https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/
The confluence of societal and governmental factors leading to these outcomes is an irredeemable tragedy. Nobody gives a fuck about education and the consequences are accelerating
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You mean a socioeconomic system organized around the credo “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and families” doesn’t lead to optimal results when concerning the transfer of knowledge and skills from one generation to another?
Dam this market shit sucks ass
In stark contrast to when I taught in China where education was presented as a patriotic duty and most kids bought in (of course some were too cool for school, teenagers will be teenagers but it was the exception not the norm)
Beat me to it. This is the natural consequence of what is essentially anarcho-fascism. Civil liberties are a luxury only for the rich, and thus in real terms: we’re all just going to return to monke.
Hmm, what if we ran schools like a business?
test scores get worse
Hmm, we must not be free marketing schools hard enough!
Is it COVID? Is it tech? Is it stripping out every single penny from public education and attacking teachers and schools as part of a 50 year long right wing smear campaign against education? The world will never know
step 1: the majority of normie parents do not really take education of their children seriously
step 2: the kids therefore do not take education as serious or important or even useful
step 3: behold.
i work with early high school students twice a week and they do not care at all, almost to the child. literally, like fewer than 10 of the 150 kids i’ll see in the day are actually motivated enough to bother really trying. worse, most of them insist that they are trying very hard. this is in a quite progressive school, in a progressive city, with teachers that are at worst woke-ass libs. we all know that you don’t actually get them to be more motivated by being abusive to them and disciplining them into submission, but if you stop doing that without actually changing curriculum in a way that motivates the kids to want to try and learn, all you get is a louder classroom. no amount of relative kindness in the world is going to make fundamentally myopic teenagers start seeking enlightenment, nor was the stick really motivating for this either. it’s very draining to witness.
I mean imagine being a kid now. What are we even going towards? Whats the future look like for the average person? Toiling away as the world burns? I dont blame the kids for checking out. They’re living in a world that has only chased the dragon their entire life. It was disparaging when I was in school, its probably overwhelming now. I can hardly check into work myself.
that’s a large aspect of it, certainly. they have vague notions that they need to have some amount of educational attainment to make enough money to live comfortably, but this is not really connected to a lived motivation to actually build the skill of learning. and i think there’s also a less discussed aspect where the broad bulk of the social current have their attentions and desires being moved between different very totalizing media. they do not engage with the world in such a way that learning is a skill worth honing. in fact, i think they’ve become rather divorced from being able to think about developing skills in general. in other words, if kids never really see anything put in front of them that suggests reading is useful and seeking knowledge is good, they won’t have any motivation to that effect. our entire educational designs in the modern era are fundamentally structured entirely around the notion that this motivation already exists within the student, and that they simply require a guiding hand to keep them focused on the task.
A promise of a secure future does seem to be a reasonable prerequisite before asking someone to make a long term investment
What are they even being educated for?
Nobody cares about anything. Society is in a state of obviously rapid decline for the overwhelming majority, yet every change from our government has only accelerated the decline. These kids have no future. Society doesn’t value educating them because they’re feedstock for the capitalist meat grinder. Most of them will toil away in pointless jobs completely alienated from everything around them then die.
In educating the masses you will only teach them how bad a deal they have gotten and what steps may be taken to rectify it. They are more malleable and pacifiable stewing in their own ignorance. Decreasing education grows the lumpenproletariat.
In educating the masses you will only teach them how bad a deal they have gotten and what steps may be taken to rectify it. They are more malleable and pacifiable stewing in their own ignorance. Decreasing education grows the lumpenproletariat.
couldn’t put it better myself.
These kids have no future.
that said, i agree with the general truth of this paragraph, and the literal truth of “nobody cares about anything,” but it is also very much the case that the kids are wholly unaware of this future. their nihilism is actively caught up in the conscious consumption of food and media, somewhere around 1/3 of them simply refuse to stop listening to music in at least one ear during classes. they are very much living in a “dead flag blues” reality without realizing the lumpenproletarianization they are undergoing precisely by their having no drives or interests beyond what they can see and hear and smell that are in any sense animating.
