1 Everything about US public schools makes sense once you realize they were designed to turn farm kids into factory workers.

-j

2 a) I'm vehemently fond of homeschooling, and of the opinion that single rooms schools are the most theoretically sound scheme for industrial schooling.

b) Grade/subject specialization is pretty clearly theoretically a work station/production line approach to schools.  The premise of which should not be plausible, even inside even the framework that the Education majors use.  Production lines work because they have a limited state space in the parts, and passing previous steps correlates well having the next steps performed successfully.  Even the Education majors assume that minds have hidden complexities, of the sort that would be well below the noise floor of their measurement approaches. 

c) Unemployed blue collar workers are probably often a better and saner influence on children than recent university graduates would be.

d) I think you are overlooking the nature of the enemy.  The enemy is pretty much a subset of university trained theory obsessives.  The common features include obsession with theoretical models, forecasts, and having no actual skill in discriminating between sound and unsound theories.  They have invincible confidence, the way someone who does not feel pain is not stopped by pain.  However, like pain insensitivity, this is a mixed 'advantage'. 

e) They find it hard to imagine losing.  They trust forecasts which predict that their win is a certainty.  'Then you screw up again, like you screwed up every time before' is not an idea that they test.  The core of their model is outright extrapolating beyond the data.  They've picked a strategy that is a combination of wishcasting, adn manipualtion.  It is unlikely that they have a great fall back if the manipulation does not work.

f) They outright thought that four years of Biden would be their big break, a gamble whose rewards are worth a fairly significant risk.  It can be shown that this is probably incorrect.

g) Treating forecast as reality is the same mistake that they make.  (Human behavior is necessarily a reduce order model area of theory.  Their theory and metric oriented approach to manipulating behavior is exactly a scheme that might expose new behaviors that they had not seen before.)  If you think about reality in the same way that they do, you default to picking similar strategies.  Different selection, hopefully, due to different goals.  You can trap yourself by supposing that you must have a theoretical understanding of soemthing before you can do something.

h) 1. Preference cascades.  Totalitarian control does not foresee a certain opportunity, lots of people choose the opportunity.  2.  Aggregate theory does not predict emergent effects of local fixes.  3. Carefully thinking 'I do not know that' when something is outside your personal experience can create a mind that is harder for a lefty to predict and manipulate than if someone has studied and trusts most of the same theoreis that the lefy has.  4.  Therefore, excessive trust in theoretical forecasts can deaden the mind and heart. 

Anyway, yeah, I used to drive myself much crazier with the theoretical forecasting.  Recently, I have taken a great deal of comfort from uncertainties around my theoretical understanding. 

3 Based on extensive family experience in the field, the goal of academics in Education is to stay as far away from actual children as possible. Most haven't taught in a classroom in decades, and haven't been a student in at least as long. They no longer know how to teach or learn, if they ever did.

-j

4 One thing I will note is that in the Covid era, when parents could see what the schools were teaching their children, we saw a lot of push back.  Even in fairly liberal areas of Virginia, not too far from DC.  It was very much a sign of a preference cascade to me.  However, now that children are back to the secrecy of the school systems and the parents are more and more being forced back to the office, much of that is quieting down.  For all the bemoaning I see about how kids didn't learn anything during remote learning (with more than a little truth to it), the reverse may be resulting in all of us losing sight of the educational abuses and outright political indoctrination and grooming occurring in the school systems.

5 I can't speak to the education system as everything I have is third hand or worse. But it's certainly the case that our education system as a whole is totally garbage at this point.
As an aside, I've really missed this kind of posting. You do a great job of picking an interesting topic, and then giving us info and thoughts that are far deeper and more insightful than you'll get at any major new site, X, etc.

6 I've noticed this too, reading autobiographies and books written around the turn of the century. 
I don't know if it's *just* how we're educated. People in the early 1900s seem *more intelligent* in general than moderns, including people unfortunate enough to be caught up in the original Prussian system (universally hated among students.) I've been told it's just selection bias - the people who wrote and were written about were a smaller wealthier subset. I don't know if I buy that. My grandfather's midwestern schoolbooks are more coherently written. 
I wonder if we're all being poisoned by something and it's stunting us somehow? (Or we're not being poisoned by the right thing that Victorian types were all ingesting.) Certainly, since the 1980s, something terribly wrong is going on with our metabolisms - that's a hard inflection point in obesity rates.