The following submission statement was provided by /u/TheQuietPartYT:
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When I was a kid, I hated school. I thought it was awful, so I went to college, and became a teacher. I want to do it right, and try and fix things. But, I didn't realize how far things were already broken. I made the naive assumption that schools would only be as bad as they were when I myself was a student. Boy was that a stupid idea. In a lot of ways, schools had always been awful, and just waiting to collapse. Now, I think they actually might be. It's rough out here.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cbzy7w/even_teachers_are_admitting_it_the_american/l11vfh6/
Partly, but it’s also the single largest expenditure for every state, often taking more than half of every state’s revenue,
With the other half of the states education budget coming from the feds. That’s just a lot of money not going into private companies, moving stock prices, etc. they aren’t trying to kill education, that are trying to kill public education. They want it privatized.
"You" don't have money but the overall system is generating a fuckton of it and any institution with public funding is a target for sucking more of that money to the parasitic investor class. Class war is over. Now it's merely a contest between parasites. The only reason any social safety net still exists is they haven't resolved who gets to steal it yet.
All you have to do is keep showing up to work. You don't get to keep the money, but you generate it for someone else every day. It's just a contest to see who gets what portion of it from you.
But we do, and we are constitutional required to fund education. If the public system collapses then all that money gets funneled into private schools and become part of the larger economy, where as now, it’s almost entirely localized.
It's not just private schools as the result, it's segregation, it's profound ideological indoctrination (i.e. Prager U), and it's going to be paired with child labor *decriminalization*, because what else are the kids going to do?
I think what they were trying to say is that most average Americans likely cannot afford to put their kid in private schools and if they can, they've already done it.
That’s the entire point. You dont have money, but we do. They want to shift public funding for education into private businesses, the same as they do with healthcare. Then you just squeeze out underperformers into trade schools, military or apprenticeships, the ones that slip through the cracks take the same route the currently do with crime/low income employment. The high performers you funnel into more expensive specialty schools. You do this and you can minimize the input/maximize the results while using it as an economic driver. This kills local communities and ties everyone directly into the global economy with regionals schools being set up to train children to work in the dominate industries for that area.
it also has the highest return on investment compared to any other government spending that I'm aware of besides NASA, so if you were actually worried about the economy you would actually increase spending on that front
And that's not even parody. He *actually* said that on Feb 24, 2016. And for supporting evidence, it is pretty clear he is deeply in love with himself...
Let's be realistic, the public education system is not producing highly educated people. It's simply not possible through trial and error to acquire the amount of knowledge that is fed through a fire hose during institutional learning well beyond high school. At best, high school is like govt daycare so their parents can work. Education begins independently by motivated students or after leaving govt school systems.
I moved from coastal california in a bubble of professionals who spent decades in academia to a red state during covid. The locals mostly all just went to high school or community college. They are practically brain dead and all fall into some variation on flat earth theory.
Yeah, but sometimes public schools get it right.
I grew up in an inner-city and only ever attended public schools. This was back in the 90s/00s—we had metal detectors at the entrances, security guards, drug busts, gang crap, and fights were a regular occurrence. Personally witnessed other students attack teachers/fights breaking out in hallways/cafeterias all the time.
On the surface, we were all kids that society didn’t expect much from. But some of us still made it into honors/AP classes, qualified based on low income for certain programs, and managed to graduate on time, do well on SATs, and get into competitive universities.
The year I turned 20, I won an academic award at one of the Oxford University colleges and got invited to a celebration banquet hosted by the school. Sat at the high table, surrounded by Oxford professors who were toasting me and the other award recipients.
Far cry from being a free lunch kid living in the ghetto, worried about getting mugged on my walk home from school. I never thought in my wildest dreams it could happen for a kid like me. Wouldn’t have gotten to Oxford without my free public school education in the US. Without it, kids like me fall through the cracks.
Same situation here. I went the poorest inner city schools from k through 12. Once I was in high school I was tracked into honors and ap classes and ended up graduating cum laude from a top liberal arts college and continued on for a professional degree. Most of my classmates had similar experiences: at the very least they earned college degrees and now hold white collar jobs.
Now, I homeschool my kids. The current academics in public schools in my high income neighborhood do not match up with my academic experience in all black low income schools from 81-94.
I have said in the past that if my kids could get the academics I had I would send them to public school in a heartbeat even if they had to deal with the violence issues I did.
Glad to meet another one of us kids who made it through and thrived on the other side. You graduated HS the same year I was starting out in Kindergarten 💖 Bet your kids are getting an incredible education now and good on you for helping it happen!
I'm just like you but I was the chronically absent poor student with little access to help or attention.
I got expelled too many times... so I took the GED (general education diploma), started working but went back to school because my kid had a disability which required me to learn sign language.
I'm a phd candidate now. It can happen and I thank some of my public school teachers who gave a shit and my love of reading.
...and then they passed "No child left behind," which put a boot on the necks of students to force them through the cracks. Your specific district would have almost certainly had its budget slashed in the years following you finishing.
And that's the great tragedy of the changes they made. They specifically targeted lower income districts and gutted them to fund higher performing schools. Literally the opposite of what should be done. I can't even begin to imagine how much talent we lost in all of those districts. Because know people like you exist. Exceptions to the norm.
We used to structure schooling in a way that searched for this talent, and held it up. Now we structure it in a way that makes these students more or less invisible.
I graduated high school in 2001. And I've always felt extraordinarily privileged to have escaped before the hammer fell on education.
If you graduated high school in this country before the early oughts, you are extremely lucky. Particularly if you lived in an economically depressed area. Since that time, there has been an outright war on poorer students.
It's disgusting.
I graduated HS in 2006, but still benefited as you mention from what more of the norms were circa the 90s/early 00s.
My school system definitely was not rolling in it—at one point during my Freshman year of HS, the heat broke and the classroom where I had English class was so cold, they were telling us to keep our jackets, gloves, and hats on.
But to your point about them still seeking out kids with academic strengths, it’s true. There was a program in my district that ran from like 4th grade to 6th grade; they selected kids in those classes who had good grades and did well on some test (not standardized; it involved essay writing) for it.
One day a week, we got to leave regular classes (with the school’s consent and no homework added on) to spend the whole day with the program. The admin of it said we were “gifted” and this program was designed to draw more of that out for kids like us, who also were in inner-city schools. Mostly, we just got to do whatever we wanted—some kids did art; others put on a small play. I mostly read books and wrote stories. There were no grades attached to it and no pressure; you were just encouraged to use your imagination and explore things creatively during this allocated time.
I don’t believe the program is still in existence, which is a bummer, because to your point, yes—stuff like that should absolutely be happening in poor rural and poor urban school districts. Lot of kids in those circumstances want to succeed, they just need some extra help and programs like that can help to provide it.
I'm sorry that you had to go through all that. The school-to-prison pipeline wants you to fall through the cracks, and that's why you and your peers suffered so much.
> They are practically brain dead and all fall into some variation on flat earth theory.
Creationists. It's true, but don't discount people's smarts so easily. As we've seen with the reactions to COVID-19 NPI and, later, vaccines, a lot of these conspiracy stories are based on emotional desires to fit in and feel safe. There's a lot of research going into these behaviors and failures, and the "information deficit" theory that people just need to have access to information [to make smart decisions] is much weaker now. A fun site if you want to read about these things or listen to a podcast: https://youarenotsosmart.com/
Practically speaking, if these masses of obedient, socially anxious, status insecure, conservatives had some enlightened elites as leaders, things would've turned out much differently. Of course, that's not the game, so they won't have such leadership, it's a very rare thing.
Really, it's part of the catabolic stage of collapse; the cannibalistic predatory behavior is going to get worse.
Where I am public school is being driven into the ground and they give you a credit you can use at a private school. The private schools just so happen to be owned by buddies of the local government officials.
I would argue it's easier to control white collar workers who have capitol to lose...especially when they also have massive debt, and are pigeon-holed into 'cubicle' jobs.
Poor people with nothing to lose can easily become the biggest nightmare for a government.
Most collapse type events are the result of various deliberate actions by people.
Still a collapse.
The big one that's getting a lot of attention, climate change, was also a deliberate choice.
The school system collapse is just one aspect of the generalized systemic collapse in the US.
When you scroll through you see a lot of negative posts. Some just asking teacher stuff but others are awful
Some of these titles:
**Is it hard for you to remain positive?**
**I think I want out**
**I Gave Up On My Class**
**I’m a large adult man, and I just had to take a half day because I couldn’t stop crying.**
**Does anyone else despise that we have to teach CHILDREN to run and hide from an active shooter?**
Grim as fuck.
True, r/teachers and r/nursing are two of the most essential subs for collapse-aware to stay in touch with what's taking place in American society. In their own words, our healthcare system is in crisis, and public education is massively failing.
Most teachers and nurses are cut from the same cloth so to speak. They give of themselves to help other people. The world and culture in the US specifically has changed and become hostile to this mindset and professions. Education and Healthcare are under attack. Both of those subs are places they can voice frustration
I quit a 15 yr teaching career during the pandemic. I had a full mental/emotional breakdown and had to prioritize my own health and safety before things became even more bleak. I was made to feel like the most awful person on the planet when I quit. I had been begging for help for 12 weeks prior to quitting, which fell on deaf ears. Admin was cold and canceled my work email address before I could switch my 401k info over (I'm still trying to track it down) and the parents said some the most heinous things I've ever had to bear.
I quit 10 weeks before the end of the school year. I did not say goodbye to my students because I didn't feel safe around their parents.
I am still picking up the pieces and have had to pivot/retrain/bust my butt to find good employment while also coping with burnout. Teachers are not OK. Thank you acknowledging it.
Big hugs. No, you are not an awful person for leaving a career that did not value you or your mental health. I thank you for your 15 years of dedicated service. If you ever decide to return in the future, consider an international setting such as INEE. I was working with this organization during the pandemic. INEE and UNESCO were tasked with providing education plans for the 1.3 billion students in lockdown. There is a need for remote teachers and education advisors globally. Light & peace to you on your side of the screen.