We are so cooked lmao
What are we supposed to do?
I think the problem is much more fundamental, schools are essentially abusive and hostile to (many) students. One of their core missions is to sort students, selecting some of them for higher education and others for precarity. This necessitates institutional bullying, which I have witnessed plenty of while at school. Naturally many students will react with being unmotivated and hostile, it’s an abusive situation. I swear if some aunt or uncle treated the children like some of the shit I’ve seen in my schools days, most parents would forbid them from having any contact.
Now, I do think you have a point though, a teacher that’s embracing the role, being strict but predictable and “fair” is more respectful than one who thinks or pretends they’re your friend and just trying to help you. You’re also right that kids whose parents nurture curiosity and learning will obviously do better in school. As will kids whose parents are generally competent, stable and loving, as those kids will be able to better cope with the whole school situation.
I think the problem is much more fundamental, schools are essentially abusive and hostile to (many) students. One of their core missions is to sort students, selecting some of them for higher education and others for precarity. This necessitates institutional bullying, which I have witnessed plenty of while at school. Naturally many students will react with being unmotivated and hostile, it’s an abusive situation. I swear if some aunt or uncle treated the children like some of the shit I’ve seen in my schools days, most parents would forbid them from having any contact.
i’m very sympathetic to this analysis because it correctly describes the basic structures of the system as a whole. it’s institutionalization, students understand that they’re performing for grades and exam scores, etc. etc. and it was bound to arrive at proceeding generations that simply start not to even care about that. the discipline and punish analysis as applied to the school is correct; i just think that it is incomplete. i think it lacks the ability to explain the success of, for example, chinese education when it is to a fault predicated on producing an objective meritocratic sort of students to determine who gets the best higher education. the model of education exists in an entirely different cultural context, within which what outwardly appears to be a similar educational medium is quite different. i think it’s unlikely the case that the differences just in the scheduling structure of chinese education, teacher temperament, and curricula could explain their system being fundamentally compatible with and similar to the western european educational model that terminates at western-style university education and yet achieving different results. surely if it were so completely different as to achieve such better results it wouldn’t be able to do so in a manner that is still compatible with the western academic structure. and yet, the educational outcomes are much stronger. in other words, i think the chinese education system is structurally quite similar to that in the united states, should therefore be just as abusive, and yet has not produced an increasingly ill-educated, propagandized, lumpenproletarianized society as the u.s. has. therefore, i don’t think that institutionalization is as fundamental as the society that encompasses the education system. and ours let’s corporations eat the children in any way they can get away with. last week i worked with a student that was using kalshi to bet on tennis during class, and that was an AP calculus student, so not one of the ones in this group of failing math students. even the more education-curious ones are often already investing themselves in attempting to become oppressors.
I don’t really know anything about the Chinese system. It does seem to contain plenty of abuse though.
I have thought about education in a socialist system (I’m imagining something more along the lines of the Soviet Union here). I do think that fundamentally, the sorting function is still there, since various kinds of jobs requiring more or less education exist and need to be filled, and that requires some “meritocratic” justification of who gets do what job, some of which do have higher pay and prestige. But precarity doesn’t exist in the same way. Everyone is guaranteed a job, with decent pay. And you can take it easy as well, the boss just doesn’t have the same power to ruin your life. I think this would take some of the pressure out of the schools as well. But that’s just what I imagine, I really don’t know how it was in the USSR, neither personally nor have I read anything about it, so maybe I’m totally off.
But I do think you have a point. The wider societal and economic structure would impact how overall abusive the school system is, even when it is or seems quite similar.
i’m with you. i think that’s right. there are a lot of reinforcing factors that favor capital in the design of specifically the entirety of u.s. society.
something something a proliferation of electromagnetic opium dens or something.
fewer than 10 of the 150 kids i’ll see in the day are actually motivated enough to bother really trying. worse, most of them insist that they are trying very hard.
