> However,the United States, particularly in the last 50 years, seems to have fostered a culture averse to education.

There's good reason for this. Not everyone enjoys learning for the sake of it. The pitch for forced education is that it will help you sustain yourself as an adult. If adults are finding their time in forced public education to be regretted, then they pass that information onto the younger generations. Maybe there are better ways to acquire useful skills.

I'm always a little surprised to see the HN crowd so in favor of education. The median commenter writes programs for a living, and probably acquired that skill mostly on their own. They might enjoy learning for its own sake, but surely they can look at their own situation objectively and realize their marketable skill came more from free time, computer access, and internet access, than an educational institution. If the strategy was to bet on what already worked for oneself, and hope it works for others too, then they would want to pull money out of schools and put it into libraries, computer labs, and internet cafes.

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HankStallone 4 days ago | parent [-]

That's all true, but this crowd also leans heavily progressive. Progressives have a great faith in processes and systems. Get the right top-down systems in place, and everything will be good. Naturally that includes the school system, especially government schools.

It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.

	▲	alphazard 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing. That's an interesting theory. It definitely explains a lot of what we see. I don't know if anyone self-describing as progressive would sign off on it as their own thinking. Phrased the way you put it, it also seems like a kind of cognitive bias almost like the gambler's fallacy. Assuming that the concrete data you have is not representative, and instead the opposite is more likely to occur. The correct reasoning would be "this definitely worked for me, assume I'm not special and try to make the same path easier for others". The reason I think it might be a strawman is that the ideology your talking about does want to help others, and that thinking would make them less effective at that goal.