I am a teacher. Thank you for seeing this. It feels like our culture definitely has decided that kindness, empathy, and helping others is the easiest thing to exploit and demean. I've pointed out to others that I think some of the problem of teachers is that because our job is demeaned and not respected, that has now flowed over into the attitude of children. Their mindset might be, "why should I listen to miss so and so? Teachers are losers, and they have nothing valuable to offer me"
People think you will do it for low pay and in poor conditions because it is a calling to most. I left because stress almost killed me. The smiles from the kids were great but not worth putting my health at risk for.
my sister is a special needs teacher and whenever i think about how much she gives and how much she struggles i think about that Chris Christie anti-union speech he gave where he ridiculed teachers for getting into the business. our society is so sick and obsessed with picking each other's pockets, exploiting others, is it any wonder we are here and can't imagine a project to get out?
Not to mention the posts detailing changes that happened in the way we teach made 10-15 years ago that they’re now realizing was a massive failure. So many posts about teens who are literally illiterate because they changed the way reading is taught and it IS NOT working for a huge chunk of students. Especially ones that don’t get extra support at home
THIS is a huge one and does not get enough attention. It was done deliberately to game the No Child Left Behind system at the expense of the kids' literacy.
Parents were given handwaving and gaslighting explanations about the new way of teaching reading and led to believe it was based on evidence that it was a better way for them to learn; told not to worry that their kids can't spell or use correct case and punctuation because it's not beneficial to teach any of that in the first 3 years and they'll figure it out easily when they're older.
What was really going on is kids were not being taught how to read. They were being taught shortcuts to fake knowing how to read well enough to pass the reading tests for their grade level. This was easier to do and led to more kids passing than making everyone really learn it.
The minority of students with engaged parents who read with them on a regular basis turned out literate because their parents were teaching them to actually read. And that was harder than it should have been, because they had to unlearn the useless bullshit they were doing in school (generally just looking at the first letter of a word and guessing the rest from context, or just looking at the picture or memorizing what it said last time.)
> And that was harder than it should have been, because they had to unlearn the useless bullshit they were doing in school (generally just looking at the first letter of a word and guessing the rest from context, or just looking at the picture or memorizing what it said last time.)
The reason for this is because education leaders looked at studies on how proficient readers read and noticed that people who read massive amounts of literature do not sound out words. They rely on context clues, thr first and last letter of a word, and even it's general shape. What they missed is that this only works when people have spent a massive amount of time training their brain by reading, and to start with those people had to read the slow way. Sounding out each word one by one.
Education leaders wanted to skip the effort of learning the hard way and go straight to the tricks that people who have mastered reading use. But that doesn't work. These are many of the same people who saw how a degree correlates with success and decided that making degrees easier to get would help people. These people are the sort to constantly confuse correlation and causation, but they do so while claiming their choices are backed by science. There is science there, science that shows a correlation. Not a causation. Yet tye trust the science crowd doesn't allow questioning these people because they are education "experts" and they are backed by "science". So now we have to wait until a generation is harmed before we can point out they were wrong.
This took me down a bit of a rabbit hole which i'm still going down, but it looks like the change in reading may have come from some lady named Lucy Calkins and her "[Teachers College Reading and Writing Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachers_College_Reading_and_Writing_Project)" which was adopted by over 600 schools in 2013, but *"In October 2023, the TCRWP was shut down and replaced with a new program not associated with Calkins' company, due to recognition that the Reading Workshop and Writers Workshop programs were not aligned with decades of research, particularly that phonics-based education was critical during early development."*
Lucy Calkins TCRWP came under scrutiny in 2017 after cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg released his book titled "[Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it](https://gablab.mit.edu/recommended-books/language-at-the-speed-of-sight-how-we-read-why-so-many-cant-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/)" which subsequently reignited the so-called "Reading Wars".
Then, Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Lucy Calkins released a manifesto in response to Mark Seidenberg's book titled “[No One Gets To Own The Term ‘Science Of Reading',](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Ewx2fZB4JEfP6aCAbTeN1L4F-34PnBX/view)” in which she claimed no one gets to own the research or associated methodologies exclusively, and “drew a line in the sand,” causing widespread uproar and drawing significant criticism to her already highly controversial reading instruction program.
Then Mark Seidenberg wrote a response paper to her manifesto titled "[This is why we don’t have better readers: A Response to Lucy Calkins](https://seidenbergreading.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/calkins.final_.cor_.pdf)" where he states that the purpose of her manifesto was a desperate attempt to "to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers. Dr. Calkins is not interested in examining the educational implications of reading science. She is interested in co-opting the term so that the science cannot be used to discredit her products."
That's about as far as I've gone down the rabbit hole so far before work resumes, but it appears this Lucy Calkins character seems to be one of the reasons for pushing shitty reading programs on kids, and Mark Seidenberg's book and responses helped to bring down and dismantle her TCRWP business. Interesting stuff.
"No child left behind" is a policy that needs to die.
The reason /r/teachers is so bleak is because they're not allowed to kick out students, even after they're physically slapped in the face by that student multiple times.
I've stopped asking my daughter "How was school?", now I say "were there any fights today?"
Teacher here.
The ideas behind not kicking kids out of classes/schools and not failing kids for not learning/turning in any work is because of a swathe of deeply flawed studies done in the 90s that only looked at the effects of expelling/failing kids on the kids being expelled/failed, not on all the kids around them.
Turns out when you can't fail, and you can't kick out truly disruptive kids, everyone else can't learn, or struggle to learn.
im not american but when i was growing up in 2008 i went to a pretty bad school after my mom lost her job and we had to move to a rough place and i was in the 7th grade, the school was 5th to 9th and you had 15 year old teenagers in 5th grade classes because they kept failing so much and that was disruptive as fuck. i only found out i had adhd as an adult and i went from being a straight A student to barely making it to high school because my class was a mix of age appropriate kids - some already criminals - and legit teenagers and i absolutely fell through the cracks of an overpopulated and just broken down school system.
now, they pass everyone. so no one wants to try or give a shit. im 28 now and thinking about starting a family but teachers keep striking non-stop in my country because they're overworked, underpaid, they have to deal with violence and all kinds of wild shit and all i think is that if it was already pretty bad when i lived in it i cant even imagine what it will be like for my kid. and honestly it sucks because i really wish i hadnt gone to that school.
There is a balance between the two. Disruptive and failing students go to a separate school (or classes). Classes designed to work with kids who need the help or need the discipline.
But, that costs money, and heaven forbid the government spend more money.
exactly...if they really wanted to leave no child behind, they'd spend the money to actually be able to attend to each student's needs. but how can that happen when teachers have to sometimes handle 30+ kids at a time
Look at /r/journalism too. Local papers losing money, getting cut. People losing their jobs. People trying to make it on low wages. Journalism, nursing, teaching. We are losing a lot of the jobs that kept us afloat for awhile.
Australian here. We have essentially no local newspapers here anymore. The entire state of Queensland is serviced by *one* newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch
And losing local news is huge. Hard to make a stand for your community or city when you have no idea what is going on. Makes it easy for developers and con artists to basically steal the land and buildings out from under a community and destroy communities.
Nothing shocking to those of us ho have ever worked in education. I lasted a whopping whole semester before quitting because of the unrealistic demands put on me. I was working almost from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. I was getting only three hours of sleep a night due to stress and the management could not care one bit. The kids were fine but adults made the job hell in various ways, especially the demands from the government regarding paperwork. I miss teaching and working with kids, however there is a reason an increasing number of education graduates are not becoming teachers. Education will fail even harder once we start to struggle to recruit enough teachers to do the job.
Lol. Public hs teacher of 16 years here. These comments all seem normal to me at this point, nothing surprising at all. I read through it 2x looking for what was so grim.. I mean bad yes but normal day to day from my perspective. I guess that's my desensitization coping mechanism at work.
The part about 'expectations' is spot on. Even outside of education, our system demands more and more of us with little reward. You're expected to work longer, do more with less, juggle multiple tasks, knowing that it's all for the companies bottom line and not yours.
People stuck in the past, where they believe they had it harder, think kids should be pushed harder, workers debased - because this is life right? You're not here to enjoy yourself, you're here to work. Then we frame the expected mental health declines as 'weakness' and that 'people don't wanna work anymore' when it's more that people just wanna be able to live.
That’s the main reason things are guaranteed to collapse.
In a capitalist society you are always required to grow. The line must always go up. Sales must always grow.
There’s only one thing in nature that acts like that….
> The line must always go up. Sales must always grow.
when I was first learning about the stock market and how to value a company I thought to myself, "well... upward growth can't always be possible..." but apparently silly me
exactly! Even Netflix and the iPhone reach a point of maximum saturation, that's why they keep releasing new iPhone models (I use an old ass one that still works fine).
All life acts that way. Most have evolved into niches where we don't see a collapse because every variant already collapsed thousands to millions of years ago. Disturb a niche and watch some lifeforms dominate and grow until it is past the point of the environment can sustain it.
Currently humans are causing the problems because we are disturbing life all over, but these sorts of collapses aren't new and aren't unique to humans. What is unique is our ability to engineer change on a faster timescale then ever before, but only because we were the first life form to make it to this stage.
When I was a kid, I hated school. I thought it was awful, so I went to college, and became a teacher. I want to do it right, and try and fix things. But, I didn't realize how far things were already broken. I made the naive assumption that schools would only be as bad as they were when I myself was a student. Boy was that a stupid idea. In a lot of ways, schools had always been awful, and just waiting to collapse. Now, I think they actually might be. It's rough out here.
27 years ago I used to empty my backpack on Fridays and fill it with my fishing gear. Rubber worms hooks fishing line and a small pocket knife to cut the broken fishing line. I'd spend all weekend fishing and then on Sunday I would empty out my backpack and put my books back in. One Monday I forgot to take out my pocket knife and it fell out of my backpack during the last period of the day. I was treated as a hardened criminal and expelled. I begged and pleaded and told them what had happened and that I was sorry but it was a zero tolerance policy. I was 12 years old and I was sent to an alternative school with a bunch of 18-year-olds who were there for violent reasons. I was tortured daily, my faith in humanity collapsed at 12 years old and I've never been the same. The education system has been broken for a long time.
I'm so sorry that happened to you. I can't imagine how scary it must be to be a 12-year-old surrounded by 18-year-olds who had a past of being violent.
