re: #68 Bert’s House of Beef and Obdicuts

I got viciously bullied at times in school, and I wasn’t even the one who got it worse. One guy got bullied so much that he started abusing steroids so that he could physically match up to his abusers. Fucked up.

As for a curriculum presented in different ways, people self-select for that at higher levels. My wife, for example, only learns from audible material if the person speaks quickly, so she records her lectures and plays them at 2x or 3x speed. She doesn’t learn from simply looking at images well, but she learns wonderfully from copying or free-drawing that image. So she does that.

These things are relatively easy to test for, and we have more than enough money in the bloated admin portion of the education budget to pay for such testing. The main monetary challenge would be signing this multipronged approach— textbooks for some, recorded videos for other, interactive games for others. But the rewards for our country would be huge.

The problem with that approach is that it would be opposed from both the right and left. Conservatives would see it as needlessly experimental, not instilling discipline in students*, or “an attempt to use video and special classes to create socialists” (this last is pretty dumb, but it would get said). Liberals would feel it ruined the communitarian aspects of education*, would result in the restructuring of school budgets in a way not in the teacher’s unions favor, or “was a right-wing Koch Industires plot to use tech to create hyper-capitalists” (also dumb, but it would be said less often).

*: The two points marked with an astrix are really expressing the same type of concern, that being that games wouldn’t instill a child with needed social skills. Unlike the dumb points, this concern shouldn’t be dismissed casually.