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Is education now lip-service?

Ted Bauer
5 min readJun 28, 2022

We’ve been talking about the importance of education since virtually the beginning of time. Is the idea waning, though?

Hopefully not, but it might be.

Let’s walk through the importance of education and its shifting narrative. This is a blog post. It’s meant to be somewhat brief, and there have been entire books written on the importance of education. By no means will this be that thorough. I’ll probably be a little bit all over the place because it’s a broad, important topic.

The importance of education, Step 1: Why is modern education system like this?

Most people think the education system is based on agriculture cycles. NPR has even reported it out like that. In reality, that’s not the full deal. Think about it logically: kids would be needed in the spring (harvest) and the fall (planting) more than the summer, but kids were in school in the fall/spring. The real reason is air conditioning. School buildings were hideous in the summer before that, and the wealthy in urban areas fled to second homes. It made the most sense to suspend school in the summer.

The approach to education at the K-12 level has been relatively similar for generations. It’s changed a bit, yes. New models have emerged (charters!) and whatnot. But by and large — this…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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