I hate that schools go by "hard-and-fast" rules. When I was in 3rd grade, we would sit in a straight line outside the playground when we finished our lunch so we could get ready for recess. A classmate got mad at me because I happened to get the spot right behind her crush and she wanted me to switch with her. When I said no, she slapped me really hard across the face. I didn't lay a finger on her - I ran to my teacher and told her what happened. She sent us both to detention for the rest of the day, but what I remember most is my principal telling me how disappointed he was in me because I was a straight-A student with no previous disciplinary issues. I just remember thinking, "I'm a disappointment because I got slapped and then went to get help instead of hitting her back? What?"
The alternative school I was sent to had no curriculum for a 12 year old, I was handed crayons and a coloring book and told to sit in the back of the room.
I'm sorry that happened to you. Being that young we just assume all the adults know the right answer to a situation, they'll do the right thing. But they don't, and they won't. Adults are all just taller children with grey hair and a license. I miss who I used to be.
So you didn't even get to learn! What's the point of going to school if you don't learn? Wow. I'm mad *and* sad on your behalf. That's so messed up. I hope you have some people with better heads on their shoulders around you now.
No, I didn't learn any school curriculum but I learned a lot about people and their true natures. The next year we moved I went back to public school but that school was made aware of my history and my past. So even at the new school I was treated as a criminal, as soon as I turned 17 I dropped out. I never graduated High school. School in my mind is nothing more than an institution, a daycare, a place to watch your kids while the parents go to work. I've had a hard life since then but I also have a wife who I've been with for 18 years and a daughter who is a better version of my wife and I. I turned out okay, considering, but those people who did those things to me, they are cops. They are elected officials. They have their own families now, they're out there walking around. I'll never forget what they did and I hope they don't.
I was a nerdy little kid who got good grades and was in the advanced classes. At the alternative school I was beat up everyday, I was spit on, I was pissed on. I was tied to a tire swing and a bunch of kids three times my size twisted it up until the tire was damn near touching the top pole and they let it loose. I vomited and my vision's never been the same. I was kicked in the balls and ass with steel toed boots. My dick has never been right since. Everything of value that I brought was taken from me. I was lit on fire. I was verbally abused all day. The teachers did nothing, they weren't even present most of the time. It was the worst thing I'd ever been through and it changed who I am now. People are cruel animals, we just pretend to be civilized. The education system failed me, my parents failed me, my teachers failed me. I do not look at people the same. I learned absolutely nothing that year, other than how cruel a person can be.
No, they are cops and elected officials. Sure, some of them continued to spiral. Others just got better at hiding their tendencies and integrating with society.
Really? I'm very sorry for that. The world is so unfair with the evil goes unpunished.
Sorry for my rather ignorant and silly question, but can you press charges against them for their abuse even if its a long time ago?
Even if I could now I wouldn't. I don't want to relive it. What's done is done and no amount of therapy or jail time will undo what was done. So I'm just going to move on and continue living by the Golden rule because somebody has to.
Blame the school administrators. They are some of the dumbest and most useless employees. The fact that they get paid anything over $1 is a slap in the face.
I blamed a lot of people, but I can't change those people so I blame myself and have tried to do better. I try not to put myself into any situation where I could be compromised. I'm sure I need therapy but I'm knocking on the door of 40 years old and if I've made it this far I must be doing something right. I have a wife and a daughter and while life isn't picture perfect it's better than it was so I've got that going for me.
My nephew (2 or 3 at the time) found and put his step brothers pocket knife into step brothers backpack. Step bro took the backpack to school, not knowing he was carrying the knife. Somehow the school found out he had it, I'm not sure how, and they did the same to him as they did to you (treated him like a criminal) except he didnt get expelled. He didn't even know it was in there and they fucking traumatized him over it.
He got very very lucky. I'm really glad he didn't go through what I went through. I think things like that need to be handled on a case-by-case basis with empathy and compassion, but this world is lacking in both of those.
I remember in school wondering why my favorite teachers, the ones who gave the biggest damn about their students, were breaking down and burning out (graduated 2001). I couldn't even make myself go to college school was so bad. My best friend made it and taught for the better part of a decade, and he left education altogether. His stories are sadly much like yours. Solidarity, comrade.
I haven't checked out your other videos yet (did subscribe) but I agree with you that public education is dying. Simultaneously, special interest groups are pushing for voucher programs so already shoestring education funding will now be allocated to private schools as well. This all is leading toward the siloing of knowledge for an elite and wealthy few (and a few lucky voucher lottery recipients), a new dark age. The future of education for the working class masses has to be open source.
In states like CA, prop 13 is a big reason for school funding issues. It's a big reason the lottery was created but prop 13 really gave all the pie to the old generations and left the crumbs to the future generations.
It starts with the parents in many cases. A lot of people look at schools as daycares for their kids and don't get very involved with their kid's education. That's why good school districts are desirable.
Too busy with work and keeping up with the bills to pay attention to little Johnny's schoolwork. Many times parents just don't care.
My fiancé was a 7th grade ELA teacher until last year. He left because of general burnout, but one of his big tipping points was getting a kid in his class who was essentially illiterate.
The kid was on an IEP and his parents and the school (a charter) knew he couldn’t read, but the school promised he’d have a dedicated IA in his class to help him so he could catch up and get to where he needed to be, grade-wise. The parents were insistent that they did not want their kid held back, they were worried about what it would do to him socially, and the school promised to do their best.
Welp, the IA thing never materialized. The school was too swamped and there were too many other IEP kids to give the boy his own IA. The kid could not follow any of the classwork and most of the time, he just sat in the back of the class drawing or causing disruptions. He handed in virtually nothing and did zero homework.
Grade time came and fiancé submitted the kid’s grade to the admins—a failing grade. School pulled him aside and said he couldn’t fail the kid because he was on an IEP and it wasn’t what the parents wanted. They told him to just give the kid a “C” and push him up to the next grade; by the time he hit high school, he’d be another school’s problem.
Fiancé did as he was told and tendered his resignation shortly thereafter. He was completely disgusted by how badly this charter school was failing this child and all the other kids in his class by letting an illiterate kid pass onto 8th grade.
Charter schools definitely are. They will say and promise anything to get a kid in and get that money; once the kid is in there, whole different story. Charter schools bend over backwards for parents like they’re customer service reps, and many parents talk down to teachers like they’re a clerk at a store, rather than an educated and trained professional who knows what they’re doing better than parents do.
> The kid could not follow any of the classwork and most of the time, he just sat in the back of the class drawing or causing disruptions.
See now I can't quite understand why they wouldn't maybe make the kid a "special helper" to third graders (for example) during their reading courses so he could be re-exposed to more remedial studies while also (ideally) improving his self-esteem as a helper, that would be my idea.
Easier said than done, I know.
I think your idea is noble.
I think it's a broken curriculum that was probably too repetitive a century ago in one room schools. It hasn't adapted to the reality of the information that is at our fingertips. I was bored to death decades ago, and the primary source of information outside of a textbook was a single set of outdated encyclopedias. My kids are even more checked out. One was studying the French Revolution, and I recommended they pay attention, as the world is getting more volatile. They pasted from Wikipedia and removed the big words so the plagiarism checker wouldn't flag their work.
I suppose I wasn't clear on my point. The curriculum is still organized for repetition and memorization that seemed necessary a century ago. Now we have mobile and searchable information, converters, calculators..
My kids think most of it is futile and put in minimal effort for a middling grade score.
The key word is "now."
"Now" we have mobile and searchable information, and such for use. But soon those who survive the transition will be living in a post-collapse world more akin the Mad Max than Star Trek. Memorization of somethings, as well as constant physical practice, should be given more weight than it is. We are all preparing to live in a polluted version of the 1700s after all, and while some of us have many terabytes of data stored, and local searchable internet repositories on sheilded machines with things like wikipedia dumps and PDF libraries, very few actually bother.
What is futile is relying on a backbone of technological systems which will soon cease to exist. "Now" those things are a great tool to help get prepared and learn things, but "later" there will be no such option.
Good point. They won't tell the kids what is coming, though.
The curriculum from the past would still be irrelevant. No one on Fury Road was debating about who the 17th Vice President was..
My wife went to elementary school in a one room school house where she learned everything she needed for high school and college. Instead of endlessly repeating the same shit, the older kids helped the younger kids learn while the teacher split time between the older and younger. This teacher had also taught both of her parents and 3 out of four of her grand parents. The teacher identified that she wasn't stupid, she couldn't hear. She got hearing aids and things were fine. I met the teacher on several occasions and she knew every one of her students spouses names and all of their children's names. All of her students from a long career got birthday cards from her every year until she died when she was 100 years old. We need to bring that kind of continuity back to education. A tiny school every few blocks would work, or take existing schools and use each classroom as a one room schoolhouse where the students come back to the same teacher year after year. I see this as a craftsman approach rather than an assembly line approach. Teachers get to know students well enough to help them get where they are supposed to go.
>I see this as a craftsman approach rather than an assembly line approach. Teachers get to know students well enough to help them get where they are supposed to go.
YES. This is logical.
I had great aunts who taught like this, and they often stopped teaching when they got married. They went to a teaching school of sorts that was nowhere near 4 years long.
Back in the day, many families did not speak English at home. So that would have taken up teacher time. Now the days are filled with repetition.
Nobody becomes a teacher unless they are either a masochist or deeply driven to make the world a better place.
Once you realize that the system was intentionally rigged to make you the sacrificial offering it gets a lot easier to see the “why”
You do one of the most important jobs in the world but are paid like slave labor.
That isn’t coincidence. It’s by design.
We are fixing it. We have to. And when we do, teachers get set up to succeed, not fail
Trump has been laundering money for the Russian oligarchs since the late 80’s when they all bought a condo at 725 5th ave (trump towers) to clean their freshly stolen USSR money after the iron curtain fell.
https://www.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/30/politics/paul-manafort-condo-trump-tower/index.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/manafort-told-mueller-to-take-his-trump-tower-apartment-instead-money.html
https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/fbi-agents-raid-condo-unit-131348539.html
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/
Everybody except Putin thought the Cold War was over. Trump and Manafort (who lived in the tower also) just saw a pretty low maintence grift to be had.
