History Headscratchers / Daria

** The end of the episode was supposed to be a joke, because Helen didn't know Daria wasn't wearing her contacts. And then it's back to status quo.

* After ''Through a Lense Darkly,'' does Daria still wear contacts for driving? Empty frames with contacts? The episode ends abruptly when Daria isn't wearing glasses or contacts, and her mom asks if she wants to take a surprise driving test to celebrate her contacts--but the next episode she's just wearing glasses again, even though driving would be dangerous.

** Your vision is still blurry out the corner of your eye where the frames don't reach, but the issue evolved from there by delving into Daria's insecurities about her appearance.

* ''Through A Lens Darkly'' revolves around Daria debating the question of 'Does switching from glasses to contacts make me a hypocrite?' Thing is, she got them for driving, because her glasses have thick rims that block off her peripheral vision... so why not just get some new glasses with thinner frames?

*** Lawndale High seems to be in a fairly wealthy area, though Ms. Li doesn't exactly seem to have the right priorities when it comes to school spending. So the funding thing makes sense.

** Some schools, especially suburban or rural ones, don't have AP classes - often due to a lack of funding, or simply being too lazy to hire any AP teachers.

* Why are Daria and Jodie stuck in the same classes with morons like Kevin and Brittany? Does Lawndale High not have advanced placement classes?

**** Not all schools are particularly invested in how smart the students are. And all the stuff you listed would only work if Kevin was willing to go to them.

*** Special Education students are allowed to play sports as long as they are physically able to. Not to mention there are plenty of other ways for him to get help with his education like extra time on tests or with teachers, allowed home schooling times, etc that wouldn't involve taking him out of regular classes.

** Kevin is a jock. Not only a jock, THE jock. The quarterback who apparently plays very well (as indicated by ''A Tree Grows in Lawndale'', where without Kevin, the Lions lose every game). Taking into account Ms. Li's personality should give you the answer. Ms. Li's entire life is consumed by bringing "glory and honor unto Lawndale High" and making as much money off it as she can. She's not going to place Kevin in a special needs class when he's her sports cash cow. All she has to do is see to it that he receives passing grades so he can keep playing, and that's what she's going to do. There's never been an indication that she's particularly concerned how her young charges lives will turn out after high school.

** Not having personal experience from American education system I can only speculate but wouldn't arranging special classes cost money? As in something Ms. Li would be most unwilling to fork out and thus be very eager to outright deny Kevin's condition. It's already established, that the school hands out passing grades for jocks just for doing good in sports, so it wouldn't come as a great surprise if Kevin's disabilities had been swept under the rug.

** Early episode actually indicated the Quinn was not exactly chaste and innocent. Consider the episode ''The Big House''. Jake says something like, "Burning the midnight oil, huh?" and Quinn immediately responds with a panicky, "We weren't burning anything!" She frequently let slip hints of exactly what she was doing on those dates of hers. Beyond that, it's suggested she had complex systems with which she purposely manipulated her boyfriends. She worked very hard to learn just how to get a boy to do exactly what she wanted. It's no surprise they didn't put up much of a fight. It was only later on that the writers started making Quinn untouchable.

* Why didn't the school put Kevin in special education classes? He clearly has a learning disability, and maybe he wouldn't have gotten held back if he wasn't taking courses he wasn't able to understand.

** Given that the roof of the library caved in because Ms. Li had embezzeled the money set aside for repairs, odds are that the PA system is old and run down. The times she appears in class to make an announcement are the times that the system is on the fritz because she won't repair/replace it.

** We do see the non-named characters treating Jane and Daria poorly on occasion, and Kevin and Brittany do have their moments. They're not bad people, though, and the viewer isn't meant to think of them as such; possibly the only person who's meant to be more or less unlikeable is [[TheLibby Sandi]]. Kevin and Brittany are put in a less sympathetic light than the main characters mostly because they're dumb and shallow and lazy. As to Daria's image, it becomes increasingly obvious that, for all her insisting that she doesn't care what others think of her, the truth is that she does: she specifically wants people to think of her as someone who doesn't care what they think of her. Which is kind of Zen, really. As for high school, I can't speak for you, but mine wasn't that much unlike Lawndale High, at least as far as student interaction went. The jocks and cheerleaders were all perfectly polite people who didn't have any problem making friends with band geeks and whatnot. There was never any celebration of popularity or the illusion thereof.

*** Fiction doesn't accurately high school well because there are a lot of different high schools.