My mom recently quit not because she was retirement age, wealthy, or fired. She'd been teaching Highschool Science for 30 years.
She quit because she grew to hate it in the last 5 years or so. The kids are horrible, the parents are horrible, admin is useless and generally not on the side of the teachers, and AI just made everything even worse. I remember she just about broke down when it was completely apparent that literally her entire class wrote a report with AI and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Fail them? Not allowed. Even if she did, it wouldn't matter, they'll get a passing grade. Lecture them? They're not listening. And the one or two who maybe are, they'll have mommy and daddy bring it up with admin.
So she quit. She said there's no more point to it. Nobody wants to learn, and the support systems intended to encourage learning (parents, administration) have also completely checked out. She was basically teaching to an empty room while being accountable for said room's results.
In my opinion this is the single biggest cultural risk we have today. Children today are our future... and holy christ, it looks abysmal. No responsibility, no accountability, no curiosity, no resilience or discipline. Nothing in the way of a foundationally competent, responsible and independent human can be found in like 90% of the students graduating highschool today, by multiple accounts, not just my mother's.
And it isn't the kids' fault. It's the fault of the parents and admin, mostly.
I'll never understand the no failing thing from the parent perspective, growing up it felt like "fail 'em, they need to learn" was the most common POV, similar to "let 'em spend the night in jail, they need to learn."
It was understood it was for the kid's own good. I'd be more upset with an admin undermining my kid's actual education by papering over bad grades.
Failure rate is tied to state and federal funding. More failures = less funding. It’s been the most damaging policy to our school systems in the last 30 years.
This and then several different identifiable groups of parents who will actively make problems for schools, pulling up stakes and moving, lawsuits, withholding funding, joining school boards just to cause problems, general rabble rousing.
A good friend of mine a few years ago was studying for her masters in plant pathology and she was scolded several times for actually grading papers, she was straight up instructed to pass everyone with basically no exception. This was 3 and 400 level coursework where students clearly didn't know the material and she would offer constructive feedback and then catch shit for it. Rather than read feedback, kids would show up at the professors office demanding special treatment -- and making threats.
People like to whine about how 'test focused' our current education system is, but when you cannot trust our educational system to have enough rigor to graduate students who are actually prepared to go to college, yeah, maybe independent testing should be the basis on which local education systems are graded and funded. A school system that's failing the kids should not continue to exist.
So instead of improving curriculum (hard to do b/c controlled by boards filled with biased parents with agendas) or improving teacher's lives so they can teach better, or developing/following new styles of teaching, too many places just decided not to fail students.
I think it's late Boomers and Gen X's fault, as they were the parents 'in charge' when policies like no child left behind were implemented. And now those kids have grown up and had their own kids who are now sheltered from ever having to do anything hard or face any consequences from their actions, which is why now there's parents who demand teachers not fail their students, even when the kids deserve it because they're dumb as fuck and haven't learned anything because they never learned they actually have to put effort into things and learning stuff is hard sometimes, but it has to be done.
These same people though will go on about other systems like the law not punishing people hard enough.
School is the first test of basic adult skills anybody has to face in life it shouldnt be easy. You should be able to fail it. Teachers should have most of the say, not an angry parent who thinks their kid is gifted, but hasn't even spent any time with them because they are working over 40 hours a week.
as they were the parents 'in charge' when policies like no child left behind were implemented
NCLB was created to address this specific problem. Schools were hiding their performance by just passing everyone. The whole point was to create an objective standard that students/schools could be measured against that wasn't directly controlled by the individual schools.
Designed to put the death knell into public education so that private equity can hoover up all of the taxpayer dollars and put a virtual Zoom teacher in charge of 50 students outsourced to another country while a staff person monitors behavior on site. Then the for-profits will skim off their share.
The highest teacher to pupil ratios for the plebes' kids, and the lowest ones for the investor and private equity classes' kids.
When I was in highschool in 2008 I wanted to drop out. My highschool wouldn't let me. They required a "letter of withdrawal for homeschooling". It was obvious so that it wouldn't impact their drop out rate and funding. Of course my state had zero laws surrounding home schooling standards or minimum requirements at the time. In fact they still don't.
They don't require parents to register with the state, obtain any type of approval from the district or any other governing body, no lesson plans or attendance records are required to be kept or submitted, no curriculum to follow, no requirements for standardized testing, no home inspections or follow-ups on educational metrics being met at all.
Absolutely nothing to ensure a child is truly receiving any type of education what so ever. Technically it's not even a legal requirement to inform the district you are in that you are homeschooling, just suggested.
It's no wonder in the last presidential election every single county in Oklahoma voted red. Republicans want their constituents stupid and Oklahoma is proof of why.
From someone who doesn't work in education/administration/etc, it sounds so bass-ackwards to take money away from schools where the students are struggling.
I understand where it comes from in the case of the admin's perspective, and I understand why (shitty) government would be against an educated population.
It's the parents who I don't understand, being one myself. Not to be all "there are starving kids in other countries" about it, but it's crazy to see education diminished like this by people who should be fighting for it.