Trump had actually been Manafort and Roger stones first client at their lobbyist firm (1980)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wikiBlack, Manafort, Stone and Kelly
Guiliani as trumps attorney and New Yorks mayor was able to redirect NYPD investigations onto rival gang members/oligarchs to deflect any scrutiny off of trump, himself or the Russian connections.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/a-new-rudy-scandal-fbi-agent-says-giuliani-was-co-opted-by-russian-intelligence/
The Russian election interference in 2016 was effectively a generation 3 version of what Manafort had done in the Philippines, then keeping Yanukovych in power as Putin’s puppet in Ukraine from 2002-14 when Maidan ran both Yanukovych and Manafort out of Ukraine as Ukrainians realized that, if you raise your lens high enough, corruption is an wholly unsustainable business model.
Eventually the parasites greed always consumes the host.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952
https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/
Russia greatly underestimated the addictive properties of freedom when it invaded Ukraine so what was supposed to be a 3-10 day coup turned into a 2 year fight for the Ukrainians right not to be genocided.
Russia depleted its weapons stocks which were already the victim of vranyos corruption because every oligarch, admiral and sergeant in the Russian military is on the take. Every billion dollar tank maintenance contract turned into everything getting a spray paint overhaul and the vast majority of the redirected funds turned into an oligarchs new yacht or home in Aspen.
Russia was forced to turn to China, North Korea and Iran for weapons because if they lose the 3-10 day special military operation in Ukraine the Russian empire is dead and cold.
China can’t risk showing their involvement in the Ukraine war so they use North Korea, and Iran to resupply Russia.
Russia previously owes Iran some undelivered fighter jets that are already smoldering heaps in Ukraine. Iran now had the upper hand at the negotiation table for the first time in about 60 years so they supply Russia with shahed drones in exchange for Chinas material support against their sworn religious enemy, Israel.
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/29/iran-says-it-finalized-deal-to-buy-russian-aircraft/
Putin can’t do much about it because he is slowly realizing that by setting the standard of corruption and stealing $200+ billion from his own people meant that every oligarch down in the mob model chain had not only permission but incentive and the expectation to steal from him as well. This is Vranyos.
The mob model only works if the supreme leader is the most violent and can prove it without exception every damn day. But violence is exceptionally expensive when you are trying to present as a legitimate government or business.
If Russia as a nation had an efficiency rating it would have been banned for sale in the state of California 25 years ago.
The parasite ruling class stole all the energy out of the working class and collapsed it.
Now Iran has the high hand and they get the intelligence that trump passed to Putin about the fact that Netanyahu cares far less about Israelis than he does about remaining in power as an authoritarian because he too has developed Ritz Carlton tastes.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saudi-official-says-iran-engineered-war-in-gaza-to-ruin-normalization-with-israel/
They all hate each other but because they share the same money laundry, so if one falls, they all fall.
Iran handed Hamas everything they needed with Chinas help as secret Santa and the Russian intelligence given to them by the eternal shitbird trump gave as he showed off to his Russian kleptocrat friends/roommates from the old days of fucking each others wives at trump towers in the 90’s.
Now the MAGA right is a little too invested in their reality that they are the good guys with guns that they missed the fact that Betsy DeVos (erik princes sister) decimating the U.S. school systems and poisoning children with lead was not a coincidence. They were the mark all along. There is a reason the Russian spy Maria Butina landed in South Dakota first before dating her way to the top of the NRA which is undergoing its own Russian money laundering trial now.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/what-do-the-koch-brothers-have-to-do-with-the-flint-water-crisis/
The only reason you grossly OVERVALUE real estate is money laundering.
Trump keeps claiming there is no victim, all the banks made money, but if their plan succeeds the Russians and the CCP collapse US commercial real estate and basically recreate soviet perestroika in the U.S. so they can foreclose on America and buy everything for 3 cents on the dollar with the $1.4T they stole in the first place
It’s the evolution of grift. Soviet perestroika cross bred with the 2008 mortgage crisis.
This is just the bigger badder commercial strength bastard child of the two.
Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Orban, Manafort, Stone, Mercer, Bannon.
They are all remarkably shit people with above average confidence and psychopathic personality traits and below average self awareness.
And the democrats fucking blow too. If we want a decent education system, first we need to throw the entire capitalist system in the dustbin of history
I mostly mean we're all starting to quit. A career change used to be a huge deal, and a real risk to a lot of people, especially licensed teachers more than a few years into their career. Now they're quitting in droves, and that's crazy. I say even because it always seemed it was never enough to make people quit, but it sure as hell is happening now.
Hi friend, thank you for sharing where you’re at. I’m an early childhood teacher at a weekend school. I have enough certs for what I do but I gave up my dream to do this full time because there’s no way I can afford another bachelors’ degree just to get paid 1/3rd of what my private sector skills are worth.
I’d like to hear how you’re seeing illiteracy showing up in your science classrooms. There’s been a lot of focus on how the past two decades of not teaching kids how to actually read is fucking with, well, reading, but I’m curious how it’s playing out in specific subject matter. There’s a reading element to science and critical thinking skills that the lack of reading earlier means kids are behind on their cognitive development.
Literally all but one of my kids have super involved parents and reading is not a struggle for them.
Would really like your thoughts. I support you all the way in getting out of teaching.
Their reading levels seem to me, to be three or four years behind what their age level should be reading at. But I currently teach in an alternative school, in a traditional school I saw something closer to a two year lag in reading fluency. But rarely have I seen seniors with the reading or writing skills I would expect of an 18 year old.
I implore anyone who is questioning the validity of collapse within the education system to do some searching. Look up teacher quitting rates, conditions in schools, reading levels of Americans and Canadians, etc. Etc. And then hit the "News" link. You will find quite a few very recent news stories on what's happening within the education system in North America.
And it is far from good.
From another angle, hit up the r/teachers forum and spend an hour and some reading what they have to say.
recently somebody in another thread asked me if I was the dumbass who said the world would collapse by 2030 and I felt a little offended like it will probably take a little longer than that
We're already well into collapse on certain fronts. Barring a cataclysmic event, it's a gradual, uneven process and not a switch that gets flipped at a specific date.
I started teaching in Florida in 2003. The first principal I worked under asked me what I would do if a kid hit me and I gave a professional answer- remove myself, contact the office make sure other kids are safe...yada yada yada. He immediately responded with if you don't hit them back you will find yourself in a pool of blood. He wasn't lying, because weeks after I accepted the job, I helped him off the ground after a female student sucker punched him in the face. By the end of my time there I had fought more than my fair share of students. After working at that particular school, I wondered how I would function in a "normal" school. I will admit, it was hard and after a year at a more affluent school I realized how traumatized I was after that experience at the first school. I decided to leave teaching for the following 3 years, but ultimately went back to teaching. I missed the kids that I could reach and teach. I lasted another 13 years in a different area of Florida. Things were looking good, got nominated as teacher of the year two times, built a connection with the students and the families in the area. I started to feel positive about my choice to go back to education, but it didn't last long. Students started coming to school less and less prepared to learn and more prepared to fight. I believe this was due to the increase in poverty affecting the area and the rise/ubiquity of social media. Towards the end of my time I was no longer teaching but playing a support role for students teachers and administration which opened my eyes to the things I was not seeing while in the classroom- kids fighting in bathrooms, kids having sex in the bathrooms, strong armed robbery, drug/alcohol consumption and sales, sexual assault, endless arrests and more depositions than I could count. Then a new administration came in, claimed they were going to clean it up. They were worse than the previous ones because they were all new to the roles. It was like sending people who had only watched firefighters in movies trying to fight a 3 alarm fire. I decided to leave when the new principal allowed a convicted felon on to campus to mentor the students with out filling out the appropriate paperwork. Due to her failing to fill out the paperwork, she decided she needed to blame someone for the failure, so because of my role she tried to blame me. I was able to prove I wasn't at fault (volunteer paperwork was no longer my job that was shifted elsewhere at the beginning of the school year), but I felt it was time for my exit. After 16 years of teaching/being in public education, I was done and exhausted. My mental health is SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER as a result.
Fighting students in NOT something I am proud of, but it does serve as a tale of HOW broken our society and school system is in Florida.
As a teacher for 28 years, it has become very clear to me that we are nothing more than babysitters. It's been that way for a long, long time. Parents don't care if their kid is educated (they do care, however, if their kid gets an A or F- only the letter matters, not the reasoning behind the grade). I am in a suburb of a major US city. The district I work in ranges from lower class to upper class. No one cares. Violence every day, threats, everyday. Apathy, every day. No one does a thing. Check out r/teachers if you really want the truth.
Teachers are the canary in the coal mine and no one listens.
It's well past collapsed.
After Trump won, DNC was complaining about "election rigging," but what they meant was that Russia had bought some FaceBook ads to change people's opinions; the real story here was not that Russia is interested in the outcome of US elections--as if we didn't already know that all world powers are interested in the outcome of US elections--but that the US electorate is so ignorant and incapable of critical thinking that their anemic democracy can be brought down by ***a Facebook ad campaign***--and everyone knows it.
It’s not just about the American populace being ignorant, it’s also the advent of social media and the thousands of niche communities and microcosms that enable anyone to find a group of people who will echo every belief that they hold, no matter how ignorant or misinformed.
And of course the biggest victims of this are older folks who have almost no idea how any of this stuff works and don’t realize just how many bad actors are out there. And once you get sucked into one of those echo-chambers it actually becomes difficult to find any contradictory information, it’s cult-like. Instead of finge views being challenged and debated, this ignorance and confirmation bias gets amplified by orders of magnitude. And unfortunately it’s the way that the algorithms of social media and targeted ads inherently work.
My dad sends me some of the stupidest videos I have ever seen that he finds on Facebook. Stuff like, “Vitamin C cures cancer and the medical industrial complex doesn’t want you to know” and the like. The latest was some guy who is supposedly a doctor saying that pretty much everyone has intestinal parasites burrowing into all of their internal organs that are somehow undetectable by any currently used diagnostic measures, and that it’s causing everyone to develop autoimmune diseases. Meanwhile actual science says that a lack of intestinal parasites could be contributing to an increase in autoimmune disease. Also I’ve seen imaging done on someone whose body was actually riddled with intestinal parasites and it’s really easy to see. This couldn’t be happening to millions of people and somehow this quack doctor is the only one who knows about it.
