re: There's a skills gap coming that will reshape the economy

Wanna have fun?

Buy something in multiples of 78 cents (.78, 1.78. 5.78, whatever) and then give them the dollars and 3 cents.

Bad enough the cashier has no clue, but I have seen MANAGERS ask why I did that. You have to draw a picture that you "Don't want pennies back"!!

I live in a "3rd world country", visit secondary (high schools) often. There are two schools juxtaposed to one another.

They are both in poor/violent areas. One the kids are as expected, smart arse for the most part. Tear up the school, troublesome for all involved.

The other is an oasis. You walk in and security is strict, the place is immaculate, the trophy case is full of academic awards. The kids walking down the hall ALL greet you.

They wear uniforms and you catch one of the kids chastising another for his tail hanging out, etc.

They have standardized tests across the country and every year a student or two ranks in top 10 for the country.

I asked the principle about it and she said its the home, not the school. If I had one kid playing the arse, I would have 20 parents here that week demanding I discipline the kid or get rid of him.

My point is, both are public schools, the difference, the parents. And its reflected in their children. And the school administration adapts what is acceptable.

In the states how does a school in Baltimore, where the district spends 20K a year per student, have not a single child in a graduating class, yes they graduated, not have a 10th grade education? The parents put up with that shat.

Heck I worked with a guy in the 9th ward in New Orleans and watched a 3year old in a diaper cuss out a store owner. The child was by himself. The store owner told me little Johnny's mother was pregnant with him at 12 and now he is staying with who knows, running around in the street by himself, with who knows doing what to him....and we wonder why he is a gangster a few years removed?

quote:

---

Abolish public education

---

What good would that do? Or are you thinking, how much worse can it get?

Average act scores steadily dropping as well. Idiocracy was prophecy

quote:

---

People have been complaining about younger generations since forever

---

If you’re going to quote Socrates in a discussion re: decline of intellect, at least get it right.

Thanks for the confirmation of the decline in critical thinking.

Socrates never said this

Most of these issues are issues well before high school.

The simple fact is that education starts in the home. How many parents don't read to their kids? How many set a bad example for how to treat people in positions of authority?

If it was simply schools fault then there would be no good and bad it would all be bad. Too many people expect schools to raise their kids for them and pass off the blame rather than having a moments self reflection about the standards and behaviours that they are responsible for.

From my own experience, generally the kids who were smart at 6 and 7 are the same kids that are smart at 16 and 17. The root cause is the parents and home life not simply blaming stuff on schools.

Not to say there aren't good and bad schools, but it's a societal issue of people having no concept personal responsibility.

Wait until AI starts replacing those lower level students in Corporate America. Unemployment will soar.

Yep. I had a vendor tell me when I started a business. Move your penny’s around like manhole covers and they will turn into quarters.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, plenty of these students end up failing out. A small number get a failed grade on this type of assignment, learn from it, and change their behavior. That’s the best case scenario and the desired outcome. But for most, a failure here is just a preview of more of what’s to come across their other classes, and they eventually fail out without ever receiving a diploma.

The problem (this problem at least) isn’t at the professor level, it’s at the administration and societal levels. The administration is letting in people who they know are not prepared to meet even minimal levels of accountability, and who therefore have no chance of ever earning their degree. But the universities have to do it to remain financially viable because the percentage of graduating high school students who are ready to transition into adulthood is getting smaller and smaller. And they know they can do it because the government guarantees tuition payments regardless of the student’s ability to repay tuition loans.

The government gets some votes, the university gets tuition payments for a year before the student fails out, the high schools get to say that a higher percentage of their students are going to college (because they are graduating students with 3.5 GPAs who wouldn’t have had a 2.0 20 years ago, adding more noise that is difficult to disentangle during the admissions process), and the only losers are the now former student who is left with $10,000 in loans to repay despite possessing no degree to increase their wage potential, and the taxpaying citizenry of the country who are functionally flushing their taxpayer dollars down the toilet every step along the way.


It’s predatory lending by the government, coupled with exploitative admission standards from university administrators (almost all of whom at this point have liberal arts backgrounds instead of STEM or business ones), responding to the collapsing competency of society to move children through the historically normal timeline of individual development. These plummeting admission standards are leaving professors with a student pool of functionally undeveloped adolescents who still need to be trained on how to be a responsible adolescent, when historically we were being given young adults who were in college to learn how to be responsible adults that can contribute somewhere within society.

If we could trust the government to actually care about the well being of society, we could use the community college system to get children up to that standard of responsibility we expect from a well-prepared adolescent, while we can use the more advanced university system to keep servicing the young adults who are legitimately ready to find their role in society. But since it will inevitably be considered racist or sexists or classist or some other ‘ist’ by the activist class, and because our government is too spineless to stand up to their derangement, we’re left with a system that funnels unprepared children into environments where they never have a chance to succeed.

It’s at a point where the entire incentive system feels like a logic trap straight out of Catch 22… there’s no way for any individual to win because the entire system of incentives is so far out of whack from anything a reasonable person would consider desirable. Which is just to say, we need to zoom out… this is a society-wide issue.

The quote is from a 100+ year old dissertation on the complaints about young people from ancient times. And this somehow disproves my point that people have been complaining about younger generations since ancient times?

quote:

---

It was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. The words he used were later slightly altered to yield the modern version. In fact, more than one section of his thesis has been excerpted and then attributed classical luminaries.

---