Have you found any approach that helps improve this?
Have you found any approach that helps improve this?
well i think if we all really committed to a “don’t shoot the dog” inspired behavioral approach we could successfully train them to perform the process of learning with sufficient diligence for long enough that it becomes self-reinforcing, but that’s an awful lot to tackle twice a week or to get curmudgeonly educators to even understand the concept of.
it’s the phones dude
It must be because the woke mob is stopping cops from summarily executing children
the majority of them would refuse to do 285 - 271 without a calculator, let alone fractions.
So, I can do it mentally, but it does technically take more effort and brain work than using the calculator. In this example it’s obvious that we should be able to reason out the answer, but I would hardly say calculators are ever the problem. Ultimately they are a tool, and for most people knowing how to use a tool is good enough.
I always think of calculating triangles with sin cos tan, and the fact that we were taught how to use the calculator and only the calculator. I assume there is a long handed version you can do with pen and paper, and I assume you eventually know it if you study mathmatics, but for most people knowing how to use the calculator is probably sufficient.
And as we’ve learned now, they probably don’t even know that.
i absolutely said that about calculators for a long time before working with students trying to learn algebra. they genuinely largely struggle to understand what they’re doing because their ability to manipulate fractions and arithmetic is so stunted. it’s not that drilling long division would be good, but the calculator dependence is absolutely not helping. it also makes most of them deeply allergic to fractions as opposed to decimal approximations, that they also don’t really understand correctly. in ways that greatly harm their willingness to even try to learn math. it is unfortunately absolutely not like learning sin cos tan ratios. which they also struggle to understand are functions because they have trouble with functions because they have trouble digesting even basic algebraic concepts like substitution. not that i mean in any way to comment on your own abilities, these are my observations from working with the kids.
No I’m sorry, I think I was truly speaking out of turn. I haven’t been in school for a while now, and I only experience some interactions with the younger generation. I think it was wrong of me to discredit the importance of the basics.
You learn the alphabet before you learn to read.
no need to apologize, i have a math degree and i was of the mind that people were overreacting about the extent of calculator use since most of the arguments are reactionary before i started working in a school.
but lo and behold, no, for reasons entirely other than what most people would think, it’s absolutely killing the kids.
It’s absolutely true, you can give someone a basic arithmetic problem (addition, subtraction, simple multiplication) and the first reaction is to grab a calculator. I have to interrupt my learners, and be like, “no, you don’t need a calculator to multiply this by ten, I promise you will waste more time pulling it out then just thinking about the answer”.
I have had classes where I get my learners to look at their calculator history, and they realize how many really basic things they offloaded to their phones that they absolutely knew if they were just willing to consider it for a few seconds.
it’s been really stunning to observe for me. a lot of the students i work with, when i’ve insisted on trying to do the arithmetic without a calculator, has been to simply fucking guess.
this is partly a problem i think of our local education system and how little effort they require from middle-school students (ages ~12-14) to simply pass them through, but it’s still off-putting to observe.
I don’t think there is a reasonable way to calculate trigonometric functions by hand. The computer solves a number of terms in an infinite series to approximate it. Back in the day there used to be books of tables, that had a lits of trigonometric functions logarithms, and so on for different numbers. I guess you could also use a slide rule. As a side note, there is an old timey isekai by an American author, I forget the name, were the magician has to give up his magic to get a book of tables and it’s considered a good deal.
The closer thing to solving trigonometric functions by hand that can be taught in grade school is the unit circle. Incidentally when you buy a ruler set, it comes with 2 triangles and a compass, the 2 triangles have 30 and 45 degree angles Wich are the ones used for the unit circle.
all correct, there is not a nice work around for general computation of trigonometric functions. this is partly why the algebra of trigonometry is emphasized. the closest one might find to simple reasonable approximations of trig functions are the approximations one uses in physics for “small angles” which is a trick employed to get a model out of a differential equation without a solution in terms of elementary functions. so for “small angles” one can substitute
xforsin xand1forcos x.