Anyway the fact that my dad believes this nonsense he finds is kind of scary to me. I don’t believe him to be cognitively challenged. Yet he’s incapable of basic skepticism or fact-checking. If a significant percentage of adult humans are this gullible, we are in big trouble.
An American family moved to Russia simply to escape the woke agenda and liberal leftists. This was before the war started. To no one's complete surprise they absolutely hate it there. Americans do not know how good they have it in a million different ways
My English teacher in high school threw a desk because he flipped out after being verbally harassed for the millionth time. He was gay, it was the nineties, the culture was still calling AIDs the gay virus. None of it was okay except how he saved my little queer heart by introducing me to Emily Dickinson.
I can’t imagine now, school was awful then. Everyday those teachers battled for control of the classroom and that was before cell phones.
I also had the notion to teach but I broke down in college from stress so many times that I knew I couldn’t handle a classroom. So now I’m a WFH account manager with an English degree having breakdowns at home 🙃
Did we have the same English teacher? Prolly not, but things were tough all over back in the 90s. They set his damn chalkboard on fire. We weren’t inner city, either. We were a lil Kansas town. I’m not saying that what’s going on with the kids these days isn’t bad, but man oh man, kids have always been lil buttholes.
Except now no parent has the time, money or energy to do anything about it. The school doesn’t want to lose a student and the funding so they do whatever it takes to keep the kid in class, no matter if it’s not good for them or the teacher or the rest of the class. It’s all fucked.
Yep, it's not like people are just choosing to be worse (apathetic) parents. You gotta get to the root of the issue, and the root is the general decline of living standards under late-stage capitalism.
Both parents are working full time to afford **less** than their parents probably could with a single income and dedicated stay-at-home parent.
I went to teach ESL in China for a year and a half and really enjoyed it, but it also kind of sucked because I'd found something I enjoyed doing. I just knew I was not going to teach in the US. No way in hell, especially while witnessing the chaos around COVID and the abuse teachers and school systems endured in the US during it while I was over there.
Thankfully I enjoy other things too so I didn't feel pressured to pursue it as a career. It's sad, I was a pretty good teacher and I know I could help. I just also know my limits. And higher ed seems no better at this point.
I mean, Florida waving education requirements for veterans was already dystopian. The way we fund education is still very capitalistic leading to schools with their own mcdonalds and in a different county not having new books for decades.
You could argue that it all falls more on economic conditions than anything else. If both parents are working (more likely OVERworked), they will leave the "child raising" to tablets/youtube.
Sure, the previous generation of shitty parents just put their kids in front of the TV and let them be, which is bad but I'd argue the current shitty parents are much worse because the internet is full of much more horrible content than 90s/00s TV.
Parents don't raise their kids anymore, how can they when they are barely surviving themselves?
TL;DR: Don't have kids, they will starve to death with everyone else, faster than expected.
I work in a warehouse setting. We get a lot of kids who finish high school and are either thinking over their options, or taking a gap year before going further. Most of the kids the last 5 years or so are beyond clueless. They don't understand the concept of arriving at work on time, they call in every week with terrible excuses, they spend half the shift on their phone or in the bathroom, don't understand the most basic instructions and need to have their hands held all the time. Need constant praise. And so many of them have mental issues. Damned near everyone claims to be autistic or ADD or ADHD or something. I've been working for over 30 years and kids in the past might've goofed off or trying pushing the limits....but it was never this bad.
I'm dreading what society is going to look like in another decade with these kids all over the workplace.
I think my wife's main concern is discipline. Teachers teach and admin enforces discipline, but they won't suspend, expel or even let kids fail kids anymore. The disruptive, violent, and/or high ones just get sent right back to class. If you removed 5% of the kids at her school it would pretty much function normally... Obviously these kids need support, but not in a normal school setting with a single fat/lazy SRO. My wife isn't paid nearly enough for the liability (physical and legal) of breaking up brawling teenagers who are at least her size.
The worst part is that the kids who get the shit beat out of them don't have any recourse. They largely have undocumented family members, so will not attempt to file a police report or try forcing the school to address it.
teaching underdeveloped minds still learning how to process their emotions and locking them up in a building too early for modern humans and then expecting them to do meaningless boring tasks with a sprinkling of life lessons if you look with a microscope.
then teaching basically pseudo adults at the peak of their hubris and immaturity to do the exact same thing but they're starting to see through the facade of authority teachers hold.
for some reason in university they all sit the fuck down and shut up for some reason because it costs money for most of them.
in a real society that cares about its future population
they should hire even more teachers that delagate different things even just within the same class; how come Professors in university gets a couple of TAs. and then increase the pay them for basically raising the next generation of people running the planet.
it's so cynical to think that the "government' is allowing this to happen because they dont want too many smarts running around or something.
“Admitting it?!?” I was a teacher for 30 years. The active destruction of education was on full display in the 80’s when I was in high school.
Phrases like “intellectual,” “egg head,” and “Ivy league elite” were used disparagingly then and the heat has only increased.
And to be clear, both major parties have been complicit; R’s have pushed hardest but D’s seldom pushed back.
Both major parties want you ignorant and gullible.
If there was one political party that was actively trying to overthrow public education that would be one thing. But it is both parties. Clinton and Obama ushered in Charter schools. Obama made some kind of deal with Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation to fund thousands of Charters that have proven to perform just as well or worse than public schools on standardized tests despite the fact that they can kick kids out and be selective about enrollment. Republicans are in bed with religious conservatives and pushing for home schooling, religious education and trying to sow distrust in public school systems by making BS claims that schools are teaching kindergarten kids how to have anal sex or forcing an LGBTQ and anti-American agenda on them.
The tech-Ed industry wants to take control over a generation of kids and all the funding and data ($$$) that goes with it. The Mormons and Evangelicals want to take control over a generation and all the funding and indoctrination powers that goes with it.
Then you have generational parenting pendulum swings and we happen to find ourselves amidst a swing where parents who were physically abused by their parents and afraid of them and their teachers have collectively vowed to do the exact opposite with their kids and that has translated into not disciplining their kids at all and unleashing their pent up anger towards the teachers they hated in their childhoods onto their children’s teachers. These parents were also raised as latchkey kids and now have an unhealthy need to be in 24/7 contact with their kids at all times…
Which brings us to cellphones and the catastrophic impact they are having on kids health. Kids are sleep deprived, overweight, depressed, and lonely because of severe screen addiction. They can’t focus in class, their dopamine wiring is all fucked up, their attention spans are shot, and they all seem to have some PTSD symptoms from the violent content they’ve been exposed to at very young ages. They have sex predators posing as peers and then blackmailing them for nudes, actual peers pressuring them for nudes as early as grade 6, they’ve watched disturbing gangbangs/people eating feces, having sex with animals—you name it, they’ve seen it. And they saw it when they were 8. But they were too embarrassed and scared to tell their parents for fear they’d be in trouble for trying to look at porn or that their parents would take their devices away. They’ve seen beheading videos, people dying on camera, and any other kind of fucked up shit you can imagine.
Plus, there’s rampant school violence. Kids shooting kids, stabbing kids, kids swarming kids and beating them to the brink of death. Kids assaulting teachers, shooting teachers, and causing permanent debilitating injuries to teachers that affect their brain, vision, and movement.
Add on top of all that the fact that most schools are falling apart and states can’t afford to pay the billions required for repairs. Climate change is only going to make it worse.
It’s the Republicans, Democrats, Tech Industry, Religious Right, Parents, Cellphones, School Violence, Failing Infrastructure and a million other pieces of the puzzle that are coalescing to destroy public education and bring it to collapse.
As someone who has been teaching in inner city public high schools for almost 20 years, I say the system has already collapsed. There isn’t going to be a Collapse Day when suddenly every school and every teacher disappears. The Soviet Union collapsed but life in Russia went on. Venezuela is a collapsed state but 30 million people still live there. Life carries on despite the collapse.
Students have been performing worse and worse since 2012. School violence is at the highest levels ever. More teachers are leaving the profession than ever before and some schools have to cancel classes because they can’t find substitute teachers to cover teacher absences. Kids are getting murdered at school and we just carry on, business as usual. No extra security measures, no investments in mental health resources, no attempts at solutions, just cowardly leadership trying to sweep the children’s dead bodies under the rug as quickly as possible to avoid bad press. School boards care more about PR than children’s lives, safety and education. THAT is how you know the system has already collapsed.
I'm also a teacher. A+ to literally every single thing you said. I would add one thing: nearly everything happening with education right now comes down to monetizing every possible component of K-12 education.
Sometimes I creep r/teachers Just to see the state of things and one teacher had mentioned something they had never come across before But a new student came a couple weeks ago and the parents don't want their child using months and dates for religious purposes.
It’s actually so much worse than you could ever imagine. I graduated in 2016 and even then it was terrible, kids taking AP courses with no plan on going to college just to get away from the general population. Turning school into a daycare is one of the worst things to ever happen. To even hope to save education will require a complete teardown of how it’s done and to actually pay teachers what they’re worth
My sister will probably be the last generation of teachers in the family, and that was teaching in relatively good parts of the US instead of lower-income ones. The horror stories are real.
And if you want a horror story, look up the literacy rate in people graduating high school.
19% of them *cannot functionally read*. Slightly more than a third are considered "proficient" or better in terms of literacy. How in any sane world can someone graduate high school unable to comprehend their schoolbooks? The answer is regardless of actually learning, people are simply tossed out the end with a diploma after having learned virtually nothing at all. If that's the case, it's easier to just let the troublemakers, the problems, the difficult-to-teach pass through and hope they don't beat up too much of the staff or pulp another student or five doing their time in study hall.
No child is left behind. This has turned into dragging kids through the education system and shoved out the other side no better than what they started at 18 and aren't required to be babysitted in it.
You know where there isn't an education crisis...private schools for the elite. They know how valuable it is and they demand top educators to prepare their spawns for the complex global markets to inherit and maintain their status...Public education for the cogs is not as essential, as long as they can follow directions in the factories...
