I've taught at several universities in the US. I was always stunned by how much students coming out of high school are unprepared for university level intellectual challenges. They don't even know the basics of every field, be it math, language, or science. In a class of 25 college freshmen and sophomores, there were maybe 2 students who knew that a generic sentence is made of a subject, a verb and an object. The rest had no idea.
America's rural roots continue to haunt it. There is a notion out there in the hinterland that students don't need general knowledge. They just need the minimum necessary to function in society. That is what 18th and 19th century England imported to the US, with its social class divide between an educated aristocracy and the peasant class (that did not need an education). And that has become America's education mantra: The three Rs: "Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic", which educators jokingly misspell as if to drill down the contentment of being an illiterate but happy American moron.
I've seen too many educators and teachers make flagrant mistakes in language. But language is the foundation of all the three Rs. If you cannot communicate science and math - before the formulas and the equations - with precision, then how can you expect all three subjects to make it into a child's education?
Even today, the bulk of American universities operate on the premise that education is a gateway to a good job. White this is true, education cannot however be reduced to a tool toward a job. A good education, with general knowledge of the world and a mastery of language, is necessary to bring up citizens who are aware of, first themselves, and second of the world at large. Their place in the world should be guided by the universality of the human experience, not just by the uniqueness of the US with its short and absurdly boring history.
Unfortunately, American education is so self-centered that children emerge from the school system as ignorant and illiterate as anyone who's never been to school. Only America matters, and only your self-esteem matters, schoolchildren are told. Recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, as if America is a totalitarian country where conformism and subservience are instilled from an early age. No wonder 77 million of them believed a liar like Trump and voted for him. Americans are prisoners of their own self-declared uniqueness, which blinds them to how the other 8 billion people on earth live and think. No wonder then that American first-time travelers outside the US "discover" that real life is much more diverse, and often happier, than what they were brainwashed to believe.
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Teachers Are Revealing The Things About Education That No One Wants To Admit But Are 100% True, And I Was Unprepared For How Real This Got
Julia Corrigan
Sun, January 25, 2026
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Recently, Reddit user dokutarodokutaro turned to the Teachers subreddit to ask, "As a teacher, what’s something in education no one wants to admit, but we all know is true?" Teachers answering the question had a lot of insight on the matter, so here are their most interesting responses:
1. "We have a serious literacy problem, and I think it starts in early childhood/elementary."
—u/Upper-Energy-7907
"Some parents seem to think kids magically learn things as they age. This issue goes hand in hand with all the kindergartens still not potty trained or the preschoolers who can barely talk."
—u/dokutarodokutaro
2. "Not allowing kids to have consequences is going to lead to a generational crisis."
NBC
—u/IowaJL
3. "The real money in education is selling programs to schools. There is an entire parasitic class of grifters, 'entrepreneurs,' and 'thought leaders' that do nothing but go around giving speeches about how if you just buy this book/program/trademarked strategy, all your students will behave and start paying attention."
ABC
—u/Afalstein
4. "Lecture is okay in the classroom. Not every single minute and activity needs to be exciting and action-packed. Kids need to learn the background or reasoning behind a lesson before applying it. They're also going to need to learn to take notes if they go to college."
Carol Yepes / Getty Images
—u/nicktoberfest
5. "Children do not read books anymore."
Gideon Mendel / Getty Images
—u/inhalien
6. "Kids need to fail and not be pushed through with multiple chances to pass."
—u/DocSewer
7. "Administrators care much more about keeping parents happy than they do about supporting teachers or keeping disruptive kids out of classrooms."
—u/ZestycloseSquirrel55
8. "Allowing one student to ruin the learning of an entire class should never be allowed."
TBS
—u/Professional-Fig207
9. "Just because suspensions are down doesn’t mean behaviors have improved."
—u/Gold_Repair_3557
"I was at a school where they said at a staff meeting as a 'celebration' that office referrals were down. A teacher who DNGAF proceeded to respond, 'Well yes, because you took away the online referral form and it took you three weeks to give us a new paper form.'"
