Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1p48x0x/can_anyone_confirm_are_modern_students_really/
Turns out that capitalism in decay produces an environment which is actively harmful to human growth and flourishing. Who could have predicted that?
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immediately seeing comments with 100s of upvotes blaming these kids for having “zero work-ethic” and no “grit” and how they’re being given too much grace blah blah blah
Yeah! Why won’t these checks notes infant children pull themselves up by their own bootstraps!?
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but those comments arent shitting on some of the most vulnerable members of society so they arent getting showered in 100s of upvotes
Certified
moment, 
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(god i hope 99% of the commenters on there arent actually teachers)
On the one hand, it’s
, so they’re probably mostly teenage / early 20s boys and federal agents.On the other hand, it’s Amerikkka, so the actual teachers are probably
too.and LLMs!
I share your hope but unfortunately I knew a former teacher who would fit right in there with the things she says.
that place is a reactionary shit hole
I’ve believed this place is an op or is effectively unmoderated for a long time. If i ran the sub id be doing what r/k12sysadmin does, verification that posters actively work in schools. The nursing and askdoctors sub do this, but teachers doesn’t. I’ve found that r/teaching isn’t as bad.
R/teachers hates kids with a passion and reddit hates them even more.
comments with 100s of upvotes blaming these kids for having “zero work-ethic” and no “grit”
“He’s fucking 2 years old.”
“Yeah well he should be in the mines!”
I heard that they yearn for them
I take everything related to teaching or school I read online or even hear in real life with a grain of salt.
is going to be worse than most places, but this topic is a real honeypot for ”back in my day” and ”kids these days” rhetoric.
Skeptical about the screenshot. And rest of thread.
I asked if he knew the color red, he said No, and I ended up having to google a picture of the color and show it to him.
The teacher was unable to locate a red object in a kindergarten class?
Out of classes of 20, over half are in early reading intervention groups. They can’t spell or write their names
Isn’t that what school is for at this age? Surely its not assumed that the majority of children can spell before going to kindergarten at age 4 or 5.
we’re supposed to have them reading writing full sentences…
Here is a kindergarten writing curriculum I found: https://www.wpschools.org/cms/lib/NJ01001331/Centricity/Domain/4/K Writing.pdf By the end of November, expectations:
Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
A. Capitalize the first word in a sentence and the pronoun I.
B. Recognize and name end punctuation.
C. Write a letter or letters for most consonant and short-vowel sounds (phonemes).
D. Spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships.
If this is supposedly an inside baseball forum for people who are professional teachers, why are they not discussing the sorts of things which are reasonable goals? I would expect to see stuff about assessment tools/criteria, milestones etc.
kindergartners coming in who are not toilet trained - so many that the district is now advising teachers to make a toilet training plan.
I don’t believe that phones can cause parents to delay toilet training for years. What is the proposed mechanism for assuming such cost (diapers) and inconvenience (laundry and mess)? How do phones make that less annoying.
I don’t buy that this could be ubiquitous among poor people or people who work long hours.
yeah this smells like bullshit to me too.
Kids should know how to spell their name by age 4 and definitely by 5 barring some kind of learning disability. Typically kids go to kindergarten with some knowledge of letters and writing. They do not need to know how to write pretty much anything else besides their name though so the writing curriculum you pulled isn’t really applicable to just their names. Most kids are taught the letters and phonics of their names from a very early age and is the entry point into writing.
edit to add: I agree tho this post is BS lol
But don’t you teaching toddlers writing is cultural, not natural or to be assumed? That’s why sesame street was made as an intervention to teach letters and other things. Not everyone is motivated or knowledgeable on how to teach literacy. Assuming parents are literate in any language much less English. Its November, kids have been in school for 2 months.
And people’s names are not exactly equal to each other in difficulty. Some people have many names, or they are extremely long, complex, having clumsily romanized spellings, or unique among their peers. Or their name at home is completely different than name at school. Do you think its fair to expect everyone to pick it up at the same speed given diversity of home environments?
I actually do think at the end of the day, it is the schools job and not the parents to teach writing. And to peek in on general development and offer support. I think phones could be substantially changing how all that is done but this particular post is as you say, bullshit. Somebody’s fantasy.
Assuming parents are literate in any language much less English.
86% of the worlds adult population is literate which is the vast majority. No one said anything about English. I learned how to write my name in Farsi first. Once I knew how to write in Farsi learning English was much easier since most of the skills in writing are completely transferable. Spending time with your children and showing them their name and practicing writing is fun and something people are capable of.