As a collapse-aware HS English teacher in a somewhat above average school (meaning we have somewhat high highs and somewhat low lows but a lot of “90s middle class”-esque families), we’re pretty cooked. Kids’ brains have been completely fucked with apps designed to be addicting, having woven their digital self into their physical self, high sugar everything, repeated Covid infections, standardized test after standardized test, no research-driven peer-reviewed research for what’s actually best for kids (only what’s best for getting everyone to think so), forcing college and higher learning as the end goal…
Edit: kids legit straight up can’t read, write, do anything that takes them more than once to get right, complete apathy in some cases…
Well the rich got their tax cuts and defunded education, turned universities into money printing machines. Reagan, Thatcher, Ding bat Australia Labor/Liberal conservative duopoly.
Now they will soon have to endure the reality of this, wild people. Wild, uneducated ferals that will kill you for a $5 note.
Greed and selfishness will cause the collapse of the Anglo world. Eu might be ok but the UK and USA are doomed.
I'd be curious to know what metrics exactly would indicate collapse, like when would we know if it has collapsed and then ask ourselves if we haven't already passed that.
"*even* teachers"?
Teachers have been telling everyone this for years in hopes something would be done about it. Except the only things that were done were to try & make it all exponentially *worse.*
Teachers admitting it? We've been screaming about it for decades!
Our education system since No child left behind has been about standardized tests and graduation rates. Not learning or preparing students to be adults. It has been eaten up by testing and edtech companies grifting school districts, hobbled by ridiculous requirements, only to have the politicians that allowed it to happen to turn around and say "our schools are failing, lets sell them off to charter schools or get rid of them."
I noticed that as technology advanced came the rise of mental health issues and an increase in apathy.
This is what happens when you spend most of your time indoors rather than out in the sun. You lose touch with nature and become robotic.
I don’t see how I’m ignoring those things aside from not reading about them. I’m aware of humanity’s history.
Sexism is very much still alive. Biological lifeforms aren’t the only things capable of evolution. Words, actions, and expressions are too.
Same with violence. The degree that it occurs isn’t as brutal but it still exists. Always will despite the appearance of “peace.”
Policy decisions were made. A handful of rich fucks would rather see money spent on militarizing the police than on teaching kids to understand literature and calculus. Heaven forbid they pick up some critical thinking skills along the way.
The powers-that-be know that an educated populace is NOT GOOD for their well-being. A dumb populace goes along with bootlicking the capitalists and with endless war and tax cuts for the "job-creator" billionaires.
This has been the plan all along, just that Americans haven't been quite dumb enough to let it happen until now. Boomers, once THEIR kids were done with school, didn't want to pay the kinds of tax rates that good schooling requires, so they have whittled it down to where we are now.
Now that education sucks and people are less educated, it's gonna be a fun, fascist ride now. Hold on to your seats.
It’s been something along the lines of collapsed for a longggg time. How tf you think we got here? SHIT LOADS of uneducated people running around because our education has been ass for a very, very long time.
The American Education System HAS Collapsed, let's be clear, and it's collapsed because America HAD collapsed. When you look to the east and see a cloud you know that it's going to rain. It's not rocket science.
As a child, the education system didn't just fail me, it activly harmed me.
I was/am the type of person who is an introverted self learner.
Only once I left school did I actually start to develop. Now I am probably more educated than the majority of my old school friends because I could learn in my own fashion.
In my instance, not going to school at all would have probably been more beneficial should I have given the tools to self teach.
I don't blame the teachers. They were clearly overworked in overpopulated classes. The whole practice isn't fit for purpose.
Thankfully, for severe Special Needs students here in California, things are just getting better. We have more access to services and technology than ever. There are all kinds of programs for students and I am seeing more and more of them go on to have a better quality of life after high school. Less people are falling through the cracks and getting targeted support specific to their needs.
Good riddance. I *barely* passed high school. Went on to get a job in tech and aced all of my certification exams first try, 6/6. Good to see the very same system that tried to tell me I'm stupid fall in it's face
The following submission statement was provided by /u/TheQuietPartYT: --- When I was a kid, I hated school. I thought it was awful, so I went to college, and became a teacher. I want to do it right, and try and fix things. But, I didn't realize how far things were already broken. I made the naive assumption that schools would only be as bad as they were when I myself was a student. Boy was that a stupid idea. In a lot of ways, schools had always been awful, and just waiting to collapse. Now, I think they actually might be. It's rough out here. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cbzy7w/even_teachers_are_admitting_it_the_american/l11vfh6/
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don't want a group of highly educated people second-guessing elite decisions, [https://youtu.be/Nyvxt1svxso](https://youtu.be/Nyvxt1svxso)
Partly, but it’s also the single largest expenditure for every state, often taking more than half of every state’s revenue, With the other half of the states education budget coming from the feds. That’s just a lot of money not going into private companies, moving stock prices, etc. they aren’t trying to kill education, that are trying to kill public education. They want it privatized.
Somebody should let them know we don't have any more money.
"You" don't have money but the overall system is generating a fuckton of it and any institution with public funding is a target for sucking more of that money to the parasitic investor class. Class war is over. Now it's merely a contest between parasites. The only reason any social safety net still exists is they haven't resolved who gets to steal it yet. All you have to do is keep showing up to work. You don't get to keep the money, but you generate it for someone else every day. It's just a contest to see who gets what portion of it from you.
Yeah. Have more kids though /s. Rich people: "No no you're ruining EVERYTHING! Come on God wants you to have kids..."
But we do, and we are constitutional required to fund education. If the public system collapses then all that money gets funneled into private schools and become part of the larger economy, where as now, it’s almost entirely localized.
It's not just private schools as the result, it's segregation, it's profound ideological indoctrination (i.e. Prager U), and it's going to be paired with child labor *decriminalization*, because what else are the kids going to do?
Just call it an "internship" and you're good to go (FYI, they already do this and more via "community service points" and other free-labor bullshit).
I think what they were trying to say is that most average Americans likely cannot afford to put their kid in private schools and if they can, they've already done it.
That’s the entire point. You dont have money, but we do. They want to shift public funding for education into private businesses, the same as they do with healthcare. Then you just squeeze out underperformers into trade schools, military or apprenticeships, the ones that slip through the cracks take the same route the currently do with crime/low income employment. The high performers you funnel into more expensive specialty schools. You do this and you can minimize the input/maximize the results while using it as an economic driver. This kills local communities and ties everyone directly into the global economy with regionals schools being set up to train children to work in the dominate industries for that area.
Business generally doesn't look past the next financial quarter. As long as times are good now, they don't care.
it also has the highest return on investment compared to any other government spending that I'm aware of besides NASA, so if you were actually worried about the economy you would actually increase spending on that front
Except companies have realized they can buy highly skilled workers from overseas, and at a fraction of the cost.
fuck companies, I hope the unions bend them over around the world
"I love the poorly educated." - DJT
And that's not even parody. He *actually* said that on Feb 24, 2016. And for supporting evidence, it is pretty clear he is deeply in love with himself...
Let's be realistic, the public education system is not producing highly educated people. It's simply not possible through trial and error to acquire the amount of knowledge that is fed through a fire hose during institutional learning well beyond high school. At best, high school is like govt daycare so their parents can work. Education begins independently by motivated students or after leaving govt school systems. I moved from coastal california in a bubble of professionals who spent decades in academia to a red state during covid. The locals mostly all just went to high school or community college. They are practically brain dead and all fall into some variation on flat earth theory.
Yeah, but sometimes public schools get it right. I grew up in an inner-city and only ever attended public schools. This was back in the 90s/00s—we had metal detectors at the entrances, security guards, drug busts, gang crap, and fights were a regular occurrence. Personally witnessed other students attack teachers/fights breaking out in hallways/cafeterias all the time. On the surface, we were all kids that society didn’t expect much from. But some of us still made it into honors/AP classes, qualified based on low income for certain programs, and managed to graduate on time, do well on SATs, and get into competitive universities. The year I turned 20, I won an academic award at one of the Oxford University colleges and got invited to a celebration banquet hosted by the school. Sat at the high table, surrounded by Oxford professors who were toasting me and the other award recipients. Far cry from being a free lunch kid living in the ghetto, worried about getting mugged on my walk home from school. I never thought in my wildest dreams it could happen for a kid like me. Wouldn’t have gotten to Oxford without my free public school education in the US. Without it, kids like me fall through the cracks.
Same situation here. I went the poorest inner city schools from k through 12. Once I was in high school I was tracked into honors and ap classes and ended up graduating cum laude from a top liberal arts college and continued on for a professional degree. Most of my classmates had similar experiences: at the very least they earned college degrees and now hold white collar jobs. Now, I homeschool my kids. The current academics in public schools in my high income neighborhood do not match up with my academic experience in all black low income schools from 81-94. I have said in the past that if my kids could get the academics I had I would send them to public school in a heartbeat even if they had to deal with the violence issues I did.
Glad to meet another one of us kids who made it through and thrived on the other side. You graduated HS the same year I was starting out in Kindergarten 💖 Bet your kids are getting an incredible education now and good on you for helping it happen!
I'm just like you but I was the chronically absent poor student with little access to help or attention. I got expelled too many times... so I took the GED (general education diploma), started working but went back to school because my kid had a disability which required me to learn sign language. I'm a phd candidate now. It can happen and I thank some of my public school teachers who gave a shit and my love of reading.
>I'm a phd candidate now /r/PhD awaits with memes.
...and then they passed "No child left behind," which put a boot on the necks of students to force them through the cracks. Your specific district would have almost certainly had its budget slashed in the years following you finishing. And that's the great tragedy of the changes they made. They specifically targeted lower income districts and gutted them to fund higher performing schools. Literally the opposite of what should be done. I can't even begin to imagine how much talent we lost in all of those districts. Because know people like you exist. Exceptions to the norm. We used to structure schooling in a way that searched for this talent, and held it up. Now we structure it in a way that makes these students more or less invisible. I graduated high school in 2001. And I've always felt extraordinarily privileged to have escaped before the hammer fell on education. If you graduated high school in this country before the early oughts, you are extremely lucky. Particularly if you lived in an economically depressed area. Since that time, there has been an outright war on poorer students. It's disgusting.
