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).
To the spelling point: The world, for the most part, has moved away from the grammarian tradition of the 19th and 20th century of having a handful of dictionary makers decide what English is proper and what isn’t - the language evolves on its own, and if a misspelling becomes popular enough, it becomes a proper spelling. For example, facade is a french word, spelled façade, the accent under the C means it’s pronounced like an S. We dropped it in English because we don’t use accents in English, and now we spell it facade. It’s a “misspelling”, but you’ve probably never spelled it correctly. The language was never consistent to begin with, pretending you can fix spelling to make it so is a fool’s errand.
I disagree that it’s a fools errand. Misspellings rarely become popular enough to become “proper” because we teach everyone the “proper” spelling and we have spell checkers on our computers that are used for virtually everything.
There’s no method for the people speaking the English language to put pressure on a word that already exists because we’ve build up this infrastructure to "lock things in’ and insist that “they’ve been this way so they must continue to be this way.” The only way we get language evolution currently is via slang … which is hardly a way to get a better language.
I know the history of facade, it’s like many other words we’ve stolen from other languages that don’t make a lick of sense in our alphabet. It’s not an infinite list, it’s fixable, but we need to change the mind share that “it has to be this way.”
We made up official spellings, we can fix them, they’re not an immutable law of nature.
The fool’s errand is trying to make the language consistent, when it never has been, especially trying to do it via spelling. English isn’t consistent. It’s not supposed to be. It takes pieces from every other language and integrates them into English whether it makes sense to or not, leading to inconsistency. That inconsistency, I think, is by design. It makes the language more versatile than any other, a “good enough” medium of communication for everything, but usually not the best, which for communication, tends to be fine.