Not everyone is motivated or knowledgeable on how to teach literacy.
Teaching 4 year olds how to write their names is really not a huge lift, Sorry, I don’t agree. You should be motivated to spend time with and educate your children and family members. If you lack adults able and willing to do this it is extremely problematic and possibly abusive. It should be attended to in school and they need to be tooled to help people with special needs but this should absolutely not be the majority or expectation.
Do you think its fair to expect everyone to pick it up at the same speed given diversity of home environments?
Writing your name is not that difficult and most kids enjoy learning. Not everyone will be able to and that’s ok, but most people should be.
I actually do think at the end of the day, it is the schools job and not the parents to teach writing.
I vehemently disagree. It is in fact a parents job to educate their children to the best of their ability. Schools are tooled to make up for gaps not do everything. They should be able to focus on the percentage of people who are unable to and give them extra attention not do everything for everyone.
You should be motivated to spend time with and educate your children and family members. If you lack adults able and willing to do this it is extremely problematic and possibly abusive.
While I agree with you overall I don’t think you’ll get much traction here with that framing. I doubt any meaningful proportion of parents are failing to spend time with their kids willingly; more likely is that both parents need to work long hours just to make ends meet. That’s a broader social failing, not abuse.
Child neglect is abuse though. There are people who refuse to pay attention to or care for their children, my dad was a good example of this. For the rest it is abuse by the system.
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never believe anything written on reddit
Heads up, that sub is straight up filled with racists
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Maybe technology is bad for kids, but that reads like a good ol’ “kid-stupid” boomer bait.
there were more community pre-K programs going on when i was a kid, as far as i am aware. like that was a thing parents could take advantage of at no cost.
it wasn’t just 0 -> kindergarten. i did a year in pre-school where i learned the ABCs song and basic phonics.
from what i understand now, that shit hardly exists in most communities and if it does, it is not only not free, it’s expensive as hell, so it’s only for affluent parents.
class sizes are also bigger and as i’ve heard from career public school teachers, every class is all over the place in terms of abilities. so if you have 1-2 kids who need a ton of attention, it’s doable. but once you have more than 5, it’s a bust.
schools allocated funding towards teachers aids, but i wouldn’t be shocked if, like every thing else, that got offloaded decades ago onto competitive federal block grants which have all seen gutting this year.
so, you take all that, you take the socioeconomic context of the place, the fact that public school teaching has been reduced to precarious levels of pay for requiring extensive expensive education and professional licensing, and you deploy it all as a strategic, deliberate, multi-pronged approach to gutting universal free education as a social program for the working class and you’re going to see a catastrophe that compounds year over year regardless of whatever technology “these dang kids today” are using.
before it was phones, it was video games. before that TV, before that comics. kids with exhausted/inattentive parents stay up crazy late goofing around into some shit and are completely fucked during the school day with behavioral problems and they aren’t thriving in the classroom.
i love to shit on phones/screens and doomscrolling, but the bigger picture here is austerity, emiseration, and inequality at 100 year highs.
it takes a village to raise a child and the village is on fire.
Over two decades ago my Muslim parents sent me to a pre-school program in a church because it’s what they could afford and it just made sense at the time. It isn’t all that uncommon either lol, I’ve had cousins go to private catholic schools just because the education / opportunities are better, and these schools hand out scholarships and subsidize the costs like crazy.
We weren’t practicing Catholics, but my mum was raised Catholic and she had her kids baptized Catholic too. Mostly so that we could go to Catholic school. It was uncomfortable, it was sectarian, the broader institution was homophobic and transphobic, it bloody sucked, but the Catholic schools were allowed to punish for “values based” issues public weren’t (not that sexual harrassment was ever punished besides blaming the girl and telling her to say yes the first time and not drive the boys to public outbursts, but they sure as hell put a stop to heresy!), and they had far less of a juvenile delinquents and kids of known criminals problem.
There’s a reason the novel I’m writing loosely based on my own time in the Roman Catholic School District has an antagonist named “Bishop McCarthy”. When they weren’t being stuck in the Protestant Reformation, stuck in the Great Schism, or stuck in the 50s on gender and perceived sexuality matters, they were stuck in the 50s in a way that really fucking sucked for a kid who was first called a commie, accurately, when he was five. Not that I ever admitted to anything besides thinking people should share more than most of us do and thinking the Book of Acts had some neat parts that are still super relevant. Not that that mattered. They thought I was a communist, and they already didn’t like me because I was a girl who wore boys’ clothes to school and didn’t hide that I viewed the other girls pretty much about the same way the other boys viewed them. But of course, the other boys could make rude comments or even grab my ass and I’d get the lecture, not him, if I just looked at another girl too long I’d get the lecture, not her.
