i dont know who decides these things in the US because it's so weird and fragmented, so i dont know who to blame, but when i went to an american school in suburban NJ in 1998, in a small town where property taxes were slightly higher and therefore paid for 1) supposedly better schools and 2) maintenance of trees on the streets.

it also only had one road in and one road out, often with a cop sitting in a car watching the entrance, so while it wasnt a gated community, i've often thought that it must've been on the spectrum.

at any rate, the school was absolutely fucking inhumane compared to any school i've ever gone to in hungary. the curriculum was shit, the homework was super repetitive, and we had 8 44minute periods in a day (one of them being lunch), with 3 minute breaks between them. baaarely enough to rush to the toilets and then your next class. you also didnt have an actual class, a group you stayed with, the whole yearful of students were reassembled into new groups for each subject.

and anyway, 8 periods is absurd, what the fuck. 3 minute breaks? i think the shortest we had in hungary were the 10 minute breaks. and like, period 7 was rare and reeeeeallly stretching it, and period 8 (if it ever turned up, i certainly never went to anything like that) was for like extra higher level tutoring or school club shit you could optionally do.

i dont know how this compares to american education in other places and times, but it was fucking grim, lemme tell you. and it's not like the hungarian education system is a gem.

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

over 25 years ago, i was in high school in the US. we had something like 12 minutes between classes, which was referred to as a "break".

then one day two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria and there were so many students watching the armed police who are permanently stationed on campus felt unsafe. administration rang the bell early and all the administrators, janitors, others were suddenly on radios and bullhorns announcing break was over, handing out detentions for anyone not quickly jumping up to their next class, and i remember seeing an additional police officer riding his motorcycle aggressively INDOORS through a hallway to push students through.

after that, it was announced that we had lost the privilege of "break" indefinitely and only had 4 minutes between classes.

a year later they put up barbed wire fencing around the entire school and added metal detectors.

the "fight" involved no weapons of any kind. it was simply the armed pigs seeing a number of young people in one area well exceeding the number of rounds they were carrying.

schools in the US are prisons. they take away "privileges" and lockdown more and more every year. for "safety".

[–] huf@hexbear.net 14 points 4 months ago

meanwhile one of my favorite stories from high school in hungary was simply going home for "empty" periods (a friend and i could skip english class because we'd done the certificate for english). it was easy since i lived a few stops away by tram, and then we could maybe watch a family guy episode and go back. and it was better than hanging around school.

so one day the vice principal caught wind of this and decided to stand on ceremony, so when we tried to go back to school for our final class after the empty period, we were denied entrance by the doorkeeper type person. which struck me as absurd. teenagers wanting to go into a school for music class of all things (a subject that "didnt matter") and being denied.

anyway, one of the gym teachers came along, heard us out and let us in because she too saw that this was absurd.

after that, they instituted a policy of you cant go out during the day, because blah blah legally responsible for you blah.

so we naturally climbed out the back.

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

schools in the US are prisons.

r/teachers gets really mad when you make this point lol

[–] CatoPosting@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It has proven to be very controversial anytime I bring up my opinion that teenagers are one of the most oppressed groups in amerikkka

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago

The existence of the troubled teen industry should've erased any doubts about that.