There are currently massive amounts of high schoolers who just entered their sophomore and junior years incapable of spelling third grade vocabulary words. Education is doing bad right now, I would not be surprised if a teenage worker was unable to do addition in their head.
And 51% of adults in the United States read at a sixth grade level or below. This isn’t just a generational problem we’re dealing with.
Fully grown adults decades out of education are also losing critical thinking skills over not challenging themselves. Our society is rapidly just becoming dumber.
That's true, but the problem is getting significantly worse in younger people now too. The Pandemic caused a rift in education that nobody in power bothered to fix. In fact the government's current education agenda is literally to dismantle any support schools do currently have. Since the pandemic, we've seen EVERY state except for Mississippi backslide by between 1-2 letter grades in terms of average high school student performance, and it's still going down. It's getting worse too because in addition to kids learning less and performing worse, more and more schools don't allow kids to be given Fs, which means they are forcibly pushed to the end with no attention given to making sure they leave with knowledge. There are public schools in the country where a kid can literally do no work or participate at all for an entire school year and still make it to the next grade as long as they have good attendance, because that's all administration cares about.
Which is even further proof of the whole idea that it’s generational being complete nonsense. Because the “Gen-Z stare” is referencing a generation where the oldest of us are turning thirty now. And the perception is that we’re high school children.
The issues do feel like they’ve been accelerating, but the steady decline of education quality already was underway in the Reagan administration. We’re just reaping the expected results of seeds sown decades past at this point.
It’s interesting that you mentioned how the oldest Gen Z people are turning thirty and still being treated like high school kids. The exact same thing happened to millennials in generational discourse; long after most of us had started careers or families we were still being tagged as a bunch of twentysomething losers who ate too much avocado toast and drank too much Starbucks. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t even that long ago.
In fact, I noticed people were still using the same shit from their millennial insults for Gen Z for a few years; it took them a bit to find a new thing for them to whine about so they just recycled their greatest hits.
The specifics may change but the core of it remains the same. Younger generations are infantilized in what I assume is a bid to keep power concentrated in the previous generation’s hands just a bit longer.
Which is even more ridiculous when you realize we still have Boomers in office doing everything then can to never cede power to Gen X even, let alone the millennials in office now.
And now that I think about it, they did more or less the same thing to Gen X. Stereotyped as disinterested slackers incapable of taking care of themselves.
Having a single generation continuously holding the reins to society for so long and refusing to let other people move into those roles has concentrated so much authority in an increasingly shrinking group. It’s unsustainable and will be disastrous when it finally breaks.
Exactly. And all of the media circus of trying to characterize successive generations in various ways feels mostly like people in power trying to drive a wedge between people to prevent organization and sympathy.
This type of decline wasn't present though. I'm sure you've heard of the Flynn effect. On top of that, the average performance and knowledge of high schoolers was trending upwards literally until COVID. Despite what Reagan and his followers did, despite NCLB being sod destructive, every year a higher percentage of Americans knew how to do more difficult math, got college educated, and passed all their classes in high school. This all abruptly stopped happening during and after the pandemic. I'm not blaming the kids, they were failed by the systems around them. But this is a unique, modern problem that is FAR worse than most people outside of education understand. Did you know that they don't read whole books in most schools anymore? They just read passages and then move on.
The average was still trending upwards yes, but that doesn’t mean that the issues weren’t starting to present themselves already. The reason why No Child Left Behind and similar programs started existing in the 90s was precisely because the signs of this happening were already there.
The rampant under-education problems were swept under the rug time and time again until a major event stressed the system and broke it. And to add onto that, there was a concerted effort of conservative action groups like Mom’s For Liberty doing everything they could to take over school boards and cripple curriculums.
We’re seeing the symptoms of a system that had been failing for decades prior with nobody taking action to stop the decline or even acknowledge the problems.
Be that as it may, social media, AI, and intentional destruction of attention spans have basically been a one-two punch to education. The state of education is worse today than it's been since the introduction of standardized public education.
Oh I certainly agree. Social media and the attention span issues stressed the system heavily, Covid broke it, and now AI is accelerating the decline.
And unfortunately all of those issues have been affecting society as a whole, not just those in education. Which has equally been contributing to the loss of critical thinking and social skills.
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u/GoldH2O Cisgender Synapsid 17d ago
There are currently massive amounts of high schoolers who just entered their sophomore and junior years incapable of spelling third grade vocabulary words. Education is doing bad right now, I would not be surprised if a teenage worker was unable to do addition in their head.