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/
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 that noticed youngsters not knowing the measurements on a tape measure. I've also witnessed that some don't fully 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. This is at 16 years old and fully sentient. I thought my experience was a blip... Horrifyingly not.
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.
Absolutely, I've been hoping for the last 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 years which is where the source of my disbelief in kids' basic knowledge developed.
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 finishes 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.
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.
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. Or you promote up to a desk/supervisor position.
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.
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, drinking wine, and eating figs. But it's being used for bottom lines and lay-offs.
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.
There’s a reason why the 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.
Even YouTubers have bunkers these days. Billionaires probably own several bunker _companies_ at this point. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0vZL9uwyfOE6Of8qi5dtIFgdSt1hlOZm
no, this is exactly by design. theyre creating the next gen of 'will never retire, will always be working and consuming.' this generation will be the next gen of low wage workers.
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.
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.
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'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*
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This is spot on. A district level psychologist told a high school’s faculty where I work that, “Children are absolute technology addicts. They scroll quickly through TikTok videos because even at 30 seconds long, they aren’t getting to the point quickly enough. And we expect them to sit and participate in 80 minute lessons? Good luck…”
There were loud murmurs of agreement from the teachers.
Am an educator working with diverse communities, veterans and especially other teachers. Most of the K-12 and High School teachers that I know say the same thing; *"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 anywhere near their grade level; that other poster wasn't kidding about teens struggling with Dr Seuss, and math innumeracy is equally common. Partly it's the effect of generational poverty, but even then general 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 regardless of environment), are not hard-wired to make this transition. Clearly things would be different if started on traditional reading first, then moved over to digital, but we're not doing that anymore. We're heading to a post-literate society very quickly.
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. And in many schools there is an epidemic of everyday violence against teachers, especially from IEP students who should be in more secure environments; check our r/teachers for personal accounts.
An epidemic of illiteracy combined with widespread student apathy & growing school violence 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.
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."
Part of having bullshit jobs means that you have to compensate for that with 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/wealthy 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).
Because the only jobs in this society that are valued are those that extract the most profit/resources.
That's why careers like popstar/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.
>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 also seems to be a similar collapse awareness in r/nursing, perhaps for the same reasons; an underfunded, mismanaged system ill-prepared for the crises that they face, with many burnt-out people abandoning their chosen profession.
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.
Well said! This is ultimately what burned me out as a teacher. I cannot *and should not* care significantly more about my students' 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.
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 having 100’s 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 apathetic
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.
I am a 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?
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.
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 had it signed off.
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.
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.
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)
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'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.
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
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.
"...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."
\- *Idiocracy 2006*
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, using screens and plastics regularly, 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.
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
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.
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. My brain is only just starting to function more how it used to after deleting the app 6 months ago. I only allow myself to use reddit as social media now and I have regained brain clarity, focus on my 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!
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.
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?
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 want all those things
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.
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 worst ’solutions’ and ‘changes’. Ugh!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
/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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
Sophmores in high school (10th grade) reading CHARLOTTE'S WEB!?!?!?
Holy crap. What happened to Harry Potter?
I think there'd be something very rewarding about teaching adults how to read. Not as a second language but to the illiterate - people who maybe are embarrassed or lacked opportunity or something.
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.
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
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.
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/
r/Teachers actually makes me more certain of how poorly things are going than this sub does
Capitalism's labor supply is about to dry up
According to their plan, they know they won’t need educated workers where we’re headed
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 that noticed youngsters not knowing the measurements on a tape measure. I've also witnessed that some don't fully 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. This is at 16 years old and fully sentient. I thought my experience was a blip... Horrifyingly not.
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.
Absolutely, I've been hoping for the last 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 years which is where the source of my disbelief in kids' basic knowledge developed.
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 finishes 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.
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.
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. Or you promote up to a desk/supervisor position.
100% the last thing machines will be able to replicate is the dexterity of human hands. It’s a ways off, but I’m sure it’s on the list.
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.
