I think it's bad, but I also think there's a impulse to prove that others are dumb, even if it's children who are undergoing a severe mental health crisis.

Even if what the users say is 100% true, I didn't see any posts talking about the reality of being a student in a world where you were forced to go back to school when people were still dying of covid, there are mass shooters who will come in because they watched something on Fox News, or that they are seeing climate change ravage their world.

I struggled to pay attention in school because of abuse and my GPA went to 4.0 as soon as I left the house.

Material conditions are a thing we talk a lot about here, but I feel like even then, we can forget about material conditions for children in the US.

I dunno. It's bad to be in school and we're definitely going to feel the consequences for a while. I just hate that the blame is gonna fall on teachers and not the depravity of capitalism.

I would imagine a lot of these students fail to see the "point" of learning. The US education system is so detached from the reality of these kid's lives that they just find it hard to care about. Why should they?

My generation was sold the lie that if we did well in school we could go to a good university and get a degree and get a really nice job. But that's such an empty, hollow goal for a person's life, and it didn't even turn out to be true, nepotism was and is the way to get a decent job, and these kids probably know it, and they also know that they don't know anyone in high places to get that cushy job.

So I don't really blame them for their apathy in a cold indifferent capitalist society that will probably crumble before they hit 40. Why work hard to get further in such an obviously broken system?

millennials with some spillover to gen x and gen z are the only people on earth who know how computers work, when they're gone it's going to be a bad time

I would take a lot of that stuff with a grain of salt. There's someone in there claiming their AP human geography class didn't know what even numbers were. You really get the sense that there's a real creep in a lot of these stories from "I had a kid who did X..." to "My students do X...", all without any requirement to justify how some bad outcome is worse that it was in the past. teachers can be drama queens, and redditors can be idiots.

I'm sure there are districts in the US with dramatically under-resourced classrooms, but this has always been true. Right now there is a real zeitgeist where I live as well to try to tell this story that the kids are categorically worse as well, but honestly most of that is complete hash, or at the very best complicated. Covid did cause some general developmental delay and that is a real concern, but generally kids aren't much different than they used to be and in a lot of ways that are really important they're the best generation that's ever existed.

I have kids who don't know how to start a new email. They just go back and reply to the first email I ever sent them all year long and never change the subject line. Others know how to start a new email but they write the body of the email in the subject line and leave the body blank. One kid was properly blown away that I could attach documents to emails…

Tbf I know a ton of adults like this. Zoomers about to have the email communication skills of old racist boomers

I was talking to a younger coworker the other day and he said he has friends who can barely spell and sorta just sound it out and pick from the top 3 keyboard suggestions like they're typing Mandarin.

The loss of phonics in schools and the general teaching to the test is really hurting students.

My BiL is in high school. He's not a dumb kid but struggles in class. I found one of his essays laying around and the spelling and grammar were all over the place.

A lot of this seems really overblown, and the whole viral trend of teachers complaining about student being behind feels off to me. I'm a teacher. Not for k-12, so maybe I just haven't run into it yet, but this doesn't match my experience.

It’s a bigger sign of a class divide. You find kids like this in public urban schools with a police presence within the school. You don’t see this as much at the better public suburban schools.

imo this content feels a little bit like millenials making themselves feel better about those dumb gen z/alpha kids.

I want to add that there are high-performing students out there. However, from my experience, the gap between the "gifted/honors" population and the "general" population has widened significantly. Either you have students that perform exceptionally well or you have students coming into class grade levels behind. There are rarely students who are in between.

There are nerds who will learn no matter what and there are students who need a push either from the parent or the teacher. With online classes, there isn't much the teacher can do to compel students to study and if parents don't do it either then they'll end up falling behind.

"During their presentation I got the distinct impression they had no idea where pearl harbor actually was. So during the questions I asked, "Where is pearl harbor?" Without a moment's hesitation they replied, "My research did not reveal that information to me."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1axhne2/the_public_needs_to_know_the_ugly_truth_students/krockyu/

The inevitable results of capitalism intentionally knee-capping public education by underfunding education and underpaying school staff, to keep as dumb a populace as possible while also creating justification to further privatize schooling/restrict a good education to the rich.

Do you think there's anything more sinister at work here than just capital being bad ? Even if things are old half as bad as that sub makes them out to be it seems like just such a horrible thing.

Edit; and by capital being bad I mean profit seeking off of education and the desire for a limitless supply of uneducated consumers/workers.

Can confirm as a substitute.

Personally, I blame chan culture becoming more and more mainstream, so it's "cool" to be stupid.

Thankfully, I've had some really sweet, hardworking kids but it sometimes takes me aback when I'm teaching a sixth grade class and they have no idea what a 'vertebrate' is. Like come on, I learned that from Spongebob.

I think we’re mistaken in blaming COVID for this although it’s certainly a contributing factor. The US has always had shitty educational outcomes (look at our literacy rates) compared to even much poorer countries. Biggest villain here is austerity, which has only worsened in recent years. I’ve seen several news stories about districts having to go down to 4 or even 3 days a week since they literally can’t keep the doors open, either due to lack of funds or lack of teachers (which is just a lack of funds by another name).

The teachers are doing the best they can but trying to pin it on the parents is wrong headed too. By the time a kid is in high school they’ve spent 8 hours a day at school for half the year for 8 years, like at that point if they haven’t been taught how to do simple math there’s something very wrong with the system itself, and it’ll never be fixed because rich people don’t give a shit since their schools are good (funded through property taxes) or they go to private schools

Hope hexbear doesn’t overcorrect in the other direction on this one. Public (ie most publicly available) Education has been hamstrung for decades in service of private profit, and as a result, students have having a more difficult time learning and behaving in an academic setting. The fact that the issue is systemic doesn’t mean that anecdotes about individual experiences are inherently false or covering for capital

Fellas, I have a solution. We round up all the children and we force them to live on a farm and do communism together. Then every fall, we get the twitch streamers to come to the farm and select which children should be taken to another farm and taught to read, then we take half the children who can read as selected by the twitch streamers and take them to another farm where twitch streamers choose their jobs (the ones that stay on the farm exist purely to watch the twitch streamers), and when the children can read and have jobs on the third farm the twitch streamers select the best out of all of them to make the next generation of twitch streamers. Those that are selected to move to another farm and fail are not sent back to the first farm (or is kicked out of the first farm), is moved by high speed rail to the pits to mine valuable asbestos to make twitch steamer branded blankets. We cannot let those who those who know how to read or work possibly teach those who do not. This is how we build a perfect socialist society, we must follow the tenets of communism with grifter characteristics and create slave plantations.

You really falling for this?

Didn't you hear? Those kids don't have the skills they should have learned 10 years ago because covid happened 4 years ago.