"I just don't think governments are organised enough to think 'Ooh, I know, we'll make education insufficient so people will accept bad policies!' They're mostly just lazy."
Really? Then why has sociology as a subject largely been phased out? Why have certain books been removed from reading lists?
Prioritizing, typically economically. There isn't really the political will nor financial gain at a time when many schools are considering cutting hours to balance the books to have a more comprehensive history or other humanities curriculum and it's easier to have a smaller selection of books for exam boards. It isn't malice, many teachers would love to teach wider, but the time and funds and wider social will isn't there. I think the financial cuts have malice, but not what the schools are doing in response to cuts and regulations.
Also, sad as it is for me to say as that was my academic home, sociology is one of the fields that has been most hit by the recent journal scandals and many of the resources for it that I've seen published for schools and young people are shite. If we want less one-sided bias, then we'd need an academic and funding shake-up from the top if we ever want to sociological texts that aren't ideologically-driven to end up in schools. I wouldn't give any of mine one of the sociology texts for schools I've seen recently without a heavy dose of notes added alongside, and I'm not the only one - there have been plenty of complaints about them. We can't expect schools to teach what is largely missing in the adult field, no matter how frustrating either is.
And having gone to many schools without uniforms, they all still had dress codes and no matter how relaxed they were, there was still plenty of staff time dealing with students pushing the boundaries, particularly in high schools. I clearly remember me and some of my classmates wearing short shorts and tanktops in the middle of a Midwestern winter, snow piled high, because teenagers. The idea that getting rid of uniforms would automatically mean more suitable sensible comfortable clothing or saving time is nonsense. I think either route has benefits and risks, but not having a uniform isn't going to solve most of the issues with clothing, it mostly just replaces them with other issues.
BiBabbles of course no educational system can teach everything but they can teach with much less bias and they can teach pupils to question and research and learn for themselves - that is what I feel is lacking currently.
More varying biases and teaching kids to see and analyze bias I can see, but just going for less bias I don't think will work for many subjects. With just one subject as an example, all of history is full of bias, down to some of the dates we use for events, and is used by people for many purposes. The coffee house text I linked above, I've seen people within the last decade use them to show how oppressive each of the sexes were to each other in the 1600s (for my sanity, I assume they read a description and not the full text). For geography, our maps are full of bias and assumptions. I think it's better to show the biases within these fields and openly discuss them and how there is so much more out there for them to learn.
Teaching kids to research and question and learn for themselves well is a very time-intensive ongoing task for many reasons - even more now with the internet as it is - and takes a certain level of development before any teaching it will be of use. Much like maths, there are steps along the way and much like science, doing it before developmentally ready just means having to either water it down to the point of ridiculousness that means it has to be retaught later or kids are left to flounder. I think we'd need a far larger budget for learning support to get the step-by-step research and learning process in school done well. I don't think there is the political or social will for it.
Really, in my school experience and the very limited one my DD has had so far, I think they do expect too much questioning, researching, and learning on their own at too early an age. During the Easter break, my Y7 DD had 5 research projects to do plus a couple other assignments. I walk her through the research process every time. I still walk my Y9 child through the research process for his essays, more so when he's entirely in charge of the assignment because it takes quite a lot of skills to pick a suitable topic, research it well, and produce results others can understand. This isn't something simple we can tack on or just make more of.
Personally, I prioritize being able to analyze and critique what comes before them because everyone is going to come across texts that aren't what they appear at first glance, and finding evidence within the text for their answers and through gaining those skills we come to starting to get the first steps to be able to question, research, and learn for themselves well.
There is no way there is time in the school day for all the humanities people have wanted in this thread and teaching the skills needed for good questioning, research, and self-learning, let alone all the other stuff schools are expected to do. We can use the humanities to do those things, I do it all the time, but it would still be a much smaller fraction than people are asking for.
The issue isn't schools are brainwashing, that's just making schools a scapegoat. The problem is there is little agreement on what schools are meant to be or do and little resources to do all the things expected of them, and they are prioritizing for what there are resources and will. Part of that is because, as a society, we're not entirely sure what we want children or adults to do, there has been some good work expanding girls' options in the last half century, but for either sex, how to consider those options is a big social questions no one has much answers to so we can't really expect schools to do that.
I think rather than hating on and making conspiracies about schools for not doing enough, we need to figure out how to do more ourselves for our kids & communities.