It’s so tragic. Because I’ve always wanted to be a teacher but where I live they get paid so so bad I literally couldn’t afford to do it since I have to take care of a few relatives. Like maybe if I lived alone and spent nothing.
I keep dreaming the US will see things like this and actually improve education. Pay teachers more, give them the resources they need in the classroom, focus on actually educating etc. then I’d be on it in an instant
A foolish dream in this hell of neolibralism And religious fundamentalism
Right now the thing is charter schools. Its ruining everything.
Wait—you mean dumping public funds into schools that aren’t held to any education standard isn’t improving education?
When I was a child I went to a charter school for a few years. I was the problem all along haha.
But seriously it was a weird school I actually did learn things at but most of them seem to be totally insane. And of course more or less steal from the public schools.
For the people in charge, this is the best news possible. Their decades-long campaign to destroy education is working. They’ll pay teachers nothing and force them to teach white supremacist Christianity and nothing else.
Don’t forget give the teachers guns and expect them to shoot school shooters
So I see these sort of headlines. And then I look at the sort of school work my kid has, and it seems so much more advanced than what I was doing at his age a few decades back. Which makes me think that there’s some disconnect between the changes in the material getting taught and the changes in how it’s taught. Especially as I frequently see stories about how many tweens and teens are suffering from burnout, it points to a system that mistakes grinding kids out quicker for one that makes them smarter.
it also certainly depends on the school. the school i work in has students in essentially the same curricula i saw 20 years ago. part of the thing with burnout as well is that it’s somewhat motivation dependent. when the kids don’t care about school, when their entire social reality completely grates against our pedagogical methods, they genuinely get burned out much quicker despite actually learning much less.
I’ve seen a lot of people upset at children at how they don’t care about school. They lack motivation and “they don’t care”
Of course they blame it on tablets and shit and it’s like. Kids and teens are not fucking stupid. Why should they care about school when it just means they’ll be on the street or living with their abusive parents because they can’t get a job or apartment. Climate change is here and a transportation crisis is looming near.
Like shit is fucking BLEAK for the next generation.
Also means they are going to be a driving force for change. So we best be reaching out to them and helping them with their politics.
Why should they care about school
counterpoint but I didn’t care about school and I still did great, I HAD TO if I wanted to fuck off and spend the rest of class reading/sleeping
countercounterpoint but I’m also a college dropout paralyzed by low executive function so
Kids and teens are not fucking stupid. Why should they care about school when it just means they’ll be on the street or living with their abusive parents because they can’t get a job or apartment. Climate change is here and a transportation crisis is looming near.
many of them do, but even more of them aren’t willing to admit it or are still gleefully unaware. they can’t be actively afraid of climate change or the economy when they can’t and don’t read. the vast majority of the students are simply more interested in whatever they have going on in their personal lives, goofing with their friends. those with lib parents will sometimes parrot lib talking points.
i don’t at all disagree with your solution that we must raise their class consciousness, but in my anecdotal experience, they are much much less advanced than what i understand you to be suggesting.
Its not really a matter of how advanced they are. The material conditions are going to force their hands to action at some point. The big question is will they be reactionary or not. When I say work on their politics, I mean this. How reactionary they are is going to be very important.
The kids will toss brown people into a woodchipper while fortnite dancing mark my words
Since “No Child Left Behind” came into effect, it’s nearly impossible to hold kids back, so many just keep advancing through the grades even though they can’t read or do basic match. There’s over 2 decades of kids that were pushed through no matter what to make the numbers look good. Obviously not true of all kids, parents and exceptional teachers can still intervene when the system fails a student, but a large amount of kids coming out of high school fell behind a long time ago.
