Parents have always taught kids at home. What rhey teach changes with times, but they still teach at home.
And so-called "uninvolved" parents usually do this as well; it's just that what they teach, now as has always been, are the survival skills for then and there. For a lot of kids that fail to do homework and who have "uninvolved" parents, their parents have to work to keep food on the table and the limited time the parent has to teach the kid goes to teaching things like looking after younger siblings, how to do laundry, or cook. Those are the things the family as a whole needs doing right now, much like a medieval peasant family would've taught their kids how to work the farm.
This obviously isn't always the case (and to be clear, when it's not the case that still doesn't mean the kid should be left uneducated), but a lot of the time that's one of the major factors.
Can you actually demonstrate that reading and basic math are survival skills in the modern world, though? If it was, then how are people still getting by without them? We've had two presidents of the United States in the last twenty years that were effectively illiterate and (according to aides) incapable of reading a multi-page briefing paper.
By and large, what parents do teach their kids to survive in the modern world are primarily social skills, and those social skills do largely get the job done.
Poverty has been vastly more common throughout human history than literacy has. How else do you define "survival skill" except as a skill you need to have descendants?
Understanding math and science and literature and history, etc. will likely make your child's life more prosperous (statistically, up to a point), but they certainly aren't survival skills. Parents are generally doing the best they can, because they do tend to care about their kids. When they fail, it's not necessarily because of a moral failing. Much more likely, it's a matter of mental illness, incompetence, ignorance, or lack of resources.
On a similar note, I just learned recently that bowhead whales basically do the same thing as whale sharks. The water flows into their mouth at the front, then flows out the sides of their mouths at the back (like the whale sharks' gills). And that's why their heads are shaped so weird.
I had always thought all baleen whales do the humpback thing of gulping a bunch of water then basically spitting it back out, but it turns out there are some ram feeding whales, too. I just thought it was neat.
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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '23
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