But if your particular local Catholics are more interested in ecumenism than sectarianism, you can pass for a practicing Christian of some description, you’re cis and straight, and either they have no reason to think you’re a communist (not that they need one, the tiniest breadcrumb will send them flying off the handle) or you aren’t dealing with the really nutty conservative-area Crusader guys, it can be really awesome. And it was probably less awful than public school. At least the older kids out for random tormenting, and same age boys confused and frustrated by my gender presentation and the fact they found me attractive, only ever attacked me with words and bare hands, no one carried knives or brass knuckles or anything. Meanwhile there were reports of knife fights and massive brawls at the public middle school and high school way too often.
Catholic schools are different everywhere. Some are awesome. Mine were crap. You hear way more stories of the craphole ones.
i never buy shit like this anymore. i b doing shit outside. i interact with kids in my neighborhood or kids at the skatepark regularly enough that i can confidently say the kids are alright. i find it pretty wild how older people are constantly trying to claim these kids cant read too. all they do is read on their phones and shit all day. maybe they can’t spell due to auto correct but boomers can’t either and thats not phones fault.
Being able to use menus and user interfaces is a bit different to being able to read and comprehend any amount of text. I have conversations with people online everyday where I’m like “this person didn’t actually understand what I wrote to them because their reading comprehension is so poor”. Being functional online does not mean being in any way capable.
They would get lost in a terminal, which isn’t a substitute for reading either. Although using a terminal does include reading documentation by using
man.Being able to use menus and user interfaces is a bit different to being able to read and comprehend any amount of text.
not really? if you’re in some program that has a shit load of menus, you don’t know what 99% of that shit does. you just open the menu, look around for words you know and teach yourself what the program does that way. that’s how most people in my (millennial) generation learned how to use computers. we had some bullshit class in school that taught us copy/paste and the rest we figured out on our own. kids are born now knowing how to copy/paste, they can figure out menus and interfaces just fine. it’s older generations who are not able to comprehend menus and interfaces.
as far as your conversations with people online, that’s just anecdotal and also completely based on your own perception in your own brain. you don’t know if they comprehended it or not, maybe they just didn’t feel what you were saying, don’t agree with you and don’t care to put the effort in to tell you why. doesn’t necessarily mean their reading comprehension is low lmao
Yes really. There are a levels to comprehension. You can use UIs and menus with Lexical comprehension, that doesn’t mean you can read well. Ability to use an interface is not comprehension, you’re even admitting that yourself with your example? Just click around and learn what works, that’s not comprehension. That doesn’t mean a person has learned to read and comprehend, it just means they have specifically made themselves able to use that particular UI.
you can absolutely build comprehension by just clicking around and figuring out what works. me saying that isn’t “proving anything” lol. it’s not the be-all end-all but you can absolutely learn and comprehend by doing that. tons of people who are professional video and photo editors or whatever else taught themselves exactly like that. you’re taking what i said as “JUST click around til it works”. that’s not what i said. but that’s kind of how people figured out literally everything ever and the basis for all comprehension. they just started fucking around til they comprehended what output their input created. and again you don’t know what level of comprehension anybody you’re speaking to has. for all you know they think you have low comprehension.
i think we just disagree on this, that’s fine comrade.
you can absolutely build comprehension by just clicking around and figuring out what works.
That’s not reading comprehension. A person clicking around a bunch of menus can not read a piece of text and extract information from it.
This is a basic level 2 literacy question:
1 in 5 americans can’t answer this question correctly currently and literacy is getting worse in america over time, these kids stand no chance.
Level 4 literacy (what I would consider a proper reading comprehension ability) is described as:
At level 4, adults can read long and dense texts presented on multiple pages in order to complete tasks that involve access, understanding, evaluation and reflection about the text(s) contents … Successful task completion often requires the production of knowledge-based inferences. Texts and tasks at Level 4 may deal with abstract and unfamiliar situations. They often feature both lengthy contents and a large amount of distracting information, which is sometimes as prominent as the information required to complete the task. At this level, adults are able to reason based on intrinsically complex questions that share only indirect matches with the text contents, and/or require taking into consideration several pieces of information dispersed throughout the materials. Tasks may require evaluating subtle evidence-claims or persuasive discourse relationships. Conditional information is frequently present in tasks at this level and must be taken into consideration by the respondent. Response modes may involve assessing or sorting complex assertions.
