Farmers often have to be their own mechanics, engineers, biologists/botanists, veterinarians, carpenters, electricians, etc. They won't be farmers, they'll be unskilled laborers.
Whatever did we do 100 years ago when most people couldn’t even sign their name? Farmers inherit the skills through work, experience and training, they’re not usually pouring over textbooks. The literacy rate was abysmal for 99% of human history and we made out ok.
The things you could have success in 100 years ago look very different in modern times.
Historically parents have pushed their kids towards obtaining at least a minimum level of education for a reason.
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I was in education for years...standardized testing, lack of recess, over filled classrooms, poor quality curriculums - these are a huge part of the problem. Kids being raised in stressed out family situations - poverty, multiple jobs and parents glued to phones that hand them a device to get kids out of their hair are another part. Kids can't learn when they don't have basic physical and emotional needs met. I had to leave the educational field because it started breaking my heart. Kids were abused and neglected at home, kids were abused and neglected by teachers and the school system. These kids just don't have a chance on any level.
Am an educator working with diverse communities, veterans and also other teachers. Most of the K-12 and High School teachers I know say the same thing; *"that the kids are not alright."*
Grew up in Baltimore and still maintain many educational contacts there; there are entire public schools where no one reads at their grade level, and math innumeracy is equally common. Partly it's the effect of generational poverty, but even then reading and math skills were much higher 20 and 3 years ago.
My own take is that it's effect of digital technology shortening attention spans and transitioning reading from physical books to screens, which is a different process neurologically and developmentally. It's possible that human beings, still a form of primate, are not hard-wired to make this transition.
But there is another related issue; as other posts in the OG thread show, many teachers experience a complete lack of caring on the part of students. More and more they just don't GAF.
The loss of literacy combined with student apathy is a clear sign of a culture in rapid decline.
Society, parents, students. Nobody gives a fuck but the teachers. I don’t understand where the apathy came from but it’s overwhelming everything.
Not to get meta about it but it feels like only collapse gets it. All the time I’m drawn here because I fucking care that things are collapsing and it seems like 99% of people are fucking fine with it. Whether it’s their kids not being able to read or our future people don’t give a single shit anymore and it scares me.
I still can’t wrap my head around that either. My grandma was all “Thank the garbage men, because of them we don’t have cholera and rats”. Apparently, other families didn’t have that kind of thinking? I guess? Because the treatment of society’s backbone is abhorrent.
You this most clearly with the anti-vax people but I think a lot of people just don't realize that this used to be an actual problem.
Society has 'beaten' all of these ills like cholera, Plague, Polio and they've been gone so long that generations have come and gone since the pain of their existence was felt.
Since so many people never saw children crippled by Polio or shit themselves to death with cholera, many of them assume that they were never a problem in the first place. What's the big deal if I don't get my kid vaccinated against Mumps? Nobody even HAS mumps anymore!
Now Mumps and Measles are back and, soon enough, their good buddy Small Pox will be here too.
People don't even know the fruit in the grocery store comes out of the ground or off of a tree. People don't know shit about shit and think they're geniuses because the ramifications of their poor choices haven't directly impacted them yet.
Dude I work at a pizza place in my college town and my manager thought that mushrooms were a vegetable. He said something like “yeah and these are the toppings for our veggie pizza, so all the vegetables go here” and I challenged that because mushrooms are absolutely not a plant. Most ordinary people are dumb as fuck
This is something I've been pondering a lot lately too. Why are people so resistant or perhaps unable to learn from the experience of others? ESPECIALLY when it comes to disease. We have quarantines, vaccinations, indoor plumbing, loads of cultural history and infrastructure because we did learn from those before us. Now we have this culture of "Who cares, do you what YOU (the individual) wants, fuck others. You're the only one who matters."
>My grandma was all “Thank the garbage men, because of them we don’t have cholera and rats”.
Welp, should the day ever come that I actually have a child and they're old enough to understand that, I'm using it. Your grandma knows what's up.
Because the only jobs in this society that are valued are those that extract the most profit/resources.
That's why careers like popstar/actor/influencer are so well compensated; it's because they exploit the most and are thus rewarded the greatest, in both monetary compensation and positive attention.
The industries that don't extract resources are devalued. That's why things like teaching, cleaning, and all other service-related careers are paid the least and given the least respect. If you're not successful at exploitation, you're not valued in this society.
i would like to add, we used to value the human brain as a resource. it is after all the most powerful resource on the planet. we propagated the American Dream idea globally to extract the human brain resource from other countries by opening our borders to migrants and welcoming immigration. we also used to respect education for the same reason.
somewhere along the lines we forgot just how powerful the human brain is as a resource.
Part of having bullshit jobs means that you have to compensate for that will bullshit coping mechanisms about how successful and smart you are (helps with self-esteem), which works better if you insult and disparage the "essential workers". You see... this is the bourgeois mentality. The people working those essential jobs are doing something that you can't and won't, and you know that you're dependent on them. That's how the rich feel, as they're the most dependent on others. This is how they treat "the help", which is what the service sector is; the servant sector. The rich (especially the insecure ones) have to keep looking for ways to feel like they deserve it, they earned it, they're special, and that means looking for superiority (i.e. by punching down).
I think the apathy comes from everyone being overworked and over-stressed. I also have a crazy side theory that people with the dark triad personality traits had more children historically than ppl without those personality traits. Think Ghengis Khan gathering 200’d of kids. Meanwhile the nice sheep farmer only has 1 or 2 kids. Ghengis’s genetics are more widespread and that means his dark triad personality traits have more of a chance to be passed on into the population. Now fast forward 100’s of years later (with more crazy ppl having more kids than sane ppl) and we essentially evolved to be more likely to have some degree of the dark triad. Aka we become greedier, selfish, and I empathetic
>Society, parents, students. Nobody gives a fuck but the teachers. I don’t understand where the apathy came from but it’s overwhelming everything. Not to get meta about it but it feels like only collapse gets it.
In terms of education at least, r/teachers seems to get it. There is a similar collapse awareness in r/nursing, perhaps for similar reasons; an underfunded system ill-prepared for the crises they face,
I had to completely get out of healthcare because it was mentally and physically killing me. I have always loved caring for sick people. My first after school job was caring for a quadriplegic. Between c-suite greed and indifference, supply shortages (some critical meds), severe staff shortages, insanely poor pay, being punished for being out sick, patient entitlement and abuse from patients it’s too much. I remember when bringing someone ice cream,because I remember from 3 days ago they really enjoyed it, it was a positive interaction. Now it would more than likely be treated like I slighted them somehow. I truly loved going the extra mile for people. I treated them like my loved ones. When it got to the point that I saw co-workers being punched in the face and I kept being groped I finally said enough. Most people have no clue how bad healthcare is here in the US. It’s only going to get worse and worse.
I feel this on a cellular level. I'm at this point now myself. I work in labour and delivery and I had thought switching to travel nursing in 2021 would be good enough to keep me going. I thought that would eliminate the poor pay and politics part, since I could leave a facility the second I started having to deal with politics. But working in some rural towns has made it even clearer to me just how bad our healthcare is in Canada. Now, I'm looking to get out of bedside entirely.
I'm so thankful to not have kids so I don't feel pressure to keep pushing on in a career that has brought on unhealthy levels of stress and mental trauma. I just came home from my last contract a week ago and I've barely been able to get out of bed since. I'm not even sick, just completely drained in a way I have never experienced before.
It's great that you had enough awareness of how bad it is to get out. Some healthcare workers have been doing it so long that they don't even realize what a sh\*t job it is. I have talked to multiple people in healthcare who need anti-depressants to be functional, mostly due to working for years under horrendously abusive conditions. It's wonderful to have a regular paycheck, but mental health is important as well.
Is this cumulative brain damage from environment & viruses, prolonged stress, etc? Anecdotes like yours point to lack of impulse control, like the id is allowed to run wild. Filters are off.
I'm so sorry you have had to deal with situations like this
Hacker twitter (it's a thing) has also known. Our systems are incapable of security without users and leadership that follow process. The basics of badging, password rotation (no post-it), access control lists (who cares? when you can just let someone in), phishing schemes, role-based permissions ...and the complete ability to understand the REASONING behind basic security measures is tantamount. "Why do I have to...?" becomes "I don't care why" becomes "who cares?" then you're popped. I think the move to a password-less society with phone tokens is a direct response to user inability to create and maintain secure environments, therefore a new secure exchange must be created each time.
Kids know that there's no future, no better tomorrow. They know that they were born to be cogs in the dying machine and they don't give a shit about PEMDAS. Who can blame them?
Apathy came from just observing the bullshit that our economic system and environment is since the 2000s.
Work hard and make it? Lies.
Science will create a great utopia! Lies.
Environment will get fixed easily but slowly thanks to Science! Also Lies.
The law is blind but fair! More lies.
Effectively everything we were told as kids when I was growing up about our society was just a lie. And I saw the 90s good times in the US (suburb kid).
Imagine being a teenager now and you saw your parents realize the lies of society right in front of you as you grew up. And then had the hammer blows of several once in a generation events that seem to fuck up the world in even more unfixable ways.
You'd be really apathetic about most things too.
Hell I've got my retirement solution in my closet right now and I lucked out as a millennial with job and housing. I have lost hope in any future but at least I had some blissfully unaware adult years before I had this shit hammered into me.
The apathy drives me nuts too. I have a kid who sits with a blank stare on his face all day, literally does nothing and hands me blank work with his name on it. Just shrugs when confronted. Can't get him to do shit, and he doesn't care.
Well said! This is ultimately what burned me out as a teacher. I cannot *and should not* care significantly more about my student's outcomes than the students themselves or their families. I'm a very good teacher, but if students don't put forth any effort, they're not going to learn.
Is this specific to the US? I would assume other countries are seeing declines in test scores as well if this is related to digital technology at young ages.
I am high school teacher. Our district's attendance rate is at 63%. I have students that have missed 40 days this semester already. Kids aren't even showing up to sit on their phones all day in class. They just stay home instead.
This part I don’t understand. Our ISD would have the parents slammed in court or jail for having truant/delinquent kids. Why are so many schools allowing this? Are they just not taking attendance and collecting the money like the kids are there?
I was a truant kid, not because I didn’t care but because I had a lot of emotional issues going on. It took them a year and passing me through my sophomore year for them to bring me in front of court. I was mandated I think forty hours of community service. I never did it and signed off on it.
I’ve more than made up for it now, going to college and I’ve put in hundreds of hours of community service since then. But, that’s because I had the actual desire and drive to, these kids don’t. Ultimately truancy isn’t an effective way to get kids to go to school anymore.
Kids are dropped for attendance after a certain threshold is met, but the district is apparently overwhelmed. Once a student is dropped, their parents just enroll them again and the cycle begins again. Truancy court in my city is completely overwhelmed to the point of being almost useless.
At my worst during highschool I got up to 40ish days missed and a truant officer was waiting for me one day when I finished up playing hooky somewhere and came home. Is that just not a thing anymore? I actually had to go to court and had years of punishment lmao.
Would that be a kind of natural selection at play, nature sorting students out into different populations but sitting at home won't prevent them from passing on their genes in the future. They (the populations drifting apart) may however end up being incompatible with each other for mating.
And being too intelligent is also a disadvantage. People don't want to hire you if you're too smart, because it makes you a threat, and that's jaut one reason. Also, jealous people will also try to tear you down on the workplace and force you out. When I was in the army I got bullied bad and demeaned for being an intelligent woman with aspirations. I'm now long term unemployed, there is no place in the world for people like me, which is extremely depressing if you think about it.
I mean, as someone from Alabama, there is a huge divide between the literate and the illiterate. It’s why they wouldn’t let slaves learn to read and tried to keep non-whites out of schools. My great-great-grandpa was brilliant, could’ve been a PhD. Instead he was illiterate in English and grew up pulling a plow because they couldn’t afford an ox.
Literacy is a major, major way to get any kind of social mobility. My great-grandma was a seamstress. My grandma was a nurse. My uncle is well-to-do, some business/finance stuff I can’t comprehend but thank goodness one of us loves math. Knowing your letters and numbers means you can get generational wealth. My nieces weren’t born on a farm, left in a barn with wet sugar rags so their mom could do back-breaking labor.
That’s also motivation enough for the elite to happily keep workers dumb and poor. How else could they get anyone to do work like that? If every worker in every sweatshop in the world fully understood how fucked we all were, there’d be a lot more rioting, I’d guess.
Interestingly enough, MS, AL and LA have all fared much better than most other states in the country since before the pandemic. They changed up their curriculum to focus more on phonics and it has made immense and almost immediate impact on reading proficency.
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/education/kids-reading-scores-soared-deep-south-states/289-2c2450e0-ccc0-48af-9b88-eacb33545336
Thank you for sharing! My mom taught me with phonics and then root words. She accidentally gifted me a lot of Latin comprehension because I loved the idea that big fancy words were just a few word pieces glued together.
Reading Harry Potter at 11 was hilarious because, once again, I wondered why Latin was magical. Then in horror movies, it’s demonic. Apparently, Satan just can’t be bothered learning English. He learned Latin and gave up on any new languages.
Perhaps, yes. It depends on what the goal is. Life may often be brutal and short, but I remain grateful that my family got some time that was far less awful. Sure, their literacy may matter less as Collapse intensifies, but for now?
I’m of the perspective that death and entropy are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean one should lay down and die. Human history is full of horrors. Before modern medicine, my mom and I likely would’ve died in childbirth. Every day, children die of dehydration, starvation, disease … But I can’t control *everything*, I can merely continue to live off spite at inevitability and to help my loved ones have a bit of goodness before the end.
Also for the novids. I’m waiting for the generalized testing and grading bell curves to be shifted down to accommodate the dropping abilities.
It’s incredibly sad but this is nearly an entire generation being forcibly reinfected by a disease that causes vascular damage body-wide, immune damage, and brain damage.
I can’t feel proud for keeping my daughter safe and her doing well in school compared to her peers because her future is bleak.
I do think about this a lot. I was not a stand out student in any regard. Solidly average at best. My daughter blows other kids out of the water and reads like a machine. It’s interesting how much better she’ll have it just cause she has two parents who give a shit and everyone else is sliding backwards.
Be careful. The others will not be happy that she has two parents that actually give a shit, and scoff if you will but they can inflict levels of psychological damage that can perma-fuck her.
I speak from experience.
I think you're probably right, just know there's no right answer here it seems like. Met a lot of people that somehow think they "missed out on socializing" and endlessly complain and blame people for homeschooling them. I try to tell them all they missed was absolutely crushing self confidence issues and a ton of bullshit, but here we are and it's going to come up, it's all over the internet how "bad" it is, there are groups that complain endlessly. There's no perfect way here, something's always gonna be wrong with whatever you do, you gotta pick the least wrong. But come time for their first entry level service job, expect to get an earful about lack of social skills.
I'm a teacher and I'm being regularly infected with COVID that I catch from the kids. I am finding myself getting noticeably more stupid after each infection. I feel like an old man but I'm only middle aged.
Some places over here in Europe already did that for high school graduation exams in 2021 or 2022. If they had kept it at the same difficulty as pre-2020 most students would've failed miserably and would've been forced to repeat 12^th grade.
Wrong - it’s just more work for those who have these skills servicing people who don’t. Most of my time at work is writing down what people are thinking, summarising, refocusing them off chat and social media, forcing concentration, basically babysitting. My job description does not include these tasks but they are necessary for me to perform my job and document that I am not negligent. The people who are the decision makers are really good at using educated people. It will be even worse.
I find it a little hard to believe that people glued to their phones don't know how to read. I feel that technology has dramatically increased the amount of reading most people do.
This is what AI is for. I’m a teacher and I cannot possibly imagine a large portion of my students ever being at a cognitive level to do many of the jobs that I feel AI will replace in 10-20 years.
That will be the excuse as well, due to a lack of workers who fit the skill set and education to do said job, some company will design an AI system that can do it.
I think many blue collar jobs are safe, but I firmly believe the vast majority of white collar jobs will be gone by 2040.
As for blue collar work, we're already getting gen z and younger apprentices that can't read tape measures and couldn't even figure out the next thing to do if it was spelled out in a 3 minute tiktok.
Blue collar work, especially the skilled trades, isn't as braindead as it's made out to be. I was also making more at 25 than most college grads make at 35, without the student loan debt.
Can confirm, thought it was just me noticed youngsters not knowing the measurements on a tape measure. Also I've witnessed that they don't filly understand the order of months in a year, can't tell the time on an analogue clock, and don't know the number of days and weeks in a year. I thought my experience was a blip... Horrifyingly not.