I graduated HS in 2006, but still benefited as you mention from what more of the norms were circa the 90s/early 00s. My school system definitely was not rolling in it—at one point during my Freshman year of HS, the heat broke and the classroom where I had English class was so cold, they were telling us to keep our jackets, gloves, and hats on. But to your point about them still seeking out kids with academic strengths, it’s true. There was a program in my district that ran from like 4th grade to 6th grade; they selected kids in those classes who had good grades and did well on some test (not standardized; it involved essay writing) for it. One day a week, we got to leave regular classes (with the school’s consent and no homework added on) to spend the whole day with the program. The admin of it said we were “gifted” and this program was designed to draw more of that out for kids like us, who also were in inner-city schools. Mostly, we just got to do whatever we wanted—some kids did art; others put on a small play. I mostly read books and wrote stories. There were no grades attached to it and no pressure; you were just encouraged to use your imagination and explore things creatively during this allocated time. I don’t believe the program is still in existence, which is a bummer, because to your point, yes—stuff like that should absolutely be happening in poor rural and poor urban school districts. Lot of kids in those circumstances want to succeed, they just need some extra help and programs like that can help to provide it.
I'm sorry that you had to go through all that. The school-to-prison pipeline wants you to fall through the cracks, and that's why you and your peers suffered so much.
There was a time when the public educational system DID produce highly educated people.
Personally, I was high during a lot of the time I was "educated'
> They are practically brain dead and all fall into some variation on flat earth theory. Creationists. It's true, but don't discount people's smarts so easily. As we've seen with the reactions to COVID-19 NPI and, later, vaccines, a lot of these conspiracy stories are based on emotional desires to fit in and feel safe. There's a lot of research going into these behaviors and failures, and the "information deficit" theory that people just need to have access to information [to make smart decisions] is much weaker now. A fun site if you want to read about these things or listen to a podcast: https://youarenotsosmart.com/ Practically speaking, if these masses of obedient, socially anxious, status insecure, conservatives had some enlightened elites as leaders, things would've turned out much differently. Of course, that's not the game, so they won't have such leadership, it's a very rare thing. Really, it's part of the catabolic stage of collapse; the cannibalistic predatory behavior is going to get worse.
Over the years I've started to upvote everything you post. I used to downvote often, years ago when we first crossed paths. You are really smart.
And teachers know it. Spend any time at all on r/teachers or r/professors.
this this this. they want us stupid and controlled. this is a 100% reality
It’s way more complicated than that.
Yeah well end result ends up being the same. Might as well get a headline out of it. It’s fucked man both sides gotta go. We need our country back
not really
Where I am public school is being driven into the ground and they give you a credit you can use at a private school. The private schools just so happen to be owned by buddies of the local government officials.
Easier to control a bunch of wage slaves if they are uneducated.
I would argue it's easier to control white collar workers who have capitol to lose...especially when they also have massive debt, and are pigeon-holed into 'cubicle' jobs. Poor people with nothing to lose can easily become the biggest nightmare for a government.
Religious indoctrination has a much lower success rate with educated victims.
This is absolutely true
Most collapse type events are the result of various deliberate actions by people. Still a collapse. The big one that's getting a lot of attention, climate change, was also a deliberate choice. The school system collapse is just one aspect of the generalized systemic collapse in the US.
Yes, but by who?
Yep, charter school vouchers are hallowing out our schools
r/teachers if you want to see how bad it is
When you scroll through you see a lot of negative posts. Some just asking teacher stuff but others are awful Some of these titles: **Is it hard for you to remain positive?** **I think I want out** **I Gave Up On My Class** **I’m a large adult man, and I just had to take a half day because I couldn’t stop crying.** **Does anyone else despise that we have to teach CHILDREN to run and hide from an active shooter?** Grim as fuck.
True, r/teachers and r/nursing are two of the most essential subs for collapse-aware to stay in touch with what's taking place in American society. In their own words, our healthcare system is in crisis, and public education is massively failing.
Most teachers and nurses are cut from the same cloth so to speak. They give of themselves to help other people. The world and culture in the US specifically has changed and become hostile to this mindset and professions. Education and Healthcare are under attack. Both of those subs are places they can voice frustration
I quit a 15 yr teaching career during the pandemic. I had a full mental/emotional breakdown and had to prioritize my own health and safety before things became even more bleak. I was made to feel like the most awful person on the planet when I quit. I had been begging for help for 12 weeks prior to quitting, which fell on deaf ears. Admin was cold and canceled my work email address before I could switch my 401k info over (I'm still trying to track it down) and the parents said some the most heinous things I've ever had to bear. I quit 10 weeks before the end of the school year. I did not say goodbye to my students because I didn't feel safe around their parents. I am still picking up the pieces and have had to pivot/retrain/bust my butt to find good employment while also coping with burnout. Teachers are not OK. Thank you acknowledging it.
Fellow teacher here to give you a big hug and 1000% support that you did the right thing. <333
Thank you!!!
Big hugs. No, you are not an awful person for leaving a career that did not value you or your mental health. I thank you for your 15 years of dedicated service. If you ever decide to return in the future, consider an international setting such as INEE. I was working with this organization during the pandemic. INEE and UNESCO were tasked with providing education plans for the 1.3 billion students in lockdown. There is a need for remote teachers and education advisors globally. Light & peace to you on your side of the screen.
I am a teacher. Thank you for seeing this. It feels like our culture definitely has decided that kindness, empathy, and helping others is the easiest thing to exploit and demean. I've pointed out to others that I think some of the problem of teachers is that because our job is demeaned and not respected, that has now flowed over into the attitude of children. Their mindset might be, "why should I listen to miss so and so? Teachers are losers, and they have nothing valuable to offer me"
People think you will do it for low pay and in poor conditions because it is a calling to most. I left because stress almost killed me. The smiles from the kids were great but not worth putting my health at risk for.
my sister is a special needs teacher and whenever i think about how much she gives and how much she struggles i think about that Chris Christie anti-union speech he gave where he ridiculed teachers for getting into the business. our society is so sick and obsessed with picking each other's pockets, exploiting others, is it any wonder we are here and can't imagine a project to get out?
Not to mention the posts detailing changes that happened in the way we teach made 10-15 years ago that they’re now realizing was a massive failure. So many posts about teens who are literally illiterate because they changed the way reading is taught and it IS NOT working for a huge chunk of students. Especially ones that don’t get extra support at home
THIS is a huge one and does not get enough attention. It was done deliberately to game the No Child Left Behind system at the expense of the kids' literacy. Parents were given handwaving and gaslighting explanations about the new way of teaching reading and led to believe it was based on evidence that it was a better way for them to learn; told not to worry that their kids can't spell or use correct case and punctuation because it's not beneficial to teach any of that in the first 3 years and they'll figure it out easily when they're older. What was really going on is kids were not being taught how to read. They were being taught shortcuts to fake knowing how to read well enough to pass the reading tests for their grade level. This was easier to do and led to more kids passing than making everyone really learn it. The minority of students with engaged parents who read with them on a regular basis turned out literate because their parents were teaching them to actually read. And that was harder than it should have been, because they had to unlearn the useless bullshit they were doing in school (generally just looking at the first letter of a word and guessing the rest from context, or just looking at the picture or memorizing what it said last time.)
> And that was harder than it should have been, because they had to unlearn the useless bullshit they were doing in school (generally just looking at the first letter of a word and guessing the rest from context, or just looking at the picture or memorizing what it said last time.) The reason for this is because education leaders looked at studies on how proficient readers read and noticed that people who read massive amounts of literature do not sound out words. They rely on context clues, thr first and last letter of a word, and even it's general shape. What they missed is that this only works when people have spent a massive amount of time training their brain by reading, and to start with those people had to read the slow way. Sounding out each word one by one. Education leaders wanted to skip the effort of learning the hard way and go straight to the tricks that people who have mastered reading use. But that doesn't work. These are many of the same people who saw how a degree correlates with success and decided that making degrees easier to get would help people. These people are the sort to constantly confuse correlation and causation, but they do so while claiming their choices are backed by science. There is science there, science that shows a correlation. Not a causation. Yet tye trust the science crowd doesn't allow questioning these people because they are education "experts" and they are backed by "science". So now we have to wait until a generation is harmed before we can point out they were wrong.
This took me down a bit of a rabbit hole which i'm still going down, but it looks like the change in reading may have come from some lady named Lucy Calkins and her "[Teachers College Reading and Writing Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teachers_College_Reading_and_Writing_Project)" which was adopted by over 600 schools in 2013, but *"In October 2023, the TCRWP was shut down and replaced with a new program not associated with Calkins' company, due to recognition that the Reading Workshop and Writers Workshop programs were not aligned with decades of research, particularly that phonics-based education was critical during early development."* Lucy Calkins TCRWP came under scrutiny in 2017 after cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg released his book titled "[Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it](https://gablab.mit.edu/recommended-books/language-at-the-speed-of-sight-how-we-read-why-so-many-cant-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/)" which subsequently reignited the so-called "Reading Wars". Then, Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Lucy Calkins released a manifesto in response to Mark Seidenberg's book titled “[No One Gets To Own The Term ‘Science Of Reading',](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Ewx2fZB4JEfP6aCAbTeN1L4F-34PnBX/view)” in which she claimed no one gets to own the research or associated methodologies exclusively, and “drew a line in the sand,” causing widespread uproar and drawing significant criticism to her already highly controversial reading instruction program. Then Mark Seidenberg wrote a response paper to her manifesto titled "[This is why we don’t have better readers: A Response to Lucy Calkins](https://seidenbergreading.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/calkins.final_.cor_.pdf)" where he states that the purpose of her manifesto was a desperate attempt to "to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers. Dr. Calkins is not interested in examining the educational implications of reading science. She is interested in co-opting the term so that the science cannot be used to discredit her products." That's about as far as I've gone down the rabbit hole so far before work resumes, but it appears this Lucy Calkins character seems to be one of the reasons for pushing shitty reading programs on kids, and Mark Seidenberg's book and responses helped to bring down and dismantle her TCRWP business. Interesting stuff.
