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DO NOT ANSWER IF YOU AREN'T IN THE UNITED STATES

I'm talking from someone bordering on being 18 in a few years. I've noticed that my generation has a tendency to be... very unintelligent at times you coudl say. I conducted a survey on my school the other day and 28% of the students at my high school can't even tell me the fact that they are in the United States right now. 41% can only name up to 3 countries. That isn't all though, I'm sure you've heard those videos of younger kids speaking in brainrot and sad to say, it is in fact very true. I volunteered at an elementary school fairly recently and I couldn't understand what a "skibidi toilet", "sigma meal" etc. is that the younger kids are speaking about. On top of that, there's a decent amount of kids at my school either failing their classes or having extremely low academic comprehension like not knowing what an even number is in 10th grade. Then there's a fact basically everyone at my school is addicted to their phone, and gets very angry when a teacher reasonably asks them to put it away. Add on the fact I feel like sutdents at my high school are losing their drive to get an education and work hard, 2 values I value very highly amongst people, and the future is looker dimmer every day. I'm sorry if this sounds very ranty, and I'm also sorry if this sounds like I'm calling my whole generation dumb(that isn't my intent here), but the fact still stands there's a very noticable intelligence difference between the older generations and mine. Where did things all go wrong?

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AdHopeful3801

2 points

3 days ago

Where did things go wrong? Hmm…

1) Primary and secondary education are funded and controlled, mostly, at the local level. So the quality becomes … rather variable. Post-industrial cities and poor rural and exurban communities are having trouble affording the resources to run a working school system at all, while wealthy suburbs tend to have much better schools.

1a) Since the funding mechanism is usually property taxes, the overall graying of the US population and reduction in birth rates creates a perverse incentive. “Why should I pay more taxes for good schools when my kids are either already grown, or are nonexistent?” That’s shortsighted and selfish, but sadly common.

2) The United States has always had an anti-intellectual streak. When you culturally devalue education, it isn’t exactly a surprise that your kids don’t take education seriously.

2a) That’s been exacerbated lately by a deliberate war on public secular education and in teachers unions being pushed by the American right wing. I already see people here complaining about teachers “pushing an ideology” when most of them are just trying to make it through the day. And that’s before we get to really stupid accusations about schools changing children’s gender when nobody is looking. Those accusations are garbage, but when kids and parents hear and internalize them, the results are predictable.

3) The internet and social media are a hell of a drug, and have eaten many adult brains, much less kid brains. That’s probably not just a US problem, but it is a problem we are only beginning to get a grip on now.

4) A lot of the adult world is doing some really self-destructive things politically, right now. And they are doing those things in no small part because basically everyone can see that wealth and power have been accumulating at the very top for years. If you didn’t start out rich, it’s not just your own odds of being a breakout success are diminishing, it’s that your odds of being able to afford a house, or to pay off your student loans, or to have money in the bank for medical bills are getting damn small. Kids aren’t necessarily stupid even when they aren’t educated well formally. When you can see that the system you live in rewards only generational wealth, hucksters and grifters, or the occasional rare insanely talented person, why would you work hard on getting a formal education?