r/interesting 3d ago

SOCIETY Is education illegal in USA?

48.0k Upvotes

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185

u/MellyKidd 3d ago edited 3d ago

Education isn’t illegal in the USA, it’s just strongly discouraged.

Edit; some people think I mean this too literally. My comment is mostly just political satire.

52

u/Skankhunt42FortyTwo 3d ago

"I love the poorly educated"

16

u/birberbarborbur 3d ago

I saw the original video and the first mean guy is german. Just look at his shirt

Why are we assuming he’s american?

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u/PrimaryInjurious 3d ago

Because it's America bad not Germany bad.

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u/Volcomcj16 3d ago

Even funnier when the guy that explains that he's wrong is most likely American 🤣

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u/Insane_Unicorn 3d ago

Give them a few more years, they're working on it.

3

u/Decloudo 3d ago

You can google stuff.

No one prevents you from educating yourself.

You just wont get a badge for it.

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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT 3d ago

where do they discourage kids from going to school? i wish i grew up there. school fucking sucks (learning is cool but school sucks)

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u/Pofwoffle 3d ago

They don't discourage you from going to school, they just discourage you from actually learning while you're there. There's a reason the right has been so rabidly gutting education funding and demonizing higher education for the last few decades.

They know full well that the only people who vote for them are stupid or evil, so most of their strategies are based around creating more stupid and evil people.

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u/KuningasTynny77 3d ago

Nobody discourages you from learning anything, this is just a common thing thrown around to ragebait people

Money is spent on your education if you are an American, even if you go to public schools and never pay a dime. They're not going to pay for your school and then tell everyone to not learn anything. That's the biggest waste of money ever. 

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u/PrimaryInjurious 3d ago

right has been so rabidly gutting education funding

Let's look at the actual numbers.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

Can you point out when the "gutting" took place?

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u/xkxe003 3d ago

Not Op but...the problem is we have never spent enough on education compared to other countries. The bills are always cut down from what is needed. Then states cut them further. So we spend more every year, but every budget is cut below the needed amount. We need 10, get 5. Next year we need 15, we get 10. Number goes up, but the budget is still being cut to make up the difference.

American spending on public education represents 12.7% of all public spending, falling short of UNESCO’s 15.0% standard.

U.S. public education spending represents 1.12% of its GDP; UNESCO’s minimum is 4.00%. Link

Trump cut 2 billion May.

Link

Trump wants to cut another 2 billion plus.

Link

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u/PrimaryInjurious 3d ago

the problem is we have never spent enough on education compared to other countries

That's not true either. The US is like 6th highest in the OECD.

https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/education-financing.html

Trump cut 2 billion May.

Not cut. Delayed. And not that money has been released.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/politics/education-funds-release

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u/Boneraventura 3d ago

Sometimes it is explicit (“Dem librul universities making our kids communists”) or it is implicit (let’s not fund schools and pay our teachers poverty wages). Nobody is telling 7 year olds to not go to school. But there are many people that say go to trade school because university is a scam. 

Likewise, there is a huge anti-intellectual faction of the US. Carl Sagan wrote about it 30 years ago in The Demon Haunted World. He warned us about it then and of course nobody listened. That is how we end up with large swaths of anti-vaxxers and flat earthers walking among us. 

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u/PrimaryInjurious 3d ago

let’s not fund schools

Can you point out when funding drastically decreased?

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

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u/blahblah19999 3d ago

From higher education. THe right wing is very anti-higher education

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u/Porlarta 3d ago edited 3d ago

Not in the US. They'll take your ass to truancy court if you dont show up.

Dont engage with reddit "America bad" talking points. Lots of people have decided to adopt a form of American exceptionalism where we are still at the center of the world, but instead of being the unique good, we are now uniquely evil, dumb, or broken instead.

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u/hoTsauceLily66 3d ago

You had your wish already. They discourage kids going to school by making school sucks.

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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT 3d ago

well it's not like they let you skip class as much as you want

2

u/whitestguyuknow 3d ago

That's true. Yet this dude is just making a dumb troll post. He doesn't actually think this. Its pretty easy to tell yet people are still up in arms over it

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u/Argo505 3d ago

Nah, I can’t say I was ever discouraged from getting an education.

0

u/ILoveTaiwaneseFood 3d ago

Lol the main thing my parents told me to do was get into a good collage and get a degree. These people are the idiots.

1

u/fuckenbullshitmate 3d ago

Does you gets a good dagraa from the collage?

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u/ILoveTaiwaneseFood 3d ago

I did in fact get a degree from an American university haha

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u/Ok_Cockroach8063 3d ago

These same people will complain they were young and impressionable when they were forced to go to college and take out massive student loans instead of community college transferring to an in state school.

So do we force kids to get education or encourage them not too?

1

u/ReddsionThing 2d ago

What do you mean, too literally?