I will also confirm- I encountered this tape measure issue multiple times. I still have trouble wrapping my head around it.
And all their screws sat proud, too. It wasn’t like it had to perfectly match the bevel, but they didn’t seem to be able to *see* when the screw heads were sticking up. I thought the first one was just messing with me.
This was by no means 100% of new hires, but it was more than one, and more than it should have been. It’s just a tape measure, cone on.
It beggars belief, honestly. It's really scary. They do not care about the quality of work they put in, even in the real world. From what I've seen, it seems to be a whole generation type of thing, not an individual or few individuals.
True, I do also believe that collapse is only a few years away. Perhaps everyone quietly realises this? Though people I talk to about it seem pretty oblivious to it.
I have met a whole bunch who were really good, too, so don’t lose hope.
It seems to line up pretty well with high school subcultures, though I don’t have anything other than my own observation to back it up.
Car Kids- good
Geek or band kids- 50/50
Gamers- seem to lack a very basic grasp of physics, as in they are continually surprised by the reactions to actions in the real world. Probably best to avoid, but not nearly as bad as…..
Leadership kids- just awful. They have somehow been trained to be anti-leaders, need *constant* encouragement to do anything, treats being corrected as a personal insult.
Those are the four categories I have experience with, at least three from each. Obviously, this does not encompass every possibility
I’ve heard of inability to read analogue clocks and cursive writing, but tape measures??
I may get downvoted on this, but I wish schools would bring back shop, home ec and drivers’ ed. When I was in school in the Stone Age, 8th graders had to take either shop or home ec and you can probably guess who took what. I would have everyone take both, as both teach basic skills everyone needs and a frightening number of kids aren’t getting at home.
The current gawd awful driving has a lot of contributing factors but eliminating a semester of drivers’ ed has not helped.
As a teacher, I agree. On a bright note, my urban school is starting a program next year where all students will take a class where they get to work in different fields for 2-3 weeks at a time. There will be stations basically, where they will run plumbing, electric, work on engines, drafting, vet care, etc. It seems pretty cool and since this is for middle schoolers, they will have an idea of careers that may interest them and when they go to high school, they can continue with classes that expose them to their chosen career. There is hope, although it's a small hope lol.
I am so grateful that I had cooking, sewing, woodshop, swimming, & driver’s ed as classes in school in the 90s! But I also think part of the problem is some of today’s teachers are not that strong themselves. I am sitting with my kid helping him with homework (questions about a chapter book)… and the questions are non-sensical, and don’t track in a logical sequence. I think teachers these days have to deal with all of the daily distractions that all adults do, have their own short attention spans, etc. But the job has gotten harder too - communicating with parents digitally, keeping up with email etc. is a lot more on their plate than there used to be. And it’s crazy how underfunded public schools are these days. There are fundraisers for literally everything, and requests for volunteers for literally everything- as basic as making copies.
As silly as this might sound, all those old educational films they make fun of on MST3K and Rifftrax might have been more valuable than we admit (and maybe a lot of the ones starring Goofy and such were useful too.)
The fault here lies with post secondary schools. For the last 30 years at least theyve been bloating their tuition and lining their pockets, in coordinatiom with secondary schools theyve agressively oversold the value of post secondary education and shovelled any struggling student direct into the trades. Now youve got a massive influx of incompetant and bitter tradesmen. We have collectively devalued skilled trades as a culture, and its not stopping anytime soon
Nailed it on the trade/college monocultures. I have been working in a trade adjacent industry for almost a decade now and all of the tradespeople that interact are, mostly, the same 'type' of guy.
You get a unicorn here or there, but it's mostly white guys in their 40's and 50's, low education, from historically low income households or a line of various tradesmen, conservative, etc.
So, so many of them are Dunning-Kruger come to life. Can't tell 'em nothing, can't save them from themselves. They constantly complain about not being able to find help but anytime I see a new apprentice come in the old-heads are rarely able to actually 'teach' them anything. They basically just use them as gofers, patsies, and punching bags until they leave for something else.
I was born in '88 and we started on our college pipeline plans in elementary school, if I remember correctly. I want to say it was third grade or so we all had to take a packet of info home to our parents and it was essentially a class plan that carried us through to high school.
Since I was 'gifted' I got shunted right into the college pipeline. The whole concept is pretty horrifying to me now; classist at best, completely racist at worst.
Shop is very expensive because of the equipment and liability insurance. You would have to have trained staff and a way to handle students whose behavior is out of control (before giving them sharp tools). We would need a lot of money to do this.
I am not sure what your Stone Age time was but I was in junior high school (7-9) in the 90s and *everyone* had to take wood shop, cooking, metal shop, and sewing. I am really surprised they have got rid of it in many (most?) places as it does teach valuable basic skills. I don’t have many young kids in my life so will have to ask my nephews who are in that pre-teen/young teen age what they have available. I may not have ever taken up a passion for carpentry, but I can certain read a measuring tape and make my way around basic tools and projects for example. I am certainly not intimidated by them anyway. My husband - who also had to take all those classes though I think his shop classes were combined as wood/metal - remains a more patient and more skilled sewer than I am despite me having a mother who was an incredibly talented seamstress, though!
Went to school in the 90's and we never did ANY of those things. You could have maybe gotten some very basic cooking and home ec 'type' stuff if you took one particular rotating elective in 8th grade, but that was it for me.
But I was also always in the 'gifted' programs (which I now realize is just part of the college-debt pipeline) so I may have missed some of these classes along the way.
I came from a single parent household so this may not be typical for other folks in the age group, but I had to teach myself a lot of very basic things just because there wasn't always someone there to take care of something for me, otherwise.
> I may get downvoted on this, but I wish schools would bring back shop, home ec and drivers’ ed.
the school administrators are too busy trying to show off how "advanced" they can make the curriculum to impress parents and the government.
In the late 80s/early 90s we had to split between both in 7th grade and then got to choose in 8th grade (a quarter each in 7th of sewing, cooking, wood shop and metal shop). Whatever other objections I had to the way I was schooled, I always thought that was smart. At the very least you finished the 7th grade rotation knowing how to sew on a button or mend a small tear, cook something more complex than a piece of toast, and how to most of the basic hand tools without risking loss of a digit or an eye.
It is largely the removal of these classes that has resulted in it. Their parents outsource everything because they are the first generations who never had shop, and they don't have time to learn to do that stuff, so they just pay for it. Growing up, I learned all that stuff at home as my entire family was in the trades. I helped my dad build a house from felling the trees to the electric and everything else. I did have shop class and home ec, but they were for a quarter each in 7th grade. I only retained that info because it was in daily use at home.
My youngest is 15 and he's in shop. He loves it. Living in a rural area, we still have it (but not home ec) which is great. They did a semester in woodworking and now they are doing welding and will end the year with small engine. It's the most useful hour of the entire day that he spends there. Otherwise he finished his work in 10 minutes and sits and reads while the teacher deals with the behavior problems in the rest of the class. My oldest son is 27. He has a master's degree. He does Task Rabbit because it pays more than his field. He now wishes he had listened to all the people who talked about considering the trades.
At my tiny little country school in the early aughts everyone has to take wood shop, metal shop, & home ec. For some reason we didn’t have a drivers ed course but the shop classes were so fun & really showed everyone’s creativity
Absolutely, I've been hoping for the laser decade to see home ec or some new subject, let's call it Life Skills get added to the curriculum. I worked in a school for 8 of those years which is where the source of my fear of the above is from.
Oh dear god. I'm a stagehand, about the artiest, softest profession that can be considered manual labor (we do have to use screwguns, hammer together trusses, etc.) And at a relatively recent job, three of four of my coworkers didn't know what a level is or how to use it. It was chilling.
> Blue collar work, especially the skilled trades, isn't as braindead as it's made out to be
I work in IT, and I also do DIY stuff to fix my old house... blue collar work is HARD. It involves a lot of complicated math and precision and creative thinking, way more than IT does.
The only difference is that IT is harder to conceptualize at first so theres a bigger barrier to entry
Blue collar work can be rewarding, especially if it provides opportunities for artisanal pride. But it's very hard on the body-- by the time you hit your 50s you can feel crippled.
I was working with plumbing apprentices the other day who couldn’t slope a pipe to save their lives. I was told a 1 percent slope, so that’s the trench we dug, but I ended up having to go back and hand dig for hours because they kept sloping their pipe too steep. I offered to let them use the highly accurate 6 thousand dollar laser I was using but they didn’t know how and wanted to use a level with a piece of duct tape around it.
This kid tells me “well how do we know those are accurate?” and I’m like “measure out the length of your pipe and shoot your rise over run, I’ve used this to put in kilometres of pipe and it’s never out”.
Kid didn’t know how to figure out his rise over run. Didn’t understand how to use a laser. Was installing his pipe backwards with the bells at the low end of the pipe. It’s just worrying, I’m a pipe layer and equipment operator but watching these kids I could take over the interior plumbing and do a much better job. The plumbers had some sumps last year that they insisted had to be a couple meters deeper than normal and now I’m suspecting it’s their total lack of math.
My blue-collar work friends had much the same experience, but they are also in pain most of the day. Some curb it by drinking too much, others pop too many pills, some use weed/cbd (which is probably the best option).
Altogether you pay a different price doing that kinda work. The price is by the time you are 60 your body will be in shambles unless you go to great lengths to protect it.
It’s certainly NOT braindead ! Figuring out real world problems is essential for human survival. Long ago I worked at Mazda a dealership with a mechanic that was frequently called by the engineers to solve issues. Uni is a racket in many cases
Same here. It's frustrating to see what is coming in from the new generation.
I was making way more than a lawyer friend who has massive education debt. But it's stressful because the workload is immense, especially because we were expected to clean up after the newbies.
Watching AI go from barely being able to draw hands to producing the most incredible videos imaginable in the span of like 1-2 years has destroyed any doubts I have about AI. That shit's coming, trying to pretend the AI revolution isn't coming is serious copium.
The thing is, that's specifically algorithms that cover generating images using latent noise and other techniques for image & video generation and processing.
It cost several billion dollars and required tens of thousands engineers, scientists and mathematicians and around 60 years of research to achieve. It's impressive but it is not as capable as people think.
A.I is essentially a buzzword. These algorithms do not "think". The algorithms being employed aren't stopping for a second to "comprehend and contemplate" what they are doing any more than Microsoft office does. They're performing very specific tasks.
They're not going to spontaneously become self aware in the same manner that you, I or anyone else is. This means they are not generalised. If you ask a human to perform a novel task, they can.
This isn't to say developments in neural networks aren't already useful or don't have practical applications. They do.
The "AI revolution" that could threaten the social fabric of the world will not come until a general intelligence can be developed. Given that it cost billions of dollars and took several decades of development to achieve highly specialised algorithms, I'm skeptical we'll see that happen any time soon.
It isn't so much copium as it is having an understanding of how these systems work.
When you look at it through the lens of cost-benefit and time to market, AI based systems that exist today have had an absolutely terrible return on investment.
We've managed to achieve glorified chat bots and image/video generators since the first deep learning algorithms were created in 1965.
This is often how these types of advancements happen, though. You get a few key pieces that often take a long time to fully master, then suddenly all the right pieces are in place to witness a rapid explosion in development. The industrial revolution was a bit of a slow burn in the making, one could argue that it had been building up for some 2000 years or more, but once it hit...it hit HARD. I suspect AI will be the same way. We're getting VERY close to having the right collection of tools soon to really see AI/algorithms/neural nets/whatever you wanna call them explode in power. We're still watching this stuff in relative infancy, I'm willing to bet this tech will be unrecognizable in 10 years.
There’s some kind of smug self-assuredness which abounds here that reasons the serverfarms worldwide shall overheat, too costly in resources to maintain their running before AI can be allowed to inflict any real damage.
That’s a foolhardy take, imo, especially in light of the advancements we have witnessed over such a short time frame.
Sora is terrifying tech, & so are the problems coming with it: in combination with today’s news cycle & the sociopolitical climate, do folks really expect the rabble are going to wait around for clarification & walk back any potential chaos instigated over something widely being shared as “real” online..?
And like it or not - indeed, believe it or not - that’s the point we are *very* quickly approaching - people are shitting on the idea of Skynet being impossible, while the Matrix is being constructed under our very noses; that is, the ability to easily detect & know what is real, & what is simulated…gone, like tears in the rain :’)
Why are the Luddites considered a joke? Because they only smashed machines, they didn't try to smash the bosses imposing the machines.
AI is just a tool of oppression and exploitation. The task is to smash the exploiters and oppressors.
Actually, the Luddites had a lot to say about the contributions they had made to the industry that were instrumental in being able to make an automated loom. They weren't so much as pissed about the advance in technology as they were in being completely left behind by a tech they played key roles in helping shape. Nobody would have been able to make an automated loom without the centuries of knowledge and refinement needed first.
I'm worried about how far this tech is away from being able to convincingly create video footage of anyone committing any sort of crime. That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of abuse potential.
>This is often how these types of advancements happen, though. You get a few key pieces that often take a long time to fully master, then suddenly all the right pieces are in place to witness a rapid explosion in development.
That's what we're trying to tell you though...the pieces for true AI aren't there. The current algorithms "exploding in power" isn't going to spontaneously make them actually intelligent. We're nowhere near having actual AI. We don't even have infant AI.
I suppose a bit of clarification on my part is needed here. I'll admit, like most these days, I use the term AI a bit loosely. The AI powering my Civilization 6 game isn't truly artificially intelligent, but we still call it an AI, know what I mean? I know there's still a long way to go before we have truly intelligent AI, but these algorithms are more than capable of performing extremely stunning feats well before reaching that point, as witnessed by the current state of things. As it were, the machine is capable of replacing us without truly needing to be intelligent, so long as there's still intelligent humans to provide guidance when needed.
The AI "Revolution" doesn't require that AI develop the ability to efficiently perform the tasks we assign it-- the AI Revolution is already underway because managers entranced with the novelty of AI are assuming it already has such ability and are employing AI to replace human labor, purging the work force to lower costs.
Good point about the key pieces. My day job is around knowledge graphs, prior to the rise of GenAI, I wasn't at this company but its been around since the early 2000's.
Fast forward to today knowledge graphs help visualize databases by relationships on a node level (like a brain/synapses/connections) and for GenAI/LLM this helps reduce hallucinations and give better explainability in the context of something like a chatbot for example.
I don't know where this goes (but also good things like a cure for cancer could come out of it, at least for knowledge graphs and not GenAI per se).
we don't need a generalized AI for the current algorithms to wreak complete havoc on our economic system. ChatGPT can already do something like 65% of white-collar jobs if it's connected with other software because believe it or not, most human work requires no intelligence and most humans at work do not ever do novel tasks. only the people whose jobs are already multi-disciplinary are somewhat insulated.
> A.I is essentially a buzzword. These algorithms do not "think". The algorithms being employed aren't stopping for a second to "comprehend and contemplate" what they are doing any more than Microsoft office does. They're performing very specific tasks.
You should do more research on AI before stating that, check out the logic puzzles that ChatGPT is able to solve. Thinking logically is an emergent property of intelligence, and it has the ability to do that.
I tend to agree up until the “ask a human to do a novel task and they can”. The crux of this thread is the are trending to the unable/ unwilling end of the spectrum.
Good post and agree with your points. While Sora's video generation capabilities are certainly impressive on the surface, it's all ultimately pretty generic. However, I read a Twitter thread breaking down how Sora actually goes about creating the output videos, and that system of algorithms for assembling the various "patches" into something relatively coherent is what I found to be more impressive and potentially ground-breaking. Like if someone wants to design virtual reality worlds and the like, that's the technology which I imagine is going to unlock them.
It also sounds *extremely* resource-intensive at the moment, so...yeah this wave of AI stuff is cool I guess, but I don't see it overcoming any more hurdles super soon.
But really this critique is just moving the goal posts. We now have AI that can parse a verbal prompt and create a boring but relevant new image in less than 10 seconds. This is essentially magic compared with punch card chatbots of the 60’s.
I think a lot of people are overly skeptical because they don’t realise they are standing on the slightly steeper part of the exponential curve. Once they get AI to improve itself humanity is changed forever and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
> the most incredible videos imaginable in the span of like 1-2 years
May I see an example of one of the most incredible videos? I've just seen uncanny valley commercial pastiches and nauseating horror videos.
While I am afraid it will take my job (we just had training on using AI based software in lesson planning and curriculum development) I am also for the AI revolution as perhaps AI can do what humans could not in righting many of the wrongs we caused over the last century. Finding a means of correcting climate change with as little negative impact on society as possible, finding cures for many of the diseases that plague humanity, progressing science and technology past a point we are capable of.
