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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Love paragraph one on the development and proliferation of ideas. There's probably a deep vein on memetics and ideas in the internet age to be mined from Culture War threads. Sure wish there was a search feature on The Vault and it actually had all the AAQC's.

Paragraph two/three reminds me to post a recent chat I had with a highschool teacher. He had mentioned he was headed to graduation, so I asked him a question.

Me: "How are the highschoolers? Kids I'm around are younger. Seem mostly fine but there's lots of doomer stuff from places like the reddit teacher place, [teacher friend X] quitting the profession, etc"

Well, they're not good.

I try hard to not be the "kids these days" kinda person, but the kids in school right now are the subject of a sociological experiment that most of us would probably agree is not going to go well for them. These are the first kids in history who have grown up with screens in front of them and the message that the screen is good and they're not okay.

Most adults will probably acknowledge that their phone is a problem. I don't know that I've ever met an adult who believes that they have a good control of their phone or that it isn't a problem somewhere in their life, and it's much worse for the kids. It's anestisizing them to feelings and experiences, and they're dumber because of it.

I mean that in a couple of ways:

  1. All those movies you're supposed to see in your life? The ones that every one has seen? They haven't. They played on their phone through it, or they went to go watch this other thing and never saw it. There are huge cultural things that they're missing, and I'm not talking about, "What do you mean you haven't seen All the Presidents Men. I'm talking about things like The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast or such. They have no cultural knowledge to speak of. [Editor's note: this just sounded like old man-ism to me. But could indicate more concerns about decreasing shared culture, values, and increasing siloed experiences as a people. ]

  2. They're not only uninformed they're misinformed. They get a lot of information about life from tik-tok/social media, and they aren't old enough to discern between "this is a quack pushing a bad idea" and "this is a doctor." I've had kids who have been transported to the hospital because they drank so much water (because some influencer told them to, as "healthy") that it screwed up their electrolyte balance. They actively believe in conspiracy theories, because the fake moon-landing stuff has a bunch of accounts pushing it, but the history accounts don't exist/aren't watched.

  3. Their reading/critical thinking skills are really lacking. Shakespeare has never been easy, but "My only love sprung from my only hate!" should be something that they can parse, and they can't. The lack of time reading is leaving many of them the inability to think very deeply, and they don't know enough to have anything to think about.

  4. They're fragile beyond belief. Their feelings are the most important thing in the world, and anything that hurts their feelings is automatically wrong.

With all that being said, they're nice enough. They're not bad. They're selfish, they're self-absorbed, and they don't have great skills, but they're nice. Their parents are probably the reason to quit: The inability to hold students accountable for their poor decisions, and that it's somehow the teacher's fault, is more of a soul-sucker than anything the kids can do.

Me: "[I basically say, well, teenagers have always been jerks.] Definitely a concern there with just how easily and cheaply social media can manipulate educated adults, let alone kids that are accustomed to sucking up 80 second clips as an informative source."

Yeah. They're not radically different, but the bad is just worse. They're more coarse. Like... selfish jerk? Yes, but twenty years ago, you could shame them for it. Now? They don't see anything wrong with being selfish. "Hey, if I don't look out for me, who else will?"

And yeah—we don't have the social mores to deal with the technology that we had. In 800AD, you would have beer for breakfast—it had calories, it wouldn't make you sick, and it was so weak that it wouldn't be a problem.

By 1300AD, a bunch of monks had invented distillation, and suddenly there was hard liquor. It took hundreds of years to figure out the rules for dealing with it. "No drinking before 5 o'clock", "this is for adults only", "one and done" and all the other rules we have in society.

We're not there yet with the tech—and a lot of people are just so firmly in the "more is better" place they don't see the need for it. AI is going to ruin their ability to think and write, I'm sure.

With all that being said, they're nice enough. They're not bad. They're selfish, they're self-absorbed, and they don't have great skills, but they're nice. Their parents are probably the reason to quit: The inability to hold students accountable for their poor decisions, and that it's somehow the teacher's fault, is more of a soul-sucker than anything the kids can do.

Only tangentially related, but this paragraph made it occur to me the sad irony of the situation with respect to how much teachers are believed to be able to influence kids. This attitude of blaming the teachers for students' poor performance caused by students' poor decisions obviously stems from the belief that teachers have the responsibility to influence students to make better decisions, and implicit in that is the belief that teachers have the ability to significantly influence students into making better decisions. It seems to me that the people who both buy into and push forward this belief also tend to be the ones who are most supportive of teachers, the biggest proponents of rearranging society such that more money and resources flow to teachers. This makes some sense, since if teacher quality matters a great deal for student performance, then incentivizing the best and brightest to go into teaching by giving them more money is likely to pay dividends in the form of better students. And yet it's the prominence of this very same belief that's responsible for this phenomenon of teachers being blamed for their students' poor performance and eventually deciding to leave this "soul-sucking" profession.

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