School districts in America being locally funded instead of funded in proportion by population size/need through a central pot creates soooo many systemic issues and ripples effects that I feel like most people don't really see firsthand because most people don't move between drastically different communities over the course of their life working with the right populations in the right fields to really just see how starkly different education is for different people in different school districts and the effects that has on their lives.
Like, I'm often seeing online people saying shit like "USAmericas have no excuse for not self-educating on imperialism anyone with an internet connection and a small amount of curiosity can just look it up. They must have slept through history class if they don't even know what wars we've been in." People who say this, I think, don't realize that the education they've received is probably vastly superior to people who weren't as fortunate in the school district birth lottery. Without adequate funding, it doesn't matter how passionate and dedicated and smart your teachers are, it's simply not possible for students to receive a good education when the teacher:student ratio is fucked, there's no funding for books or school librarians, and all the kids are hungry as shit cramped into tiny uncomfortable buildings without proper heating and cooling. When your school is more like a prison than a university you're lucky if you can get basic literacy out of it. Not to mention all the kids with extra needs that can't get met and the ramifications of systemic poverty on mental health and ability to focus or even have time to do stuff like reading assignments.
The vast majority of Americans being ignorant of the history of US imperialism is not due to a lack of curiosity when a lot of those people can't fucking read at an adult level and have no research or critical thinking skills. They didn't need to sleep through history class if they couldn't even hear the teacher over their classmates shouting at each other. Information literacy in this country is very very low and the legacy of "no child left behind" means the worst performing schools just get worse.
It's easy to undervalue education when you're educated. Without the education you have, the world appears incredibly small. Without education, you don't even know how to formulate the right questions to get answers, let alone how to do dependable research. If you don't even know the world imperialism how are you going to be curious about it.
Every day at work I am dealing with fully grown adults who act like preschoolers and seem to struggle to understand the most simple concepts and sure some of them probably got lead poisoned growing up or have some intellectual disabilities but for most of them it's the illiteracy and lack of education because schools in Philly have been fucking struggling for so long. Things like logic and reasoning actually do need to be taught at some point, even if it's not Formal Logic. You need to teach people lots of different ways of thinking, how to analyze problems and formulate solutions.
The way our schools are structured needs serious reform. They're far too restrictive and punitive and prison like and make children miserable. But also more than anything else we need to fix this issue where wealthy school districts just are able to give a better education to the kids living in them and kids in low income school districts barely get an education at all. You can't blame the average person for a lack of curiosity if their only exposure to US military history of Call of Duty and nobody ever taught them about distinguishing fiction or propaganda from reality.
If anything is more responsible for making me shift my politics left, its this 5 year old video:
Due to how funding is made in our school systems, businesses with billions of dollars are given sweetheart deals and don't pay any property taxes. No property taxes, no school money. You can't fund school reform if there are no funds to even keep the schools operational. And then all these industries pour out chemicals that make the kids sick. We call this area Cancer Alley. This corridor of Louisiana has so much investment that it dwarfs many countries, and it has poorest people in our country living there. The deck was stacked and the game was rigged by the house before even the hands were ever drawn. Louisiana is not a part of the imperial core. We are an inland colony, with an exploitable, disposable workforce. Our schools are factories to churn out new workers to feed the industrial machines.
