Which is worse: bad citation or anecdotes with no citation?

AFAIK the actual research is somewhat unclear.

But my (former teacher) problems with “education” are a wider topic for another day.

That’s something only a teacher would say. As someone who did all their school work and got a fancy engineering job, a lot of it was bogus busy work that 99% of us have completely forgotten.

You can’t tell me that I needed two teachers having me comb through the book for words that weren’t part of the index so that I could rewrite the word’s textbook definition on a piece of paper verbatim on a weekly basis and that that was a good education experience.

You can’t tell me my high school study hall where they’d give you something to do if you were bored and forbid you from sleeping or playing games unless the study hall monitor “liked you” was a good experience.

I mean my high school algebra teacher couldn’t even remember the algebra lesson she’d taught every year for over a decade when I had her. If it was really a life skill or that important, she would’ve remembered.

In calculus they teach you the hard way to differentiate and then they’re just like “ah but actually you can do it this way and that’s how everyone does it.”

Artificially raising the difficulty by forbidding formula sheets in math is also just stupid. If you can see the problem, recognize which formula to use, and use it, that should be enough.

We’re just straight up wasting millions of hours of people’s time with our education system that has very little merit in terms of long term results and retention and negatively affects both people that come out of it “passing with flying colors” and people that flunk out because of various home life circumstances, bad teachers, difficult with the material, or a lack of interest.

Students are miserable (suicide is at an all time high last I checked and I’m pretty confident it’s not just about social media), administrators are miserable, teachers are miserable, and kids really don’t learn all that much that stays with them into adulthood. We desperately try to shove way too much information into people’s heads in a very dry and uncaptivating way. We need to throw the system out and figure out how to teach what matters and change/replace stuff that doesn’t matter or make sense (e.g. we changed the spelling of various words in the past, why don’t we fix them instead of teaching a bunch of ridiculous spellings that make no sense like facade, ghost, llama, etc).