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Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

it's not really what we wanted, it's what we were taught. decades of defunding education and not modernizing the system that was originally based on apartheid, the creation of media conglomerates that advocate for anti-intellectualism, all of it just run rampant and increasingly unchecked, the large scale smearing of academic institutions from the outside and the insidious internal replacement of academics by administrators

the current version of the US was orchestrated deliberately by our wealthiest elites (eg Koch, Murdoch, etc) - the pleebs were becoming too powerful and now they're over-correcting

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I don't disagree, but you're explaining _why_ they want it, not that they don't want it.

They've, for sure, been manipulated into wanting it, needing to believe it, but that's where the US is at, in a high enough percentage for the current administration to happen. The path of the US hasn't changed direction though, the travel down that path had just been accelerated somewhat by Tmurp.

They sure don't need it though.

(I agree with your comment below, but I'm unable to reply to it, so I replied here via edit)

sure, the why is to explain how it's happening and how to combat it - funding education, modernizing our systems, getting rid of unnecessary middlemen

a flat description is just an accusation that you can do nothing with except feel a kind of anti-social catharsis that doesn't net any progress in the other direction

since when have we been defunding education? over the past 60 years the per pupil spending on education has increased pretty substantially. you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated but it's objectively false that we've been reducing funding for education over multiple decades.

As far as I can tell this is factually true. Do people care to refute rather downvote shooting the messenger?

Some US states seem to spend more per pupil than excellent independent ("private") schools in the UK. That is a lot of money.

Brigading is a real thing and hard to combat, so the votes don't necessarily carry the signal they appear to.

I am not sure its that, so much as people not liking to hear anything that contradicts their politlcal beliefs.

the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

teacher pay-rate and total comp are better indicators of defunding and they are dismal: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_211.60.a... - this shows pay rates have stagnated since the late 2000s with some trending downwards since

even then the rising costs don't reflect an increase in percent-of-GDP spending - that's actually gone down in the past decade: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_106.10.a...

The % of GDP numbers seem to show, for elementary and secondary schools, rises and falls. It, fluctuates. Except for a dip in the 80s its been between 4.0% and 4.5% since 1967.

> the per-pupil number is a deliberate red herring. spending increases only cover increasingly expensive private contracts, expensive middle-managers who often contribute little of value in terms of actually educating pupils, and liabilities

Is that not just a more detailed explanation of what the comment said? jayglow said

> you can argue that the funds aren't well allocated

You have explained how they have been badly allocated. Its a general pattern in the western world's government expenditure on many things.

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