As long as it doesn’t start launching nukes or consider killing off half our species in some way, I think AI is our only hope for the future.
> I am also for the AI revolution as perhaps AI can do what humans could not in righting many of the wrongs we caused over the last century.
AI is only going to perpetuate those wrongs. There is a *reason* several major Capitalist groups are pushing hard for AI. They essentially see AI as their ability to create a "God" that will guide all of Capitalism with its "Invisible Hand".
AI could benefit humanity, but the current "versions" are being trained on all the flawed and failed systems, Capitalism and Systemic Racism for instance, we already suffer beneath because it is not being exposed to anything *but* those things. It will replicate all our failings and only further trap us in them.
AI is not a hope for the future, it is stagnation. The only "hope" for the future is the dissolution of Capitalism.
I think you are being too optimistic. I believe AI will be use d by the elites and government in very sinister ways.
Heck I won't be surprised the government, tech dudes and other billionaires, elites will try to kill off/depopulate the 99% of the population as they are no longer work and thus are not useful anymore.
But it isn't AI though, it's just a huge relational database. If you ask it to draw you a monkey it doesn't *know* what a monkey is. It just goes okay I have a learning model full of images tagged with "monkey" and I'm going to just extrapolate from those an image of "monkey." It can't come up with anything new or even novel.
I think likely to be another tech trend like crypto and self driving cars where what is being predicted is a stretch beyond what it is capable of but that it is still being used to hype and drive investment money despite expectation vs reality.
You are describing what humans do when you tell a human to draw a monkey. And a brand new drawing of a monkey that isn't a literal copy of anything is new.
To me, that's just another way of saying we can use machines to get rid of 95% of human effort, with humanity getting to stay relevant with that final, diffuclt-to-breach 5%.
Yeah but I mean you know the old toxic trope, if one can't elevate one's self, one can tear everyone around themselves down.
So, I mean, even if AI turns out to be about as smart as The Clapper... look at the incoming competition...
As it should be. We really don't need humans to do half these jobs, if your job can be replaced by machine your goddamn useless. Focus on getting a education so your not poor
Maybe, maybe not. Humanity is a very hardy species that has survived at least one near extinction in our prehistory, the Black Death, smallpox, and lots of other shit. I think climate change is potentially an existential danger for our civilization, but I believe humanity itself will survive.
>I think many blue collar jobs are safe, but I firmly believe the vast majority of white collar jobs will be gone by 2040
Me, a man from a blue-collar family who encouraged me to pursue education in hopes of getting some type of office career: laughs maniacally.
Did you ever read Ilium by Dan Simmons? One part that stuck with me was humans were living in a "post literate society". Most people didn't bother to learn to actually read. They had phones and tablets do all of that for them. All automated. Only a few "hobbyists" bothered to learn to actually read..the way some people do calligraphy or blacksmithing these days. At the time I thought it was crazy. But now I am really starting to wonder if we are headed that way.
I'm still pissed we could automate most jobs with robotics and ai, eliminating the *need* to work so we could spend more time lounging on beaches, naked, talking about philosophy, and eating figs. But it's being used for bottom lines and lay-offs.
That’s why I think blue collar jobs are fine. Once someone develops a system that teaches kids based on an algorithm that’s specifically suited for kids at an individual level (in the same way Social Media keeps people hooked), I know I’m gone.
The guys on the roof of our school constantly repairing the 40 year old AC system, repainting the buildings, installing the wiring and all that. They’re irreplaceable and will be for quite some time.
Are you saying you’re a teacher? I read it as saying the kids tutored in such a way will outcompete older white collar workers. Just a funny misreading.
No blue collar jobs will be designed around having machines do them , building is one area where machines can basically 3 D print walls with wiring and plumbing as well .
I'm a train driver and in the last 5 yrs I've seen 3 different suburban lines converted to run with automated trains.
Blue collar jobs will last a bit longer but not much .
I highly doubt it for a lot of more skilled work, outside specific physical tasks. Like the telecom techs will be here for a long time, but anything even slightly repetitive in a somewhat controlled environment is gone. Like factory work will basically all go away.
There’s a reason why us isn’t investing in its people or infrastructure. They know there’s no future and they are trying to grab up as much as they can to build bunkers.
Biden administration just announced a $5 billion investment plan to upgrade our nation's drinking water and related infrastructure:
https://abc7chicago.com/us-drinking-water-infrastructure-biden-administration-epa/14449199/
See this sounds like a FDR type policy, but people need to see it materialize. For far too long it goes to state and local agencies, and attached non profits and the funds evaporate with no meaningful change
Even YouTubers have bunkers these days. Billionaires probably own several bunker _companies_ at this point. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0vZL9uwyfOE6Of8qi5dtIFgdSt1hlOZm
No, it’s going been going on for decades because the countries run by libertarian psychos who hate the state. The situations not fundamentally different for countries that do invest in education and their governments aren’t stupid.
Labor and consumption are directly linked. If labor goes down so does consumption, and if consumption goes down so does labor.
Everything in capitalism costs money, and money for the vast majority of people is obtained by selling their labor. If a person does not have money then they can not buy things to consume. If people can't buy things to consume then production drops, which in turn causes labor to drop.
At a certain point there will be no more profit to be had because there are not enough people consuming.
I absolutely think those with their hands on levers of power underestimate this. True, yes. Will they break it anyway because we’re running out of resources to sell and extract? Also yes
They will very likely get rid/massacre the 99% of the population through various means the moment AI and other robots already replace everyone in their jobs as the masses are no longer useful for them...
When you eventually come to the realisation that is not by design and no one is in charge, it’s a lot more difficult to deal with. We live in an illusion that any of this is planned, most things in society are simply emergent properties of complex systems.
Chiming in a couple of days late here, but this is absolutely the truth. My job is unironically part of the "deep state", and I cannot stress how reactionary and short-sighted the government of the United States is. Generally, the people we've entrusted policymaking to are little more than children playing in a sandbox.
It's "planned" in so far as it's "Capitalism functioning as intended, to benefit the rich." There is no specific "design" apart from maximining to extract infinite profit from a finite world.
This right here. Actions lead to reactions and most reactions are not planned. Humans are short-sighted and naturally self-serving, so it’s kind of inevitable we have these civilization collapse cycles.
i would still argue that systemically making government programs shitty in order to 'prove' theyre ineffective really is part of the strategic design of a specific voting group in the US. obviously not every part of this is engineered- youd have to put on quite a tinfoil hat to say that the increase of 1 parent and dual income households is directly engineered- same with the impact of ipads and phones introduced early in childrens lives. but the point is some of it is intentional and the remaining parts work themselves out as biproducts of late stage capitalism.
Good. This shit sucks. I wanna go to college and make art and learn new things. Whack ass warehouse. I can't go anywhere or do anything half the time can't afford a house, can barley afford food, like what's even the point.
It's already hilarious to see the industrial corporation bosses trying to come up with excuses while they cannot find replacement.
They cannot see this idea that, as we all try to "grow", all sectors, it was never sustainable nor logical. But they cannot fathom that. Some of them have no issues when I talk about us being 4 billions in a place that's now hosting 400'000 individuals.
But I morbidly enjoy watching that, as the impossibility to grow will make society change ever faster :o
The amount of labour we require to supply the wealthy is very small. We (the technocracy) are cashing out. Humanity is being downsized. Dead people don't need an education after all.
We merely adopted the collapse, they were born in it.
As in, we observed the erosion of the education system, but they actually live through it. For younger teachers, this constant erosion is the only thing they know about the system.
I can’t even imagine what the teachers witness daily. The teacher sub is so alarming. It truly makes me glad I ended up in healthcare instead because of teaching.
I think we underestimate previous generations are also illiterate and cognitively impaired. The things I have seen on med/surg units is unimaginable. People that cannot read or follow simple instructions. Many cannot comprehend anything we try to educated them on. I don’t know how people live that way or make any medical decisions. It’s scary af.
The decline in healthcare and education are just ripe for completely collapse.
> People that cannot read or follow simple instructions. Many cannot comprehend anything we try to educated them on
that's why grifting with "snake oil" is going to take off. It's part of catabolic collapse.
I've been teaching at universities / colleges since 2012 and with incoming 1st years it's been like:
2012-16: students seem slightly less prepared each year, but technology *is* changing fast, we just gotta adapt.
2017-19: okay, what's going on? Student preparedness is definitely getting noticably worse each year...
Fall 2019: what the FUCK is going on??? Why do these kids seem like they've never been to school before!? This 19 year old at an R1 literally can't spell his own name?
COVID lockdown era: ?¿?¿?
2022 onward: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
We've been talking about this for well over a decade, but the most common response has always been like:
"oh you're just an alarmist, people have always been complaining about 'kids these days' & you're just bitter, everything is fine!!"
But the shit has definitely hit the fan already. From where I'm standing, id estimate some sort of threshold in k-12 was crossed c. 2015 & now we're seeing those issued magnified massively because of *gestures*
>the most common response has always been like: "oh you're just an alarmist, people have always been complaining about 'kids these days' & you're just bitter, everything is fine!!"
The funny thing is... that opinion was most ubiquitous of the "Greatest Generation" talking about their kids, the Baby Boomers. And they were A1 Fucking Right. The Baby Boomers had the world handed to them. They benefitted from the New Deal and the massive WW2 and post-WW2 investment in society. Then "rebelled" against their parents in a literal orgy of "sex, drugs and rock n' roll", until that got boring, and then they decided "Greed Is Good" and embraced Reaganomics (lower taxes on the rich, fuck the poor, crush unions, destroy the social safety net, demolish Main St., commoditize housing).
Our current world is the result of the "Me Generation" stealing from the future to fund their entitled youth, indulgent middle age, and luxurious retirement.
I mean while its probably accurate to say that the boomer generation has not done the greatest job at running things, what you have written is basically a stereotypical narrative. Like its the exact same thing older people write about younger people just replace some of the terminology.
The problem isn't generational, I think sometimes we forget that civil rights, LGBTQI rights, the second wave of feminism etc. were driven in large parts by boomers. What has decayed our systems is the political establishment rolling back everything that was stopping corporate greed pumping at 110%. But Regan was not a boomer for example, and in fact a large number of US presidents were not either. Only Obama was a clear cut Boomer. Trump, Clinton, Bush and Biden were born on a literal cusp of that generation. It is likely that there will be more millennial presidents than Boomer ones all up. And yet things keep declining all the same. The entire body of the senate and congress will be a different story obviously, but to the degree where the political decay can be placed onto a single generation? its not so clear cut.
Implying that the Boomers were unique in their destructiveness is basically ignoring that the industrial revolution saw its own share of socioeconomic crisis's. That a considerable number of tech billionaires who are problematic right now are millennials or Gen X, that people like Andrew Tate are millennials. Its kind of buying into the exact kind of mythmaking that we accuse older people of doing with young people. It also oversimplifies the actual problems to a 'Boomers bad, less Boomers good' kind of dichotomy. Which means even when every last boomer is dead, the problems we laid the blame on them for might actually still be around. Voter disenfranchisement, corruption, greed, and political apathy are not exclusive to them. Thinking that they are is how we get blindsided by the fact that quite a few Gen X, older Millennial, and Gen Z were also keen to vote in authoritarians.
I think there should be a zero tolerance policy on phones in classrooms, and turn rooms into some kind of Faraday cage for the inevitable kids still bringing them in. If there's an emergency, parents can contact the school or the teacher like they used to. I know that doesn't solve every problem, but it's a start because the constant phone use is ridiculous.
> im so sorry but this would only cause more issues
Maybe, but maybe not?
I am, admittedly, only a first year teacher after making a career change in my forties, but between my current job, student teaching and my university practicum I have been in three different schools. All with their own unique and different classroom cultures.
One of the only things all three of those schools had in common was that they were cell-phone free. In my first school the rule was phones are silent and in lockers throughout the day, not to be taken out until final bell. In my second school they were collected each morning by homeroom teachers and redistributed at the end of the day. In my current school, the rule is simply that they aren't to be taken into the classroom; between periods and at lockers are fine, but if they're visible in the classroom they are subject to confiscation.
Obviously all are nightmare policies. Children won't follow them and god forbid you actually confiscate one the parents will be beating down your door.
Except no. All were successful and in three school years I can count on one hand I've had a violation. The first two were Title 1 urban schools and the current school is an upper class suburb; resistance has been worst (as has behavior in general) in my current school, but the reality is when policies are clearly outlined and enforced they...well, they mostly work.
I do have a zero tolerance policy for phones in my classroom - which is backed by a clearly written and public school policy - and I can't imagine teaching in a school that *didn't* have a phone policy.
Perhaps my experience is anomalous, but I've found that for every policy that on it's face is an obvious nightmare, they mostly meet with success when they're clearly written, communicated, and enforced.
I got out of education right at the start of the pandemic, I was feeling collapse so heavily and that deep feeling of “no one is even acknowledging the problem” so I switched to child welfare. I thought at least there we could admit the issues.
It… it is so much worse than people acknowledge. The complete gutting of funding, the barriers, the *politics*. It was too much.
Crime also rises with despair. If you know you've got no future who cares about stealing some jeans or whatever?
Shit, some of these kids got a better chance at having their basic needs met in prison than they do working two and half jobs the rest of their lives until they die. I understand it.
No-fail policies are part of it. Bigger class sizes is part of it. Teachers paid peanuts is part of it -- less retention of the sharp ones; districts keeping the ones they'd rather weed out, but there are no replacements.
It's not just teachers making peanuts -- salaries are in no way keeping up with the cost of living, so what's the incentive to join the workforce -- all the people the students know have to scramble more just to make ends meet, much less make any real financial progress through life.
The [Climate Reanalyzer](https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) Daily Sea Surface chart is often posted in this subreddit. The world is baking, and the students are growing up into that. Nothing in their world will ever be as good as it was even last year. They know this.
What incentives do students today have to get anywhere or do anything? The ice is melting, species are going extinct, birthrates are falling because of a variety of environmental reasons, and besides that, who can afford a kid anyway?
Given all that, and other factors not considered, is it at all surprising that more and more formal-education-aged students have no fucks left to give?
> I'd estimate some sort of threshold in k-12 was crossed c. 2015
Could one factor be the financial crisis of 2008/09 causing parents to spend less time with their then high school children?
Our public school system is definitely the canary in the coal mine. (I'm a veteran teacher who recently left K-12 public school teaching due to the ever increasing outrageous levels of systematic dysfunction we're expected to deal with.)
It's the same up in canada(BC). I have buddies that areteachers and say it's absolutely fucked. They are all looking to get out. The pay is fantastic but admin, parents, shitty kids, phones and other things are driving them nuts. Grades are no longer a thing in BC btw
I'm taking a pay cut to leave as a veteran teacher, but ultimately it's worth it. I couldn no longer afford the toll teaching was taking on my physical and mental health. I hope your friends are able to find something much better to transition to!
Yes, I just went to the sub to look around and am pretty sure that China will surpass the US within a generation in terms of innovation and economy. The average K-12 kid there is way ahead of the average K-12 kid here.
What will they be in our society when automation takes away the easiest jobs and what's left requires a college education or specialized training?
The podcast [Sold a Story](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) goes deep into why so many kids struggle with reading these days. It'll make you completely furious and is one of the best short-run podcasts I've listened to.
"...but the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner city slang, and various grunts. Joe was able to understand **them**, but when **he** spoke, he sounded pompous and faggy to them."
You saw some significance or meaning in the quote... Hence why you quoted it?
I am not saying you intended anything by it, but the quote very clearly implies that *inner-city slang*, which is just a Conservative/Republican code word for AAVE, is related to lower intelligence.
Plus the whole central conceit of Idiocracy is predicated on a pretty questionable eugenics-like understanding of human intelligence and social development.
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Another reason why the idea that the current and future youth will bring about the utopia is absurd. Kids who can’t read, pay attention to anything longer than a TikTok video or perform basic social interactions will never be more than mindless consumer slaves, not revolutionaries.
Let's not forget- this is all part of the plan, so if/when they vote, they are easily manipulated by Tik Tok and deepfakes. None of this is accidental.
The onslaught of information, & the reactions that come it, continue to come at a pace faster than corrections in accurate reporting can possibly allow for.