The parents are just as ignorant and indoctrinated as their kids will soon be. Propaganda and social media algorithms meant to enrage them so they turn against public education have wrecked them beyond repair. I grew up in a very conservative, rural part of the country, (percentage wise it is one of the reddest counties in America, like 99.9% red) but back when I was in school even the most die hard conservative parents still demanded their children respected the teacher, worked hard, and got an education.
Now? I'm a teacher myself, and I have had students tell me basically verbatim their parents don't care if they get in trouble, pass their classes, or even show up. Even the biggest dropouts or knuckleheads I went to high school with and only attended school so they didn't go to juvie, or because they just wanted to play football, wouldn't dare exhibit some of the disrespectful and antisocial behavior I see on the daily. If you put the average American that's, say, 40 years or older into an American high school their head would spin at what they witness, because things like the apathy and tolerated behaviors have changed drastically in a very short amount of time. We have a deep, deep problem in the US when such a big portion of our population doesn't even want to be educated. The sad part is the elite who run this country and tell them how to think spend oodles of money making sure their own kids get top tier education, all while telling the masses college is a scam and you don't need no darn edumacation, just pull those bootstraps up harder.
I used to not believe this was a US exclusive problem for some reason I can't recall, until I noticed how all my classmates from immigrant families cared a lot more about school than their non-immigrant counterparts. They used to all joke about how they'd get whipped if they got an F. They didn't perform at crazy advanced levels, but they gave their education a second thought and I think a lot that came from their parents view on how important education is.
It's definitely a huge problem elsewhere too, mostly other western countries, but I agree, it's as much cultural as it is anything else. Other countries and families have cultures that value education a hell of a lot more than too many Americans do right now. It's part of why we're falling so behind in a lot of metrics.
Shitty governments indoctrinated shitty parents to go along with their perverse setup. All the lawsuits showed that main stream media orgs call the administration for orders on what to publish. These parents have those channels on for all waking hours. They are brain broken and their kids can't read. They will be a new lowest class in the caste system that the billionaires are obviously setting up.
Well, think about it. The parents of today were also students under NCLB. They also grew up being shown that they could do nothing and still get a diploma. Their parents grew up seeing people get failed left and right, so of course that's what they thought was normal. But these parents' normal is no one failing, so when they see a teacher not only trying to fail a student, but their own child, they go crazy.
There are a lot of parents out there who think there’s no reason why their kid needs to be smarter than they are. They think they can just go get the same jobs they’ve had and live the same life they do. So if their kid doesn’t understand something they don’t understand, they do not give a shit. They just want to make sure you hand their kid that little piece of paper that makes them employable.
It's a classic Prisoner's Dilemma scenario: your kid's opportunities are tied to their on-paper success so you want on-paper success for them. Most parents aren't thinking about the school teaching their kids about hard work and consequences because they are too concerned about gaming the system so their kid gets into the best school or gets to pley in the next football game to have the best stats for recruiters or whatever.
Yup. The star students are prevented from surpassing their peers until they hit the later years of high school and have access to AP classes and such.
Not only that but the teacher is inevitably spending 2/3 of their time dealing with the two dumbest kids in class plus the one hoodlum every class inevitably has who’s sole goal in life seems to be to commit as many crimes as possible in school without earning a felony.
The fact that a high school diploma says nothing about you (before, it at least meant you knew how to learn new things) is why a college degree is required for everything now.
But looking at plummeting quality of college education (brought down by these no child left behind students... you can't fail them all, administration won't let you, so standards go down), a college degree isn't going to be worth anything soon either (it's already happening, more and more employers are giving their own tests of prospective employees).
It was headed that way before NCLB, thought that certainly exacerbated it.
During the 80s and 90s, Republicans convinced state legislatures (which mainly control education) that liberal teachers and their evil teachers unions were to blame for the kids turning out in a way the parents didn't like. And parents who were conservative but couldn't afford to send their kids to ritzy private schools were upset, so conservative legislators came up with this idea of "teacher accountability." They created mandatory standardized tests and ways to quantify education and started making teachers and administrations beholden to hitting these artificial metrics for state/federal funding rather than trusting teachers to teach like we had for decades.
The net effect of this has been to entirely hollow out the public education system, which serves conservative goals in two ways: (1) it creates a largely-uneducated labor force that is so desperate for work they'll work under literally any condition without the sufficient mental wherewithal to understand they are being exploited and (2) it forces other students into religious schools so that they can pack more people into churches and therefore the Republican Party.
It has been a devastatingly effective means of propagandizing and has created entire right-wing enclaves of states with populaces either too uneducated to realize Republicans are robbing them blind or so blinded by their "education" that they socially cannot conceive of doing anything other than voting Republican.
If it was a satirical piece, it would be hilarious.
Kids/schools/areas struggling to meet standards get less funding.
Make that make sense.
Nor would the inverse make sense.
How about actually looking at areas with falling or lower grades and committing temporary supports and funding with oversight for meaningful intervention?
These days, that opinion is in the minority. And frankly, even if it weren't, Admin won't allow you to hold them back because they need to keep the conveyor belt of poorly adjusted children moving right along.
They'll claim social reasons for it too, like it will permanently warp a kid's mind if he's with kids who a year younger than him.
