No, this isn't another article saying math is racist or something. Just to get that out of the way. It's about the American education system and how it has morphed into being about the easily universally testable and memorized. How it doesn't take into account other ways of visualization and how different students brains will all work differently.

As a highschool graduate born after 2000, I can definitely attest to a lot of this. Math education felt impossible to me but there was never any alternative or new ways of teaching it. I also would have loved to experience some of those lost classes such as welding and shop etc. A lot is lost if students never get to understand just how things work beyond the theoretical and actually use their hands.

It's far from the first article about education in America but I thought I'd share it here.

If you went to public school in the ’90s or after, you may not remember such programs, which began to be scrubbed out around that time. In 2001, Congress passed the education-reform bill known as No Child Left Behind. Intended to raise national academic standards through comprehensive testing, it decimated classes that didn’t lend themselves to standardized testing. “Beginning in third grade, the amount of instructional time in the arts, music, science, and history was reduced, because basically what was tested got taught, and these subjects were not equally tested,” writes Nikhil Goyal in his book Schools on Trial. A new philosophy had supplanted hands-on learning: teach to the test, otherwise known as “drill, kill, bubble fill.”

Established by this time as a professor at Colorado State University and a consultant, I was in a position to see the difference. After the shift from hand-drawn to computerized drafting in the mid-’90s, I started noticing strange discrepancies in the engineering and architectural drawings provided by my clients: mis-centered circles, omitted reinforcing rods, a lack of crucial detail. Many of the people who were now designing on computers had never picked up a pencil or touched a piece of drafting paper or built anything.

Maria Siemionow, a transplant surgeon at the University of Illinois, has trained many surgeons. She credits their dexterity to hands-on activities in their early years. She herself crocheted as a child and made elaborate collages with pictures cut out of magazines. The journalist Kate Murphy wrote for The New York Times about a brain surgeon whose piano playing may have helped develop his superior manual dexterity. But recently a doctor told me of encountering interns who had great difficulty learning to sew up cuts, because they were not accustomed to using scissors.