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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.
Many college kids can learn a computer game in an evening, order stuff online, backpack on another continent and drive a car through rush hour traffic. Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps. Someone who is mentally incapable of learning 332423/234 after 12 years of math training stands no chance when it comes to being able to buy cinema tickets in an app in five minutes or using a self checkout machine. People claim to be too low Iq to learn the times table yet are capable of memorizing other things.
School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have. Math is one of the toughest subjects to skip chapters in. If you haven't mastered one chapter in the book the next chapter is impossible. Kids develop an identity of being bad at math and society accepts this instead of forcing them to repeat the basics until they have mastered it.
This, in my opinion, is the largest problem facing the modern US public education system: total collapse of standards for the lowest levels (and that level seems to be creeping ever higher over time). The compounding effect of a kid being passed ahead without learning the previous year’s curriculum is ruinous. On top of the direct problems of incapacity, it teaches kids that actually learning things in school doesn’t matter and so there’s no need to try, while also simultaneously teaching the more studious kids that any setback is a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (because if no one ever gets a C on anything then it must be really unforgivably bad). Similar problems with discipline/behavior only compound the issue further.
For example, you may have heard of the “Mississippi miracle”, where Mississippi public schools have gone from rock-bottom for reading skills to top-10 in the country in a very short time (and one of the only states to show improvement at all), and without any significant spending increase. There are two reasons for this, and they’re excruciatingly simple: they changed to a “back to basics” reading-and-writing curriculum focused on core competency at young ages and without assuming the kids were reading or being read to at home; and they made it significantly easier for schools to hold back students who weren’t reading at grade level.
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