Every teacher I teacher I know thinks standardized testing is bullshit. They’re forced to “teach the test”. At the same time, a decline in test scores means the system is failing even by its own metrics . If I ever heard a teacher say “yeah, their test scores are lacking, but they’re definitely gaining a valuble education,” then the decline in test scores wouldn’t be concerning. But I’ve never heard that.
I think it depends on the kid. Bright and motivated kids have access to more resources than ever, including computers and also AI. Paradoxically it’s never been easier to do self-directed learning. But that would be the extreme minority, it won’t make up for catastrophic erosion in the baseline
is it more advanced or does it just seem more advanced because the last time I saw the common core math they were teaching kids it was like, wow, this is a lot of unwieldy and useless bullshit
iirc I think I was looking at what was basically chunking (where you break up numbers into easier to manage segments) but written down in some weird way where I imagined I’d spend as much time learning the notation as learning the actual math
Nah, the common core math method is different from the traditional notation I grew up with, but I get that it’s presenting kids with a variety of options to complete the problem so they can choose the one that fits their processing style. Whereas the “one size fits all” approach with traditional notation is intuitive for some kids, some kids can muscle through it, and some kids, well they end up being the people that say “I’m not a math person”.
Not to mention that my feeling isn’t just coming from the math work, if anything it’s the writing work that feels more advanced.
Common Core math actually is pretty good/fine in concept, but the execution is where it’s terrible. A lot of “common core” math textbooks (if the school even bothers with textbooks anymore instead of digital problem banks) are a complete scam, for one thing, just repackaged versions of older books. And a lot of the teachers, especially in lower grades, themselves do not have strong enough of a math background to have a “big picture” view of math education and so have no idea how to bridge earlier concepts to later concepts. The fact that calculator usage is allowed way too early in a lot of places is one symptom of this – they do it so that students’ lack of basic arithmetic skills doesn’t get in the way of learning algebraic skills without realizing that it’s all one and the same. Or sometimes they do know but simply have no choice because the kids are already behind and they have to do “something.”
(and nowadays if the teachers don’t care the kids don’t care either and will skip the calculators entirely and ask ChatGPT for answers…)
It’s a downward spiral, overtesting creates a “teaching to the test” environment which erodes creative and critical thinking, which leads to lower test scores. The bureaucrats look at this and come to the conclusion that more testing is needed so they can get more metrics to “analyze.” Rinse and repeat.
A bit conspiratorial of me to say this but I think keeping the people dumb is beneficial for both political parties in the US and so this not a failure but the system working as intended. Also neoliberalism doing it’s thing of course.
Of course there is financial benefit to having some intelligent workers for certain trades and to compete internationally but why give the working class the cognitive potential to see beyond the bourgeois bipartisan political façade when you can keep them stupid enough to blame immigrants, the illuminati and lizard people etc?
I’m not that convinced this is true when the location of revolutions has been places like Russia where literacy was 20% at the time of revolution. How educated were people in China? Or Cuba? Or Africa? The leadership certainly were highly educated, self education or otherwise, but the base? Not educated.
Just because the US keeps its population deeply uneducated doesn’t mean it isn’t also working extremely hard to keep it propagandized and placated in ways that uneducated historic revolutionary populations were not. The material conditions in the US right now are still vastly different than those places as the very center of the imperial core. Illiteracy does not have to have a causal relationship with revolutionary potential, it’s just that literacy is not required to have a revolutionary population. I think ExistentialNightmare is right, certainly in the short term, neither party, who both represent the ruling class, benefits from having an educated population. Long term is another story, but we all know that long term isn’t a real consideration otherwise climate change would be taken seriously by the ruling class beyond using it cynically for fascist agendas.
Education is a useful tool for refuting propaganda. Today, we are saturated with 24/7 propaganda, so the masses need to be educated enough to read, but not enough to have critical thinking skills and tools for evaluating media.