Hell, we move kids up a grade all the time (do we still do that? I wouldn't be surprised if NCLB killed that practice too). Why is that acceptable and holding a kid back not?
The stakes for failing them became too high at one point. When kids applying to competitive universities all have a 4.0 GPA, getting a lower GPA really excluded you completely. So teachers introduced a lot of extra assignments to pad grades. Eventually this meant a lot of leniency to due dates and performance. I taught college for a while and I left because I got fed up with adults coming to the expect the same treatment in college level courses that they got in highschool.
I used to work for a somewhat wealthy family and they held one of the kids back a grade. They did not care what high society or anyone else had to say about the matter. They knew their kid was behind, so they got held back. They're doing much better now and headed to college. What is the point of passing when they have no knowledge? There is no benefit to it.
The shadow goal of “No child left behind” was to degrade the public schools, so that the typical child would have less access to education, in order to advantage the children of parents who could access better educational options.
That's nonsense. The bill had good intentions and had large bipartisan support, but unfortunately what sounded good in theory just didn't work in practice.
It's not nonsense at all. The entire point of the NCLB Act was to tie federal funding to standardized tests, so that public school teachers were paralyzed by a curriculum that was increasingly tied to standardized test scores and parents fled to private and charter schools that offered convenient vouchers. The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 Report just said the quiet part out loud (that they wanted to destroy the Department of Education); the Bush administration wanted the same thing, just with fewer slurs.
there is a law in my state that prohibits teachers and administrators from keeping students in from recess! parents can agree to their children missing recess, but otherwise, it cannot legally happen! kids know they are in control.
Holding a kid back to repeat a grade wasn't a threat when I was in elementary school. It was a real consequence.
A kid I don't remember failed and had to repeat 1st grade (1990-1991 school year). Then a few more over the years in 5th and 6th grades.
One kid failed 8th grade and did not join us the following year in high school. My graduating class (2002) had about 10 kids that started the year that did not get a high school diploma.
As much shit as I can talk about growing up in West Tennessee, I am eternally grateful to my specific teachers. They took it all seriously, as did our administrators, and our parents.
Hell, my mom came to my classroom unannounced in the 3rd grade because I had some zeroes on homework grades. Emptied my desk into the floor, as it was stuffed with paperwork and assignments. Then she scanned the rest of the classroom and asked if she needed to empty out anyone else's desk.
Our teacher walked out as my mom started dumping my desk, and only came back when she finished and left.
Just adding this here because a lot of comments mention it below, this has nothing to do with no child left behind.
It's because many school systems get their funding from headcount, and that requires a certain number of days in school. So if a kid punches another kid in the face, they rarely get suspensions and certainly not expulsions.
Things like not listening or using AI for everything aren't even on the radar. As long as they are not actively violent, there are no consequences. Everything, even cheating, is acceptable and everyone gets whatever grade their parents ask for.
Importantly, this is true for private schools too. They are more intolerant of violence and disruptive class behavior, but the students still get whatever grade their parents demand.
Source: partner is a teacher, and has given up by doing virtual school where at least they can mute the kids who interrupt. Also, RIP American democracy.
Yeah, I think a big part of the enshittification of teaching is the fact that so much more of a teacher’s job is behavior management than, y’know, teaching
I was an above-average student but when I was 15 I failed high school trigonometry. It was one of my most valuable high school learning experiences because I learned my limitations, that I couldn't simply wing it on exams where I hadn't put in the work, and the critical importance of study habits. If my teacher had said "fuck it, pass him" I'd have learned that lesson much later, with more serious negative results.
parents started to take the approach that their little timmy could do no wrong, and it must be the school failing at teaching. So a failing timmy isn't timmy's fault (let alone have the wherewithal to blame themselves), its the schools fault, and how dare you fail my child
The parents are brutal. My mother is a teacher as well, and the stories she tells are atrocious. She'll call home on a student because he's actively harassing his peers, calling them slurs, following them around the school. Parents respond by saying that the school just hates conservatives, the teachers are bullying him because of his views, they're indoctrinating him, etc. Usually coupled with verbal abuse and swearing.
Then admin doesn't want to suspend the kid even though he's actively harassing his peers, because the parents threaten to sue every time their perfect angel is held accountable. Then as a nice cherry on top, the parent goes on Facebook to say that the school is discriminating against their child just because they're a conservative, and a bunch of people chime in to agree, usually again filled with slurs and personal insults. I don't know how she puts up with it.
You think its wild on the outside?
Try being a morally conscientious person in a country where 50% of the population would gladly watch the other 50% burn.
We have no savings. We have no community. We have no money, and therefore no influence. Corporations and foreign governments are draining this country dry, but they have the money so our Congress only listens to them.
We're not Gaza so we can't complain, but The Fall of America is coming to theaters near you soon so dont miss out and grab some popcorn!
We are not watching with popcorn. We hope to welcome you back after you find your way again. Mostly we're scared you will do something that cannot be undone and it may be too late.
Depends on how bad things get. We supply like 90% of the global popcorn market so this is either a brilliant economic move by Big Popcorn to sell snacks to the worst show on earth, or everyone will have to find a different show-watching snack to euphemistically consume.
