Interesting excerpts from a thread detailing a teacher's struggles with growing rates of illiteracy in students.

OH MAN I WONDER WHERE THEY LEARNED THAT FROM

Maybe the generation before them had a nasty habit of pathologizing every little imperfection they had so they could get out of doing stuff too! Wow, that’s amazing! Those two things might just be related!

@Owl Everyone is self diagnosing mental illness, I remember being on forums when people started claiming they had aspergers in the mid 2000s, it's only grown exponentially worse

It’s just people pathologizing their stupid quirks and dysfunctions so they don’t have to work on them and improve them.

Much easier to just watch more Rick and Morty and play more fucking Switch.

@Owl @PraxisOfEvil They are working on them. The thing is that they're making them worse to the point where they are developing dysfunctions that weren't there until they made them a reality.

@fishsticks @Owl @PraxisOfEvil teens want something to be wrong with them because they think it makes them quirky, and then it becomes an actual problem for them. i have seen so many fucking people get actually depressed because they made depression their aesthetic.

my roommate's sister was actually upset that nothing was weird with her and so she was self-diagnosing herself with all sorts of shit, and even told him that she wished she had his physical deformity. that's pretty fucked up.

This is the #1 issue we should be discussing. We're all freaking out about the results of fucking up our kids and not about how we actually fuck them up early on.

When you're a kid/teenager the future is this amorphous blob you can't think clearly about. People around you usually do not help: "you can do/be whatever you wish". This fucks up teens so bad (kids too). No, you can't be anything you want, there are things you're good at and things you're not good at. And there are things you just can't be good at no matter how hard you try, e.g. play the nba at 5' tall or be a space pilot with an IQ of 70. Or be a woman if you're a boy (I make a point not to forget to alienate that crowd in every post).

We should really stop:
a) prettying up the grades so we don't "hurt" kids (and parents)
b) coddling laziness disguised as mental or physical illness
c) rewarding participation without effort - downplaying success
d) overloading them with activities - taking their childhood away
e) burdening them with ADULT things (like politics and ideologies)
f) making them feel ashamed for things they can't change (skin color, temperament, height, etc)
g) ignoring their need to be accepted by their peers (not their parents), which is #1 in their brain well into ages 17-18

Muh no child left behind lmao. The reality is, tons of people don’t need to be in school. They should be plowing a field or wrestling a goat or something. The idea that education is for everyone is retarded.

The trend for me seems to be completely private quality education for those that can afford it and everyone else just being warehoused in a giant govt depot.

You have to discriminate if you’re going to be productive at all.

no child left behind

One of the worst things that happened to the American education system, the first being racial integration.

Federal student loans for universities is high on my list, being directly responsible for proliferation of all the worthless majors and massive student debt that is crippling an entire generation. Also makes my degree worthless by association.

Universities should be for STEM and maybe a few other majors only. The amount of useless crap you can get a degree in needs to be massively culled. Most careers that require a degree should really just be a certification IMO.