That is as good as an exhaust port built into the Death Star for those in control of the flow of this information, a weakness too sweetly vulnerable not to be exploited.
as a young Gen X'er with a few tricks left up my sleeve I'm thinking this disparity in critical thinking ability may be one of the elements that allows me greater access to more things (advantage) if only I could harness such a thing lol
but really, if I could get my ass off reddit and apply myself I would probably do a lot better than all these doofs who can't read or write or form coherent proposals
Get into a trade, learn to do something AI can't. I got a degree in accounting after 10 years fixing planes, couldn't find a job, went back to fixing things (not planes this time.) The job I got started me higher than anything accounting was offering and I feel like AI is gonna drastically reduce the number of accountants.
> learn to do something AI can't
I already do lots of things AI can't. For example coordinating jackasses who won't speak to each other...
I actually work at a big bank and we have a guy recently hired to pursue "AI Strategy" and he was explaining to me that AI itself has to first be trained to complete very specific tasks before it can do anything. It is not so simple as some people make it sound.
The audio/video issues are pretty extreme for content producers though, that part is wild. AI porn on demand could destroy any relationships that weren't already doomed.
We are quickly entering an era where something like footage of a nuclear explosion unleashed in some far flung battlefield could conceivably be convincingly faked, filmed from any imaginable angle & complete with accompanying faked news media reports on a world changing incident that never actually took place…& you’re concerned with the dirty pictures? :P
That is absolutely outrageous you know how to fix airplanes and couldn’t find a job fixing planes or doing accounting with an accounting degree. It does not bode well for the rest of us!
He specifically mentioned his enlightenment as an advantage over fellow gen-Z people, I was offering some career advice. Can you not read? What are confused about I was replying to that guy not the thread.
And if you are a huge enough loser it's collapse related because AI is gonna wipe out a shit ton of jobs so if UBI doesn't become the norm it will plunge millions into poverty. Asshole.
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? I seem to have gotten to you in a massive way and I only wrote a single sentence.
I'll reiterate but with more clarity: how is using the collapse of the education system to enhance your own well-being in said collapsing society going to help you in anyway shape or fashion, especially after said collapse? It's such short term level thinking it borders on psychopathy expressed by the rich themselves. Why would you not, you know, spend your time trying to reverse said collapse or at least prepare a career/way of living that is effective in spite of it.
Doesn't mean to prepare your life career as if it won't happen at all.
Also doesn't mean to embrace the same values and live in the exact same manner that got us here.
I keep telling myself the silver lining in all this is that I won't have to worry about job security ever again. It's not a very silver lining, honestly
Relatable, in a sad way. If I was forced out, I have the world’s weirdest backup job: antivenom extraction. Not afraid of snakes. Have worked with snakes. Entertained Betty the rattlesnake with her key chain toy. Far from a safe job with my disability but Hell, talk about job security. Even fewer kids today are around animals than in my gen. I highly doubt they learned how to gently handle snakes as a kid.
It CANNOT be emphasized enough how much of a fucking fantasy it is that this generation will lead some kind of next level revolution to beat both capitalism AND a dead planet.
It's possible, but it won't be because they're particularly smart or talented or anything. It'll be because violent revolution is the only option left once our climate is totally fucked and the ruling class fully institutes fascism.
This country is not heading towards facism, it’s headed toward technologically accelerated authoritarianism - mixed with pseudo feudalistic living conditions where the vast majority of Americans do not have any sort of financial capability of acquiring propetty.
85% of homes in Orange county, Ca are HOA, A.k.a 15 min cities.
I have been searching for property/land/flat grass for 3 years, min 1/2 acre.
2 homes, both over $3.5 mil
Covid has shown us we are just slave labor pumping out tax dollars!
we must unite & stop consuming & show our overlords we have power
Thanks for getting it; those lost in 20th Century-type, Left-Right illusion don't understand. Like the poster earlier ITT said, *"No one is in charge and none of this is planned."* The current destabilization is an emergent properties of complex systems beyond human capacity to manage.
And the US has exported it worldwide. The further away we get, the less WW2 feels like a victory for humanity. Soviets win it, Septics pick the carcass.
In order for a revolution to have a chance, the cybernetic police state has to be wobbly enough to knock over. So far, no luck, but if it's overwhelmed by internal and external migrations, we'll see.
However, any revolution from the American public is likely to be far right. The only reason Congress ever got raided was because the American government wasn't regressive *enough* for them.
>However, any revolution from the American public is likely to be far right
That is not a revolution, that's a *counter-revolution*.
It is impressive how the right and their media have figured out how to create reactionarism without actually reacting to something like a rise in worker movements. It's preemptive. It's orwellian, but they're probably going to 'eat' each other after they ruin life for queer people and various vulnerable minorities... just keep an eye on the moral panics.
Yes, different definitions. I prefer to use useful definitions; more thoughtful, less knee-jerk. I have problems with the "bourgeois revolutions".
If you need some contrast, go read up on the Haitian revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution and see how they were treated by French revolutionaries.
Look what happened in Syria for a preview. Syrians thought, *"If we all rise up, the regime can't just kill all of us. It would destroy the country."* But the Assad regime was happy to murder or imprison and torture %5 or %10 of the country, and make half the country refugees, to hold onto power. Their slogan was, "Assad or we burn the country."
And if you consider that AI and automation will replace many "essential service" jobs, they can easily start the mass-killing without worrying about doing damage to the all-powerful economy.
I agree. It’s on the underemployed and highly educated millennial generation. Question is if anyone has the balls to step up and be the leader the world needs in time before everything goes to chaos.
There are no more good Leftist-leaning leaders. The Left as a collective tears itself apart. You have to be 100% perfect and have not made any mistakes. I doubt there will ever be a leader who can change things.
I'm highly-educated and underemployed, and believe a bought of chaos is exactly what we need to bring order. Humans understand chaos and order; we don't fundamentally understand the states of gray in-between because we can't name and categorize these states. Millennials have been swimming in gray since 9/11. 2008 was a precursor to our future prospects, not the lived pain of failed responsibility, such as a foreclosure or a lost 401K. Even, the pandemic was gray to many, so most weren't called to act. I'm not a let it burn sort of person \[I joined immediately after 9/11\]; but I thought this was pure chaos... most of my generation did not. We are far more demoralized than X. I think Z and A are now floating a drift because of their millennial parent's trauma; a trauma unlike others from the past because it doesn't have a name because if you look at it, it's purely mucky gray.
Uh-huh. Sure. But no one listens to us. Perpetually too young for the boomers to take us seriously. Not young enough to join the brain rot over in Tiktok land.
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I have always scoffed at that 4th turning garbage.
Like... y'all failed as hippies don't try to put that shit on your kids to pull it out at the last second. You ain't Yoda.
It's shocking how much we are on phones or laptops/tablets in a day. Maybe this will be our generation's version of lead poisoning. I can at least say my eyes are in terrible condition and likely due to this.
Lol, I’m Gen X. My kids had tamagochis. This past Christmas I got all the grandkids one and they love them. These are more tricked out with cameras but you still have to keep it alive.
I work at a public high school. Phones used to be banned but no one has the spine to enforce any rules. At first phones weren’t allowed at all, then they had to be locked in a pouch provided by the school, then the school just gave up and let all the kids have and use their phones whenever they want. Students are also supposed to wear uniforms, but the school gave up on enforcing that too, and now half the girls are in crop tops with their bra cups showing. I don’t even know why the school bothers to make rules.
This is an extremely important point. I don't understand why schools are allowing phones in class, or even requiring laptops or tablets now. Schools must be getting kickbacks from educational software they force to install. There's zero reason that kids should have devices in class at all. I remember in 3rd grade we got written up for having pogs on the playground, not even in class. We send my step-son to a private school and this is not allowed in class. They required the laptop only during the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Meanwhile my friend's kids are required to get chromebooks in primary school. Of course the kids goof off on them.
I wouldn’t let my children take phones to school, but then I think of the Project Lincoln “Back to School” commercial and how the kid is texting his parents during the school shooting. Then I think, “yeah, maybe they should have a phone for emergencies.”
Great time to be a parent right now.
My wife is a teacher and our oldest goes to school with a phone. It's locked during the school week so he can only call or text (no games) during the day.
He also walks with his younger sister to school and one phone is essentially tracking their location for the walk to and from.
It's ironically used more to find where he has left his phone than to find him but it's also given me piece of mind enough times to let him have some freedom outside of school.
A lot of GenXers like to say, "back in my day..." But then complain their parents needed commercials to remind them they had kids.
Anyway, all this to say, yes. School shootings and lockdowns were a huge reason to have him take his phone.
Back in my day we only got the shit beat out of us, kid on kid rapes in the bathrooms, and permanent psychological damage. But no assault rifles.
... what? Too real?
This is the reason schools can't ban phones btw. School shootings are common enough that kids actually have to think about texting their parents to let them know they're about to be gunned down.
My oldest has a phone in his bag for this very reason, but he never takes it out and it’s on school mode. Phones shouldn’t be banned, but having them out unless it’s an emergency should be.
Locks and silences it unless you put the code in. I have it set for the hours they’re in school. That way they never accidentally forget to silence the device
10 for the phone. It’s literally in his backpack on silent all the time except to charge every several days. He’ll use it to text me or call when he’s with his dad. He takes it when he goes over to a friend’s house or whether. It’s not fancy so it can get a bit beat up. My younger one got his watch, which I gave him at age 8. Also always on silent and only sends and receives texts and calls from contacts I put in.
Yep truth. I hope I can wait till my kids are teenagers before I hand them unfettered, unmonitored, access to the internet in their pockets. That shit is terrifying
>School shootings are common enough that kids actually have to think about texting their parents to let them
Many parents are extremely vocal about this issue and demand access to their children via phones.
On iPhones at least a parent can configure downtime settings so the kid can only call or text specific contacts during given hours. I’d guess Android has something similar.
Like most of these things… it comes back to the parents.
Blame parents. Parents all get their kids the phones and tell schools they want their kids to have their phones on them at all times.
Parents are the downfall of education in this country. All these dumbass parents are fucking destroying education.
Saying you want your kid to have their phone on them (not confiscated) is not the same as saying you want them to be openly using it during class. As a parent my biggest worry is school shootings. So yes I will blame parents, the ones who don't properly lock up their guns.
Yeah except that screen addiction is a real thing and when you try to take away an addict’s drug they flip out. Plenty of teachers have been physically assaulted to the point of having broken bones, fractures, and traumatic brain injuries because they tried to confiscate phones from screen-addicted students.
Many school boards across North America didn’t want the liability of teachers getting injured or students being arrested so they opted for the path of least resistance, which is: a teacher can ask a student to put away their phone, but they should not physically take it from the student.
Parents are to blame here on many fronts:
1. Why did so many parents allow their kids to get so screen addicted in the first place?
2. Why did so many parents raise kids who think it is okay to physically attack a teacher?
3. Why did so many parents expect ONE teacher to be able to control 30 students using their phones at the same time?
4. Why did so many parents fight schools so much and insist that their child NEEDS their phone on them at all times?
5. Why did so many parents expect their kid to be able to self-regulate their phone use when they are bored at school?
There are millions of parents who seriously fucked up their kid’s education—HARD—by giving them unlimited, unrestricted access to an extremely addictive device.
My response to your comment ends here.
However, because I feel so passionately about this topic, I continued to expand on this issue below. Only keep reading if you feel like it.
And what has all this screen time/addiction been linked to?
- steadily declining test scores in literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, speech and well as declining language skills, fine motor skills, digital literacy (we didn’t see that one coming!), and social interaction skills
- skyrocketing rates of obesity among children and teens (much of this is attributed to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. The average teen spends 8.5 hours per day on screens!)
- extremely high rates of attention and focus disorders and steadily decreasing attention spans among the general population.
- chronically sleep-deprived children and teens (which is absolutely horrible for their brain development, ability to learn, and regulate their emotions)
- record numbers of students with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, chronic fatigue, loneliness, social anxiety, as well as self-harm/suicide ideation/and suicide, etc…
Some people will argue that it isn’t the phones and that the effects of societal collapse are having a profound impact on the younger generation.
But society has been steadily marching towards collapse for decades. The last 100
years alone have seen two world wars, The Great Depression, devastating global famine, nuclear threat/The Cold War, terrorist attacks, school shootings, and the Environmental Movement has been in full force since the 1970s sounding the alarm about acid rain, the hole in the ozone, animal extinctions, deforestation, pollution, etc...
And yet, despite the steady march towards collapse that has been happening for decades upon decades, an entire generation of teens suddenly began to sharply decline in every aspect of mental health, physical health and education right around 2010 — precisely when they all started getting smartphones and just a few years after social media became part of daily life for most people.
If you really want to see collapse, talk to a teen. Ask them how they really feel about cell phones. I taught high school kids for 17 years before I couldn’t take it anymore—it made me too sad. I asked 1000s of kids to share their thoughts on social media and cell phones (I was just trying to make their writing and discussion topics relevant and interesting for them). They told me:
- They felt completely addicted to their phones and wish they could stop using them but didn’t know how to.
- they said they felt like they didn’t have any fun memories because most of their lives have been spent watching things on their phone
- they said that they were pressured to start sexting and send nudes in middle school (that’s grades 6, 7, and 8!)
- they said that the best day of the year was the day the WiFi went down because they spent the whole day actually talking to their friends rather than them being distracted by their phones
- they say they usually don’t fall asleep until 1-3 AM most school nights because they are on their phones or gaming
I have never seen such awkward, scared, shut down, depressed kids with so much anxiety about getting 90s in all their classes even though they are reading at Grade 6 levels. They are definitely worried about the planet and about the economy and they hate the path the world is on but that isn’t what THEY tell me is really hurting them the most—it is those motherfucking phones.
When the older generations complain about the youth I find it so ironic. Like who tf do you think raised these kids? You did dumbass.
It's wholly on the people who raised those kids.
Can’t just take shit away anymore. Can hardly discipline kids at all. I’ve seen parents acting like fools at school events, at drop off, pickup, etc. Admin says nothing. They don’t correct anyone when policies or rules or guidelines are broken right in front of their faces. It’s insane.
>When did phones become ok in class?
Teachers often have no choice. There have been some recent, high-profile cases of student-on-teacher violence due to teachers attempting to confiscate phones. Often the administration will support the students keeping the phone especially if they are on an IEP and/or need to be in touch with their parents.
I learned how to fix a design flaw in my Canon Megatank printer from a Filipino YouTuber. The design flaw is the lack of a one way valve for pressurization of the ink lines and the black ink line would back up with air after the printer sitting idle for just 3 days.
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I'll shamefully reply with a previous comment I made a while ago that made people sad...
I've had this fantasy since I was young that my generation and the others following us would radically transform politics worldwide for the betterment of everyone. What I actually learned is that every generation is full of greedy idiots who will happily fuck over each other in exchange for personal gain.
Bad news.
[https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/enfuturama/images/4/4c/President\_Richard\_Nixon%27s\_Head.png/revision/latest?cb=20210821084700](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/enfuturama/images/4/4c/President_Richard_Nixon%27s_Head.png/revision/latest?cb=20210821084700)
I thought it would at least get easier with genX but they are still trying to please imaginary boomers that aren't even in the room.
They just hold the rest of us in place. Millenials still need to struggle along with genX to get them there and they may not be emotionally difficult but their sense of my turn and ego may as well have us forever in the 1980s.
Also thinking they should have solutions but their business has not even nearly enough scale to be involved in lol. It's like they can't hear past what they want even if it doesn't exist or they have zero expertise in it. They just waste money at a ridiculous rate. Yes amazon has that, no that would require changing your entire business model and rehiring everyone including yourself. No I'm not being difficult Susan.
I still have hope, if the uneducated Virginia coal miners could pull off the labor battles they did then so can our fried youths.....plus they have far less patience for disrespecting authority figures
The coal miners may have been uneducated in a formal, book smart, sense. However, they were extremely resourceful, resilient, independent, fiercely loyal, and handled guns their entire lives. I’d much rather go to battle with my uneducated hillbilly friends than a group of 21st Century digital boys.
Considering half the battlefield is digital now im still hopeful, plus all the blue collar types that get amped up for video games now I bet we could bridge the gap.....
Agree with everything you said except last point. How will they become consumer slaves if they don’t have jobs to earn money? I think the reality will be an impoverished, starving underclass living off government issued food coupons in slums, while the elite live in gated communities.
Personally I think that there are always opposites to the same degree. The mindless consumer slaves we'll be opposed by people with more desperation than we have now and that will create revolutionaries. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.
Yeah...when I was a kid, if my parents merely thought I had misbehaved or done something wrong, I got my ass beat (literally). My mom would say "I'll spank your ass until it's beet red!" and she did just that. So a lot of kids of my generation were too afraid of not following the rules or doing what we were supposed to. Now, millenial parents know the harm of that parenting since they experienced it, so the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction with extremely permissible parenting becoming the norm.
