I think the problem is much more fundamental, schools are essentially abusive and hostile to (many) students. One of their core missions is to sort students, selecting some of them for higher education and others for precarity. This necessitates institutional bullying, which I have witnessed plenty of while at school. Naturally many students will react with being unmotivated and hostile, it's an abusive situation. I swear if some aunt or uncle treated the children like some of the shit I've seen in my schools days, most parents would forbid them from having any contact.

i'm very sympathetic to this analysis because it correctly describes the basic structures of the system as a whole. it's institutionalization, students understand that they're performing for grades and exam scores, etc. etc. and it was bound to arrive at proceeding generations that simply start not to even care about that. the discipline and punish analysis as applied to the school is correct; i just think that it is incomplete. i think it lacks the ability to explain the success of, for example, chinese education when it is to a fault predicated on producing an objective meritocratic sort of students to determine who gets the best higher education. the model of education exists in an entirely different cultural context, within which what outwardly appears to be a similar educational medium is quite different. i think it's unlikely the case that the differences just in the scheduling structure of chinese education, teacher temperament, and curricula could explain their system being fundamentally compatible with and similar to the western european educational model that terminates at western-style university education and yet achieving different results. surely if it were so completely different as to achieve such better results it wouldn't be able to do so in a manner that is still compatible with the western academic structure. and yet, the educational outcomes are much stronger. in other words, i think the chinese education system is structurally quite similar to that in the united states, should therefore be just as abusive, and yet has not produced an increasingly ill-educated, propagandized, lumpenproletarianized society as the u.s. has. therefore, i don't think that institutionalization is as fundamental as the society that encompasses the education system. and ours let's corporations eat the children in any way they can get away with. last week i worked with a student that was using kalshi to bet on tennis during class, and that was an AP calculus student, so not one of the ones in this group of failing math students. even the more education-curious ones are often already investing themselves in attempting to become oppressors.