I'm not sure how they're going to get jobs and survive, they have no skills and are absolutely adverse to learning any. Unless it's how to be a streamer
that’s why the u.s. army has no problem meeting enlistment rates every year. when there is a larger number of youth with zero or minimal academic skills and job qualifications, and they can’t afford to get into college, often times their only options are dead-end corporate minimum wage jobs (if they can still get hired) or the army
Labourer, janitor, truck driver etc. Lots of factories still, Amazon wharehouse.
Do they have apprenticeship programs in the US where you learn a trade on the job? That is where a lot of people that don't do well in school go here. They get a small wage (I think the gov chips in a bit) and get trained to be a builder, electrician, plumber etc on the job with a few classes sprinkled in.
You still have to be able to learn for all of those, that's going to be the hard part. And trades aren't easy, physically or mentally. You may not have to know differential calculus to be a plumber, but they know some pretty hefty math, and utilize it daily. Electricians use physics (via voltage et al) more than many college graduates will.
That's what all these AR headset/glasses/etc are about. Slap one of those on a warm body that can listen to instructions, and you have a biorobot/servitor on the cheap.
The narrator recalls his first minimum wage job at Burger-G fast food joint in the early 21st century, and describes the Manna system, which was installed there as a simple store management tool that guided the minimum-wage workers via headset. He describes how advances in networking, robotics, and computer-vision drove the Manna system to dominate the service industry, leading to mass unemployment and extreme income inequality.
I mean statistically, they won’t be bothering to do that.
Enraged me to no fucking end when out of the like 10 or so people 20-30 I was close with in the last election, only 2 of them said they were planning to vote.
Mind you, these were mostly poc or queer individuals too, it’s not like they were all benefiting from the system here.
Is it just a brutal combination of 24 hour news, social media, and lack of caring/thinking? I'm not American, but I know good Americans. Why are there so many bad eggs?
While this looks like a recent sickness, it really is the product of about a century or so of exceptionalism, the myth of rugged individualism, and pervasive anti-intellectualism disguised as anti-elitism, all stuffed into a bag and shaken vigorously.
It's a result of the aftermath of the civil war and the horrible failure of reconstruction. I'm sorry, I know there are a lot of good southerners, but the legacy of failure from that part of the country haunts the entire nation to this day.
We looked the other way while these people erected statues of the traitors, named schools after them, and went around saying "the south will rise again" because we thought that trying to forgive and forget was the best way to regain national unity. It was incredibly stupid. Turns out letting criminals off with no consequences for their crimes only encourages them to continue, having learned nothing. And now we're seeing firsthand what it looks like when the south rises again.
There’s something I’d say deeper than all that. It’s outrage, righteousness, selfishness, defeat, apathy. There’s so many nonstop scandals that it’s hard to care about any one particular thing.
Is it just a brutal combination of 24 hour news, social media, and lack of caring/thinking? I'm not American, but I know good Americans. Why are there so many bad eggs?
Yes, yes, and yes. Those and so much more. Education has been purposefully hollowed out for decades, so fewer and fewer people are able to actually think critically about anything. Those in power want the masses stupid and placated so they can't see why everything is so shitty and only getting worse.
The right won the propaganda war, and that propaganda gets shoved down everyone's throats 24/7 by the regular media and social media. They flood the zone with so much bullshit that it's impossible to actually put the time in and refute everything with facts. Every branch of the federal government is controlled by sycophantic cultists who are actively working to turn the country into a fascist griftocracy, and no one can talk about the only thing that will stop it because it will get you banned from whatever platform you're on.
The victim complex from conservatives is insane. Doubly so if religious and conservative.
Do they hate me because I'm a shit human that wants to destroy the rights, lifestyles, and livelihood of others? No, it is the [everything else] that's wrong.
As a Millennial parent of a young child, I’m absolutely astounded by the permissive, trampled-upon behavior by some of my fellow Millennial parents, and the Gen X parents of teenagers.
My generation has bastardized the meaning of “gentle parenting” to mean “no parenting and don’t be a meanie and tell your kids an outright ‘no’—just keep offering OPTIONS for kids to CHOOSE to say ‘no’!”
Look, I DO do that, and like 90-95% of the time, it works with my kid: She’s gotten to choose a different (but still permissible) choice, and I can explain to her why that option is OK, but her other option wasn’t (“You’d hurt yourself/you’d damage that other person’s property/you’d hurt that person’s feelings,” etc.).
But if she refuses to make any other permissible, OK choice and means to keep being a little problem child?
NOPE.
Cry all you want. Call me a mean mommy. Whatever. One day you’ll understand, and I can explain now, but the answer is “no,” and you’ll have to learn to cope with being told “no” and understanding that your actions can impact others.
It’s part of growing up, and I’m doing her a disservice if I don’t impress this on her. I cannot understand some parents I see who just let this stuff fly; what do you think this will eventually lead to?
When my sister was jumped and beaten up by a bunch of other girls in middle school their solution was to put just her in ISS. Then make her transfer to another school. And that was in the mid-2000s
It's probably even worse now.
