyOwl]

Kids spend basically their entire formative years in what amounts to prison, with prison social dynamics.

Increasing the power input to a broken machine will just get you a higher garbage output

These summarize my feelings on the issue. Dumping buckets of money on incompetent government organizations chiefly concerned with bullying children is not productive.


On the funding issue, teaching people is cheap. Good teachers ought to be expensive in theory, but otherwise there's just not a lot of infrastructure needed. I hear about lack of funding all the time, but seldom hear anything about what, specifically, schools are lacking that they should be purchasing to effectively do their jobs. When I do, it's almost invariably starving teachers- not crappy teachers they can't afford to hire a competent replacement for, just starving ones- or absolute bottom of the barrel poverty where they need to buy pencils and food and clothing for their students. Nothing that would explain why schools on average are attempting to do their jobs but can't due to lack of specific goods or services.


On the structural issue, schools are exponentially fucked. You're never going to get good results when you treat your customers with contempt, and they do that squared.

First off, they're a government agency with state-mandated attendance. That's going to give you a lot of corruption, incompetence, and holier-than-thou fuckery because for the most part, there's no way for them to lose. Competition exists, but only in expensive and generally extreme alternatives. You don't pull your kid from a public school and put them in a private one because the latter got a higher Yelp score. You do it because you're fancy or the public school fucked up hard. The school itself is also immortal; for a public school to collapse is basically impossible.

But wait, there's more! Because these aren't normal customers you're dicking around, these are children. They don't know anything. They need your guidance. Their concerns and observations are adorable and you can't wait until they figure out how the real world works. So even the very minor shits a government agency might normally give don't really apply here, because kids are even less people than normal. You get shades of caring about what their parents think- hence the image of schools kowtowing immediately any time a parent threatens to sue- but at best this means the feedback cycle is muffled by a layer.

On top of all that, we're currently living in (or well beyond) the Age of Information. The idea that knowledge needs to come from some authority figure in a formal setting in a physical location is about as absurd as the idea that owning a horse is vital for reaching said location. The principles schools are built on are badly outdated. In some cases they've adapted somewhat or retained residual value, in other cases they've just become more absurd with time. The result is a place that's trying to teach people how to form coherent arguments while forcing them to show up daily to read an eighty year old novel in person at gunpoint. It's not completely without merit, but it's a janky mutant abomination with few clearly agreed upon functions.


So to recap: We've got immortal cancer cells belittling their captive customer base in pursuit of goals that don't really make sense at the moment, if they ever did. Prison is a remarkably apt comparison for the level of competence and good effect you'd expect to receive from the current setup.

Kids view school like some adults view their dead end job: you punch in, do the minimal that you need to be considered effective, and spend most of your time thinking what you're going to do when you're not at work. That's an attitude we gotta change if we want better students, and by extension, better citizens going forward.

This is true, but it's largely a problem with how schools are structured. You can't just sit down and persuade kids to love school any more than you can convince adults to be really excited about their dead end job. If the task is not persuasive, many people will be unpersuaded. People have repeatedly tried to short-circuit this because they want people to be really really motivated to partake in really really unmotivating systems, and to no one's great surprise it tends to miserably and consistently fail.

[McTraveller]

government organizations chiefly concerned with bullying children is not productive.

Do you really believe this, or is this hyperbole?  I guess maybe there are some people high up in education policymaking that are just there for powermongering, but the vast majority of people in education are actually trying to help children learn.

And I don't mean "memorize facts"; that's a very small part of learning.

[IronyOwl]

government organizations chiefly concerned with bullying children is not productive.

Do you really believe this, or is this hyperbole?  I guess maybe there are some people high up in education policymaking that are just there for powermongering, but the vast majority of people in education are actually trying to help children learn.

And I don't mean "memorize facts"; that's a very small part of learning.

Both. I have no doubt a great many people in education believe, at least on some level, that they are being incredibly helpful and productive. I also have no doubt that placement in an entrenched government agency tends to involve more politics and powermongering than productive effort.

Most importantly, though, I have no doubt that these two tenets mesh together nicely by allowing you to "help" children by ordering them around. Assigning vast quantities of homework is a very clean example: Nobody does that without claiming it's for the students' benefit, nobody has good evidence it does so. In fact, there's numerous studies suggesting that it's harmful. They keep doing it, and they keep claiming it's for the students' benefit and any less would harm the students.

In short, they're somewhat accidentally (academic effort, good intentions), somewhat intentionally (establishing control, willful ignorance) bullying students.

[NJW2000]

I was thinking about this recently, and would agree with nenjin that the child's values are very important. School's been pretty wonderful for me on the whole, as has uni to some degree, but my parents are academics and I went to a good private school, so I'm a very lucky exception. I have however lived in a pretty so-so area, and even did a bit of free academic mentoring for kids there, and one event there really shook my ideas about education.