Yup, you're exactly right about that pendulum. Fear-based control of kids definitely isn't the way to go, but being overly-permissive and afraid to even (non-violently) discipline kids is bad, too.
It's very clearly a systemic problem that can't be directly attributed to anyone.
It's not like millennial parents and teachers are all just choosing to be uniquely horrible parents and teachers.
What's driving this?
Could be the fact that both parents need to work in an average/median household to pay the bills? Resulting in less time spent providing attention to their children's unique emotional and educational needs?
Could it be the fact that they were raised with direct access to a device that is all but clinically proven to destroy the attention span and ability to focus of grown adults, never mind toddlers?
For the older ones could it be the subconscious *(and sometimes conscious)* awareness that there effectively is no real future for them thanks to climate change and rampant late-stage capitalist wealth inequality?
This is the answer. Bravo.
Blaming individuals while saying nothing about the environment and system they live in, which is being actively manipulated to serve the purpose of capital accumulation, serves absolutely no purpose.
"Competition may be the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of humanity." Until we shake off the notion that humans are inherently greedy and selfish, we will keep hurtling towards collapse and pointing and blaming each other till the end.
I homeschooled my older daughter her entire life, and this year she decided she wanted to try public school for ninth grade so I signed her up. Every time she tells me about her English class, a little piece of my soul dies. They don't read any actual books for class. They read a non-fiction excerpt occasionally, but mostly they just do worksheets where the punctuation will be missing and they have to correct it. They each have to read a book of their own choosing once per semester and give a book report. Once in a while the teacher will have them write a single paragraph on a topic like, "My Favorite Sport" or "My Favorite Animal."
That's it. That's the entire class. For ninth grade.
She told me the teacher had to tell the other kids that they aren't allowed to pick Diary of a Wimpy Kid books for their book report anymore because literally everyone except my daughter chose them first semester.
If she'd remained homeschooled, my daughter would have been starting college-level literary analysis this year and getting into Shakespeare, along with a couple dozen other books. Knowing what she's doing instead, well, I'd be lying if I said I'm not crying on the inside. But as long as she keeps her grades up and her mental health doesn't take a nosedive, I'm letting it remain her choice.
The kids who have been in these schools from day one are fucked, though.
Wow, things have really changed. In my day, 9th grade English had us reading a book a month and doing reports on it. I remember reading Cannery Row and Animal Farm, and having a whole unit on how commercials are propaganda and this is How. We spent a whole month on that. This was a public high school in northern california.
They're basically graphic novels for elementary kids, from what I remember. My daughter read them in fourth or fifth grade, I think. From what she told me, the kids pick them because they're the only books in the high school library easy enough for them to read.
My daughter picked a Stephen King book for her book report this semester, so it's not like their school library doesn't have decent books. Most of the books there the kids just literally cannot read.
Not to brag, but I was reading Stephen King, V.C. Andrews, Anne Rice, and Nancy Drew by the time I started middle school (I love dark-sided stuff).
My mother, who was divorced and worked minimum-wage at two jobs did not fuck around when it came to my schooling and because of it, I was always ahead in reading and writing. At 35, I still receive high praises for my writing and analytical abilities.
Now math? I've never been good at math. No matter how much I would study or what tutoring I received, my brain is just broken when it comes to math.
Great job on your daughter!!!
It doesn't matter, we're talking about people who only know and to know *one book*, *the book*. They know that other fantasy stories are competing with their own.
It doesn’t take much to get people like that riled up. We are talking about the same type of people that think Kevin Bacon is the villain of Footloose.
I never read the series because it came after my time and super popular things annoy me but I know lots of people got really into it so that's a shame.
The later books are. No one's going to argue that they're stunning literary achievements, but the HP books do get progressively more dark and complex as you go on in the series.
...No, even deathly hallows only tops out at a 6th or maybe (maybe) 7th grade level. 10th grade level is Brave new world, 1984, mice and men, Fahrenheit 451, slaughterhouse V.
The grade levels for books are fairly subjective, though. For example, the lexile for Deathly Hallows is technically higher than "The Old Man and the Sea" because of the way they calculate reading levels, but clearly Hemingway is going to be more difficult for teenagers to understand than Harry Potter. There's a lot more than just a book's supposed grade level that goes into choosing appropriate books for a given lit class.
I'm sorry, but even considering what you have just written here, there is no scenario outside of a class full of kids with accommodations, where a 10th grade lit class should be assigned Harry Potter. Zero. None. The fact you think it would be an acceptable pick is just another example of how the education system and it's standards of rigour are literally crumbling around us in real time. 100 points deducted from Gryffindor.
I studied literature in college and I've been homeschooling for over ten years now, and I've never been a fan of literary snobbery. There are lessons to be learned from almost any book, depending on how good the teacher is and how engaged the students are. The fact that you don't seem to understand this shows me that you know nothing about education beyond "classics good, YA books bad."
Even leaving aside the very relevant facts that you will find more complex vernacular and sentence structure in the books I listed, the works I named also impart a coherent message about society at large that Harry Potter is lacking. Any examination of the world of Harry Potter and it's parallels to our reality will wind up incoherent by most charitable interpretations and racist/classist at it's worst. It isn't snobbery. It's about trying to teach kids how excel at reading and writing. You do that by showing the BEST examples. Not your guilty pleasure. Also just to note, you homeschooling your kids below standards doesn't mean everyone else has to normalize it.
You didn't refute my apparently invalid(?) point and instead chose to go for personal attacks. Now, I know I run the risk of being accused of using big words again, but at the English department at my university, they called that ad hominem. Although it's Latin, that's not a Harry Potter spell.
I don't know what to tell you. If you think Hemingway used complex sentence structure, it's going to be difficult for us to have a conversation about literature.
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Nowhere did I say I "assigned my homeschooled tenth grader Harry Potter." My six-year-old reads Harry Potter for fun, though. I said that I don't like literary snobbery, and that a good teacher can teach meaningful lessons with any book.
"The later books are. No one's going to argue that they're stunning literary achievements, but the HP books do get progressively more dark and complex as you go on in the series." - You in response to me saying that Harry Potter wasn't 10th grade reading level
"Nowhere did I say I "assigned my homeschooled tenth grader Harry Potter." My six-year-old reads Harry Potter for fun, though. I said that I don't like literary snobbery, and that a good teacher can teach meaningful lessons with any book." -You just now claiming you wouldn't assign Harry Potter to your 10th grader.
Are we done here? Or does William Shakespeare need to get involved as well?
Well why not? After all, YOU chimed in saying it was an appropriate choice. You're trying to make an absurdity out of me when I just threw your own words back at you. In a thread about declining literacy rates no less! You're right about one thing: nobody gives a shit and that's a shame because you are hilarious with your deflections.
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I mean I don’t think there’s a problem reading smaller books as an adult, maybe they just enjoy the story or maybe they have a nostalgic connection to it? Of course some people could just not know how to read
> I don’t think there’s a problem reading smaller books as an adult,
first of all how could they possibly have a nostalgia connection if they're barely 14?
second of all, these people aren't adults
I teach a K-5 afterschool STEM program and even among the kids who self select to be in a “robotics” or “rocket science” program instead of the general “supervised time on the playground,” the amount of 4th and 5th graders that cannot read at all is damning. More than that, none of the kids have any willingness to do things themselves. We had an activity where we were building little robot kits and about half of the class wouldn’t even open the ziplock bag on their own.
>More than that, none of the kids have any willingness to do things themselves. We had an activity where we were building little robot kits and about half of the class wouldn’t even open the ziplock bag on their own.
This is what's so eerie to me, this sort of "learned helplessness" that seems to be growing in kids. In an adult, this could be a sign of serious depression--I know because I've been there, where it was a struggle to do even the most basic of tasks, like making coffee. Where the brain just "gives up" on every minor obstacle. This sort of stuff happening with kids seems really worrisome.
I used to read full series of books back in elementary school within weeks, got really into AR points. Then at some point I just stopped being able to read books at all, even short stories. Just have no attention span for them anymore
This is something that recently helped me break back into reading. (I used to devour novels in days, then I just stopped over the years.) There was a warm day, so I went outside and sat in the sun with my book. It was a quiet, peaceful setting with no distractions. You might even want to leave your phone inside. If the weather's not good, I would drive down to my local library and find a spot to sit.
I think just changing the setting is really important, to set your focus on something for a few hours. I also cleaned up my den area and made a proper reading spot with good lighting, to get myself away from the computer. It's not easy at first, but having a separate spot for this helps your brain switch gears better.
Teachers posting here about students in high school who have become totally unprepared for grade level math and reading in recent years.
We need a flair for education, since it appears to be yet another canary in the coal mine of the collapse to come.
Humans getting dumber + computers getting smarter= collapse of human civilization.
We could have worked on robots to do menial labor, but instead we built computer minds to control human slave drones. It’s been a nice run, humanity, but you only have yourself to blame.
In addition to the plummeting standards for students, the fact that so many teachers on this post talk about being unwilling to continue with it, preferring to work at retail shops like Target, is also a very bad sign for our education system and our society.
Some counterpoints are that reddit is an anonymous platform for misanthropes to vent.
"Good teachers" have always been rare. Reddit just collects the bad ones and gives them little microphones.
I say that as a bad teacher myself.
I acknowledge there is a selection bias at play, but a signal is a signal, and I suspect it's a little hyperbolic to claim they're all misanthropes. Please correct me if this was obvious in your original message.
My guess is just that society is changing rapidly, and the education models that we're using were barely adequate to the task to begin with. So things *are* getting worse in schools, for both teachers and students, but it's harder to agree on why that is, let alone what to do about it.
look i know reddit is full of miserable people who love to complain (myself included) but i cannot emphasize to you enough that the kids are actually NOT OKAY AT ALL. at least the ones in america aren’t.
i travel to different schools for my job and work with kids k-college. i graduated from high school in 2018 and college in 2022. shit is *drastically* different from when i was in school and i’m not even 24 yet. i still keep up with of a bunch of friends in my teaching cohort that i graduated with and they’re saying the same things. across all grades, all over the country.
the biggest thing i see is a lack of boundaries/understanding of how to treat other people, especially people who are supposed to be authority figures. kids have always been kids but when i was in school most people knew when to shut the fuck up and act right because if we didn’t our parents would rip us a new one.
kids now literally do not care at all and neither do their parents. they will call you a fuckass stupid hoe for asking that they participate in school. i had a kid have an absolute MELTDOWN at me when i was student teaching because i asked her to open up her chromebook and work on the assignment. i don’t think we didn’t even heard back from her parents and me/my mentor teacher tried calling/emailing a few times. to be honest, i don’t blame the kids for not caring or trying. i just wish they weren’t so violent and that their emotions weren’t so volatile. teaching is scary now :(
Other counterpoint, this is an American problem primarily. Australian standards are also going down but the US is very much losing educational quality. Most other developed nations are not. If anything, they’re getting better, because scientific research continues to further understanding of how to teach different kids better, individually.
Can’t say it doesn’t point to a US collapse though
Good point. Though the decline of US empire is probably a good thing in most of the collapse scenarios explored in this subreddit.
Sort of along the lines of the slump in emissions that we saw in the early pandemic.
As a student (14 years old), I’m trying my hardest. The system of education seems outdated. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I can’t say it’s entirely the fault of brainrot content or children being stupid. The current method of education just hasn’t adapted
Thank you for your input. I definitely don’t blame the kids, although the teacher in that post kind of does. I know it’s not your all’s fault, you’re just kids!
You’re right that it’s a failure of systems. Education is underfunded, parents are overworked, and students are inundated with addictive content from corporations that are investing billions of dollars to tap into and control our psychologies.
I see students as the victims in all this. I’m sorry we’ve failed you all so badly—you deserve better.
I think students have always been unwilling to learn to some degree. Learning is hard work and people are lazy in general.
I don’t see the nature of people changing very much at all over time, it’s everything else around them that has changed so much.
Do you think students are less willing to learn than they used to be? Do you get the sense that students feel like education won’t pay off in the end or how would you explain the apathy?
I mean I can’t say anything about past generations because…y’know I wasn’t a part of them but I’m fairly certain they are at least less respectful about it. I don’t care how much I don’t like my teacher actively swearing at them or disrespecting them is just very strange to me. But it happens, probably more than it used to because of things like internet “challenges” which range from stealing to endangering your friends
So you have a sense of respect for the social contract. I would bet 90% of your classmates don’t even know what that is nor have been taught common decency.
I don’t know of any “social contract” (I’m autistic and don’t pick up on things like this easily) I just think disrespecting the people who are there to help you learn and improve is a shitty thing to do
Being respectful is part of the social contract. For many it is simply treat others and you wish to be treated. Civilly, have manners, consideration and so on. Sounds like you know it. You just didn’t know it had a name.
They're still average humans.
It would be nice if kids in school realized the value of learning for collapse, not for a "normal life" promised future. If they would realize that, they'd know that it's time to start learning and developing many more skills, in a generalist sense.
Think of it as your music playlists. If they're not with you, on you, when the internet goes off, you will lose that music.
When you learn, you get portable knowledge and skills, like having a nice mp3 player and playlist inside your head. You could still fail at school while doing this, since it can be a different goal than what the school wants, but you probably won't fail.
I certainly don’t disagree with you. When public school was not working for my son in the late 90s I put him into a Montessori school. He worked with older kids and younger kids. They were directed but allowed to learn in the manner that best suited them. I watched his love for education and his base knowledge explode in that school. Unfortunately schools like that are either very expensive now or fail at meeting the standards they once did. I don’t know what needs to change but kids being unsupervised and left to raise themselves is definitely not helping things.
I would make the equation: Human Growth = Human Potential / Outsourced Potential.
Learning stuff takes a lot of energy. So we like to outsource stuff. Most of what we learn, is said, will not be used in later live anyway. Luckily we build our society on professionals who do put all that learned stuff into practice. More specialization, more growth in society. The problem is that it gets more diverse and sometimes missing an overlap. As critical thinking skills get tossed away along with those pesky equations we similarly get mismatches between knowledge domains and already see some tearing (vaccines) where there's a mistrust between those with knowledge and those without. I guess it's not so much a gap in intelligence but a gap in knowledge domains.
It's like: I have no idea how to make fire with just a tree, even when I think I understand that video I watched. I may try and fail. But who has time for that and why persist when I can just use a lighter. I already have a bunch in storage for when we get a dirty fan. As a result I'll probably won't have fire when this society of cards collapses. It’s been a nice run but I only have myself to blame.
>*I think I am going to teach 10th graders to read from scratch.*
I think that's wise. Good luck. Take care.
im a highschooler in online school, its true
im definitely only about a grade level behind in English (9th grade, im in 10th this is still bad because my English knowledge hasn't grown at all in years) but for all the other classes its terrible
i dont have the attention span to read things in biology or history and i have no idea whats happening in geometry at all
i really wish i had my attention span back because i miss learning but its so hard. i dont know if i should feel relieved or frightened that my experience with school right now isn't unique and a lot of other highschoolers are falling behind
atp i dont have very good aspirations for the future, im just hoping to get high school credits and be done
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Ex high school teacher, can confirm. My kids, even the ones who get all the work done (incidentally, 'getting work done' is equated with success in a public school) were largely functionally illiterate. It wasn't so much that they couldn't read words, it was that they could not derive any meaning from text. they could often read a passage aloud (with obvious difficulty) but were at a complete loss as to what it meant. other than that, I had many kids who were at around a 5th grade reading level or who literally could not get through 'big' words.
I’ve always been an incredibly avid reader, and am a writer also. My attention span has been *destroyed* by this shit. I can feel it zapping out as if it were a physical sensation. Our sweet soft brilliant minds have zero defense against it— it’s addictive. I’ve watched the smartest most focused people in my life become addicted to it. If they can’t resist it, how is a 13-year old going to? I used to read constantly, now I buy books and they sit there. It’s honestly horrific.
I'm shocked at how fast I read and how little time it takes. 5 min of reading is more valuable than me watching 5 min of some shitty video. Yet all I do is consume and engage in entertainment. Fml
The smartest people in the world have been working nonstop for the last 15 years to make it all as addictive as possible. It’s not surprising they’re succeeding.
Im with you there. I used to just have a few books in a constantly cycling pile that I would read through in a month or two.
My pile is now more like library of good but unfulfilled intentions.
I'm 15, and used tiktok from the age of 12. It absolutely ruined my attention span. I often found myself wondering why it was so hard for me to sit down and just revise or focus on anything. Surprise surprise, when I deleted these addictive apps a couple months back, I've found it easier to focus on hobbies: programming, guitar, etc.