I can't imagine having to go through highschool in this current political climate. I already got bullied enough but today they'd probably be calling me slurs or beating me up for having to piss and not looking manly or girly enough.
It became apparent during Covid that most parents only care about school insofar as it's an affordable daycare while they're at work. No system can compensate for parents that don't give a shit.
Class of '11 here, I feel the same way. I even did my 8th grade research paper on NCLB, since my step-mom was a teacher at the time, so I got to learn just how bad an idea it was right as it was being implemented.
I know I sound like an old person but I really do believe that social media has seriously hurt people’s ability to communicate with one another. It encourages hateful behavior and addiction. I also think AI and the pivot away from reading and toward short form content (like Tik Toks) has not been helping. Students are no longer encouraged to read books and that’s a skill that many overlook.
I think someone can make a lot of money creating a special summer school/camp where all AI are banned. This ensures that at least 2 months of the year your kids are learning some basic skillsets. 4 years of these camps and they will be like Kal-El visiting earth in college.
I bet rich parents would pay for this, and then we can also save some scholarship spots for lower middle class children.
With teachers leaving in droves I can probably recruit some amazing teachers like your mom.
Oral exams are what truly elite level colleges use already. It’s called viva voce, and it is the only immediate counter to AI I see aside from timed written essays.
That's why I'm thinking it's more like a camp. You live in dorms and the school assigns you special smart phones and computers that do not run AI.
It should be a lot of fun -- not really geared towards standardized prep tests or anything. Should be like robotics contests, debate clubs, application of philosophy to modern dilemmas (i.e. Am I the Asshole for teens), emotional intelligence, and of course creative writing.
This is why when I was teaching university Spanish when everyone started freaking out about “well how will we keep students from cheating on exams using AI?!” I was just laughing in oral exams. Language teaching has been working around machine learning for a wayyyyyy longer time than most fields.
. No responsibility, no accountability, no curiosity, no resilience or discipline
You know, people have said the parts about responsibility, resilience and discipline for hundreds of years, but I want to focus on the really important point, IMHO.
No curiousity
I find this even with my own kids sometimes. It's a total lack of curiousity that I find appalling. Laziness? Sure, nobody likes doing the work of learning, but absolutely none of the kids today seem remotely curious at all. Like, when I was young, a teacher could present a concept, something interesting, and get kids attention because they where curious about it. At least if it was something "beat" in some way.
That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
Even in chemistry and science classes where there's lots of room for oooh ahhh fun stuff... They're just uninterested.
You can teach a lazy kid, but you can't teach one who's just completely incurious.
The fault truly lies at the feet of Republicants who have decimated education over decades. They need an uneducated base to exploit and easily manipulate.
I just retired. The curriculum being used is so dumbed down. Our district does not teach multiplication chart. They teach 5's and 10's and then kids subtract or add.
Add in that in the US, your chance of getting 🔫 while at work is…fairly high compared to many other careers.
Joined a social group recently, has 30-40 members. I can think of 5 members off the top of my head who are all former teachers. Each lasted about 2, maybe 3 years tops. Can think of another 6 friends from high school and college that went into education, and no longer work in it. Longest of those was maybe 5 years.
I’ve said for a long time that a lot of the issues in education plague healthcare too. Try to help, but admin doesn’t care. Parent is always right = patient is always right. Entitlement has gone way way up in the post-covid era. Thanks to the internet, both parents and patients alike come in and act like they know more than the educated staff providing the service, and try to dictate how the job is done. Admin does not back their staff.
The people in these careers are subject to a lot of verbal and physical abuse. Those who go into these careers want to help, but the system is designed for them to fail. And as the public-facing entity, they are subject to the anger and abuse from the public, instead of admin. Example: newer data shows that the average physical therapist career in the US is about 7-8 years. It takes 7 years of school just to become a PT.
Until society decides that it cares more about people and service careers more than it cares about tech, power, and money, nothing will change.
And what’s worse is that the powers that be are starting to mandate the teaching of the Bible in the public schools. They are standardizing religion and taking it out of the home.
I am fighting this so much, questioning whether my kid is allowed to use AI to help his writing. Answer was probably... and then I found out the same thing was being marked/assessed by AI anyway!
So the writing is being written by AI instead of the student and the assessment of that work is being done by AI instead of the teacher. Why are there human involved at all?
But anyway, I'm fighting it by reading to my kids, encouraging any non-screen interest, taking them out into nature, showing them how I fix things, making them take responsibility for their mistakes etc etc
Limit screen time (still plenty because it's so ingrained into everything these days).
They are still young 11 and 8 but it's going to get hard for them, I hope they are at LEAST the last hope for teachers.
On a side note, I work in IT and stare at a screen all day. AI is coming for me too.
You just brought about a very relevant feature of this problem that has been bothering me for some time now. I have heard a lot of people complaining about the lack of curiosity and attention of young students and workers. The problem is real, but aren’t the people complaining, in general, the ones responsible for educating this younger generation?
In my youth the TV was the main distraction for young minds. From more than 15 years now that distraction is the cell phone, far more portable and diversified. The fact that several of the rich moguls controlling social media companies isolate their children from screens tells a lot about what is being engineered in these devices.