I was working with your typical possibly-bright, easily distracted, slightly behind kid, trying to get him to concentrate, when he turned to me and asked why he should bother doing any of it. I gave him an answer, but it wasn't one I liked, or a good one. My flustered response involved getting a good job, earning money, having creature comforts. It was slightly calculated towards the material, competitive outlook a lot of boys that age exhibit, but it didn't motivate him to focus on the problem in front of him. He just said that he could study for exams later. This was the sort of response that I was going to get: it was as ends-focused and lazy as my answer had been. Of course he was wrong, very few people can actually cram, and even fewer can learn mathematical techniques without practice, so his best bet was to do the work in front of him. That practical side of things wasn't the main thing at stake though... what mattered was how he regarded his studies. I had failed to give him a reason to think about anything other than doing the bare minimum.

So I suspect a huge part of the problem is that it's hard for a lot of children to see why education is worthwhile, and when they do see why, it doesn't motivate them. I know myself exactly why I'm studying: it's a combination of interest in the subject and desire to attain the skills and qualifications for good employment. I suffer from motivation issues all the same, but that's generally a result of my bad habits or stupid aspects of the degree I'm doing, and on the whole I know why I'm working hard. Not everybody has that. You don't need to be financially and academically priviliged for it though: if people know what they're getting out of education, they will generally apply themselves fully, even if what they're learning isn't too captivating. For example, on a lifeguarding course I watched people from all backgrounds swotting and practicing like mad, even people who didn't seem like they'd be too invested in an academic setting.

So yeah, I think educating people about why they need to be educated is pretty key. That's really hard to do though, especially as our society hasn't figured out why and how we value education. I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good answer to say to the boy I was mentoring. I'm not sure there is one, myself.

[Doomblade187]

A minor note on the education front: we treat parents like they fail their kids sometimes, but *the government never actually puts enough resources into social services or school mental health support. Currently, schools function to supplement and assist parents in raising their kids, as I see it.

But we only put money towards the education, not the parts that actually address the people themselves (hence why school lunch and breakfast should be free, and also not Sodexo branded cheap slop).

Also, the "parents not doing their part" trope is often used as a racist trope. Minor note.

[Frumple]

It also generally completely ignores that the pressures parents face these days have pretty radically changed, as has the expectations being lumped both on them and children/young adults, for what's that worth. Most societies fail the parents pretty hard in a lot of ways, too... and we're a lot less willing to accept or ignore the consequences of that nowadays. Even if we're still pretty damn willing to ignore anything that might mitigate that.

At the end of the day there's no singular major failure point to identify with education, imo, save maybe that ground level teachers generally don't have the support (fiscal or otherwise) they need, as the primary reason results seem so sketchy at times. There's just piles and piles of different sorts of garbage being input for all sorts of reasons giving us varyingly garbage output.

... on top of being increasingly aware of how garbage that output is, of course. And less willing to accept things like, "Well, maybe the kid starves or dies or something" as a results of child rearing. It's like we're in an in-between point between thinking beating a child into a facsimile of compliance is okay, recognizing how fucking shit that is in terms of both ethics and efficacy, and figuring out what the better game plan is. Or something. Extra complications coming from all the people that are really invested in not acknowledging how fucking shit yesteryear was on most fronts, ha.

[wierd]

It's mostly about expecting consistent results from inconsistent materials.  It's a result of "Industrial revolution" thinking; We can automate and standardize production of goods, why not workers too?

The problem of course, is that children are highly variable things, and easily damaged too.  Throw onto that a blanket of (for lack of a better word coming to mind) "ethics" about how all people should be treated as uniformly as possible, and things get dicey.

The speed at which individual kids become mentally capable of grasping subject matter can vary by several years. This flies straight in the face of "Standard curriculum" as a fundamental concept.  It causes problems for the children (Who aren't mentally developed enough in some cases to grasp the subject matter, while others are ready for more advanced material, and suffer from being held back for their formative education experience), but society is fucking in love with the idea of "standard curriculum" on a standardized timetable.

There's fear that opening the door on a graduated curriculum, based on student capabilities, will be abused to shoehorn certain demographics into lower standards of education, rather than how it would be intended to be used (Milestone monitoring to determine when a student is capable of being given more advanced material, to assure no learning deficits emerge). There's pushback from industry that wants universally interchangable workers (even though this is demonstrably not possible, and they themselves even acknowledge it when they assert a need for "qualified" applicants), and government who wants as uniform a demographic as possible to ease administration needs.

The ultimate failure though, is still the delusion that such a universal standard is even attainable, and must be attained.  It does not matter what all the fears or imperatives are behind that delusion, and why people want it to be true when it is not-- the hard reality that it simply is not true is going to rear its ugly head with vengeance each and every time.


In short, standardized schools are failsauce, because they seek to attain something impossible-- and naturally, thus do a shitty as fuck job doing it.


Here's more what I view as an idealized school system.

1) Get industry out of the fucking picture. Tell them to go fuck themselves with a lawnmower or something; their input is unwelcome. No. Really. I mean it. COMPLETELY UNWELCOME.

2) Education should be about assuring that each student achieves the highest capable educational performance that they are mentally and physically capable of reaching. It should not be about assuring "Everyone ends up being interchangeable worker drones for industry."  (This is why industry should be told to go fuck itself. See point 1.)

