So I’m Australian, and here in Australia we have schools for gifted children, where admissions are based purely on standardised test results. Near the end of primary school you go to a special place to take a test, and the test is designed to measure logical thinking and mental flexibility rather than academic experience. And if you score highly, you go to a special school with smart students of all different backgrounds.
And I liked Spider-Man Homecoming in large part because Peter Parker goes to a “magnet school”, which I’m told is the American equivalent. And it doesn’t have any dumb jock types; the school bully is a little Indian brat with rich parents. It felt like a more modern take on high school tropes than all the high school movies where nerds wear bow ties that feel like the writer grew up in the 50s.
Anyway, half of My polycule says that magnet schools are all fake and only serve the rich. There’s no way a low income white boy from queens could make it into a gifted school in our world, based purely on academic achievement. I’m aware that the American system is less fair and money plays a much bigger role, but I thought there was at least a chance that a genius kid could beat the system and get into a good school with good grades.
Do magnet schools exist? Is it all just lies by the rich?
We don’t only learn in school. Fuck, I didn’t even go to school. Brilliant people are not brilliant because a school made them that way, they did it for themselves. Children’s lives are entirely different than they were when I was a child, it’s a holistic issue. They aren’t being exposed to the things they need to see. Like self-sufficient adults who aren’t consumers first, parents eventually.
Yeah, you’re right, kids should have educational experiences outside of school. But the problems of capitalism, which are very pronounced in America, are ruining that. Households now need to work 80 hours a week instead of 40, so children aren’t being looked after by their house-working parent. There is no house-working parent anymore. Children used to go outside to play, but the dangers of car pollution and car crashes have made outside inhospitable. So children are now more dependent than ever on school to teach them.
But that’s never what school was for. Genuinely. We’re gradually trying to retcon it into that, but a classroom is simply not how you take a chaotic toddler and produce a teenager who’s engaged in the world and desires to learn about it. It’s how you produce more consumers and workers. The desired end and the attempted means are totally disconnected.