Getting an education within the current system, and allowing the system to dictate your actions outside of your academic life are two different decisions. Both are within your control generally speaking. Usually people don't have the luxury of contemplating forgoing either of those choices for better ones because they don't have the time or resources to do so. On top of that, it takes a higher tolerance for risk to do anything outside the norm.
It's not really about being woke, it's about being privileged or just crazy/ballsy.
School has changed since the 50's and some of the things the teach in schools are designed to frustrate children and make them give up or to put them in a little box... It hasn't always been this way... But change is the only constant in life...
This is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page on dumbing down:
EducationEdit
In the late 20th century, the proportion of young people attending university in the UK increased sharply, including many who previously would not have been considered to possess the appropriate scholastic aptitude. In 2003, the UK Minister for Universities,
Margaret Hodge, criticised
Mickey Mouse degrees as a negative consequence of universities dumbing down their courses to meet "the needs of the market": these are degrees conferred for studies in a field of endeavour "where the content is perhaps not as [intellectually] rigorous as one would expect, and where the degree, itself, may not have huge relevance in the labour market": thus, a university degree of slight intellectual substance, which the student earned by "simply stacking up numbers on Mickey Mouse courses, is not acceptable".
[2][3]
In 2007 Wellington Grey, a high school
physics instructor in London, published an
Internet petition objecting to what he described as a dumbed-down curriculum. He wrote: "I am a physics teacher. Or, at least, I used to be"; and complained that "[Mathematical] calculations – the very soul of physics – are absent from the new
General Certificate of Secondary Education."
[4] Among the examples of dumbing-down that he provided were: "Question: Why would radio stations broadcast digital signals, rather than analogue signals? Answer: Can be processed by computer/ipod" to "Question: Why must we develop renewable energy sources?" (a political question).
In
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1991, 2002),
John Taylor Gatto presented speeches and essays, including "The Psychopathic School", his acceptance speech for the 1990 New York City Teacher of the Year award, and "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher", his acceptance speech upon being named as the New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
[5] Gatto writes that while he was hired to teach English and literature, he came to believe he was employed as part of a
social engineering project. The "seven lessons" at the foundation of schooling were never explicitly stated, Gatto writes, but included teaching students that their self-worth depended on outside evaluation; that they were constantly ranked and supervised; and that they had no opportunities for privacy or solitude. Gatto speculated:
Was it possible, I had been hired, not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy, on the face of it, but slowly, I began to realize that the bells and confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national
curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think, and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
[5]
In examining the seven lessons of teaching, Gatto concluded that "all of these lessons are prime training for permanent
underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius." That "school is a twelve-year jail sentence, where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school, and win awards doing it. I should know."
[5]