I can't help but feel like there's irreversible damage though. I can force myself to focus but it seems harder than it should be. I reinstalled Instagram two weeks ago, and for the week I had it installed I did so much less with my life, instead I just scrolled on reels for hours. All of this, and I was 12 when I started consuming this content, I can't imagine how it affects younger kids with less developed brains.
I've always been the person to try at least to an extent in school, but then again I live in England and I don't know how it differs to the situation in America. It's almost certainly short form content that's causing kids to not care about school, some of our brains are nonexistent at this point..
One thing I know for certain is that the only way to prevent this getting worse is having a ban on social media for kids under a specific age: maybe not reddit, but the more addictive apps. Parents just need to start caring a bit more.
Totally feel this.
Also even Elon Fucking Musk is clearly addicted to twitter/social media…what hope to poor kids have?
I don’t think Elon is actually all that intelligent (in fact I’d wager he is exceedingly average in all but manipulation hype and fraud) but he is basically the worlds richest person, he won the lottery of this late stage capitalist life where he could literally afford anything or any experience he could ever want…but he spends his days shitposting on twitter and getting angry at stupid shit (for 29 hours straight sometimes lol).
He should have nothing else to prove or care about in the world but he wastes his life being chronically online, it’s honestly sad and pathetic.
But for depressed/poor/disadvantaged people these quick little hits of dopamine from social media are all we can hope for.
I know if I was a kid now I would be addicted to my phone and wouldn’t have achieved what I have.
I feel this! I got sucked into tiktok for a few years and it obliterated my attention span. I could feel my intellectual abilities simply disappearing, and chronic brain fog. I feel like my brain is only just starting to function more how it used to after deleting it 6 months ago.I only allow myself to use reddit as social media now and I have regained brain clarity, focus on work, ability to engage with the people around me, read books and find enjoyment in menial tasks. I don't see how a child's brain could get themselves out of that space, it scares me!
I read \~100 books a year in a very broad range of genres (right now I'm reading both "The Autobiography of Ben Franklin" and "There is No Antimemetics Division," lol) and I go in cycles where I'll read a lot for a week or two and then not as much for a week or so, and it always amazes me how hard it is to regain my ability to focus after an especially light week. I've been reading heavily since I was four years old, and now at forty if the effects of being online too much leave me seriously struggling, the kids who have been raised with phones in their faces since infancy and no real grasp on phonics are truly screwed.
When the time comes that a government that wants to survive *has* to make hard decisions, what those hard decisions will be when it comes to handling those who *won't* be educated?
Won't be?
The issue isn't one of won't. It's an issue that for certain people the instant gratification offered by the internet at a young age has rewired their dopamine system.
This is most apparent in younger people but the older generations are also falling victim to it as well. If you were prone to things like gambling or chemical addiction, which covers almost 60% of Americans, you are instead most likely addicted to screen time now.
The folks these teachers are talking about are an issue not because they "won't" be educated by their own choice, but that they cannot be educated because their parents rewired their brains reward system as a developmental child through instant gratification and screen time as a distraction.
Teenagers are the way they are, in three out of four cases, because their parents raised them to be that way.
Parent gives child instant dopamine box.
Child gets addicted to dopamine box.
Parent tries to take away the box.
Child throws an absolute tantrum because literally addicted.
Parent to exhausted from life to deal with it gives child box back....
Do we see the issue here? The simplest and most elementary understanding of psychology shows that we are quite literally training and enforcing this behavior. Positive reinforcement is dramatically better than negative. And when the child acts up and they're REWARDED for it no wonder these kids are un-teachable..
Parents push back and tell me that I just wouldn't understand, how its so hard to rase a kid.. okay sure, but then what do you expect when your literally enforcing the behavior...
These devices and apps are nearly impossible to put down for adults that grew up without them 24/7. How is a child with significantly lower inhibitions and impulse control expected to regulate themselves?
They _wont.._ and it's only going to get worse.
I often visit my parents for Sunday dinner and I remember years ago my father refusing to get a 'dumb phone' for a job.
Now both my parents are on their smartphone more often than I am. They used to read books, do crafts, read the newspaper, but now all they do is stare into their phones.
They like to think they are more immune to tech than kids. Wishful thinking.
something like a cross between Idiocracy and Elysium is my bet, what do you think?
or wait - some sort of indentured servitude company towns where you work to live and eat there and have electricity and plumbing - better work 40+ hours if you want it all.
A LOT of Americans can’t spell and do not know basic grammar. That was the culture shock I wasn’t prepared for when moving here decades ago. I can’t even imagine how bad our schools have gotten since then.
If only there was some place they could learn to read and behave properly ...
They complain about this like it's someone else the one who is getting pay to do the job. I don't understand, who do they expect to fix this? The parents? They are not the ones getting pay to do it, and if the parents are fuck-ups, then what? It's the job of schools to elevate the population, specially the poor, so every generation is better than the last.
Ask for better pay, ask for smaller groups, ask what ever you need to do the job but, for the love of god, don't act like it's not the teachers job to educate the youth both in basic skills and in proper behavior.
If kids don't know how to read, it's the teacher's fault. You're a teacher, teach the kids how to read. And I fully support teachers, but that's why we send kids to school.
The vast majority of parents do reading homework with their kids. I'm one of them. My kid can read because the teachers taught my kid how to read. It's weird how a teacher is going to complain about their kids not knowing things. This shows that kids should clearly be held back and early teachers aren't doing their job.
Hey everyone — this is the most effective/worst kind of propaganda…the kind that builds on truth (kids are incapable of reading at absurdly high grade levels) and slips in a weird “factoid” in the middle hoping you miss it (like, wowza, somehow standards-less home schooling is better than fixing standardized education).
This co-opting is happening a lot and we have to reckon with it.
To avoid doubt: I am not a teacher and even think our schools are failing our kids…but “everybody homeschool where anything goes instead of doing the collective work to fix the way we’re teaching the next generation” is a fucking oddball statement from the OP who’s got three posts and besides this one, that includes one in r/homeschool
Let’s fix our system — it really needs it, for sure — not fucking abandon it.
The 'truth' they present is also not exactly rigorous. Like r/Teachers is not an unbiased sub of random teachers. They have been complaining about kids for years, some of them don't exactly give the vibe they like kids either. It's like blindly trusting stats from the redpill (an over exaggeration I know).
And while the literacy isn't great, what are they comparing it to? an ideal rate or what the reality of literacy is like in the US? because literacy has been going up, and still is to a degree, for decades. like saying 30% of Americans is illiterate is bad, but saying that it is now 30% down from 40% changes the story entirely.
Public education has globally been arguably one of the greatest social equalizers in history. It's struggling in part due to the rate of technology is too fast to keep up with. I am in education research you can't just implement a change in response to something like chatGPT, it takes years of preliminary research, then classroom trialing, then getting the political will before a new policy is implemented. At that point new teachers are trained in the method, and hopefully older ones also choose to learn the new process. By which point technology has made 5x the progress. It is also struggling in my opinion at least by the fact that education is being attacked on all sides by efforts to gut it with metrics, criticism from people who don't consider the full picture (i.e quoting literacy stats without a full appreciation of how they came about), and a desire to move education towards models that streamline kids into becoming a workforce rather than full individuals. It isn't helped when people who would rather homeschool their kids for reasons that sometimes is not the educational attainment of their child (the success of which is hugely reliant on income and the parents own educational attainment. In effect, it might work if the parents are highly educated but even then its not a panacea).
I feel subs like r/Teachers are tricky because I get where they are coming from, but people who have an axe to grind with public education and frankly education in general are going to manipulate what is more or less venting. And then we get posts like this where the nuance is lost and suddenly the crisis in education is being 'solved' by people who just don't know the full picture well enough to solve it. In effect the 'just take the phones away' solution which discounts how kids:
\- Will Find ways to circumnavigate it
\- Need to learn how to interact with this technology because it isn't going away
\- Know that teachers cant actually take their property
\- Can tell that some teachers will enforce rules differently and lean into that.
\- Know how to replace phones with other screens.
In effect any attempt to take the phones away requires taking all forms of technology away, so no using laptops in school, enforcing phones bans during breaks, a greater limitation of using technology with homework or assignments. And then you have to ask the question of how do you teach critical literacy in the 21st century without technology, because that is where 21st century literacy happens. Some of the comments here I just want to go, "do you think educational professionals haven't thought about that?" this problem is very complicated and its not going to be solved easily. And its not helped by people taking a vents from teachers and forming a selective crisis to push their own narrative of what needs to happen.
I wish I could give you an award. I wonder if these are sockpuppet accounts trying to demonize public schools. A lot of content on reddit has been shown to be fake too so it wouldn't surprise me
All the way back in 2017-2018 I was shocked that Cal State University students didn’t know what nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and prepositions were. We were all seniors in college and my teacher had to take a month so that we could go back over stuff I had learned in 3rd grade.
No idea but I was stunned. I thought I was going to go through that class, write a few papers and go graduate. Little did I know is I’d be going back to 2nd grade
In my area functional illiteracy was encouraged. I got punished multiple times for "reading outside my level" as a kid. I can imagine that would be very discouraging to kids who struggled.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned this, but there's been a growing trend in teaching reading away from phonics and towards a system called "three-cueing" that teaches children to guess unknown words by context, grammar and the first letter. It's been around since the 1980s but has been growing, especially in the USA, as the way that kids are taught to read. There's a podcast called "Sold A Story" that goes into some depth about it.
Some kids will blunder through and learn to read anyway, but a lot of kids will have difficulty because they've learned to do a quick scan and guess what's actually been said. Their reading ability is tested by their ability to read the same teaching materials that keep things nice and simple and have pictures, so the fact they can't read words in isolation doesn't become obvious until later.
This is really the stupidest timeline. When did decisions to do the dumbest thing possible start? The 80s? 90s? I know people cry capitalism but really, the only answer I can think of is that it’s lobbyists or politicians with financial conflicts of interest because man do they keep choosing the dumbest ’solutions’ possible. Ugh!
I see something similar where I work all the time. Bean counters and upper management implementing the stupidest ideas to prove they've accomplished something and to garner attention. They destroy what isn't broken adding many levels of complexity making issues worse, just so they can have their name on it.
Recent example #1: We had some hand injuries across the company from hammers. A VP decided we need to reduce the number of hammers, all hammers have to be registered, and checked out from a centralized location (up to 30 minutes away form where they are needed). All of a sudden we are having damaged equipment and more hand injuries from heavy pieces of metal/rocks/monkey wrenches.
Example #2: Some VP decided kaizen was the way to go. It's a system used in factories to eliminate waste in time materials etc... It was to be implemented across the company. It's great for repetitive tasks, in a research lab that tests a different item every job it makes everyone want to pull their hair out. "How long does it take to do X?" part 1 - 20 minutes, part 2 4 hours, part 3 - 16 days. It's never the same and can't be standardized. They were breathing down my neck for months until I put together a massively complex Excel sheet with thousands of variables that showed how F'd what they were asking was.
I'm sure it's similar with those that have their fingers in education, along with some possibly nefarious reasons things are going to crap.
It might not be as common knowledge as you expect. I wasn’t taught that way and wasn’t aware of it as a phenomenon until I first heard about it on this sub. At the time, I was flabbergasted that anyone would ever think it was a good idea.
I don't remember how I was taught reading growing up, I just remember that we weren't taught phonics and we also were taught to read by context, and I didn't have any issues with it. I think less kids have issues with it than they do with the new phonics method today. My son is taught phonics now and he can't spell anything correctly, can barely write sentences, etc. In my opinion, we should go back to teaching the old way and ditch phonics, which isn't fun anyway and seems to make reading more of a chore. Plus it does not work well with the English language.
This smacks of common core. Both ideas seem sound, but they are functionally shortcuts. Kids who familiarize themselves and get good at math will learn the "tricks"
of math that common core seeks to impart, but without that foundational math to inform them, they have no context and common core will only confuse, it won't teach. Similarly for contextual reading, that's something that will come naturally to someone who learned reading traditionally and has already built up years of linguistic context to bounce ideas off... side note, but for any parents ITT: you can still get by pretty well with Hooked on Phonics.
I'm not certain this is as new as the teacher posting seems to think. I can remember news reports in the early 1990s mentioning the existence of high school graduates who couldn't read. Some education experts claim that part of the reason that college degrees or alternately trade school degrees are now required for all but the most basic service industry jobs is that many employers have concluded that a high school degree is not a guarantee that someone is ready for the work world.
There's a point made in the thread that kids can just use text-to-speech and speech-to-text to communicate. If you can't read, your phone can read it to you, and if you can't write, your phone can also write it for you.
I am all for assistive technologies. They're great, even for abled people, for example, sometimes my eyes are tired, so listen to the audio version of an article.
It's not the same. I can, and do go back, but not nearly as much as I do when reading. And you can easily scan to find relevant information.
But leaving all that aside, imagine for a moment, the vocabulary of someone who has never read in their life. I'm betting an average of 50x less words, with a range of 10x to 100x.
Now imagine their pronunciation and the resulting spelling accuracy.
This mirrors something I was reading about Chinese, where apparently younger people aren't as well-versed in actually reading and writing the language because they use apps that use pinyin (phonetic system, like "ni hao" which automatically converts to 你好)
Language? I just mumble lazily to an AI that converts it to real speech. The AI, using its new video making abilities, transforms all written and spoken words around me into little movies that are injected directly into my visual cortex.
can confirm, im married to a high school science teacher in a major US city and she says the same thing. the education of our children is being severely neglected.
My theory is we've moved away from a reading culture into a video culture.
My girlfriend teaches at a university and part of their training consists of learning how to reach students who don't read with visuals.
I don't want to sound like a whiny old man, but it is heartbreaking to me. I've always believed that reading is one of the most important things any of us can do. It's the best way to transfer information in my experience.
5 minutes of reading a thorough and well-written article gives me more information than listening to an anchor ramble on for an hour. Same with Youtube tutorials vs. written guides.
It's not just children, though. It's everyone. The world is moving away from reading. And we're losing nuance in the process.
I'm a software engineer, in my mid 30s, and I worried for years that the next generation would flood the market and reduce my value.
Well, now there's a massive shortage of devs, and those that are hired are absolute morons. Of course I speak generally, but my fears were unfounded.
If a kid can't read in the 10th grade then the pandemic wasn't the reason - kid should have been reading just fine prior to the plague years just needs to hone some grammar and add to their vocab. That kid has never been able to read and the parents don't care.
No Child Left Behind - no matter the cost.
I'm quite late to this thread, but as a fourth-year undergraduate, I can say that things aren't much better in the academic realm. For instance, I'm taking a philosophy course as an elective, which is supposed to be a 400-level class. I would estimate that a good third of the students can't go a minute without mindlessly scrolling on their phones, or they give up and open their MacBooks with about six different tabs of activities. This is usually in open view of the professor as they lecture, almost as if they have him playing on background like LOFI while they scroll on X or something.
Only two or three students regularly raise their hands, making the conversation kind of dull. I try to contribute, but the majority of the class time is spent with the professor explaining pretty basic concepts to these few students, while the rest of the class scrolls on their devices. Despite the professor's explicit no-device policy, most students seem willing to sacrifice a letter grade for some distraction.
It's odd because the professor claims this is one of the more talkative classes, which, if true, makes me sad for the overall state of academia. Most of my classes are like this, with no one talking and people staring blankly at the professor as if they're still in a Zoom class. I believe the pandemic was a devastating event for most people in my generation, and the effects are starting to show a few years later.
This professor sometimes has us do popcorn reading, and lets just say, the whole conversation i’ve reading about phonics completely dropping out sometime while I was in school makes total sense. I'm not sure about the impact of Covid, but there's definitely a noticeable difference in the general societal atmosphere post-Covid.
I was in and out of college from 2013 to 2019. There was a difference between my classes in 2013 compared to 2019. 2013, you'd have no one on their phone, maybe 1 or 2 people, everyone talked and participated in discussions and was generally congenial. 2016, election year, it was the same except for that the discussions became nastier and the students more hostile. When I went back for the fall semester in 2019 after not being in in-person classes for three years, no one talked. It was so eerie. Every single student would come into class and be on their phone before, during, and after class. No one spoke. When the teacher asked questions, I was the only one who spoke, and I could sense great hostility from others despite their silence. But no one said a word to eachother. I wonder what exactly the catalyst for this was.