It is precisely the rate at which bourgeois propaganda is created and adapted now that creates the conditions where more education is necessary to foment revolutionary sentiment. The means of publication and distribution today make relying on the manpower of a small, elite group of revolutionary vanguardists insufficient to debunk the garbage circulated by the press. The masses need to be capable of doing a portion of this on their own.
Americans are mis-educated, not uneducated.
Kinda both at this point
A bit conspiratorial of me to say this but I think keeping the people dumb is beneficial for both political parties in the US and so this not a failure but the system working as intended. Also neoliberalism doing it’s thing of course.
Of course there is financial benefit to having some intelligent workers for certain trades and to compete internationally but why give the working class the cognitive potential to see beyond the bourgeois bipartisan political façade when you can keep them stupid enough to blame immigrants, the illuminati and lizard people etc?
Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”
Freeman was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States after the rise of Hitler. An economist who became a longtime fixture in conservative politics, he served on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1970 he was seconded from the Nixon administration to work on Reagan’s campaign.
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
(Public) Education under capital is designed to produce effective workers who can take on management roles without major training. A lot of basic work can be done by someone who cannot read or do advanced maths, but if it took a company months of training to get an employee ready to just balance books or manage a work schedule (or any other task of management). It also trains people to more readily follow orders and not question the system. It is a system built to mold children into more ideal workers under capital, at the expense of the working class instead of the capitalist class.
With the US in the state that it is in, I think it is doubtful that the rich understand why their own system does what it does, and view it as a waste of money that could be laundered instead. So they’re attacking the foundations of the society they rule over, because they don’t understand/don’t care how much it will fuck them over in the long term.
Two of my friends work in education, one in k-12 and the other at a university. Just today, the k-12 teacher says one of their highschool students misspelled “nothing” as nutting. Likewise, the university teacher was grading an introductory chemistry test, and multiple students did not realize a question asking them to use a pipette to measure a mystery liquid was a practical question where you literally use the pipette in front of you. They guessed random numbers.
it’s actually wild to me how many of them i see not capitalizing “I” in writing they turn in on assignments. the misspelling is of course also pervasive.
brainmogging these zoomers
Aren’t 13 year olds gen alpha?
they don’t seem very alpha to me!
Math in particular is imploding
Trying to teach my 20 year old coworker 6th grade level fractions was eye opening, we’re fucked lol
I thought about applying for an engineering program a while ago and went back through high school math using OpenSTAX to reacquaint myself with it again and I’m so fucking thankful I was highly engaged when I was in k-12 education. Even things I hadn’t done in a decade came back to me relatively easily because the base is very strong.
it’s really, really bad outside of the small cadre of relatively affluent students that still envision economic prosperity that is a result of grinding through the u.s. education system. even kids that are getting relatively good grades in their math classes struggle to bother trying.
It’s not the kids fault, but with scores this low, this generation might produce some takes that would make boomers blush.
don’t yankees already have terrible reading comprehension?
83% literacy rate for adults iirc
It’s really bad
Even that seems high tbh
When i was a teen one of my friends called a classmate “A poster child for childhood obesity” and he responded “What the fuck are you calling me a poster for?”
All westerners do. 89% of western adults read at level 3 or lower on the literacy scale (functional literacy or lower). Literacy is level 4. You only need to score 65% to reach that level.
So if I’m reading this right, all educational progress since 1971 has been reversed.
Probably worse, IMO. Lead was in everything back then
I think it’s quite the opposite, they care, and the down trend is intentional. A uneducated populace is one able to be swayed by propaganda, able to be cowed into submission and turned into grist for the mill. The rich needs a ready supply of bodies.
This is the first Pakled-type society
Taking a look at some of the vehicles on the road, it’s been like that for a minute
their capital is Big Strong City and everything is made out of tacky gaudy gold and they end up nuking themselves
So, growing up, my dad was a philosophy of education teacher. College level shit. Unfortunately in the early 2000s, no places around our area really continued those programs, so he was sort of forced out of work.
That should have been a sign of something. Not sure what, but…something.
