What I stumbled on as an adult trying to figure out modern education is that you can't start with modern theory and comprehend anything underneath it. There's so much reference to the past--the deep past--that you can't backtrack; you have to leap back. Way back. You can't really understand the 20th century, or 19th, or 18th centuries, without a grounding in the history and cultures from which the modern developed. It's impossible for a modern to know what it was like to be OF the ancient world, but without a pretty good survey of it, it becomes impossible to learn ANYTHING about how we came to where we currently stand.

An example of "bullshit" is the 1619 project from the New York Times. They decided that 1776 wasn't where to look for a "beginning," but instead look through the lens of modern racism theory back to 1619. Bullshit. That method removes all context from the era under study, I mean, first it straw-mans the idea of American history as having a beginning, and then asserts that beginning as being criminally fabricated by power brokers of the past as 1776, and pulls their own power play at setting a past looking limit to a new date of its own choosing while at the same time imposing a modern lens as the only one through which to look at it all. The whole project is bullshit of the highest order.

I think modern people feel so disoriented and alienated because modern education has taken the ground from under us. It's like modernity has has dug up all of the plants from a centuries old garden that had been tended since prehistory by a multitude of cultures, potted each one individually, paved over the lands we were once rooted in, set us about haphazardly on a substrate of asphalt in ornamental arrangements suited only to a modern aesthetic, and left us to figure out for ourselves how to grow.

Sorry. Sometimes I get in a really nice "we're all doomed" sort of attitude....