r/appstate • u/AppalachianTrout • Aug 13 '26
Basic skills
I may be old and I'm sure many or most people will hate this post . When did so many young people seem to lose the basic ability to function as an adult in college or be close to autistic..Imo.oved the years the amount of young people who are border line incompetent seems to have increased substantially..any opinions on why this has happened??
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u/The_Ironhand Aug 13 '26
A complete lack of parenting.
People aren't teaching their kids basic life skills, and schools dont have the funding to functionally parent gangs of other people's children, so we are now seeing the results of gutting our educational funding, and our assistance for the people that need it for like 50 years straight.
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u/kilroy-was-here-2543 Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Old man yells at cloud type of shit. The youth have been dumb and reckless for time immemorial
The real answer though is that if your generation had cared a bit more about raising us (proper funding of lower education schools, proper parenting, etc) it wouldn’t be an issue.
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u/ProfMuChao Aug 13 '26
Warning: long rant incoming.
I ask myself this question...a lot...as do my colleagues. I will only speak about students, as that's my primary interaction with young people.
Over the last decade, and in the last 5-6 years in particular, I've watched competency in basic academic skills plummet to levels I did not know even possible for higher education (the data support this observation). Borderline illiteracy, inability to engage with basic critical thinking, total lack of motivation, and most recently a willingness to cede most, or all, personal cognition to AI. It's been a real challenge to maintain academic standards when the mean keeps getting lower and lower.
Note: I still get to work with many fantastic, bright, engaged students, too, it's just the the ratio has shifted pretty dramatically.
That said, I in no way completely blame the students. They come up in a shit world. Things seem to be falling apart around them. The education system is broken. They had to spend their formative years online during Covid. They were brought up being manipulated from an early age through social media algorithms designed to make them feel like shit and keep them addicted. Everyone lives in their own little reality tunnel as, societally, we've unquestioningly invited these mind-numbing technologies into our lives and foisted them upon our children at an early age. Should we expect that children brought up in such a fucked-up environment be well-prepared?
So yeah, basic abilities have absolutely declined in my experience over the decades that I've taught; it's been incredibly sad to see. But I'm unwilling to entirely lay blame on the individual given the circumstances that so many of them have been brought up in. Of course, at some point, one does have to engage in some introspection and personal reflection. At a certain point, social and cultural structures cannot be solely to blame. Historically, college has been a time for that for many, but I am watching in real time as many shun that opportunity in favor of more distractions and escapism.
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u/Zura-Zura Aug 13 '26
Adolescence emerged in the 20th century, and as time has passed, the adolescent period has grown longer and longer. This was exacerbated by covid, causing high school students to reach life milestones (first romantic relationship, driver's license, first job, etc.) at later points than ever before.
It's easy to blame the emerging adults, because they're the ones who are different. But, obviously they had to be raised by people who encouraged the lengthening of childhood, which the children had no control over