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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.
I’m very grateful that I haven’t grown up with the educational system of the post-millennium compared to what I went through. Relative to what you have today, my K-12 education was preindustrial by comparison. Education was harder in a sense because it’s meant to be. You’re meant to achieve breakthroughs in your understanding as you build upon concepts from the simple to the more advanced. Book reports were still a regular. Cheating was more difficult. You still had calculators but good luck smuggling them into math class. For English literature we had SparkNotes to provide us with synopses for crap like Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which definitely put me to sleep. Can’t a brother read about Alexander the Great slapping people all over the Indian subcontinent?
Education has been very slow to adapt to the changing landscape over the last 20-30 years or so. If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F. Classroom sizes should be much smaller IMO and unruly little POS should be thrown out of the classroom. I don’t recall where I saw the data on this but I read charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system. Maybe there’s some social/economic bifurcation there were the increase in mediocre performance is kept to one side (e.g. public schools, or urban vs. suburban vs. rural, etc., in more detail). I grew up in suburbia so I can’t comment on what education is like outside of it.
It’s funny one of the last books I read was Human Diversity by Charles Murray. The book contains a lot of width that covers much ground, but one thing he states is that much of the environmental landscape in education is going to be demystified. We know there’s significant interplay between heredity and environment and all is some mix and interplay of the two categories. Men and women for instance are remarkably similar and perform just as well in science and math as men do, but men concentrate more heavily in proportion to that category because of social and cultural factors. Men on the other had have been observed to be slower to develop if not sit below girls in social skills, and that’s actually due to biological factors. It’s the People-Things distinction and boys and girls use different cognitive and psychological tools in how they learn and navigate the world. How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.
Most public schools would never allow this. Many wouldn't allow you to take students phones and many schools require multiple interventions and a written plan before failing students and many don't let you give anything lower than a 50. And most schools these days issue students chromebooks and expect everything done on them. A lot of teachers would like to do these things but are literally prohibited by the administration or if they tried the administration would get brow beaten by angry parents into forcing you not to.
Go look at the teachers subreddit and you'll see them dreaming about doing half the things you propose. The American education system is basically not functioning at this point and has functionally zero actual standards.
I don't understand why this policy is so often compared to awful ones. It is the same as averaging the student's letter grades to come to a final grade, instead of averaging percentages. It makes missed work a normal F instead of a super-duper F. As an unknowing-ADHD kid who struggled with getting homework done, especially when I knew the material already, that would have been an incredible blessing that hurt my learning not at all.
Because it means that failing is virtually impossible. Which means everyone graduates, which makes the high school diploma a useless credential, which means now people need a college degree to stand out. Rinse and repeat.
No, 50% brings down your average pretty quickly, if you get 50% frequently; it just doesn't tank the overall grades of students who get them on a "shit happens" basis.
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High school diplomas were a heavily discounted credential long before I ever heard of that policy, which was well after I was out of school. (Though I think I did have a teacher or two who used letter grades in their gradebooks; I didn't appreciate them enough at the time.)
Sincere question: If you are worried that this will make it impossible to fail, what do the distribution of a failing student's assignment and test grades look like without it? Are these students getting Cs on the homework and the teacher is relying on a 30% test grade to counterbalance them, or what?
Yeah; what does this mean in practice and what is a passing grade?
Why not do it like this: no grade lower than a 50 for missed homework, but you need a 70 or better to pass? The B student who doesn't give a shit about homework and aces the exams still gets to pass; exams still own students who don't know the material.
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