Only 12% of americans currently have this reading comprehension level.
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And for these kids it’s going to get even worse. First their first 5 years are going to be learning from tiktok, then their school years are going to be them using AI to do all their work for them. They will learn very little.
I could figure out a phone or tablet os that was 100% in Chinese, like every menu and all the characters could be in Chinese and I could probably figure out how to get in YouTube and surf the web and make calls.
That doesn’t fucking mean I can read Chinese
I remember there was a big stir back then about China restricting screentime and gaming hours for children/students. Lots of liberal and chud pearl clutching of course, but it’s funny to see that westerners are suffering what China had already proposed a solution to years ago.
There are so many things wrong with the way we raise kids. Right from day one the whole community is supposed to raise a child and teach them. Instead we are isolated in family groups. But those family groups don’t have the time and energy to both work and raise a child, so the child gets raised by an algorithm. The algorithm is designed for engagement, not education, so they are essentially raised by a toy.
The thing that scares me the most though is how parents are using monitoring technology. Kids are growing up thinking constant surveillance is normal and OK. They are going to grow up and not knowing how to set boundaries.
What happens when a little girl grows up, gets a boyfriend, and thinks that it’s perfectly fine that he installed a stalking app on her phone, because after all, that’s what her mother used to do?
The surveillance normalization thing is something I never really thought about. It’s a scary thought.
The first time I heard about the “elf on a shelf” practice was a
moment for me because it was a little too on-the-nose in the wake of the Patriot Act.Wait, tell me what that is besides a viral toy for kids like 5 years ago
Apparently it started back in 2005 as a viral marketing thing that was supposed to be an extension of the “be good because Santa is always watching” trope, now with physical toys. But yeah, it normalizes the idea of surveillance, even if there isn’t a literal NSA wiretap tied into every toy elf. It’s insidious.
it changes “santa just knows if you’re good or bad” like an omniscient demigod of gift giving into “santa has an extensive surveilance network to see if you’re good or bad and tampering with it means you’re bad”
Ah, yeah that’s pretty tame but still creepy
don’t get started on the family vlogging channels, imagine your first time talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend as a teen being used as a youtube video. the kids watching will normalize it too.
installed a stalking app on her phone
Even 10 years ago people were broadcasting their snapchat locations to the world. There really is no sense of privacy anymore lol
Yeah it’s wild. Even back then I looked sideways at my peers like “Oh god we’re just all doing this huh? I’m going to made to be a weirdo for not going along with this, aren’t I?”
What a reactionary filled reddit thread. Ugh.
Maybe students are apathetic, disinterested and untrustworthy of adults for a reason other than TikTok? Hmmm…
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When mommy and daddy both have to work 2-3 jobs to pay the rent…
This is totally why so many places are trying to abolish child labour laws. Instead of addressing the cost of childcare, or the underlying causes of both parents needing to work multiple jobs in so many households, legislators’ solution that doesn’t cut into bourgeois profits is to just let the children get jobs too, so they’ll technically be under adult supervision at work while their parents are also working, and instead of paying for childcare, the household can have a bit more money to feed and clothe the kid… a perfect solution, at least on paper!
We should probably go ahead and hatch a plan to completely destroy the internet.
Clearing the board for an international computer network that is not for and by the US Navy and its sponsors is worth a try
Brb, creating cybersharks to chew through the internet cables
I have long thought that people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents and this just really reaffirms that, as Americans push more and more parenting onto school workers anyway. It just blows my mind that something as important as teaching new people how to be people is just left up to people with random (and generally no) qualifications and how staggeringly widespread what is basically child abuse even from parents who aren’t even necessarily abusive. There’s a lot of knowledge necessary to even attempt to raise a kid properly.
for all of human history people who probably shouldnt be parents have been parents and have been teaching people how to be people for better or worse. the condition of modern children isnt en masse the fault of the parents. there’s a lot more in play here. being a parent is also the most basic human function, not even right but biological function
for all of human history people who probably shouldnt be parents have been parents and have been teaching people how to be people for better or worse
I didn’t say this was a new thing
i didn’t say you said it’s a new thing, i said it’s not a new thing so we can’t act like modern problems are to be blamed on suddenly there being a bunch of parents who aren’t well equipped to raise kids.
what does “people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents” even mean?
It means that it says, I think it’s wack what people are essentially given godlike authority over the lives and development of their children. So you have a biological drive to procreate, that’s cool dawg, that doesn’t mean you should be a parent. People put less thought into having and raising children than they put into training dogs and that’s not saying anything great about the general state of pet ownership either.