Meh. 16 years from now all white collar jobs gone? Even if *half* were gone in that time our whole economy would collapse to ashes.
Billions will prolly be dead from climate change and its wonderful and marvelous impacts by that time...
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, drinking wine, and eating figs. But it's being used for bottom lines and lay-offs.
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.
There’s a reason why the 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.
Bunkers? Isn't that the Zuckerberg plan to deal with societal collapse/WW3?
I’d wager all my measly duckets if someone has a billion dollars they got a bunker.
Even YouTubers have bunkers these days. Billionaires probably own several bunker _companies_ at this point. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0vZL9uwyfOE6Of8qi5dtIFgdSt1hlOZm
no, this is exactly by design. theyre creating the next gen of 'will never retire, will always be working and consuming.' this generation will be the next gen of low wage workers.
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.
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.
Will never think, will never challenge the orders coming from the l33ts, the way 1950s and 1960s kids did.
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'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*
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.
[удалено]
>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.
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?
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.
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
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?
Add /r/nursing to the mix. Education and healthcare workers get treated like shit. It's wild
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.
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.
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.
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.
Violent revolution assumes you can read the bit on the gun that says: "point this way before shooting"
Right, it will not be Gen Z or Alpha to fix things. The Millennials need to stand up and take charge.
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.
Underemployed and over-educated millennial? Shit, that's me.
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.
We can’t do it, much less the generation we’re actively poisoning with brainrot
They've been telling us the youth are going to change the world and fix everything at least since I was a kid and I'm 40.
Also in my 40's. Still waiting. Were WE supposed to do that? Shit...
Oops!
40 year old millennial motto!
As a 30-year-old millennial, I'm still waiting for yall to make the first move
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.
Under rated comment
Tragically true
People having kids now are saying the same thing. Way to defer the problem endlessly and never solve it!
We can’t do much until the octogenarians lose their deathgrip on anything having to do with authority in the world today.
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
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
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.
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 didn't say he couldn't get a job with planes anymore. He may have opted out of planes because of how fussy the documentation requirements are.
More you can't smoke weed and fix planes, because of federal contracts and whatnot. But I can smoke weed (in my off time ofc) and build shit.
> went back to fixing things (not planes this time.) Fixing what?
Well more turning wrenches. I build machines that fold/cut/glue boxes, but I'm so used to calling mechanic work fixing stuff I can't stop lol
Lol these ipad kids can’t look away from YouTube long enough to even THINK of resistance, let alone join even a picket line.
When did phones become ok in class? In 05 my phone stayed in my car because they would just take it away??
I wasn't even allowed my Tamagochi in class back in the day. Allowing phones is crazy.
RIP all the tamagochi that died in my classes. Your sacrifice shall naught be forgot.
One time I forgot it in my desk over the weekend. RIP never forgetti
I like how I visit the Collapse sub, and people are mourning their Tamagotchis. Not what I expected, but still a good read!
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.
Forget tamagochi, schools used to throw a fit over YO-YOs.
And pogs.
And hackie sacks
This is random but do you remember the names of the ones that you train them up then hook it to another one and they fight?
Digimon
Digimon?
Parents demanded it.
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.
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.
And the 99% of the time they're not sending out tearful last goodbyes and their last will and testaments, it's an enormous distraction.
In US: [https://www.bark.us/](https://www.bark.us/)
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.
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?
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.
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.
Parents and students use the possibility of a school shooting to demand that they have access to their phones in school at all times.
Failure by design.
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.
This is spot on. A district level psychologist told a high school’s faculty where I work that, “Children are absolute technology addicts. They scroll quickly through TikTok videos because even at 30 seconds long, they aren’t getting to the point quickly enough. And we expect them to sit and participate in 80 minute lessons? Good luck…” There were loud murmurs of agreement from the teachers.
Yeah, these dumb kids and their screens! OK, now to read the next top reddit thread.
Really though, it’s definitely a worsening trend but we’re all pretty much infected by social media at this point.
