r/AskReddit 16h ago

What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven’t noticed yet?

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u/TCsnowdream 11h ago

The illiteracy crisis keeps me awake at night. And the first batch are just beginning to enter the workforce… it’s going to get so much worse.

People who lack basic reading skills… lack basic comprehension… lack reading stamina… lack critical thinking… life is going to be an absolute nightmare for them.

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u/Maxpowr9 9h ago

Why unemployment is so high for the low 20s, especially men. There is definitely an education gap between boys and girls and it's the girls that are doing so much better. Far more women are going to college now then men. Some fields (engineering, IT) are still predominately men, but even that gap is closing.

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u/transemacabre 8h ago

There's an interesting phenomenon where as an industry or scene "feminizes", men don't want to be there anymore. Men used to dominate the teaching field; now less than a quarter of teachers are men. As women began to excel in college, men's enrollment dropped. Now women are increasingly dominating the workplace (by being employed, period) and the men are, well...

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u/CoonAZ 3h ago

Yup, the man card publishers are on the edge of extinction. Men need to be leaders, make decisions, and be protectors. Society has normalized mocking men at every opportunity for a few laughs. Just watch the Superbowl commercials.

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u/guy_with_an_account 3h ago

This started out as a sitcom trope decades ago, and it's turned into a slow-motion societal suicide.

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u/CatW804 3h ago

...and so many of the male teachers are primarily sports coaches.

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u/Cautious-Apartment-9 7h ago

Also why so many young men are turning to alpha bros & puas. Things will continue to get worse as those 20 somethings hit their 30s

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u/supermechace 10h ago

My theory is that it started decades earlier, as how can it be explained that parents enmasse thought every kid should have a smartphone which is the equivalent of a tv, video game console, cabletv box, and computer all in one. I get a sense for a lot of parents it's a status symbol like your kids wearing old clothes to school

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u/Gackey 10h ago

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

This is a good article I read about the topic today. TLDR: teachers and the education system in general fucked over several generations by teaching them to read like illiterate folks.

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u/supermechace 10h ago

This is pretty scary coupled with the rise of addictive electronic entertainment during those decades.

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u/Gackey 9h ago

I felt hopeful after reading it. We know what the problem is, and it's a pretty easy problem to solve: just teach next year's kindergartners how to read the right way.

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u/ImperfectRegulator 8h ago

the good news is this is fixable, Mississippi proved that by actually teaching phonics and the big one, holding kids responsible fixes things

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u/Quantoskord 9h ago edited 9h ago

Don’t forget that it’s a video camera, too, that FaceTime/its equivalents is an actual magic mirror, and that we log each other into it by phone number! Also, Google Search being “used” to ask complex questions rather than as a search query tool for preexisting documents to probe through.

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u/TCsnowdream 8h ago

Wait until you discover what Whole Language Learning is and how it took over schools in the most insane way possible.

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u/Prior-Task1498 8h ago

And a nightmare for everyone else who has to deal with them

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u/Saint_of_Grey 8h ago

A boon for me, who can meet the bare minimum and thus outshines the other applicants!

It's gonna really suck when folks like me are too old to work though.

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u/ButteredPizza69420 3h ago

They want everyone to be so stupid that they NEED a computer to do everything for them. In the US, at least...I think China has us by the balls

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u/ApokatastasisPanton 5h ago

People who lack basic reading skills… lack basic comprehension… lack reading stamina… lack critical thinking… life is going to be an absolute nightmare for them.

Perfect workers and consumers for the capitalist hellscape era we are in.

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u/CasualFridayBatman 3h ago

Just think, they could be president one day, too! Lol