Does that mean that the people who got an A in biology are more right than people who got a B in biology?
so… you’re blaming children?
“Adults” who act like children.
rong? like the estonian word for train?
I took the minimum amount of science classes in highschool. Lack of science education is less of a problem than teaching you how to sort through bullshit and analytical thinking. I basically think that our school system needs to stop focusing so hard on teaching things from the textbooks in an ever-changing world that’s cherry picked from an endless wealth of knowledge and focus more on learning how to be skeptical and check various sources and such. In school it seemed like research was always just a backseat to the goal, instead of the goal itself.
Ngl I like learning from textbooks now that I am out of highschool. I learn faster too.
And weirdest part is that I still can’t study through my highschool textbooks.
I am geniuenly wondering if they were just simply terrible at picking good textbooks and overall using them to teach.
Maybe now you’re just being able to read things that interest you?
I found by high school the kids who said that (that hadn’t dropped out) moved onto a different argument by that age
Honestly, I know it ruins the joke, but I don’t think there’s as much overlap between the top and bottom groups as one may suspect
As a kid I always thought a lot of stuff taught was like, duh, so obvious. It took being thrown in the adult world to see hmm… I guess… not obvious enough???
There are something like 10 million students attending Christian school and the like, and another 5 million or so being home schooled.
They don’t really believe in the scientific method and critical thinking, in general. At least in my experience as a student of a Christian school. I had no idea.
Gets me wondering which type of “Christian”.
Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8swSkk9yeV8 .
There are many christians (not of that^ ilk) who very much are into the sciences, and are undogmatic in their approach to either religion or science. … Which was a surprise to me and my teenage militant aitheism that had swallowed the false dichotomy whole.
Here’s the rub… those practical moderates FUEL the fanatics (donations and tithing), and they also provide the fundamentalists with a smoke screen of respectability.
They’re a huge part of the problem. The fundies depend on the moderates.
I’d say the conflation’s the bigger part of the problem.
There’s always a conflation. Fundamentalists are impossible without moderate support.
And billionaires love people like that because it keeps the most obsessive of us focused away from the greed.
LOL, school curriculums are part of the “billionaire conspiracy” too?
FFS.
As someone aware of decades of legal battles to prevent the gutting of education systems, usually noticeable around local levels, you almost always end up at corpo think tanks like the heritage foundation.
If you’re familiar with the heritage foundation, they’ve been trying to run a project2025 style playbook for decades, and it is only through their success that current administration is a billionaire playground. Reminder that elon musk could directly choose for hundreds of thousands of children to die this year by taking aware their food and medicine, because he wanted to. Also billionaires got an unimaginably generous treatment at the same time, worth much more than all of the food and medicine.
It’s more an amalgam of cooperatively evil assholes, most of which have an absurd amount of money for some reason, but yeah, billionaires are a good chunk of why there are whole groups being funded to spend all day every day trying to kneecap educational efforts, or painting academics as evil satanists who are corrupting your children with science.
They are saying people who don’t understand high school basics are useful idiots for billionaires because they’re easily manipulated
Nothing about a school curriculum conspiracy was mentioned, so it’s especially weird that you put billionaire conspiracy in quotes
Stay curious‼️ 🤔
Real. Curiosity is such a desirable trait in folks.
But not in cats.
“akshully”
That’s why my friends call me Whiskers
that’s the same people who later get to helm companies and say “who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will”
AI is a great idea and everyone in our company must use it!
It’s fun in my organisation. We get “Use AI, it’s the future, your manager will assess your use of AI” alongside “only use the AI tools on this list” with a list of tools completely useless to my, or my team’s possible needs, along with “don’t give AI any sensitive information” where everything my team works on is IT systems which makes everything too sensitive to be given to copilot
it’s a great idea if all you need to do is to compile the research you already did into variety of content types. my current fave is notebookLM because i’m uploading all the reports from other companies and sift through them somewhat faster. other than that - it is basically a linkedin post generator.
I always found science and history interesting even though i hated school.
Maths though, i always resented “you wont always have a calculator” … but now as im older i imagine kids today having a similar idea about “AI” and i can see that not ending well for anyone.
Tbf this does kind of imply we are doing something wrong. Maybe instead we should teach people to learn and judge information, rather than train them to take information presented to them at face value.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
Loooooool
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
I really doubt that.
Also, how are they to judge information presented to them if there is no agreed upon valid source?
I agree (e.g. think how many billions were thrown at string theory). Critical Thinking is an essential skill and must be included and encouraged from an early age.
Maybe many students are just trying trying to pass am exam or get a degree. There’s far too much to know about too many things to expect everyone to have even a basic understanding of everything. Knowing how to spot bullshit (aka critical thinking) is a lot easier than becoming an expert in every subject.
Ignorance is piss
Nice quip.
I usually go with
If ignorance is bliss, give me agony
or even
The ignorance that dies is not you
Kiss my piss
“those people” are drinking piss, literary
Those advocating drinking ones own urine, have some interesting (almost compelling) arguments for it.
To be fair, most schools give those classes only out of obligation. Doing dumb calculations of mols and atomic masses in high school is definitely teaching kids to ask “why the fuck am I even doing this?”
Kids are wired to ask that, so what, basic chemistry knowledge is extremely useful.
I had a co-worker who decided to clean his bathroom and decided using a mix of chemicals would be better than just using one! Makes sense right?
He figured putting bleach and vinegar together was a smart move because it meant more cleaning all at once.
Don’t worry, he’s fine. He had a sore throat for a few weeks and the fumes singed the hairs off his hands when he was mixing it.
Dang! Good to not be absent minded, and actually check out the chemical equation, and consider the implications.
Good to be reminded, and learn from others mistakes.
Glad he survived mostly unscathed.
Learning some chemistry basics is probably still good though. Not that we’re using it daily but just in the “hey mixing this stuff can kill you” or, in the same vein, seeing how it only requires small amounts to make big changes.
We’re surrounded by chemicals in our everyday lives, learning a healthy fear of them is probably for the best.
Also high school is meant to prepare you for further education, if you want to pursue that, so it really does cover a lot of ground for basic concepts you need to learn to understand and gain further education in whatever field applies.
Yeah, like an German Comedian said, while the Teacher shows how an Morse communication works, the childrens with their Smartphones already are logged in his Pacemaker.
LOL I wish it were like that. The “kids and their superior grasp of technology.” That’s how it’s supposed to be. They’re supposed to be smarter than us.
Indeed, with desktops and internet forums it really did seem to be going that way…and then with smartphones becoming specialized as content consumption and attention-capture devices, the kids started going backwards.
Yeah, they can swipe their lil’ fingers and use instagram now, but so can a chimp. It’s designed that way.
Using files and folders or printing their homework? Relegated back to the esoteric and arcane arts. It’s tragic.
But this kids who do make a point to learn and teach themselves are doing incredible things.
So I guess, the average has dropped, and now we’re seeing more dramatic extremes on either end of the spectrum. 🤔
…/TED_talk lol
We learnt to titrate in later high school, played with acids and bases and crystallizing crystals in earlier high school
Sure we learnt to calculate mols of chemicals but we also learnt why — so you can balance an equation, so you have no more acid (for example) than you need.
I bailed out of chemistry though. I had a bad teacher in year 10 and moved to botany in yr 11 and 12 (working with scientists testing salt tolerance of eucalypts to address dryland salinity) (I went to a school that covered high school and college (years 7 to 12))
Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.
Do they also teach how to spot fallacies? Or do we have to get that from elsewhere? Evidence suggests elsewhere.
















