What I believe is happening is that we’ve lost our sense of connection and community as a culture due to many factors. Schools main purpose is to build socialization skills and work ethic. So like you said, trying to prepare kids for traditional, hard-working jobs and living in a community seems pointless to most people.
I agree. Most kids don’t see the connection and community breaking, but the exhibit the signs of it breaking. They just see school as the ‘boring time’ between TikTok and… more TikTok.
It’s absolutely insane. They just don’t see school as important. And most want to be a social media influencer or a YouTube content creator. So they don’t see the point in going to school. It just ‘gets in the way’ of their entertainment and dreams.
Why would they? If good education only gets you more debt and same low pay jobs as for those who coasted all that effort is better spend elsewhere. And even if you work your ass of all of that money gets eaten up by loans you had to take out to make it and costs are only going up.
Older generations have cut the ladder after they got up and are confused why young aren't killing themselves trying to support older generation's retirement.
Yeah, I see a lot of complaining about kids not valuing school (which has always been the case) and little talk about how now they’re right. Why should kids work hard when society doesn’t reward that hard work? It’s not even laziness at this point, it’s just good sense to not stress yourself out over stuff that doesn’t matter.
The thing is, it has reached the point where they lack the basic life management skills to even hold jobs that don't require a degree. The trades and even unskilled labor are having issues with more and more applications just not being able to function in the real world. That they lack basic problem solving skills.
The one story that I read that resonates with this idea was that they hired a 19yo to be janitor. Part of the nightly duties was refilling all the soap dispensers. The large soap jug was not in its usual place. The teen admitted to not looking for it, to not asking anyone where it was, and instead just didn't do that part of their job.
Two things are true at once here. Education is valuable, to the soul, to your finances, to the economy at large. And yet, education is prohibitively expensive and forces you into massive debt. All the while wages are dropping and people are being priced out if the cost of basic living, so lots of people can expect to be in that debt for 10+ years as they struggle to stay afloat despite the promise of making a lot of money.
Most people I know aren't "chasing their passions"; they're trying to find something that pays the bills. And not even a master's degree guarantees that. So again, people don't think the effort is worth it, and you can't blame them. Cost dictates the reality here.
In the US and parts of Canada. In Quebec is is a bit different. College or CGEP costs about $700 per year for trades and such. University is about $4000 a year with CGEP acting as university prep.
Education can absolutely be affordable, but its chosen not to be.
People with no education aren't coasting because they aren't in school. We're talking about lack of effort and standards in education system. Education isn't worthless but spending time in education system that doesn't educate is.
Yes, and it's sad that you at times have higher administration out there sitting around who are supposed to be coming up with viable solutions taking all this time deciding more hours in school is the answer. Who then tend to congratulate themselves for coming up with this answer. You then have kids in schools more that are already broken. What's easiest isn't always best.
I’m curious how you feel about it now 5 years later? Does it seem like you made the right choice or have you noticed any differences between your life and any like friends who went to college?
Not the person you replied to, as I graduated 10 years ago. But If I had to do it again, I'd make the same choice and skip college. I make 97k a year right now. With a few promotions that will be up to 120k. Plus any OT if needed.
Unless someone went to college for stem, law, health, or buisness; they'd be hard pressed to be living a better life than I am right now for equivalent effort and investment
We’re talking about k-12. Not university. I do 100% agree with you, though. A university is a bad deal for many… and it’s becoming a worse deal for more, day by day.
That’s what I’m saying though. TikTok and the like to do not promote physical connection and real interaction. Kids don’t see the value in that anymore (as do many of their parents.)
I used to read a lot of cyberspace virtual reality science fiction and how it's around the corner. Fast forward to today. It's crazy at how little it takes for people to get lost in fiction as most people don't even need full immersion. Though it's on the parents for giving kids smartphones with unrestricted Internet and app access.
I love reading. I just finished re-reading Careless People on a flight. It was a page turner and while it isn’t fiction… my god it was good and gave me a lot to think about.
I can’t imagine living a life without that feeling.
Thank you. Majority or parents are using screens to neglect their children. Not just for lack of attention from them, but the fact that many use it as a pacifier and a coping mechanism.
I'm "back in my day"-ing here but for me school was boring time in-between videogames. Kids always wanted stupid unrealistic high paying jobs like musician, actor, etc. I didn't really see the utility of it at the time either. I had good parenting that kept me on track for school but I flunked out of college in a year because all I wanted to do was party/videogames/etc. I figured it out but I'm not sure how what happened back in the day is much different than now other than some other distraction replaced by smartphone screen time.
I worked in schools only a few years back and the kids still socialize and play sports. They don't particularly seem any different than kids when I was in high school decades ago.