Man, this is depressing. Back in high school in the 90s, I worked a summer job at a restaurant. There was an older guy in his 20s who worked in the kitchen and was illiterate - had to use colored stickers as cues for different foods to cook, temperature markers on the rotisserie, all put on by my boss. It was strange to me to encounter an illiterate adult, as I mistakenly assumed every adult I knew could read. Going through those stories on that sub saying 40% of their students can’t read? Or some at a 2nd grade level? Wtf are all of these people going to do for work? Get me a robot to dispense my meds in the nursing home, because these illiterate folks are gonna kill us all!
That appears to be English language literacy, the "illiterate" could be people who are fluent in Spanish but have English as a second language. With increasing numbers of immigrants from Latin America over the last 50 years, it makes sense that literacy would decrease.
I'm a HS science teacher in New York. It's not a complaint, it's simple fact. I'm not complaining about their 4th grade reading ability. What I hate is their miserable behavior, their daily habits of getting high, stupid interests like gaming or sneakers, or something even worse.
It's the most miserable job I've ever had, and when you are standing in a in public school amongst 30 kids every 47 minutes you then seen them grand image of the future. It's not bleak, it's far worse.., it's utter collapse of society.
Teaching is what led me down the rabbit hole to becoming collapse aware. I don’t know any teachers who aren’t concerned. It’s a pretty depressing job these days.
That thread, and all threads about children failing en masse in education, always depress me. I teared up reading that thread. I really mourn the failures both of the American education system and the influence of our modern society in the form of plastics and screens. I am by no means innocent in the perpetuation of this of course, as most aren't, but it is sad to see that we as a species continue to dig our graves and the graves of future generations in the name of self-satisfaction.
This is untrue. The educational materials allowed to circulate in the US and the teaching method teachers are allowed to use are literally detrimental to learning.
Telling kindergartens to guess a word, use the picture for context clues, hinders their ability to grasp phonics.
Materials we've used for 40+ years and knew was detrimental for most of that time.
This is also an international issue, affecting children in Europe just as heavily. What is happening on an international scale that may have made both students and parents more apathetic?
What is a better way? My public education was great imo. I’m a successful engineer and my mom was a public school physics teacher.
I don’t understand what are saying is the problem?
I would recommend you check out *Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong.* The article and wider podcast, goes over why these ineffectual teaching methods were introduced into our schools and why they're still there.
I would also recommend you read John Kozol's *Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. (*It's a bit outdated but continues to hold true fundamentally.)
For those who grow up upper middle class in well-founded and cared for districts the realities of education for lower-income Americans can be shocking. Many schools throughout the USA don't offer comparable academic levels, educational tools and support, or opportunities.
Ok thanks that makes sense. And yeah I’m from an upper middle class area in a more progressive blue state so our public school was great honestly.
I get that not everyone has that privilege I just didn’t know specifically what was wrong I’ll have to check out those articles.
Instant gratification removed any form of feeling of needing and valuing hard work leading to apathy. You don't really care because you're fed, with dopamine.
You said this is an international trend. AFAIK phonics are still learned in other countries... And what about languages? I don't think the problems you speak of are applicable to all of the countries. But education has been going downhill for a while. So?
The U.S is actually below average in this situation. While the international average was a loss of 15 points in math on the International Assessment Sruvey, the USA lost 13. And stayed the same in reading and science. We actually [moved up](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/5/unprecedented-decline-in-global-literacy-scores-osce-report-says) in the international education rankings post-pandemic.
\>But education has been going downhill for a while. So?
And based on this [information](https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38), all American test scores have been trending upward for the last 50 years with the only decrease coming post covid.
People have been saying education is going downhill for more than 500 years. That doesn't mean it's true.
I don’t disagree, but isn’t using a picture for context clues just one step away from using context clues in text to figure out what a word means? I swear half my vocabulary is words I’ve never looked up, but just know how to use them from books.
Sometimes I have to confirm I’m using it right but still.
Sure, but when little kids are learning to read they need to understand phonics and the concept of letters as a building block of words.
With these methods, kids learn that the text and the letters are secondary to the easier methods of guessing or skipping.
I don't know if you've ever read with a kid taught to read with sight words, especially a kindergartener ? They'll guess and guess and no matter how much prompting, they can't sound it out because they haven't spent enough time on phonics.
The first time one of my cousins was guessing any object on the page, I was confused. Now that I've read up on this phenomenon, I'm not shocked to see the same in my pre schooler God brother. We're combating it with lots of phonics based learning materials and incorporating that learning into our every day.
I agree with you. My grandmother taught me to read by age 3. I did the same with my kids and supplemented with a phonetics kit. Even ten minutes a day can have a huge impact.
It's both. There's plenty of blame to go around, but I will say that it wasn't parents who decided to switch so many schools to whole language curricula. Lucy Calkins is definitely at the tippy top of my "people to blame" list.
*Parent gives child instant dopamine box.*
*Child gets addicted to dopamine box.*
*Parent tries to take away the box.*
*Child throws an absolute tantrum because literally addicted.*
*Parent to exhausted from life to deal with it gives child box back...*
Do we see the issue here? The simplest and most elementary understanding of psychology shows that we are quite literally training and enforcing this behavior. Positive reinforcement is dramatically better than negative. And when the child acts up and they're REWARDED for it no wonder these kids are un-teachable..
Parents push back and tell me that I just wouldn't understand, how its so hard to rase a kid.. okay sure, but then what do you expect when your literally enforcing the behavior...
These devices and apps are nearly impossible to put down for *adults* that grew up without them 24/7, when they KNOW they are bad. How is a child with significantly lower inhibitions and impulse control expected to regulate themselves?
They _wont.._ and it's only going to get worse.
This gets downloaded anytime I mention it. But the lack of discipline (generally not talking physical here) is demonstrably ruining this coming generation of young adults.. and it's overwhelmingly my generation, the Millennials, either being to overwhelmed or lazy to, or them _over_ course-correcting from being disciplined themselves.
Education is not limited to school. I am often astounded at the lack of curiosity and interest that people have in life. Education might be required by the government but it's ultimately always our individual responsibility to want to learn about the world around us, in whatever ways that matter to our locations and specifics. But with being able to pretend you are someone else in a pretend online world where everyone else is doing the same, people have lost their interest in learning. Of course it's going to trickle down to kids in school. The number of adults (most of whom are parents) I know who never pick up a book is incredible. Growing up, my parents, grandparents, cousins, friends - everyone I knew, read. We lived for library day in school. After school, I hung out at the public library reading the books our school wouldn't let me read. I'm still a voracious reader. I logged many, many hours reading to my children, even into middle school. They are all readers now in varying ways. But more so than that, they are curious about life - real life - and interested and engaged in it. They have strong vocabularies. They ask questions and know how to find answers. Most people don't seem to even do that.
When I was in high school I was genuinely surprised by the amount of my fellow classmates who couldn't read without stammering and were incapable of sounding words out. Knowing that its only gotten worse for the last six or so years is really depressing.
What happens in a society where being stupid and or lazy does not kill you or stop you from reproducing? More and more people will join the behavioral sink over time as everyone tries to get by with doing less and less. It's the attempt to maintain a high eroi by reducing personal investment and keeping the return through freeriding. People are so tired of being cogs in the machine that they are opting out and it's not killing them, it's spreading. This seems to be a blowback consequence of what an effort trap and how soul crushing modern jobs are and how desirable outcomes are increasingly out of reach for younger folks as the rug is pulled out from under them. Big business does not care, they know a bottleneck is coming but there are 8 billion people right now, plenty of autistic smarty-pants to run the cyberpunk neofudal enclaves while everyone else can fuck off and die a little sooner in the 6th mass extinction
>plenty of autistic smarty-pants to run the cyberpunk neofudal enclaves
Sounds like another *Walking Dead* fan. There series should probably be required education for the collapse-aware.
No one *wants* to read. Most video game tutorials are visual based, and anything else you need can be learned from a 2-minute TikTok video. Why read? For like, jobs? What do they want jobs for?
/s. Just in case.
I used to teach both elementary and high school - there is NO way a high school teacher is going to have the time to teach high schoolers how to read "from scratch" - Z E R O.
Kids spent two years at home and realized rhat school is a waste of time and unpleasant to boot. The break in the pattern reminded everyone how artificial our predicament is.
I stopped using tiktok during the pandemic, and I've been better off for it, though everything has these short form videos now, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat YouTube. It's hard to avoid
You text-to-speech tool in your browser. Usually you can find extensions for the browser.
There are also apps and websites for that. Example: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/ in which you probably have to paste the text.
I'm sure that there's a subreddit around for /r/accessibility/
At worst, if you have a Google account, you can use Google Translate for it as it has a built-in text-to-speech tool:
[here's a link with the post text from the teachers subreddit](https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=I%E2%80%99m%20a%2010th%20grade%20language%20arts%20teacher%20in%20NJ.%20They%20don%E2%80%99t%20know%20how%20to%20read%20at%20their%20age.%20I%E2%80%99m%20serious%E2%80%A6%202-3%20grade%20reading%20levels%2C%20MAYBE.%20What%20the%20hell%20happened%2C%20and%20how%20did%20we%20get%20here%3F%20I%20have%20coworkers%20who%20said%20students%20who%20came%20from%20being%20homeschooled%20are%20at%20their%20appropriate%20levels%20even%20a%20bit%20higher%20than%20kids%20that%20have%20been%20in%20school%20since%20the%20pandemic%20%E2%80%9Chybrid%E2%80%9D%20rules%20were%20lifted.%20I%E2%80%99m%20at%20a%20loss.%20The%20most%20they%20can%20get%20through%20is%20Charlottes%20Web%20or%20the%20bridge%20to%20Terabithia..%20They%E2%80%99re%20rude%2C%20always%20on%20their%20phones%2C%20destructive.%20I%20feel%20like%20my%20school%20isn%E2%80%99t%20doing%20anything.%20I%20have%20lost%20my%20passion%20in%20the%20last%202%20years.%20We%20have%20lost%20a%20tremendous%20amount%20of%20education%20for%20our%20kids.%20I%20would%20rather%20be%20an%20online%20teacher%20on%20outschool.com%20than%20deal%20with%20angry%20parents%20because%20their%20kids%20are%20failing.%20I%20need%20wine%2C%20I%20need%20something%20I%20don%E2%80%99t%20know%20what.%0A%0AEDIT%3A%201-I%20think%20I%20am%20going%20to%20teach%2010th%20graders%20to%20read%20from%20scratch.%20Maybe%20it%E2%80%99ll%20help%20with%20the%20headache%20until%20the%20end%20of%20the%20year.%202-%20I%20don%E2%80%99t%20believe%20Covid%20is%20the%20issue.%20It%E2%80%99s%20the%20system%20and%20our%20county%20that%20doesn%E2%80%99t%20believe%20in%20education-%20just%20about%20showing%20off%20to%20others.%203-%20In%20my%2014%20years%20of%20teaching%20maybe%20a%20handful%20struggled%20but%20not%20as%20bad%20as%20the%20last%202%20years.%0A&op=translate); look for the "speaker" symbol at the bottom of the text area, that's the speech button: 🔊
i'll probably get banned for this post! My wife was a teacher and quit about 20 years ago because the parents were always blaming the teachers for their kids issues and the administration didn't support the teachers, well they were high school students 20 years ago so now you are dealing with the children of those kids and blaming the pandemic for them being stupid, our kid graduated a year early during the pandemic and ran out of Netflix to watch. So today we have infinite genders or lack of them every one has a "trigger" and a medication required mental condition. Sometimes you need to suck it up and just do it. Maybe we need to go back to spanking or a good hand across the face for when you "act like an asshole you get treated as an asshole. FYI i have late onset autism (you can be anything you want )
Yeah, you had in the first half... but the rest of your opinion is just stupid. Your original impulse to not to make your comment was the one you should have listened to.
I guess its more about vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension, being able to talk express etc. phones mostly videos with sounds music of a few seconds each, no deep reading or writing at all
From the original post
> I don't believe Covid is the issue. It's the system and our country that doesn't believe in education.
While I do believe the way the US handles education is flawed, I don't think that's the root of the issue with the upcoming classes.
Covid *must've* been a big deal for certain classes. Missing a full year or two of in-person schooling *and* the botched handling of "online" courses seem to be huge players in this.
Elementary and middle school courses have never really been implemented primarily online. School for young students is as much about the social dynamics of being with peers and teachers as the information taught.
With homeschooling, the teacher is still at home at the very least. Kids at those ages *are* ***not*** old enough to put the effort in on their side to take classes online. It doesn't make sense. Hell, I struggled with online courses in college *because* it requires the willpower and motivation to treat the class like an in-person class. They take **work.**
I also think there's an elephant in the room that I don't see mentioned too often. Phones, social media, and internet culture play **huge** roles with the change in education we've seen, recently. *Everyone* is glued to their devices and have less bandwidth and attention to offer in general. I couldn't imagine being a teenager with the ubiquity and normalized phone-use we see today.
> I was in high school in the early 2010s. Phones were *becoming* an issue then. Gen Z has an average screen time of nearly 8 hours a day now.
To finish, we don't have a perfect system in America. But we haven't had any *major* changes to curriculum or how students are taught in 20 or so years. We're just *now* seeing major issues in students.
The major changes that would affect the upcoming high schoolers are:
- the period of practically no schooling due to Covid. Infinitely worse if this hit during critical developmental years. No one really knew how to handle the students, I'm not sure who could be blamed here. Even if the US handled Covid well, that would require a period of lockdown.
- Phones. The internet. Social media. Here we are
>2 I don’t believe Covid is the issue.
Aaaaand there it is. If kids who are old enough to drive are reading at 2nd-3rd grade levels *andwecontinuetonotdoagoddamnedthingaboutit*, and it's already this bad after just a few years of watching everyone gaslight them about their grandmas dying and why is everyone coughing, and their parents post traumatizing videos of them, what will it look like after a few more years of more infections and more of their caregivers becoming disabled or dying? I don't disagree with, "It’s the system and our county that doesn’t believe in education- just about showing off to others", but that's nothing new? If anything it's our country's modus operandi...
" I have coworkers who said students who came from being homeschooled are at their appropriate levels even a bit higher than kids that have been in school since the pandemic “hybrid” rules were lifted."
Am I missing something here? Sentence implies that because of covid kids in his 10th grade class can't read? I'm paraphrasing of course but that's how I'm understanding it.
If I paraphrased correctly - The 1 year hybrid we had affected 2-3 years of reading loss? I'm left with more questions after reading this post.. I don't feel it's accurate or representative of current children's' reading levels either. I have a 17 year old Junior and a 12 year old in middle school. Perhaps we're the exception here, my children read at or above grade level material.
>The 1 year hybrid we had affected 2-3 years of reading loss?
Child development can be a very fragile thing and one year of setbacks can equal to years of setbacks for a child whose brain is still developing. The pandemic was an accelerator for a lot of problems in society and I think students who were already struggling prior to the pandemic got set back immensely and haven't been able to catch up since then.
Thanks for the different perspective. I did overlook kids who were barely making it and I do believe that percentage to be significant enough to help make sense of the statement. Cheers!
You're welcome! While I sympathize with the plight of the teachers in the /r/teachers subreddit, I sometimes feel like their complaint threads of students can veer into "kids these days/back in my day" territory. Some of the replies in the thread were kind of harsh towards the children, so I wanted to provide a different perspective as it's a symptom and not an inherent cause.
Then again, it's their vent thread, so I'll try not to shame them too much.
Aside from the funding and attention issues which are detrimental of course, secondary schools or high schools simply have too broad of a curriculum with the result that nothing is focused on enough as they scramble to cover subjects with limited time. The question is what should be reduced or cut as you will get people arguing about it, obviously Mathematics and English/whatever the main language is should be kept, but then do you do less geography and history, or cut down on the sciences, drop secondary languages, or cut back on creative subjects like art or music, or get rid of PE/Gym class in the middle of rising youth obesity. Schools cannot teach everything and end up teaching it well to the majority of students due to simple time constraints unfortunately, students are overloaded.
Phones/tablets concern me more and more. When I was a bored kid I read things out of curiosity. Gum packages, shampoo bottles. Modern app and website UI is trending towards icons and as text light as possible. Couple that with the proliferation of short form video and you get kids who's most entertaining influence is absent text.
I'm a grown ass man, I use app time tracking on my phone. Over the course of a day I can *easily* rack up 2hrs on IG/youtube/TikTok. I also have reading apps (kindle, NYT) and a kindle tablet, I'm lucky to get 1hr of reading in a day.
Social media, including Reddit, has destroyed my attention span and time management abilities. Prior to social media, it was NOTHING for me to read for hours upon hours and I would always get so much work done ahead of time. I'm 35 and I've been weening myself off of social media to help repair myself.
