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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

The article notes one reason why:

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Modern education is a total waste of life. You spend 17 years to learn something that should take 3-4 at most.

Can you elaborate?

Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?

Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.

When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.

Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.

The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.

For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.

honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed

If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).

Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.

And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.

Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?

This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):

This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of 2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam.

It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:

The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.

They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:

“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” ― Samuel Johnson

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