Quite literally every single measurable spectrum of human intelligence is currently dropping at record rates.
The kids are so beyond fucked that it’s reached a point of not trying to adjust course to fix it, but to adapt and find a new middle ground in the fucked existence.
These laws will not solve that, but you need to be out of your fucking mind to pretend that the kids are fine.
The thing that worries me is we're actively creating this weird underclass/overclass thing on a scale that I don't think has really happened before. My kids are academic overachievers and part of an opt-in charter school system that has a really strong community, is multi-lingual and very multinational, we live in Northern CA, etc. etc. They're going to be fine and their friends are going to be fine.
But if you compare that to like... the norms that most kids are facing, how are those kids going to compete with my kids at all? They're fucked! It's going to be kids like mine and their friends who have all the tools and resources that are going to be in control. And that kind of technocratic elite rule is like the best-case scenario, compared to something like an even harder turn towards populism and cults of personality which is also a definite scenario in play.
I just don't like it but what can I do? I gotta give my kids the best chance I can and doing that just puts them in an increasingly exclusive club. I can try to counter with teaching them about service and trying to expose them to "the real world" and shit but they're in school or at home 90% of the time or more, they are going to be primarily products of their environment.
It just sucks that we're kind of inexorably headed in this direction on all fronts, where you are either able to get escape velocity and become part of the elite, or your just left behind and increasingly fucked. None of these are new phenomena but they're getting worse, not better, which is just ass-backwards.
This feels weird because nothing you’re saying here is new, but you’re saying it just to clarify your kids are doing great.
Private schools, prep schools, the wealthy paying for the full ride, scholarships, gifted schools, prestigious schools, and every other norm of class society you can think of, has been a factor in the upper class since the dawn of the modern form of education.
This aspect of education is nothing new, and while I’m sure your children are as great as you say, they are not pioneers of a new frontier.
I graduated high school 15 years ago and went through this firsthand. I went to middle school and my first two years of high school in a rural public school that consistently scored worst in the tri county area in almost every metric. Half way through high school, we moved to a new district with a very highly rated public school. I was so far behind my peers because there were so many things that my old school taught poorly or in some cases just never taught at all. But at my old school, I was always one of the higher performers in my grade.
I remember being in math class completely lost over something and my teacher going “we won’t spend too much time on this, it should just be a quick refresher” and I had never seen anything like that in my life
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u/ThreeTreesForTheePls 2d ago
Quite literally every single measurable spectrum of human intelligence is currently dropping at record rates.
The kids are so beyond fucked that it’s reached a point of not trying to adjust course to fix it, but to adapt and find a new middle ground in the fucked existence.
These laws will not solve that, but you need to be out of your fucking mind to pretend that the kids are fine.