I think to fix society we must start with the youth. In high school students learn to stereotype others. I believe this is unAmerican. We should look at each other as Americans not jocks or nerds. This leads to a divided society. I think a united America is stronger. I think school uniforms are a good idea.
Be careful, for while I know what you're going for, Unity can be a concept which sets up both green flags AND red flags. In this context, my red flags are going up, because it sounds too much like social fascism; there's a reason why 1984 was written in 1948: that period of US history, as I view the various PSAs from it and the stresses of the pan-culture, was the time when we were in the greatest amount of danger in ending up in an Orwellian Regime, with the peak of that danger being the McCarthy years.
I strongly disagree with the concept of school uniforms. It doesn't promote unity, but discourages individuality. It tells everyone that they have to be the same, and anyone who dares be
different is not welcome. Humans are naturally a tribal species, and current high school culture demonstrates this very well. But school uniforms actually
promote Tribalism, which can have some benefits, but also carries with it dangers far too great to be worth it.
I am a Nerd. I was a Nerd in High School. I was a social outcast and loner until I found the other Nerds. I finally had my Place, and hold to that Place today. I have an Identity that is Mine, where I am distinct even from other Nerds. I am NOT a Jock, because I couldn't care less about sports or that culture, and wouldn't feel any sense of loss whatsoever if high schools stopped having American Football competitions.
And frankly, even the concept of "unAmerican" itself is disturbing to me. Who's to judge what's "American" or not? Most of our cultural values are carry-overs from our English cultural ancestry, and by extension Continental Northern Germanic culture. The Right To Bear Arms itself calls back to the ancient right and duty of all Freefolk to carry swords.
Don't try to force social unity. You'll just create more division.
Now... all of that said, the US education system is criminally negligent. Besides the absurdity of having more than 10 - 15 students per class (which is unavoidable at this point due to poor budgeting), the entire traditional school model is outdated. Lectures are a bad way to teach, and homework is just busywork. The material is not much better, with math being dry and boring (making even those who
might have been good at it, such as myself, dependent on calculators even for simple division), literature being decidedly Eurocentric(come on, people, the Ramayana is the oldest example of the now-familiar Hero-Rescues-Princess-From-Demon scenario that I've ever seen; that's NOT insignificant!), and the history... the history is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE, full of lies, partial-truths that encourage false conclusions, and skims over all the good stuff. Heck, I understand that at least one High School history text book only dedicates TWO PARAGRAPHS TO THE HOLOCAUST!
Furthermore, there is a poisonous conception, which the traditional school system encourages, that intelligence is equivalent to how many random factoids a person can parrot. Someone who can't parrot these random factoids is considered stupid. This is an example of what I call "intellectual elitism". Intelligence, in truth, has nothing whatsoever to do with how many random factoids can be parroted; someone who is illiterate, thinks the Sun circles a Flat Earth, and sees people of different appearance, language, and culture as somehow inferior to their own, is not
necessarily less intelligent than the person who speaks 10 languages, can program a computer, and knows the history of Rome in and out (in addition to knowing the reality of the round Earth circling the Sun or the default equality worth of all people regardless of appearance, language, or culture). A...
"literary
" ...example that I point to as an illustration is the fictional character of Son Goku from the Dragon Ball franchise. He's barely literate, at 12 years old couldn't tell the difference between men and women without "patting" them first, at that same age couldn't do math and so thought he was 14, and thought "marriage" was a type of food. He's lovingly called an "idiot" by the fanbase, but in truth, even with all of these issues, Goku is, in truth, a genius: able to master incredibly difficult (and realistically impossible) martial arts techniques, which in lore are described as requiring decades of training to learn, just by seeing them in action
once, and then improving/iterating on them to create something new
in the middle of a fight. Even Batman would need a few days to do that.
Another major problem, however, isn't with the education system, but something that probably has no realistic solution: the English language itself. English, as a language, from the perspective both of accurate communication of concepts, and from a developmental standpoint of a child, is atrocious. Internet personality SFDebris summed the problem up very well:
You didn't "sleeped", kid. You "slept". Past tense of "sleep", "es" "el" "ee" "ee" "pee". The two vowels "e" making the long sound "ee",
right? Okay, kid, how do you spell "eat"? No, not with two "e"s, you little dumb-***. Now just try telling me what the past tense of "eat" is. Ready? Wrong answer, and you spend the rest of your life collecting carts at the grocery store.
English doesn't actually have any real "rules", because there's so many exceptions, fringe rules, spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies, and a vocabulary that is, frankly, a complete mess, with a lot of words that have accumulated so many different and contradicting meanings over the years as to have become almost meaningless.
I could go on and on, but I think I'm reaching the character limit.