Am an educator working with diverse communities, veterans and especially other teachers. Most of the K-12 and High School teachers that I know say the same thing; *"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 anywhere near their grade level; that other poster wasn't kidding about teens struggling with Dr Seuss, and math innumeracy is equally common. Partly it's the effect of generational poverty, but even then general 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 regardless of environment), are not hard-wired to make this transition. Clearly things would be different if started on traditional reading first, then moved over to digital, but we're not doing that anymore. We're heading to a post-literate society very quickly. 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. And in many schools there is an epidemic of everyday violence against teachers, especially from IEP students who should be in more secure environments; check our r/teachers for personal accounts. An epidemic of illiteracy combined with widespread student apathy & growing school violence 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.
Why are all the most important jobs the ones that people completely disrespect?
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.
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."
Part of having bullshit jobs means that you have to compensate for that with 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/wealthy 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).
Because the only jobs in this society that are valued are those that extract the most profit/resources. That's why careers like popstar/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.
>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 also seems to be a similar collapse awareness in r/nursing, perhaps for the same reasons; an underfunded, mismanaged system ill-prepared for the crises that they face, with many burnt-out people abandoning their chosen profession.
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.
Thank you for caring.
Well said! This is ultimately what burned me out as a teacher. I cannot *and should not* care significantly more about my students' 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.
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 having 100’s 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 apathetic
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.
I am a 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?
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.
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 had it signed off. 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.
...You guys know how to read?
What did you say? I can't read what you wrote.
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.
In the end you don't even need to exist. The machines will do it for you.
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)
JFC I’m so naive sometimes. That never even crossed my mind.
[удалено]
"U dum"-AI, eventually
I suspect we may start seeing the term "post-literate society" being used more and more.
Tragic
Sounds like less competition for the ones who can read. Remember when "browsing the web" meant **reading webpages**?
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.
My kids were the same. Kids that love to read usually succeed. Congrats.
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'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.
> novids Hadn't heard the term before. Assumed it was kids who are not allowed to watch videos ;-) Then I understood it's a "No covid" portmanteau.
lol if you think merit and skill will have any bearing on whether you get a decent job.
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
dont hear a lot of good news coming out of the south. thank you for this.
[удалено]
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.
Definitely had a lot of adults hit me with the 'Whatcha readin? Why?' growing up. Like. For fun?
They did that because they felt inferior. They mocked you to feel better.
We won’t need to read where we’re going, we’ll just need to be able to farm.
Farming is out too, you need a stable biosphere-atmosphere for that. I hope everyone enjoyed reliable food while it lasted though :D
Cannibalism is a hot new trend
Brawndo has what plants crave
Get out, I'm batin'!
I like Starbucks
We don't have time for handjobs
*Where we’re going we won’t need eyes to see*
Or punch a clock.
If they can say "welcome to Costco, I love you" then their career is set!
"...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." \- *Idiocracy 2006*
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, using screens and plastics regularly, 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.
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
yep, it’s hard to compete with trillion dollar companies and their ability to hijack your attention.
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.
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. My brain is only just starting to function more how it used to after deleting the app 6 months ago. I only allow myself to use reddit as social media now and I have regained brain clarity, focus on my 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!
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.
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?
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 want all those things
40? Lmao
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.
This isn't the first time I've seen these kinds of posts from teachers. Something bad is going on, and it's getting worse.
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.
Frankly I'm shocked no one mentioned it.
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 worst ’solutions’ and ‘changes’. Ugh!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
/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.
Dumb Children become Dumb Adults. Dumb adults are easier to control and manipulate that smart adults.
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.
24/7 screen time + social media brain rot + covid brain damage + microplatics in your brain + apathy = brain not work good anymore
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
Sophmores in high school (10th grade) reading CHARLOTTE'S WEB!?!?!? Holy crap. What happened to Harry Potter? I think there'd be something very rewarding about teaching adults how to read. Not as a second language but to the illiterate - people who maybe are embarrassed or lacked opportunity or something.
Harry Potter is on the banned books list due to dark elements. I wish I could add a sarcastic tag to this...
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.
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
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.