I'm listening to the Sold a Story podcast season two, which is on math education in the US, and it is enough to give me an aneurysm, seriously. The season opens with a bunch of little kids' voices doing very basic algebra, and you learn later that these are poor Black four-year-olds, and all of them are getting the problems correct. Oh, and they're super engaged. Apparently, there was a group that figured out you can have kids go very fast in math if you just did direct instruction. But somehow, culturally, this was deemed "too hard" and too much of a "pressure cooker" for little kids. It's pretty funny because it's not like there was any high-stakes testing or anything. It literally was just teaching the kids instead of "letting them discover it themselves." I did a master's in education, and there was a lot of content in the program about equity, and how socioeconomic class, parental habits and attitudes, and level of education really shape a kid's academic achievement. It's just infuriating to hear that when they discovered a teaching method that works in spite of these disadvantages, it was thrown out as being, I guess, somehow not "fun" enough. It's difficult to believe that they didn't actually have ulterior motives.