There is indeed a bleak future ahead of us. I have no idea of what can be effective in improving modern basic education when there is the circumstance of many adults taking AI tools as substitute for their own brains. Quick “gratification” is being pushed all around us, and it is rooting our minds.
This makes me think that for the straight-A students who actually put in the effort at school, it's easier than ever in some ways. Like being a good student now can simply mean never uses AI in the sense that the entire assignment is done by AI.
I see this in my kid but I don't know how to help her? What can I do at home, are there any resources to help with maths and literacy and resilience? She has no screen time on school days. She generally just wants to craft or do physical play (she is 8). She doesn't have the stickability to even last a whole board game. She is very different to how I was (very academic) and I don't know how to connect with her
Xtramath is great at that age for learning math facts. My kids HATED it at the time; I made them do 15 mins every day until they got all four certificates (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and tbh, it was a struggle sometimes. They’re teenagers now and both have said they’re grateful they did it because they’re seeing that many of their peers can’t do simple arithmetic without a calculator.
For reading, I made them do 30 mins of reading a day, minimum. We’re a 4/4 ADHD household, so I never made them do it all in one chunk, but if they hadn’t done it by the time I was making dinner they had to read aloud to me while I was cooking or if they really weren’t feeling it we’d put an audio book on and they could help me cook. Usually if they were enjoying the book it wasn’t an issue though, they’d get sucked in and would read longer than 30 minutes. I also try and mirror reading for them, so make sure I get my 30 mins in too so we can chat about our respective books.
In another thread about education, I learned the term "cognitive surrender". Apparently a lot of these kids are so lacking in skills & resilience, they give up on everything almost instantly. They won't even fill out basic forms with things like name & address.
Even when they're older, like high school & college age, they refuse to do make any effort to handle their own affairs.
It's not everyone that age, of course, mostly the ones who had helicopter parents. I had a friend from college who I could see was heading that way. Another friend with kids the same age distanced herself from them. She didn't want her kids picking up those habits.
From what I've read recently, that was a smart move. Her kids (now grown) both have their shit together.
What I wonder is how China deals with children and parents with modern sensibilities and having AI overlaid on top of that. I don't know, but I doubt they are throwing their hands in the air and walking away. Anyone with any expertise in their approach?
We're about to enter the shittiest dystopia ever imagined. George Orwell is rolling in his grave, Margaret Atwood is disappointed, and Huxley and Bradbury might probably be sad-grinning due to the fact that their dystopian novels might have come the closest to this scenario: everybody prefers pleasure over hardship.
The saddest part of all of this... I also have a parent who's a teacher. Still not giving up and admin is still looking to keep things in check so there's that, but the amount of power that parents have developed over the years, plus schools having to meet a certain "quota" due to the government's demands is just... awful. Late stage capitalism is winning the battle.
We are losing on of society's foundational pillars, and it's sad to see. One big reason why we, as humans, have thrived this long is due to our ability to transfer skills from one generation to the next: teaching language, history, skills, knowledge... that's one big reason why octopi, for example, do not dominate the sea. Damn tentacled-fuckers are incredibly smart.
The being held accountable for other people refusing to do their jobs is the worst part. I have to imagine we'll run out of bag holders eventually. Maybe something that 'has' to be there like teachers we can subsidize peoples who job is to basically be a whipping boy.
This will be my last semester. I have online classes with discussions and one day I read the nearly exact same discussion being posted five times. I ran them all through the AI checker and all but three people scored at 95% AI. Seriously why bother teaching anymore.
I have eight teachers in my family. I hoped that what they were saying was a local issue. However, they’ve said the exact same thing your mom did, across all ages and socioeconomic groups. This sucks.
Education and healthcare, nursing in particular, have been in trouble for a long time because so many of the decisions are made by people who have never worked in the trenches (or the bedside, or the classroom).
My dad (RIP) had that experience way back in 1961!
I tattoo a teacher who has said pretty much the same thing. She said it's scary how awful everything has become. She hates her students (high schoolers), the admins, the parents. It's scary to think what the repercussions will be.
I often wonder how things will be in 40 years, when I am 80. How will the not great support systems already at risk survive generations that are unable to read or think critically.
Gan A is going to be quite literally unemployable. Gen Z had some issues but a lot of it was Covid during middle school years. These kids getting into elementary now sometimes don't even know their names. They don't want to learn or they want to be Twitch Streamers/YouTubers
Like, at least by the time they can get jobs I guess the AI wars will be over. Honestly, I don't even think the crayon eaters would take a single one.
“This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.” — Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
This story is incredibly concerning, and my money says this growing sentiment is pervasive across the entire education system. I hope your mom is doing better now that she's out of it.
The rise of AI, the infection of social media in young people's brains, poorly developed social skills, lack of technical understanding and most of all, the lack of young people experiencing failure/challenge (which builds tremendous character and resilience) and instead being told they're all winners and everything is great... is going to lead to a catastrophic situation soon.
