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  • I think it's bad, but I also think there's a

    impulse to prove that others are dumb, even if it's children who are undergoing a severe mental health crisis.

    Even if what the users say is 100% true, I didn't see any posts talking about the reality of being a student in a world where you were forced to go back to school when people were still dying of covid, there are mass shooters who will come in because they watched something on Fox News, or that they are seeing climate change ravage their world.

    I struggled to pay attention in school because of abuse and my GPA went to 4.0 as soon as I left the house.

    Material conditions are a thing we talk a lot about here, but I feel like even then, we can forget about material conditions for children in the US.

    I dunno. It's bad to be in school and we're definitely going to feel the consequences for a while. I just hate that the blame is gonna fall on teachers and not the depravity of capitalism.

    • Society blames the teachers, the teachers blame the parents:

      Parenting now seems like keeping them alive until it’s time to register for school.

      but it is capitalism, of course. Who has time to work 40 hours a week, prepare 2+ meals a day for your whole family, keep yourself and your kids and your home clean, spend time with your kids teaching them things and playing with them, budget your money, plan for the future, exercise, have a hobby, blah blah blah.

      It is Not Possible to do all that without help, it just fucking isn't. The only people I know who "have it all" have childcare assistance (family, nannies) and a housekeeper, and even they are having a hard time doing everything.

      I wish everyone could stop pretending that anyone does it all successfully all by themselves, but it's not in capital's interest for us to be sympathetic or cooperative.

  • I would imagine a lot of these students fail to see the "point" of learning. The US education system is so detached from the reality of these kid's lives that they just find it hard to care about. Why should they?

    My generation was sold the lie that if we did well in school we could go to a good university and get a degree and get a really nice job. But that's such an empty, hollow goal for a person's life, and it didn't even turn out to be true, nepotism was and is the way to get a decent job, and these kids probably know it, and they also know that they don't know anyone in high places to get that cushy job.

    So I don't really blame them for their apathy in a cold indifferent capitalist society that will probably crumble before they hit 40. Why work hard to get further in such an obviously broken system?

    • I do think that this is a huge factor. There's somebody in that thread who claims to be a pre-k teacher, and mentions that things like days of the week, colors, shapes, etc. have been removed from the pre-k curriculum for being "developmentally inappropriate," but kids are expected to do complex phonics exercises. I teach (mostly) 11th/12th grade in a very weird public school that isn't subject to these trends, but I have friends who teach k-12 in more standard schools that complain a lot about contemporary curriculum design. Everything is decontextualized and disconnected from everything else. The standard English curriculum mostly reads short passages to prepare for standardized tests rather than books. Math is almost entirely problem sets to prepare for standardized tests. None of it is connected to anything else, and teachers really have to go the extra mile to provide any kind of context or explanation for why students are learning the things they are in the order they are (and doing so means less time to teach to the standardized tests, which negatively impacts funding and teacher performance metrics). The insane focus on standardized testing and "metrics" is a problem at almost all levels, and has been an unmitigated disaster for educational performance. The purpose of all of this, of course, is to mold kids into ideal wage slaves for our billionaire overlords, which is why contemporary curriculum focuses so heavily on drilling mechanical skills and test performance rather than a broad understanding of the natural world and our place in it. No Child Left Behind and its successors have been a catastrophe.

  • millennials with some spillover to gen x and gen z are the only people on earth who know how computers work, when they're gone it's going to be a bad time

    • I feel like I should get into a tech job. I know a lot about computers but never bothered to learn to code. I could absolutely do any IT work but would rather get that coding money. I have started learning a few times but couldn't keep up with it in my limited free time. I've got some more time now so maybe I should get back into before there's another hiring boom.

  • I would take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt. There's someone in there claiming their AP human geography class didn't know what even numbers were. You really get the sense that there's a real creep in a lot of these stories from "I had a kid who did X..." to "My students do X...", all without any requirement to justify how some bad outcome is worse that it was in the past.

    teachers can be drama queens, and redditors can be idiots.

    I'm sure there are districts in the US with dramatically under-resourced classrooms, but this has always been true. Right now there is a real zeitgeist where I live as well to try to tell this story that the kids are categorically worse as well, but honestly most of that is complete hash, or at the very best complicated. Covid did cause some general developmental delay and that is a real concern, but generally kids aren't much different than they used to be and in a lot of ways that are really important they're the best generation that's ever existed.