It has fucked us all.
I was too, and I decided it was time to get back to reading, so most of my time is on my kindle app reading. It actually makes me a happier person, not being on all those sites.
There's a level of irony, or perhaps foreboding, there with the adults - teachers, parents, administrators, and all the ways to the top - handling the kids' future like it's someone else's problem. It clearly starts early on with kids passing when they should be held back to learn or re-learn. This, of course, means foundational gaps. That's going to suck for the kids too as they can probably sense it, they can figure out that they don't know, they're *imposters*, so all that investment in self-esteem from education is going to backfire. I can't put my finger on it, but that looks like very bad news.
I think that they're just distracted with high quality distraction, while the need for distraction is growing every day as life gets more stressful and [they learn about how the world they're supposed to inherit is crumbling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU).
I do expect "remedial influencers" to be a thing, but the kids will have to learn how to distinguish those from the conspiracy bullshit promoters.
I'm glad you mentioned this. The youth of today are more exposed to the bullshit of reality: climate change, artificial intelligence rendering humans useless, the ills of capitalism, corrupt governments and so on.
This has heavily influenced how they view the future, compared to those of us who are older and had a more optimistic upbringing due to less exposure of those things, and because of it, they don't give a shit about school, work, or even dating.
Interesting times we are living in.
can't blame it all on covid but i can't help but think this situation would be way better if, instead of pushing kids through e-school for 1-2 years, we just gave them maintenance work, held them back, and absorbed the labor shock from that
Why should they though. Idiots doing stupid shits and creeps doing weird ass stuffs and they get rich for that. The stupidity and the wackiness are literally monetized not the talent or the quality.
From what I understand teachers aren't allowed to fail kids in grade school. And teachers are judged based on how few parental complaints are received.
All the priorities are out of whack. It's no surprised that high schools are being handed uneducated sloths.
Teachers can't fail students at all. This one girl in my school comes 4 times a month, she gets 50% despite not showing up then she cheats on a test and passes. You can't get lower than a 50% , even if you don't show up you can't fail.
When I was in 3rd grade I was struggling with multiplication but then I went to the next grade and I still couldn't multiply so I hit a roadblock. Then math kept getting more complicated while I couldn't multiply and I just kept going to the next grade. I failed the state test 3 times and I'm still going to the next grade. There's no point in going to school anymore.
Where is this happening? In our state kids do fail and they hold them back. They also get fined for truancy. If they miss enough days the parents end up in court with huge fines and sometimes jail.
This happens across USA. Don't want to say my state for privacy reasons but my entire schooling they've done this. Thanks to no child left behind act.
Especially in lower income schools they pass more kids and don't suspend them to get more funding. I've seen kids get into fist fights on a daily get suspended for 2 days then come back to get into another fight.
In richer and high income schools they have better funding so their kids actually pass and actually graduate. They have better teachers with more experience, counselors etc. The rich school I went to have over 100 calculators, 30+ computers in every class.
In lower income schools you can't even get lower than a 50% (my current school it's a 75%) so the school can say 'look we have a 100% graduation rate and good test scores' even when half the kids can't even read. The good teachers quit and we get left with people that can't even speak english, having new subsitutes every day, we would go months without teachers. Months without art class, months without reading classes. We had 12 calculators for the entire school. We had like 14 computers and they barley worked. I tried to download a picture and the entire thing crashed. You open more than 2 tabs the computer crashes. We never had enough books so 4 people had to share 1 book. Not to mention lower income areas have less books, less libraries. Their parents are working 10+ hour shifts and have no time to read with them. Then these kids go to shitty schools without any books and the cycle continues.
You can't fail, you can't get left back. There is essentially no reason to go to school. If this girl comes in 4 times a month, gets 50% credit despite never coming, then cheats on a test and gets a passing grade then why am I even here.
Not in Baltimore but I heard their schools were pretty bad too 😭
https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/23-baltimore-schools-have-zero-students-proficient-in-math-state-test-results-reveal-maryland-comprehensive-assessment-program-department-of-education-statistics-school-failures
https://readlion.com/parents-left-unaware-of-stunning-illiteracy-in-a-baltimore-public-high-school/
It's so sad 😭
We had a girl that missed months of school. She would tell her mom 'I don't wanna go to school today' and her mom would just let her stay home. She literally missed months of school before someone called CPS. Then she started coming 2 times a week then cps backed off. Despite missing MONTHS of school she gets 50% credit for class. Then she cheats on a test and cheats off my work and gets a passing grade. She was flexing on me 'yeah they called CPS on my mom.' 'I just told my mom I didn't wanna go and she let me stay home' she was obese and had more snacks in her bookbag than pencils. Idk if they went to court or anything but fuck. All she has to do is come twice a week and CPS will leave her alone. And despite never coming she gets 50% credit. 🤦♀
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Supposedly they stopped teaching them phonics and are doing some kind of whole word recognition thing, which seem useless if you've never encountered a word before if you can't sound it tf out
It's hard for me to believe that mobile devices are the sole reason for what's happening. I think there's something else at work here. How involved are parents in their student's lives?
>How involved are parents in their student's lives?
Less than they used to be. No it's no a moral failing.
In this hellscape, the average family cannot survive and provide a decent quality of living for their children without both parents working. Naturally this results in less time spent with the kids attending to their unique emotional/educational needs.
Couple that with the childcare crisis; most daycares are understaffed and
Studies have shown that parents actually spend more time with their kids than the most recent previous generations did. Most of us and our parents grew up in situations where as children we would play outside in the neighborhood for hours completely unattended. Parents didn’t use to play with their kids at all.
If anything, it may be the lack of unsupervised play has made it difficult for children today to learn problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Less than they used to be? The whole latch key kid trope and never being inside was how almost all of gen x and a good chunk of elder millennials were raised. If I treated my 8 year old like my mom and grandparents treated me I would probably be in jail right now.
Reminds me of a Stephen King book called End of Watch. A killer uses a portable gaming device to get into a persons mind. Fish swim quickly and the player has to tap quicker to catch them and essentially becomes so hypnotized they can’t think. This lets the killer enter their mind and convince them to kill themselves.
People can shit on him and his fiction all they want. I think more people should have been listening to him. He has had numerous stories about cell phones and other electronic devices causing societal death for a long time.
Not to mention the brain damage that's caused by SARS-CoV-2. For those like me who still haven't caught it, it's WILD seeing how people are slowly growing dumber and dumber after each infection.
I mentioned this in my other post, but there's defiantly something up in regards to the massive depilating effect which long covid has had on a good chunk of the population. I also never have tested postive, three times vaxed, and yeah a lot of people seem to have experienced almost a reduction in total cognitive bandwidth or ability. Like a good chunk of people are doing generally fine, but there is this other chunk of people who have had their entire lives changed and are now showing up in deaths of despair statistics.
Commenting here too: Isn’t this the same reason the military started caring about poor teeth (funding fluoride)? Plus, dealing with hookworms and pellagra? Because the issue is getting baffling to me.
I grew up nomadic. I was mostly taught by my mother who had no degree. The fact that I was already post-high school in PSAT except in math? Yeah, I’m worried. We were often under the poverty line but my parents bought textbooks on sale. Maybe it’s just one more culture shock, but I’m so worried for these Standard American kids. I was getting not just regular education but learning various skills from my relatives. I can start fires and ride horses.
I mean, I’m disabled, I sometimes have to use a wheelchair—and I still could find some useful position in the military if there was a great need. Just based on my reading comprehension alone. Similarly, the local foster group immediately asked if I wanted a kid when I said I would take disabled/older kids. I don’t have an extra bedroom yet! But Hell, I guess I’m weirdly equipped by being … not a nuclear trash fire? Not great!
Also, no, I did *not* like a friend’s response about my joke. “It’s not like I can just put a kid in a yurt!” was only responded to with reminders that excess kids end up in “troubled teen” camps so yeah, you can just throw a kid in a yurt. Damn it.
Perpetual Covid infections, covid brain damage, and long covid exhaustion, along with opportunistic infections.
College students are struggling. Adults are struggling to do their jobs that were once easy habit. It doesn’t help that so many parent groups talk about their kids/families being perpetually sick for more than a year. When you’re always sick, you miss a lot of school. School districts have encouraged parents to send their kids in despite being actively ill, which continues to spread to other students, and you can’t focus when you’re sick.
Honestly with the way I felt after covid, I believe it. I literally could not do things I had always done. Not just related to work, but I'd heard playing video games might help with the brain fog. I couldn't play a game I'd played on and off for almost 20 years. I couldn't read even light novels. It took me months to do my taxes that I usually had turned in almost as soon as they'd let me file. I think the level of sickness being normalized is unconscionable. I was well-aware of the potential consequences but caught it anyway because of shared housing and an awful MIL. We were masking in common areas and running air purifiers in the bedroom and bathroom but there's only so much you can do. I don't think people want to admit it could be covid because they were so convinced that allowing this new normal was the right thing for their kids.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. We are all being put in a lot of unreasonable situations. I hope you’re on the mend.
I think you’re absolutely right. No matter how strong the evidence, most people will not be able to face themselves, so self-preservation dictates denialism.
"They’re rude, always on their phones, destructive"
One day we may have to treat devices like drugs and alcohol, 18+ to have service. No one learns healthy coping skills from tick tock and instant gratification. on the flip side there must be students who are on point, ready to become the next generation.
I am infinitely grateful that when I was in high school, I had to choose to connect to the Internet on my cell phone and I never did because it was $4/minute and charged to my mom's bill. I got my first smartphone in college but I never used it in class, because I was used to not doing it.
Even aside from Tik Tok, the pressure that arises from being popular on social media is something everyone, especially teens, should be able to do without.
>said like someone who's never had dial-up
Lol what? I was specifically talking about cell phones which I had dial up for. And my first modem was 14.4k.
> cell phones which I had dial up for. And my first modem was 14.4k.
I'm assuming you must mean those wireless portable phones? did cellular phones provide internet access via dial-up? I feel so confused right now maybe I went straight to ethernet
glad to know you share the pain, my mistake
>did cellular phones provide internet access via dial-up?
Yes, you had to choose to connect. I once got lost and connected so I could look at a map, it cost $14 for a couple of minutes and my mom was pissed.
> I once got lost and connected so I could look at a map,
oh riiiiiiight it was the fucking button I never pushed I forgot about that - this is like late flip phone, pre-smart phone era 2005 I'm thinking
She mentions the kids can't read and instead spend all the time on their phone. What are they doing on their phones if not reading words, texts, captions, etc?
Phone bad, so that reading doesn't count. Just like scrolls didn't count because they weren't stone tablets, books didn't count because they weren't scrolls, and newspapers didn't count because they weren't books.
I’m a teacher and active on that sub. That’s the second post on that topic that has blown up in the last week or so. It’s simultaneously horrifying how widespread it is, and calming that I’m not alone in my observations of widespread illiteracy among my students. It isn’t hyperbole. It’s horrendous.
This is what happens when children are not taught that there are consequences, and that when they do poorly in class the parents complain that it cant possibly be their kid and it must be the teachers fault. Allowing people to pass onto the next grade because parents complain about it is absolutely retarded.... its not just public and high school either, college and university students are struggling to read past a grade 2 level as well.
Yep!
High school teacher-- the kids are NOT alright. They are woefully unprepared to contribute to society. They are addicted to their devices. They literally can't go without them... and I even teach an interesting subject!
My gf is a teacher and we just had a conversation about this. Apparently there was a method in the 60s that we've been following to teach kids how to read except it really only works for 40% of kids, the other 60% turn out to be bad readers. The two women (democrats) who created this, know that but have lobbying to have states continue to use this method because it's making them money (go figure). Not to get into politics but republican states have realized this and have adopted a new program that emphasizes phonics as this has been back by science to make good readers. Unfortunately not all states are behind the science method, so until that changes were still gunna have this problem.
Ignorant people are more easily managed. A grossly ignorant populace makes governance easier. People who aren't able to problem solve or think for themselves are easier to manipulate and distract
this thread is a lol.
i can tell you that children are much more capable of seeing what the future will be than adults who always think it's whatever their life was plus a slight change due to "technological advancement". kids are not concerned with fitting into your current world, they are learning whatever skills they can learn to perpetuate the species. that is always how it has been. if it looks like they are becoming more violent and less inclined to disciplined attention, that should be read as a signal that the world is becoming more violent and less run by those exercising disciplined attention, not that they are less capable of survival than previous generations. i honestly hope someone gets punched in their fucking face for making a teenager read The Scarlet Letter while actual rapists sit on the supreme court and free large language models can write their essays for them.
You know what really fucked up? How awful these newer teachers are. I had so much difficulty communicating with my daughters 3rd grade teacher through email. She couldn't comprehend or spell. I know a woman who recently graduated, and she most of the girls cheated their way through math. These people are supposed to be teachers! I just pulled my kids out of the local public school.
Oh, I remember doing a stint more than 20 years ago as a grader for the CA High School Exit Exams. 90% of students back then couldn't write a coherent paragraph. This is nothing new.
But it's getting worse.
That's the thing.
Not everyone was meant to be an author, but you should be able to read beyond texts or slang. There's a generation here that's not going to be capable of doing even basic work or menial tasks. You won't be able to instruct them to cook or do any basic tasks like even balance a checkbook.
I have a college freshman who went to a wealthy public school and he cannot read cursive. They didn’t learn how to write in cursive and now any sign or letter written in cursive he doesn’t recognize as English. He will send me a picture and ask me to read it for him. It’s wild.
/r/teachers is essentially an annex of /r/collapse at this point. It ends up on my feed all the time and it’s always horrifying….
It’s actually hard to parse with the direct experience I’ve had with my kids in their school.
Wait until everyone discovers that outside of applying for a credit card, most of the "knowledge" in this bass ackwards culture serves no use to humanity as a whole.
When I was in school, there was still a strong culture of "truth shall set you free" with hardcore focus on tech development, science R&D, medical science, NASA furtherance, and basically getting to the stars and making the planets healthier for everyone.
Now everyone knows humanity has extinguished itself, and no matter our species-wide IQ, everything has led to a plastic crusted, smog-covered, ran-the-car-in-the-garage-and-we're-all-dying-now future.
What can a school teach that can break us out of Jevon's Paradox? When it's Venus by Saturday, what should anyone be trying to learn? (Rhetorical, but my answer is still loving your buddies and your loved ones for as long as time allows.)
Yeah the school system might not be great but the problem is truly with the parents in my opinion.
I have my kids reading almost daily. Both my kids read at a higher level than their grade but that was due to my wife and I being adamant about reading. Their schools taught the structure of reading but the true work is done outside of school. Once they learned how to read, we read next to them together and would help sound out words when they needed it.
I worked for an after school program and the 6th grader didn't know how to read. He was always annoying during homework time. He finally told me he didn't know how to read. I discussed this with his mom and she told me it was my job to teach him. She was a nurse as well so she had the experience of what it takes to succeed.
Being a parent isn't easy b/c free time is packed with running errands, cooking, cleaning and all the other tasks we are all aware of. But as a parent we still need to prioritize our kids education. A few times a week I review my kids school work, ask them what they are working on on their class and stuff like that. It is not a traditional school, the kids can pick and choose what they work on. Last year was our first year and I didn't realize what level of involvement so my oldest didn't work on math at all. The teacher didn't say anything and at first I was mad but then concluded that it isn't the teachers job to keep me informed of my kids progress. It was my job to engage with my kids to know what is going on.
This year I realized he was a year behind so him and I started working daily on his assignments, 20-30 mins at most. He is caught up and currently working on this years work.
If parents are not involved in their kids education and school systems are pushing kids ahead then we truly are headed towards a collapse.
My girlfriend was an early ed teacher. I didn’t believe some of the horror stories relating to the intellectual inability of the up and coming generation. But it seems like her concerns are shared amongst teachers across the US as r/teachers has been shared in this sub a few times now.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Starza:
---
Teachers posting here about how students in high school have become totally unprepared for grade level math and reading in recent years.
We need a flair for education, since it appears to be yet another canary in the coal mine of the collapse to come.
Humans getting dumber + computers getting smarter= collapse of human civilization.
We could have worked on robots to do menial labor, but instead we built computer minds to control human slave drones. It’s been a nice run, humanity, but you only have yourself to blame.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1avv6w6/teachers_complaining_that_high_schoolers_dont/krd3lx8/
Phones need to be banned from schools, period, and each school needs to be equipped with a "phone chipper" to destroy any brought on to school grounds.
745 Comments
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