—u/Team_Captain_America
10. "Sometimes shit is boring, and that’s okay. Most of life is boring. I'm not a cruise director, I'm trying to teach about the Ottoman Empire."
Zu_09 / Getty Images
—u/sadgurl1994
11. "We are lying to the parents and community. We are producing illiterates by the bushel, and no one is addressing the issue."
—u/TheBarnacle63
12. "They can't fucking read."
Channel 4 / BBC Two
—u/GrecoRomanGuy
13. "'Gamifying lessons' just feeds into the instant gratification bullshit of iPad kids."
Peter Cade / Getty Images
—u/MickIsAlwaysLate
"Omg yes this. I've gotten back into education through subbing, and often it means just putting the students on whatever gameified version of education is expected of them. They often just get frustrated and let the game time out or give them the correct answer if they are even mildly frustrated by the problem."
—u/bgrace365
14. "Oh, here's one: a few years in a classroom isn’t enough to become an administrator. There should be a minimum of 10 years in a classroom before you're allowed to become even an assistant principal, let alone more than that."
—u/leafstudy
15. "There's too much screen time in our schools right now. Technology has its place but districts have gone all-in on 1:1 and iPads in lower grades because of 'keeping up with the Joneses' and how it looks for PR rather than instructional effectiveness. I see this as the next big battleground with parents. New parents I interact with know of the dangers of screentime, and they hate how their kids are getting inundated with it in schools."
—u/YellingatClouds86
16. "Standardized testing/assessments in kindergarten are not appropriate. Pre-K/kindergarten should be about social skills, pre-writing, and learning how to be in school. Too much push is detrimental to our education system."
Zhikun Sun / Getty Images
—u/ashirsch1985
17. "The fact that teachers are often held more responsible for students failing than the students is ridiculous."
—u/ajswdf
18. "Cellphones are the single largest impediment to childhood development."
Drazen Zigic / Getty Images
—u/Musicferret
19. "Nobody reads anymore. Parents don't parent anymore, and kids have unlimited use of devices."
—u/Obvious_Front_2377
20. "Rote memorization is a better way to learn things like math facts and vocabulary words than whatever the latest trendy method is at the moment."
Ababsolutum / Getty Images
—u/DeuxCentimes
"I'm taking French right now, and no matter what the chosen method (vocab and grammar lists, listening to lessons, etc., etc.), in the end every single method revolves around repetition (aka beating it into your head)."
—u/Dry_Albatross5298
21. "Screentime has killed attention spans. Students have horrible handwriting because they never write anything. It's time to close the laptops and get back to pen and paper."
—u/yunoeconbro
22. "Kids who continue to disrupt classrooms should be expelled, leaving only the kids who want to learn. Kids have a right to an education until they disrupt other kids’ ability to receive it. Throwing out the bottom 10 percent of problem behaviors would almost certainly increase the speed at which material can be covered, resulting in those kids getting wider and deeper opportunities."
—u/AtTheWellshlyArms
23. "We need to let kids fail and not graduate without punishing schools for several years to do a hard reset on our education system. The social pressure of failing works. We just have to hold the standard from K-12."
Boy_anupong / Getty Images
—u/sharkbait_oohaha
24. "Every issue that exists in public schools is a microcosm of the issues that exist in society in general, and until society fixes itself, the things that are broken about the system won't get better."
Jacob Wackerhausen / Getty Images
—u/Careless_Tear2058
25. "If you don’t talk with, play with, or read to your child, and they come to school having spent five years staring at a screen...well, it's already too late to fix that. They’re cooked."
Catherine Falls Commercial / Getty Images
—u/rose442
If you're a teacher or a parent with an observation about education, whether it's your student, your kid, or your kid's friend, feel free to comment about it. I'm interested to hear the conversation! If you prefer, you can use the anonymous form below.
Please note: some comments have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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