I have extremely mixed feelings about the public education I got K-12 in Texas.
On the one hand, the system is woefully under-resourced and dysfunctional to an amazing degree - the few teachers who do care are so harried by low resources, low pay, and overdemanding authorities that most kids do not have teachers that will really get them to learn.
The kids themselves on average simply seem to not be bothered to give a shit about, you know, the world around them.
But the subject matter itself is another issue that I have problems with. There is a certain amount of basic learning that you must do that is not necessarily interesting, such as algebra or the history of the Gilded Age. So I can empathize with why they left it in. But the stuff that is really relevant to high schoolers, they do not teach.
There is practically no sex ed. I had one semester of "health" in 7th grade, and the few weeks we spent on sex ed were an abstinence only education that did not so much as demonstrate how to use a condom. Two of my classmates were pregnant by the next semester.
Additionally, the history that they do teach is not the right history. It's obvious that they are going through some checklist of what the "great" history is of the US, and don't get me started on world history - we got only one year of it in 10th grade and it was the shittiest class I've been in in a long time. No one learned anything that they didn't already know.
They also do not so much as mention philosophy - which is bullshit. That subject is hugely important to developing ethical little citizens, and yet it is not even mentioned in all of K-12 education. Pathetic. They could at least spend a few weeks on it.
That being said, the amount that in hindsight I actually did learn is impressive, looking back. I had no appreciation for it at the time, but the literature classes in hindsight were the most valuable thing to me in high school - it was as close as we got to philosophy. The ideas they had us talk about and write about in those classes were important and good for us at the time and for the rest of our lives. Not to mention I did develop fairly decent writing skills in high school and also was exposed to all these literary touchstones.
Math and science got the job done, I suppose, though they were certainly not labors of love for anyone involved save perhaps the one kid in each class who genuinely enjoys it no matter how it is done.
All that being said, I did walk away from my graduation with a general basic knowledge of everything, even if some of the most important stuff was simply skipped, I had a framework in which to learn it in college.
I knew who Copernicus was, who Pasteur was, what Thomas Jefferson did for this country, what rights I have as an American, how Texas came to be in the Union, why the Civil War was fought, how to do abstract math and how scientists do what they do and know what they know.
All around, I give the entire school system a solid C+. Needs serious improvement, but isn't altogether useless. Then again, I actually enjoyed learning. I shudder to think of what it did for all those kids who didn't give a rat's ass, whether that be the kids who didn't even care about grades, or the over-achievers who had no interest in learning and simply crammed and cheated their way to graduation.
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Ethics Course
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