Math and all academic courses SHOULD be challenging

Children are naturally curious. Challenge them and you get them involved.

If you give unchallenging curriculum, children get bored and disengaged and start losing out.

Courses can't be "enlightening and helpful and consequential and integrated" unless they are challenging.

Your post has some meaningful perspectives but does not support your title. I do disagree that solving equations is a useless skill. You write better equations if you know how to solve them. You can program computers better if you know how to solve equations. You can use computers to solve equations better if you know how to solve them yourself.

Teaching kids how to punch numbers into a computer is not teaching them what it all means. Similarly it does not equip them to be able to double check the results. Further, it gives no education on how to generate equations in the first place. It is a bogus educational strategy.

Tools do not mean you can neglect fundamentals. Fundamentals are foundations and absolutely remain important. Your strategy would not work.

Your last paragraph is insightful, but is not an argument for abandoning learning how to solve equations. New Math, which I was given decades ago in Canada in the first wave of it, was very useful and did not abandon equations.

Yes. magats are gullible and seek confirmation. Science tries to break theories

magats and strong-religion-believers are constantly looking for analysis and factoids that confirm their beliefs. "A dog-catcher in Podunk accepted a doughnut from a bystander - that proves all democrats are corrupt!"

Science is the opposite.

Science constantly tests theories by trying to disprove them. Science never proves a theory. Rather, it has theories that have withstood all the tests trying to disprove them. Gravity is only a theory (Einstein's theory includes Newton's theory), but it has been tested so many times that you should not try to disprove it by walking out of a tenth story window.

It's why I sometimes cruise RW sites looking to see what they might have uncovered. Due to their propensity for confirmation-seeking, my readings there tend to cause more head-shaking and mirth than insight, though I have gained insight into what makes magats tick.

Forget fatcat. Think Profit

Words like fatcat are evocative, colourful, and provocative. We love them, but they are not the issue.

The media corporations are highly efficient at generating profit due to advancing technology and professional management.

To generate profit they need eyeballs. They attract eyeballs by shock, awe, and controversy. When real news is slow, fall back on controversy.

To make profit from controversy, they must normalize extreme positions (more commonly found on the right) so they can set it up as "both sides".

I think poster you replied to is wrong about them "preferring" authoritarianism. I think they are so narrow-mindedly efficient that they don't give it much thought.

You are spot on to say so many in USA need a history lesson re how fascism creeps in

First, extreme views are normalized.

Then certain groups of people are declared vermin. Use this as a way to generate outrage in the Right Wing Authoritarian Followers (magats). Use that base as a solid dependable voting block.

Next, fracture the opposition or control parts of it in various ways.

With a solid base, become the single largest political unit or the most powerful, even if a minority because the opposition is split.

Get just enough support from wobbly third parties and groups to get operational power.

Use power to get more power, reducing limits steadily. Squeeze until there is no effective opposition. Torture. Extra-judicial killings. Violent militias.

Rule with an iron fist.

Steady now: Mass media desperate for any 2024 horse race since both noms are NOT horse races

The Mass Media (including attention-driving social media) are desperate for any kind of horse race in the 2024 Presidential election. They need one to increase profits.

With the rump's "legal troubles" and looming trial schedules, I'm confident he will become more a wanna-be Emperor with no clothes. I am doubtful he'll even be the nominee, but until the legal machinery grinds further the "perceived narrative" is that tRump gets the nomination. Hence no drama on the GQP side with respect to 2024.

However, even if tRump is the nominee, he will be defeated, resulting from hard work by many Democrats as Robert Reich today encourages Get Out the Vote.

There is no drama on the Democratic Party side, except for what is ginned-up by RepubliConners and foreign bad actors.

So with no profit-making drama for the mass media on either side, they are desperate to create drama between the two men where there is little. tRump flop-sweats and blusters his way through odious lies and revealing authoritarian appeals to his base.

Biden abides undramatically, calmly.

Hence we get torrents of poorly conducted "polls", repeated questions using the RepubliCon narrative of Biden's age, and so forth.

Ignore most of it. Don't become flustered, outraged, derailed, anxious, or exhausted. Keep calm, stay focused and maintain a steady sustainable pace.

Reich Wingers have been told "mention socialism with 'nazi' as often as you can"

It's a framing thing (see George Lakoff's work).

The "socialism" in Nazi (National Socialist party) was a ploy in the early 1930s to win power when the left was fractured between communists and anarchists and who knows what else.

It was incidental to Nazism, not fundamental. Further, Nazi policies working hand in glove with corporations were anti-socialist. The Nazis did some socialist things like making the Autobahn, but that was in fact built so Hitler could move tanks and munitions efficiently for blitzkrieg.

The framing the Reich Wing uses in the US today is to reinforce the (bogus) notion that socialism is tyrannical and fascistic. Simply mentioning the two terms together plants the idea in minds and strengthens it where it has taken seed.

It's a way to build a straw man out of socialism they can demolish and pretend to be defending the US Constitution while all the while they are creating the corporate fascism that the Nazis created.

Not disadvantage to elect comparatively principled, ethical, logical, knowledgeable people

For one thing, they are more likely to be re-elected!

Mad Maga Mike is leading the Lindbergh 1936 wing of the GQP

In 1936, Lindbergh was "America First", which was a thinly veiled racist isolationist movement in US con circles.

Mad Maga Mike is not overtly racist, and to his credit he has expressed empathy with the black man he calls his "son" for what he faces in life as an African-American. But he supports racists and policies that have racist effects.

He is definitely isolationist, which is a childish pull-the-bed-covers-over-your-head strategy in this interconnected world.

One really stupid aspect is that the CONs blame Biden for the inflation which is in large part caused by just-previous and ongoing supply chain disruptions. What is the biggest cause of supply chain disruptions? War and conflict. What policy increases war and conflict in the world? Isolationism, disengagement, not-my-monkeys and not-my-circus emulation of ostriches.

We already ARE "beautiful variations on the colour of coffee"

My simplest view is: Parents don't have rights, children do, but all rights are shared

(simplest view, because I have many views and gradations of views)

Parent rights do not trump full and proper care for children. Hence we ban "conversion therapy", for example.

Children have rights, for example, to read any book a librarian puts in their library, and many more than just those books. All the same, children are not fully formed or fully equipped to deal with some kinds of unforgiving realities (think bad judgement driving automobiles), so their rights are limited.

In Canada, the phrase "All children matter" is given greatest use and poignancy with reference to indigenous people and peoples. They have suffered so much at the hands of Residential Schools and other crimes.

Rights are shared, in that there has to be give and take. The right to expression is limited by consideration of harmful untruths (example vax lies) and exploitative production (example historical black musician royalties). The right to tax must respect the right of taxpayers to have their money spent responsibly and carefully for objectives that they collectively endorse.

The biggest "share" is that the majority -- of anything, in any form, at any time, in daily action not just voting -- must respect minorities. The tyranny of a majority can be a terrible thing.

So any supposed right of parents to bring up their children in any damn way they see fit is far away from the rights of children.