All of ThomasKelly's Comments + Replies
Hey Yassin!
Enjoyed reading your idea.
My comments are only going to be relevant to the United States but I think there are at least two ways to try to influence curriculum outside of lobbying.
- Start your own school. A few states in the US have recently adopted or broadened voucher programs which which allow some level of state funding for private schools. You could start a school and try to fund it via voucher students- the Drexel Fund lists the states with the most generous voucher schools as Florida, Wisconsin, Indiana, O
Really exciting news!
Is the FTX Foundation a private foundation or a public foundation? I ask because there are different rules concerning funding policy advocacy in the United States, where the distinction is relevant.
This idea is really interesting. Thanks for posting it and it would be cool to see if it worked!
One reason people might be hesitant to do this is people might think that donation-canceling succeeds in not changing the odds of victory for either candidate, but might believe that politicians pay more attention to the beliefs of their donors. If that were true, elected politicians would pay less attention to those with EA-sympathies. Even if it's not true (political scientists are pretty skeptical of that claim), enough people might think it's true to be an issue.
US education is super-decentralized- there's no national curriculum which makes it hard to generalize. In my experience, individual teachers can't set the curriculum but have choices within it. For example, a US literature teacher might have to cover certain themes or historical periods but could choose specific readings.
The Ayn Rand Institute offers free books to promote Objectivism, and some US schools teach her novels.
Philosophy courses in US high schools are pretty rare.
Maybe developing relevant lesson plans for statistics or psychology classes and placing them on teacherspayteachers.com would be a good way to gauge interest?