3) Child psychology and developmental milestone monitoring should be used to tailor education to each individual student. There can still be group classes, but uniformity and consistency of the class makeup is not assured, and no effort to assure that should be taken. (EG, the same kids in every classroom, every year.) This is because placement in a classroom for a specific subject matter will be determined by how well they are grasping the material.  Some kids will excel at certain subjects, but flag "behind" in others. This means that while they might have peers in one subject, they will have different peers in another.  The notion of "behind" or "Ahead" need to be tossed aside, with the focus on "Best education they can handle", with documentation to demonstrate this.

4) As individual members of a society, we need to be prepared for the news that some people just aren't good at certain things, and be prepared as a society for that news.  We need to assure that every effort was taken to assure people reach the educational maximum they can handle, but failures for people to reach some "Universal standard" should not be seen as failures of the educational system, but instead failures of society to accept the limits of its individual members, and rather than heaping blame and penalties, using these systems to identify the people who have greater needs than others, so that they can get the assistance and get into the programs they will need to not end up homeless or involved in lives of crime, or otherwise neglected by society. Such people need to reach the maximums they are able to achieve, in the areas where that achievement can result in better outlooks for their lives, and in so doing, perform the maximal good for that individual, and consequently, the society as a whole.  Failures to assure that each student achieves maximally, rather than failure to reach a certain "universal level", should be the metric by which school systems are graded.

5) Again, industry needs to go fuck itself, and abandon the notion that universal workers are even a thing-- and properly assert what their requirements are, and give reasons why. (No, they should not get to demand premium performers for changing lightbulbs.)

[Trekkin]

So yeah, I think educating people about why they need to be educated is pretty key. That's really hard to do though, especially as our society hasn't figured out why and how we value education. I'm still waiting for someone to give me a good answer to say to the boy I was mentoring. I'm not sure there is one, myself.

Well, there's the answer people will pretend justifies the entire educational system: that learning for the sake of learning is an inherently good thing and we should encourage people to learn whatever they're interested in because society somehow indirectly benefits from people knowing more things. They will describe how pupils learn all sorts of ancillary skills like critical thinking that, while totally unconnected from the subject matter, somehow justify the inclusion of all sorts of things that even the kids know are useless.

One trouble with that line of thinking is the same one we've seen historically in the problems with Chinese and later British examinations for government service: there's no test that can't be gamed. The examinations theoretically selected for the skills to competently execute technically challenging tasks, but in practice, they selected for highly skilled essay writers first and competent people second, and so the top-scoring brackets were enriched in specialists at writing good essays rather than anything general enough to actually be useful to mandarins. It also insists on ranking students on a single spectrum to suit to desirability of jobs rather than a multidimensional spectrum that could start matching people to the jobs' requirements, but that is solvable independently.

The other trouble, and the one we tend not to talk about, is that education doesn't necessarily improve people. People will tout their "lifelong love of learning" as yet another way to pride themselves on their preferences rather than their accomplishments, but if all they're doing is absorbing knowledge because they want to, they can do that on their own. I've interviewed so many people like this whose "love of learning" has made them dilettantes who have learned the most fun and interesting tenth of what it would take to be useful in ten different jobs and dismissed the rest as an irrelevant detail beneath their notice,but I've never hired any of them -- and, indeed, the ones I know socially have had a similar experience, having failed their way out of any job involving any degree of skill until they end up cooking burgers or pushing a broom, their "love of learning" finding expression primarily in a truly indelible strain of ultracrepidarianism. There's nothing wrong with that, but we can get them there far more efficiently if we just hand them a spatula and a library card the first time they try to pretend their hobbies are impressive. As for highly skilled jobs, I'll take someone with a fear of failing over someone with a love of learning any day, because I know the first person actually paid attention to the boring bits. Nor is it worth pretending that generically better-educated citizens are somehow vaguely better for society, because there's nothing actually obligating them to remember their education beyond the bits that support whatever stupid position they've already decided to take.

So, if you want to fix education, start by taking out the liberal arts, less certain subsets of rhetoric. Start by revoking 501(c)3 status from any institution teaching humanities, and forbid all federal funding from the same. Make the cost of the arts department NIH and NSF funding and the tax deductibility of charitable donations to the institute at large, and higher education will rapidly reevaluate whether it really belongs. In the public schools, of course, teaching these subjects can simply be stopped by governmental fiat, and the resultant savings used to fund STEM to a more acceptable level; the requisite teaching of higher-level literacy can be formally folded into science classes, where it frankly belongs anyway. Kids need to know how to communicate technical data accurately, not how everyone and their hamster is Jesus in purgatory. If they want foreign languages, have a committee pare all the humanist frippery out of the vocabulary of Lojban and teach them that. All other efficiencies aside, it makes the inevitable question of "when will we ever use this" self-answering: they're either learning it to make use of it or learning how to deal with the arbitrary and meaningless bullshit that will define the entirety of their career, and they get to choose which.

[Doomblade187]

Eh, as a STEM major and employee, I have to say that cutting the arts and humanities is a TERRIBLE idea. They're called the humanities for a reason; they give students a mental gear shift from STEM content, which, at least for me, was desperately needed.