Technology

A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.

The "old people complaining about Shakespeare" was the thin end of the wedge intended to defund and dismantle public education. But the leverage comes from large groups of people who are sold the notion that children are just born dumb or smart and education has no material benefit.

A lot of this isn't about teaching styles. It's about public funding of education and the neo-confederate dream of a return to ethnic segregation.

There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings?

A lot of these studies come out of public sector federal and state education departments that have been targeted by anti-public education lobbying groups. So what used to be a wealth of public research into the benefits of education has dried up significantly over the last generation.

What we get instead is a profit-motivated push for standardized testing, lionized by firms that directly benefit from public sector purchasing of test prep and testing services. And these tend to come via private think-tanks with ties back to firms invested in bulk privatization of education. So good luck in your research, but be careful when you see something from CATO or The Gates Foundation, particularly in light of the fact that more reliable and objective data has been deliberately purged from public records.