Nobody needs to tell me how requiring people to have some sort of training or qualifications to have kids could (and would) lead to eugenecist bullshit so I dunno I guess the only solution is to let people have whatever kids they want and take all the kids and raise them communally by people who are paid a shitload and expressly trained and motivated for that purpose. But woops I guess that can lead to issues like Canada’s genocidal boarding schools
I don’t care about hearing arguments against this but I also don’t expect to hear one that isn’t rhetorically similar to 99% of conservative shit appealing to tradition or whatever nonsense. Like 90% of people on this site have extreme issues with their relationships with their parents and im just saying it could all be avoided by simply not having parents!
im gonna keep it real with you comrade, i think your view on this is coming from some sort of personal issues that need to be addressed with your parents or in therapy rather than extrapolating that to “people shouldn’t be allowed to be parents”. has nothing to do with tradition or conservatism lol
nothing to do with tradition or conservatism
give an argument for parenthood by random people qualified only by being able to and consenting to sex with each other (who might not even want kids) that doesn’t boil down to “it’s nature/natural/tradition/the way it’s always been,” tell me how it’s an active good for society to essentially have children be raised by children being raised by children in an unbroken line of fucked up parental “mistakes” that could be avoided by not leaving parenting up to flimsy feel good wishy washy “oh we’re just born to be parents” bullshit
some sort of personal issues that need to be addressed with your parents
let me just ignore the like dozen comrades I’ve seen on here very vocally talk about their conservative brainrotted parents and their tribulations with them because it’s gotta be just me, every trans person on here whose parents view them in unspeakably evil terms are definitely benefitted by having such a close and interpersonal relationship with their parents. Of my 5 close coworkers in the back, 3 have similar severe issues (one has “dad left the family” issues) and the other two are old white men who I’m sure have similar issues on top of fucking up their own children with their own issues
maybe instead of having a society who needs professional therapy for their fucked up parental relationships we should have professional parenting and skip the generation after generation after generation of trauma
i love that parenting is such a difficult task and here you are saying “um no actually you need less training than a forklift driver and this is good actually, go to therapy”
for everything you’re typing, it basically boils down to “nobody should be allowed to be parents because i didn’t like mine and lots of people didn’t like theirs either”.
ok. lots of people do like their parents, do have good relationships with them, and are love and taught well by them. lots of parents do put in the effort and time and care to raise someone and teach them
yeah like i said this is something that should be worked out in therapy comrade.
For most of human history, the community raised the children and biological parents had no special powers or responsibility (or ownership). The people most involved in raising kids would be—shockingly—not be ones the community thinks is bad at raising children
Then the family was invented and class society following that
Anyone about to argue with me, just imagine me raising a kid. Gottem!
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obvious solutions (note, calling them obvious doesn’t equal calling them correct) to a problem having problems with themselves does not mean the first problem is not an issue and that other alternatives should not be sought
Just because a white supremacist govt would use child licensure or whatever to do eugenics doesn’t mean that the status quo of “anyone anywhere have a kid and do whatever you want to them as long as it isn’t explicit abuse (that anyone with an interest can actually prove or stop)” is itself good
It’s wild to me that literally raising an entire person is such a monumental task with grave consequences for error but yall are like “nah dude just anybody can do it, hell yeah”
also it’s funny how reaction to this opinion imo ends up supporting nuclear family bullshit because you can’t imagine a child rearing system that doesn’t involve 1-2 parents related to the kid (and you’re seemingly accusing me of reaction while upholding this traditionalism)
Anyway whatever i’m going to keep knowing I’m right as almost quite literally every person I know has in some way been traumatized by their parents, whether they were intentionally cruel or not.
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you really dont understand how you’re also pushing forward the same kind of reactionary thought?
The abolition of parenthood isn’t a reactionary thought though but thanks for thinking that
There’s no solution that isn’t just rebranded eugenics. The closest is some form of communal parenting where the development of the child doesn’t completely hinge on 2 people not fucking up. If a child is raised by 10 people, having 2 people be complete fuckups won’t matter as much because the other 8 can pick up the slack.
Well there you go figuring out a solution there that is already a vast improvement on parenthood
Parents are the petite bourgeoisie of the child rearing world and just because people can’t imagine an alternative (or can’t do so without imagining a system prone to abuse) doesn’t make that not the case
I’m sure this has everything to do with YouTube and nothing to do with the fact that parents can’t afford private pre school anymore. Definitely let’s blame the parents instead of the system
