more high schools need western canon reading programs so a) a culture of reading is in place by the time college happens, and b) kids can broaden their horizons to other cultures during college instead of playing catch up encountering full length primary texts for the first time.
variations are possible, but the cultural emphasis must shift from whether schools technically graduate kids who can't read 🙄to whether kids know how to read, write about, and discuss their literal, civilizational, cultural inheritances well enough to enjoy it and continue.
encounter of religious holy texts during k-12 is important not to indoctrinate kids, but to show them a) wth all the western canon is even referring to and 2) what they'll have to navigate the intricacies of during political negotiations over civil and human rights in adulthood.
you can opt out of institutions or curricular structures that require covering the classic liberal arts, but those kids won't be able to hold their own culturally besides flaccidly arguing for opting out. you can opt out of the history of culture, but then you can't lead culture.
you can't lead culture unintegrated with the history of culture bc you'll look (correctly) often like you're pointlessly, unskillfully reinventing the wheel, and you won't make relevant references that make you legible/delightful to those who put in their dues digesting history.
even if you only learn histories of culture *just* to subvert them, the ones who subvert them *well* are intimately, comprehensively aware of what has gone before, which is something that takes the best of students years to absorb, digest, debate, and modernize in institutions.
none of this is compatible with "opting out" of either just the western canon, or even out of all educational "institutions" altogether. you will never get american society to a point where the cultural power brokers and cultural critics are not extremely pedigreed and networked.
the blockchain's culture of pseudonymous decentralization was supposed to provide a path for uninitiated normies to accomplish this, but in reality, institutions and people (behind the pfps) with institutional pedigrees have an absolute chokehold on the commentary and awards.
i think the hope was to have some sort of egalitarian revolution in culture through the blockchain😂🤣, but it's basically ended up functioning more as a sort of digital satellite campus and technological confraternity that is 100% as hierarchical (if not more so) as "real life".
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