    • Yeah, and a bit of me wonders just how many of these stories we'd be getting if teachers had reddit back in 2003. I'm seriously doubtful that something has so dramatically changed about public schooling in the last 10 years to go from "sort of okay" to "Idiocracy (2005)"

    • The anecdote about even and odd numbers strikes me as less of a story about them not knowing, and more about them being so completely disengaged from the class that they're just not really listening to the teacher.

  • It’s a bigger sign of a class divide. You find kids like this in public urban schools with a police presence within the school. You don’t see this as much at the better public suburban schools.

    • I don't know how true that is. I had a roommate that was a high school math teacher and the suburban kids seem just as checked out as anyone else from what he's said. There's a small cadre of "good students" but it sounds like the majority would rather start being a wage slave than be in school.

  • I want to add that there are high-performing students out there. However, from my experience, the gap between the "gifted/honors" population and the "general" population has widened significantly. Either you have students that perform exceptionally well or you have students coming into class grade levels behind. There are rarely students who are in between.

    There are nerds who will learn no matter what and there are students who need a push either from the parent or the teacher. With online classes, there isn't much the teacher can do to compel students to study and if parents don't do it either then they'll end up falling behind.

    • How could the parents do it when most of them were working at the time as well?

      We're witnessing the knock-on effects of being completely unprepared for COVID in every way, and then our government scrambling to bail out the stock market and give away trillions of taxpayer dollars to corporations for free. This requires revolutionary change to fix.

      • Yea Im not blaming the parents either, >40hour work week can be brutal.

        What I'm saying is it's not exclusive to the U.S. but present across all capitalist countries post-2020.

        Atleast in most Western countries there were stimulus cheques, in much of the global south, IMF and World Bank forced the countries to limit deficit which was devastating and of course, whatever increase in deficit went to the big business.

      • Or the parents aren't better off education wise, i remember doing basic algebra and my mom screaming at me and calling me stupid etc. for not being able to get it but she couldn't even do it herself lmao

        i turned in a homework assignment, where i felt atleast, that she done most of the work and it was a fucking F lol

        my folks were not doing well mentally or financially so the idea of getting a tutor or staying after school never crossed my mind or felt possible, also fuck school i just got an F in math

        I honestly believe i had it light compared to others because i was super fortunate to have two parents albeit both were dysfunctional, not just one hyper extended parent who may or may not be dysfunctional themselves.

  • Do you think there's anything more sinister at work here than just capital being bad ? Even if things are old half as bad as that sub makes them out to be it seems like just such a horrible thing.

    Edit; and by capital being bad I mean profit seeking off of education and the desire for a limitless supply of uneducated consumers/workers.

    • There are a lot of lib, well-intentioned teachers falling for slick snake oil salesmen that have nice, hippie sounding education strategies that have no scientific backing. There are a lot of chud parents who harass teachers at every turn. There are Bush era policies that created horrible incentives to undermine quality education, but the funny thing there is I'm convinced that Bush actually thought he was improving public education. There are so many aspects of this that are perhaps consequences of living under capitalism for so long, but have unique manifestations

  • I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor. The US has always had shitty educational outcomes (look at our literacy rates) compared to even much poorer countries. Biggest villain here is austerity, which has only worsened in recent years. I’ve seen several news stories about districts having to go down to 4 or even 3 days a week since they literally can’t keep the doors open, either due to lack of funds or lack of teachers (which is just a lack of funds by another name).

    The teachers are doing the best they can but trying to pin it on the parents is wrong headed too. By the time a kid is in high school they’ve spent 8 hours a day at school for half the year for 8 years, like at that point if they haven’t been taught how to do simple math there’s something very wrong with the system itself, and it’ll never be fixed because rich people don’t give a shit since their schools are good (funded through property taxes) or they go to private schools

    • I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor.

      This has been the huge majority of the viral videos I've seen, which is another reason it doesn't smell right to me.

    • yeah this, the gulf between my shithole public education and what i see interacting with upper middle class people as an adult is huge

  • I'm not a teacher or anything, so maybe take this with a grain of salt, but my personal experience has been a bit different. I know multiple kids that just skipped high school, and are now in college. I know a high school-er that spends almost all day reading math textbooks, and interacting with college professors. I know a white kid that's fluent in Chinese, and learned it of his own volition. Kids building cars, flying airplanes, writing thousands of lines of open source code, working internships at major companies, and these are just the people I personally know.

    Maybe it's just survivorship bias, and I'm only interacting with the lucky or talented ones?

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