>What stops you from fact checking after you get out of the school?
First, you will forget about all the bs they mentioned. Second, you can't confront the teacher over it or to ask them to clarify in a way that other kids will hear it too.
There is one very simple reason. Fuck authoritarianism, especially when education is mandatory. Consider that a lot of people have public schooling with atrocious quality that is quite frankly quite useless, because it is mostly nationalistic, xenophobic, white-supremacists, elitist, classist, patriarchal etc. propaganda. It is actually not even useless a lot of the time, it is just harmful to a person to listen to these lies, so it's actually better if kids can drown out this propaganda by looking at a smartphone screen.
Every nation has a different education system and in many nations each region has its own education system. I don't know in what kind of a horror school you went to, but the schools I'm involved with my kids and the schools I went to teach anything but "nationalistic, xenophobic, white-supremacists, elitist, classist etc. propaganda". Quite the contrary indeed - public schools are a very important tool for integration of people from different background and cultures - it will give them a shared experience where they can learn to understand each other. By themselves, people tend to auto-segregate[0].
> Fuck authoritarianism, especially when education is mandatory.
I don't exactly know what you consider "authoritarianism". But rules in schools by themselves certainly aren't an example of authoritarianism[1].
Re; "patriarchal propaganda"; seems like you yourself got quite the bit of anti-socialist propaganda.
Remember tongue map? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map , I had this at school told in authoritative manner even though it is complete bullshit. A lot of history lessons are just state propaganda, for example, Martin Luther King was much more radical than it is usually said at school. One can give a lot of these type of examples.
I was curious - apparently they still taught the tongue map and the food pyramid in 2014. I haven't been able to find more recent textbooks, but I suspect they still might teach at least the tongue map here, because I found some online teaching material about that.
I have bachelors degree in math. Basic algebra is useful, however it is thought very badly. There is a lot of rote memorization, which is not useful for university level math. Precalculus is trash, mindless computations and solving a lot of quadratic equations. That's a big problem with school math, thought well it could be compressed to maybe 4 years instead of 12. I would say basic physics is better. Evolution in my school was maybe one lesson, this could be an 1 hour video. I had geography lessons in primary school where you had to memorize types of soil and where are they on the map of Poland. Polish literature is pro aristocracy nationalist propaganda mostly, Poland has a lot of messianic themes there which are complete bullshit. Overall for me school was a complete waste of time and source of stress, without it I would know more things that interest me and would be in much better health. In Poland we have schools in so called prussian education system - it was created to create factory workers, not thinking people. In Poland even Nobel prize winners are omitted at schools, it is only said that only Prize winners from Poland were Poles, even though most of our Nobel prize winners are Jews. We even have a lot of catholic propaganda with catholicism lessons financed from state budget.
I’m trying to understand how a child having a distracting and addicting smartphone is a good solution to the occasional misinformed teacher.