I noticed kids playing outside more in parks. But also, think of the benefit of missing out on hours and hours of preaching from their teachers. They can just research things on the internet now. And come to their own conclusions.
Like it or not, schooling was originally designed as a daycare that teaches conformity and compliance.
The idea that we can change that by improving things at the margins is IMO ludicrous.
The origin of kindergarten is daycare - for 4 years old playing in streets with literally zero adult supervision.
Modern society demands both parents working, a single parent can no longer cover even the cost of housing for an entire family. As is has become so expensive.
Let alone medical expenses, hobbies, tutition etc.
tldr; Schools turned into daycare facilites when housing became so expesive that both parents must work full time.
That is maybe 40 years ago.
Modern society itself is the problem.
Proper learning is supposed to be more active and pupil-directed. Look at the Deweyite schools in America.
If you find that to be a belittling description then I’m sorry, but that’s largely what teachers do. And it’s been critiqued for a long time by thoughtful people who care about pedagogy, so you can’t simply dismiss it as some kind of “woe be the state of education” phenomenom.
My point above is that the belittling is a major part of the problem. You want to denigrate an entire profession, sure, but it has consequences, something we're seeing as experienced teachers leave the profession.
In my experience it is not productive to have this kind of conversation with teachers since they will go back and forth between (1) general, vague praise for mass education, and then (2) vacuous, relativistic statements that says nothing about education other than “it’s relative” once they are confronted with concrete problems.
They seem to identify too strongly with their teacher identity to be up for that discussion.