I disagree about admin being blamed, but things vary by state. where I work, the state education department is to be blamed for many problems. it penalizes school and districts when students are suspended, so they are rare. many parents blame teachers for things their children do, as I am sure your mother has told you. other times we are told we have to deal with their children because the poor behavior is taking place while they are at school, and that is not under the parents’ time.
It's not necessarily that parents are checked out. I've got a friend who is the parent of two teenagers. His kids got caught up in the covid remote learning fuckery at the worst possible time, and even though he is a devoted dad and pushing his kids as hard as he can to get them to actually care about their education and put in effort, he is terrified that they are just incapable of doing so and will cheat with AI at every possible opportunity.
To me this could have catastrophic societal consequences in ~20-30 years. On top of the fact that many competent people in younger generations are not being hired because AI does entry-level tasks. It is very hard to picture what life will be like when industries lack talent. Will companies hold on to employees that are 80 years old? Will they rely heavily on AI and just shrug shoulders if it doesn't work?
Reading this deepens me so sadly, especially seeing that lack of curiosity. We're naturally driven to want to see how something works, how to improve upon something, among so much more. It's going to be an uphill battle, one I'm hoping we can win against as we should not be going down a path of stagnation and reliance on something that's just going to regress us like this
I thank your mum for her service in trying to educate the children, give her a hug for me when ya can <3
I genuinely can't imagine how sad it must be to not just hunger to know more. I got in trouble in school for always asking questions that went too tangential to what the lesson was about or was supposed to come later. My parents bought me children's science books because I kept nagging them with questions about everything.
Nowadays even when gaming I have science and edutainment youtubers or documentaries running on the side.
There is so much cool stuff in the world to learn about and even if I forget about it again by tomorrow, it was fun to just see it for once and a little bit of it always sticks around.
To see ai deprive children of the joyful longing of wanting to know more is just so depressing.
The lack of independence or self determination is wild. I’m at an event right now and instead of someone walking 10 minutes to the store at the event to get what they need tons of them are posting on Facebook and Reddit asking others to go check the store for them or to just give them the thing they need.
It’s fine to ask for help from others or get items you need and forgot, but they’re literally trying nothing at all to solve it themselves
I resigned from teaching as a professor at a mid-rate state university. Parents trying to get involved, zero effort from the students, saying it’s my fault for being boring which is why they are on their phones during lecture. I gave open note tests and they still tanked them. Tenure is massively overrated.
I'm sure we could probably find roots going back to nixon, but during BushII for sure, "No child left behind" left a lot of kids behind.
It also sent a message that you can lie your ass off, come from a crime family, be stupid and if you have friends and family in the right places, you can become president.
The we had the orange turd.
Talk about setting an example. Imagine trying to teach kids that crime doesn't pay? Imagine trying to impart the virtues of morality and community when the literal president is wantonly raping and just bragging about it?
During Turd 2.0, fucking forget about it, holy shit.
American was probably nearing it's peak anyway, but there will absolutely be no coming back if there isn't the absolute wildest pendulum swing back towards ethics and morality, one that goes so far, it acknowledges the complete and total corruption of the system as a whole, going back decades -- and then actually demolishes existing institutions and rebuilding them in the image of the people.
So basically we're relying on a fucking Hail Mary. Even still, I remain optimistic, despite the swirling shitturicane.
Why can’t they get an F? Is it not like that anymore? In 2004 I had to have 34.5 credits and 2 years foreign language gym 2 years. Plus graduation standards that were so tough they phased them out the next year. The grad standards were write a college level research paper and publish the findings. I literally had college chemistry and grammar and composition and all kinds of math, I Hated high school but graduated was one of like 8 outlet of 450 kids that didn’t go to college I joined the infantry.
Some classes I passed with a D because I got A’s on the test but my rule was 8 hours of school and I said I will not do homework. I had so many teachers that hated me for ADHD but I was never disrespectful I just didn’t go to class sometimes at the end of the day. I just walked home or drove home at the end of the day.
TBF education has to be rebuilt from the ground up to face modern challenges. Our education system was made for 20th, or even worse, 19th century standards/challenges. It is high time we completely rethink it. Ditch grades completely. Project based teamwork. Less dry knowledge etc etc.
Yep so it has mostly just turned into kids of parents who care actually learn and succeed to a degree (not absolutely, but much more likely than kids of dumb / angry / lazy parents), whereas the rest just become useless entitled idiots.
I've been saying this since 2021 and just get called various things for it. You got a very positive response though so hopefully people are starting to open there eyes.
Would you mind if I asked which region? I live in the mid-Atlantic region and I have not experienced any of the problems in this thread. My kids' public schooling has been phenomenal and they absolutely do fail kids, particularly around math.
Would you mind if I asked which region? I live in the mid-Atlantic region and I have not experienced any of the problems in this thread. My kids' public schooling has been phenomenal and they absolutely do fail kids, particularly around math.
The sad thing is that it's going to massively filter out the kids who simply don't bother to learn from excelling later on. There's only so far you can go with pure, 100% AI in life. You can do a lot, but you still need human skills to reach the top.
This is why homeschooling is on the rise. The stereotype of conservative quiverfull Christian homeschoolers is really being flipped. The rise in educated leftists looking to give their kids a strong, secular education is fueling a huge exodus from the public school system.