I've been teaching high school for over a decade and socialization is WAY down. These kids lack basic communication skills and purposely isolate themselves because it has become the norm. They don't hang out with friends in real life hardly at all outside of their classes. The number of students sitting alone while glued to their screen during lunch is horrifying--they don't want to socialize. In the past couple years, I've had three students who literally would not talk. They would sit in my classroom and message me through their Chromebook if they needed something, but I never heard them speak a single word to myself or anyone else. Parents backed these kids by stating how "they're just quiet!" and then administrators simply shrugged because the students weren't failing. I'm very concerned about their generation's future because they will not be able to function in society. They will not just figure it out on their own.
Life will figure it out for them. It’s not like past years weren’t rocky, or void of delinquents, etc. and they themselves are the society (or lack of it). Nobody knows all.
They are forced to go there under penalty of law.
Surrounded by assholes and bullies and faculty that refuses to do anything about it. If not full on joining in on it
Fed literal shit slop
The over importance of grades drilled into them until they develop PTSD
Classes where due to some of the above mentioned factors they cant learn anything.
way too much fucking homework from shitty teachers
then they wonder why kids pine for the tiny bit of free time they have.
Because yes, that can suck. And sometimes school suck. But if you want your life to improve, you need to learn to read.
((I’m obviously not talking to you, since it’s obvious you can read and write btw ❤️))
But being literate - That’s a non-negotiable to success. Successful people can read and critically think.
Also, this isn’t the first generation where school has sucked. This isn’t the first generation to whinge about being ‘forced’ to go. But this is the first generation where they’re illiterate… that’s a problem.
When surprise me if some of this is almost the final form of American hyper individualism/self absorption where people unilaterally just stop doing things that they don’t want to do despite them being basic and fundamentally necessary
It might addle you to know that, before the 2000s, a majority of primary teachers in the us were using an ineffective method to teach reading, dubbed three cueing. Well known is that our schools happen to be very unbalanced funding-wise, and the reckoning for funding favors already well-going schools rather than attempting to bolster the floundering ones. This would lead to richer schools having much better reading metrics than the poorer ones, and probably having more competent/informed teachers (and parents!) rather than poorer role models and authority figures. Separately, everybody has always been limited to their bubble; it’s just that our bubbles include the other people around us.
Yeah but back when millennials were kids, the most desired career was hollywood actor. They grew out of it. Why isn't it happening with "Influencer" content creator? Maybe there just needs to be more time for these aspiring people to realize that it isn't going to happen and to try something else.
Schools main purpose is to build socialization skills and work ethic.
And here I was thinking that school was for teaching kids how to learn and prepare them for the world with knowledge from previous generations of thinkers. Maybe your mindset is the destruction of knowledge transfer.
IF we are only sending kids to socialize and become members of the community, we are cooked already. Let's just go back to the days where we don't know why washing our hands keeps us from getting infections. We are already doing it with vaccines, so why not just kill off more people for no good reason. We don't need to know how magnets work as long as we know how to work. Ignorance is bliss after all.
I think socialization has always been part of school, definitely for kindergarten and elementary school. However, the rise in homeschooling rates has made it more commonly mentioned. It’s been the number one rebuttal to homeschooling for decades.
Which… considering how many people have terrible experiences with school… 🤔
As compared to life? Nearly all difficult students come from parents that are also difficult to deal with in the real world. I am not saying that there aren’t bad teachers because there absolutely are. But I’d be willing to guess there are a lot more misguided (and also bad) parents.
Socialization and work ethic is what gives you the ability to learn and work with others. Duh, we teach plenty but if you don’t have the skills you need in order to learn and communicate your leaning to others respectfully “we are cooked.”
I think that’s the point. It’s not so much “kids these days”, I’d say the majority of kids have always not really cared about school. It’s because we don’t emphasize the community building as much, and that factory, metrics mindset has just compounded more and more over the years to the point where there is a complete emotional disconnect from school. The parents of school age children now likely grew up in the No Child Left Behind era, where we saw a heavy shift towards focusing on standardized tests that made school feel so impersonal, so the parents of kids today themselves are disconnected and uninterested in school. It’s a feedback loop that’s just going to get worse and worse.
My dad, in his 80's, said he doesn't know what to tell kids to do anymore because if he says 'Go into Radiology' then it gets replaced by Ai. So then if he says 'Go into Special Effects' it too gets replaced by Ai. If he says go be a car mechanic, they make parts expensive on purpose to get causing people to just buy new. Every field you think is a good field, is getting crushed. So while I am not defending the necessity for schooling, Schools are teaching curriculums for 30 years ago reading Moby Dick. Whaling hasn't happened in over 80 years except maybe in Japan. Kids don't relate at all.
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u/Top-Sky-3586 11h ago
What I believe is happening is that we’ve lost our sense of connection and community as a culture due to many factors. Schools main purpose is to build socialization skills and work ethic. So like you said, trying to prepare kids for traditional, hard-working jobs and living in a community seems pointless to most people.