Been talking and writing and posting for years about how the miseducation system is based on ideas from the 1800s and early 1900s and completely out of date in most school systems. And especially for boys, whose drop out rates have been increasing for over a decade etc.
But now the study comes out showing the death rate for whites, men in particular, have been rising faster than any other group (and especially by suicide or drug overdoses and other results of self destructive behaviors) and people are speculating why. Some point out the loss of industrial age jobs, and there's a lot of truth to that. When I was a kid any working-class man could go get a job in a factory for good wages and feel he was providing for his family and he was.
In the information age and the Internet age and the robotics age we live in, the manufacturing jobs are mostly gone and jobs that don't demand higher education skills don't pay enough for one person to survive on them let alone a family. So that's a big part of it. But the bigger part is this crazy Gilded Age robber baron capitalist exploitation of everyone but the rich age we live in.
If those same people who are dying in the study, working-class whites, lived in Canada, or Europe, or Japan or any country comparable to the U.S. in productivity and education etc. there would be no stress over medical bills and healthcare because it would be provided free, there would be no stress over paying for the education of their kids all the way through college and including pre-school because it would be free, there would be no stress over another pregnancy because there would be paid family leave and free daycare etc. etc. etc.
The level of stress from living in these times in the USA is overwhelming for anyone who isn't part of the 1% and especially overwhelming for those working-class families who are further down the income level. It's an unforgiving, exploitative, rapacious economic system we've inherited from Reagan and the decades of rightwing economic and political influence. It's enough to make one give up or stress out so much it kills.
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It's a huge problem and the direction the schools are moving in will surely make it worse. Schools don't accurately report drop out rates either ....they somehow get away with "transfer"--- it's much higher than anyone wishes to see. Don't know the solution though...(Well I do- the things you mention plus the opposite of what we are doing now in the schools)
if I were running the schools, the first thing I would do for older students is allow them to use their phones in class and ask questions for them to find the answers to on them and then discuss the various answers the Internet would present them with etc. begin where they are because they are already into what the future will demand while the rest of the school system is stuck in previous centuries...not like smart phones are the answer, but they are the reality and the tool most used by students so make use of that etc.
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