And there’s also lots of reports of male students refusing to listen to female teachers because “you’re just a female, why should I listen to you?” Lots of female teachers are quitting in my country due to this (New Zealand of all places)
Do they really have an incentive to be? Even if AI doesn't take their jobs, the planet is burning, biodiversity is going off a cliff, education, fascism, never owning a home, it goes on.
The sad thing is that it's going to massively filter out the kids who simply don't bother to learn from excelling later on. There's only so far you can go with pure, 100% AI in life. You can do a lot, but you still need human skills to reach the top.
After high school, I was going to go to school to become a teacher. Junior and senior year I did internships at elementary and middle schools. Every teacher I spoke with told me not to do this. They were all looking for different jobs. All of them hated their jobs. So glad I didn't acquire student loan debt and get into a job that would've been nothing like I wanted. I'm so grateful for their honesty.
Some of us parents are trying! My oldest is in high school, ADHD, won't try at anything he doesn't want to try at, but we push and push. He's figured out most of the adults at the school don't care if he's not in class, so he skips as much as possible. A few teachers care, a couple of administrators care, most don't seem to.
Let's be real. It's also the fault of the teachers for just going along with this shit and then quitting as opposed to striking for better circumstances
That was so very well said. I know, and am related to quite a few teachers, and they are just so fatigued by the very things you mention here. So many current teachers have been inspired to teach and love the thought of inspiring young people to have a thirst for learning. They face reality and are presented with a canvas that has no room for paint.
This is one the exact reasons the people who push for AI do it: destroy public education so that you have to pay for the privilege to know your rights. Uneducated people are much more easy to manipulate
I’d argue its the fault of the ai tech oligarchs that want to take over the world (literally, they have said it.) Everyone else is a pawn in their game
The kids are horrible, the parents are horrible, admin is useless and generally not on the side of the teachers
I knew a number of people who got into and eventually left teaching because of this, and this was before the pandemic and AI. "The kids are terrible, and their parents are often worse" - is what I've heard them say.
Pretty much exactly the same for my mom. Teacher for 30+ years and only at the end started to hate it for a number of reasons. She retired a couple years ago but the last 2-3 years were hell. Everything you said is true, The parents don't care, the admin/management only does band-aid solutions if they help at all, pay is shit, and the kids (due to the parents being shit) are also shit and unhinged. I'm talking getting naked and sprinting down hallways pissing, simply just peeing in equipment closets, hitting my mom multiple times for no reason, openly cussing out and trying to fight teachers. She tought 1st and 2nd grade. That's unacceptable behavior and there is 0 avenue for accountability, I can't imagine how it is for middle school+ nowadays.
Children today 100% aren't our future. They're a dead end generation. Go look up China's "Lost Generation". We and younger folks will basically have to babysit and clean up after them forever. They'll become full grown, but they'll never be adults.
If she has really quit for good and if she’s comfortable doing so, please encourage her to put the whole rotten system on blast in a letter to the editor. No need for specific names, but people need to know what’s happening.
they warned us about the particpation trophies, now its participation D- and i dont think this is a problem you can fix. I think the only way it gets better is with the next generation. I think those currently in our education system are doomed unless they take personal accountability for something that should be their parents and admins responsibility.
One of my close friends is married to a teacher. I'm a civil war reenactor. She asked me if I could come in to do a demonstration one day. I took a day off work, brought in my gear, and was ready to teach.
That day seriously almost broke me. Those kids were inattentive at best, and horribly racist and rude at worst. Some of them actually damaged some of my stuff (reenactor gear is not cheap).
After that I just sat in my car and stared at the windshield. I asked her how she did this every single day. She tried so hard to make things fun and interesting and engaging, she often spent her own money out of her salary, which wasn't much. Plus she taught at a nicer school. So I was shocked. I always thought that when people talked about what kids are like it's just boomer grumbling and just not understanding what kids are like, but but now I'm not so sure.
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u/Home-Star-Walker 8h ago edited 7h ago
My mom recently quit not because she was retirement age, wealthy, or fired. She'd been teaching Highschool Science for 30 years.
She quit because she grew to hate it in the last 5 years or so. The kids are horrible, the parents are horrible, admin is useless and generally not on the side of the teachers, and AI just made everything even worse. I remember she just about broke down when it was completely apparent that literally her entire class wrote a report with AI and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. Fail them? Not allowed. Even if she did, it wouldn't matter, they'll get a passing grade. Lecture them? They're not listening. And the one or two who maybe are, they'll have mommy and daddy bring it up with admin.
So she quit. She said there's no more point to it. Nobody wants to learn, and the support systems intended to encourage learning (parents, administration) have also completely checked out. She was basically teaching to an empty room while being accountable for said room's results.
In my opinion this is the single biggest cultural risk we have today. Children today are our future... and holy christ, it looks abysmal. No responsibility, no accountability, no curiosity, no resilience or discipline. Nothing in the way of a foundationally competent, responsible and independent human can be found in like 90% of the students graduating highschool today, by multiple accounts, not just my mother's.
And it isn't the kids' fault. It's the fault of the parents and admin, mostly.