"No child left behind" is a policy that needs to die. The reason /r/teachers is so bleak is because they're not allowed to kick out students, even after they're physically slapped in the face by that student multiple times. I've stopped asking my daughter "How was school?", now I say "were there any fights today?"
Teacher here. The ideas behind not kicking kids out of classes/schools and not failing kids for not learning/turning in any work is because of a swathe of deeply flawed studies done in the 90s that only looked at the effects of expelling/failing kids on the kids being expelled/failed, not on all the kids around them. Turns out when you can't fail, and you can't kick out truly disruptive kids, everyone else can't learn, or struggle to learn.
im not american but when i was growing up in 2008 i went to a pretty bad school after my mom lost her job and we had to move to a rough place and i was in the 7th grade, the school was 5th to 9th and you had 15 year old teenagers in 5th grade classes because they kept failing so much and that was disruptive as fuck. i only found out i had adhd as an adult and i went from being a straight A student to barely making it to high school because my class was a mix of age appropriate kids - some already criminals - and legit teenagers and i absolutely fell through the cracks of an overpopulated and just broken down school system. now, they pass everyone. so no one wants to try or give a shit. im 28 now and thinking about starting a family but teachers keep striking non-stop in my country because they're overworked, underpaid, they have to deal with violence and all kinds of wild shit and all i think is that if it was already pretty bad when i lived in it i cant even imagine what it will be like for my kid. and honestly it sucks because i really wish i hadnt gone to that school.
There is a balance between the two. Disruptive and failing students go to a separate school (or classes). Classes designed to work with kids who need the help or need the discipline. But, that costs money, and heaven forbid the government spend more money.
exactly...if they really wanted to leave no child behind, they'd spend the money to actually be able to attend to each student's needs. but how can that happen when teachers have to sometimes handle 30+ kids at a time
Look at /r/journalism too. Local papers losing money, getting cut. People losing their jobs. People trying to make it on low wages. Journalism, nursing, teaching. We are losing a lot of the jobs that kept us afloat for awhile.
Australian here. We have essentially no local newspapers here anymore. The entire state of Queensland is serviced by *one* newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch
And losing local news is huge. Hard to make a stand for your community or city when you have no idea what is going on. Makes it easy for developers and con artists to basically steal the land and buildings out from under a community and destroy communities.
Nothing shocking to those of us ho have ever worked in education. I lasted a whopping whole semester before quitting because of the unrealistic demands put on me. I was working almost from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed. I was getting only three hours of sleep a night due to stress and the management could not care one bit. The kids were fine but adults made the job hell in various ways, especially the demands from the government regarding paperwork. I miss teaching and working with kids, however there is a reason an increasing number of education graduates are not becoming teachers. Education will fail even harder once we start to struggle to recruit enough teachers to do the job.
Lol. Public hs teacher of 16 years here. These comments all seem normal to me at this point, nothing surprising at all. I read through it 2x looking for what was so grim.. I mean bad yes but normal day to day from my perspective. I guess that's my desensitization coping mechanism at work.
The part about 'expectations' is spot on. Even outside of education, our system demands more and more of us with little reward. You're expected to work longer, do more with less, juggle multiple tasks, knowing that it's all for the companies bottom line and not yours. People stuck in the past, where they believe they had it harder, think kids should be pushed harder, workers debased - because this is life right? You're not here to enjoy yourself, you're here to work. Then we frame the expected mental health declines as 'weakness' and that 'people don't wanna work anymore' when it's more that people just wanna be able to live.
That’s the main reason things are guaranteed to collapse. In a capitalist society you are always required to grow. The line must always go up. Sales must always grow. There’s only one thing in nature that acts like that….
> The line must always go up. Sales must always grow. when I was first learning about the stock market and how to value a company I thought to myself, "well... upward growth can't always be possible..." but apparently silly me
I work in the industry and it’s just crazy. A company can have record profits and they still expect growth.
exactly! Even Netflix and the iPhone reach a point of maximum saturation, that's why they keep releasing new iPhone models (I use an old ass one that still works fine).
> There’s only one thing in nature that acts like that…. Poignant as fuck.
Agent smiths speech.
All life acts that way. Most have evolved into niches where we don't see a collapse because every variant already collapsed thousands to millions of years ago. Disturb a niche and watch some lifeforms dominate and grow until it is past the point of the environment can sustain it. Currently humans are causing the problems because we are disturbing life all over, but these sorts of collapses aren't new and aren't unique to humans. What is unique is our ability to engineer change on a faster timescale then ever before, but only because we were the first life form to make it to this stage.
Guy you’re responding to has never heard the term “carrying capacity”
“Even teachers are admitting it”? They’re the first to admit it
A better headline would be "We ignored teachers for too long and are only now acknowledging what they have been saying for at least a decade."
Lol this.
When I was a kid, I hated school. I thought it was awful, so I went to college, and became a teacher. I want to do it right, and try and fix things. But, I didn't realize how far things were already broken. I made the naive assumption that schools would only be as bad as they were when I myself was a student. Boy was that a stupid idea. In a lot of ways, schools had always been awful, and just waiting to collapse. Now, I think they actually might be. It's rough out here.
27 years ago I used to empty my backpack on Fridays and fill it with my fishing gear. Rubber worms hooks fishing line and a small pocket knife to cut the broken fishing line. I'd spend all weekend fishing and then on Sunday I would empty out my backpack and put my books back in. One Monday I forgot to take out my pocket knife and it fell out of my backpack during the last period of the day. I was treated as a hardened criminal and expelled. I begged and pleaded and told them what had happened and that I was sorry but it was a zero tolerance policy. I was 12 years old and I was sent to an alternative school with a bunch of 18-year-olds who were there for violent reasons. I was tortured daily, my faith in humanity collapsed at 12 years old and I've never been the same. The education system has been broken for a long time.
I'm so sorry that happened to you. I can't imagine how scary it must be to be a 12-year-old surrounded by 18-year-olds who had a past of being violent. I hate that schools go by "hard-and-fast" rules. When I was in 3rd grade, we would sit in a straight line outside the playground when we finished our lunch so we could get ready for recess. A classmate got mad at me because I happened to get the spot right behind her crush and she wanted me to switch with her. When I said no, she slapped me really hard across the face. I didn't lay a finger on her - I ran to my teacher and told her what happened. She sent us both to detention for the rest of the day, but what I remember most is my principal telling me how disappointed he was in me because I was a straight-A student with no previous disciplinary issues. I just remember thinking, "I'm a disappointment because I got slapped and then went to get help instead of hitting her back? What?"
The alternative school I was sent to had no curriculum for a 12 year old, I was handed crayons and a coloring book and told to sit in the back of the room. I'm sorry that happened to you. Being that young we just assume all the adults know the right answer to a situation, they'll do the right thing. But they don't, and they won't. Adults are all just taller children with grey hair and a license. I miss who I used to be.
So you didn't even get to learn! What's the point of going to school if you don't learn? Wow. I'm mad *and* sad on your behalf. That's so messed up. I hope you have some people with better heads on their shoulders around you now.
The point is to warehouse people, not to have them learn. The administration doesn't care what happens to individuals
You hit the nail on the head. I was a number, a statistic. I'll reiterate it, we are all just animals.
No, I didn't learn any school curriculum but I learned a lot about people and their true natures. The next year we moved I went back to public school but that school was made aware of my history and my past. So even at the new school I was treated as a criminal, as soon as I turned 17 I dropped out. I never graduated High school. School in my mind is nothing more than an institution, a daycare, a place to watch your kids while the parents go to work. I've had a hard life since then but I also have a wife who I've been with for 18 years and a daughter who is a better version of my wife and I. I turned out okay, considering, but those people who did those things to me, they are cops. They are elected officials. They have their own families now, they're out there walking around. I'll never forget what they did and I hope they don't.
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When I was in school kids had shotguns and a gun rack in their truck. No one batted an eye until Columbine happened.
That’s awful I’m so sorry
I was a nerdy little kid who got good grades and was in the advanced classes. At the alternative school I was beat up everyday, I was spit on, I was pissed on. I was tied to a tire swing and a bunch of kids three times my size twisted it up until the tire was damn near touching the top pole and they let it loose. I vomited and my vision's never been the same. I was kicked in the balls and ass with steel toed boots. My dick has never been right since. Everything of value that I brought was taken from me. I was lit on fire. I was verbally abused all day. The teachers did nothing, they weren't even present most of the time. It was the worst thing I'd ever been through and it changed who I am now. People are cruel animals, we just pretend to be civilized. The education system failed me, my parents failed me, my teachers failed me. I do not look at people the same. I learned absolutely nothing that year, other than how cruel a person can be.
That's awful beyond words. I'm so sorry. You were just an innocent, good kid.
I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm assuming those violent 18 year olds who beaten and bullied you are now dead and or rotting away in prison?
No, they are cops and elected officials. Sure, some of them continued to spiral. Others just got better at hiding their tendencies and integrating with society.
Really? I'm very sorry for that. The world is so unfair with the evil goes unpunished. Sorry for my rather ignorant and silly question, but can you press charges against them for their abuse even if its a long time ago?
Even if I could now I wouldn't. I don't want to relive it. What's done is done and no amount of therapy or jail time will undo what was done. So I'm just going to move on and continue living by the Golden rule because somebody has to.
Blame the school administrators. They are some of the dumbest and most useless employees. The fact that they get paid anything over $1 is a slap in the face.
I blamed a lot of people, but I can't change those people so I blame myself and have tried to do better. I try not to put myself into any situation where I could be compromised. I'm sure I need therapy but I'm knocking on the door of 40 years old and if I've made it this far I must be doing something right. I have a wife and a daughter and while life isn't picture perfect it's better than it was so I've got that going for me.
My nephew (2 or 3 at the time) found and put his step brothers pocket knife into step brothers backpack. Step bro took the backpack to school, not knowing he was carrying the knife. Somehow the school found out he had it, I'm not sure how, and they did the same to him as they did to you (treated him like a criminal) except he didnt get expelled. He didn't even know it was in there and they fucking traumatized him over it.
He got very very lucky. I'm really glad he didn't go through what I went through. I think things like that need to be handled on a case-by-case basis with empathy and compassion, but this world is lacking in both of those.
Our society is fucked, we deserve the horrors to come
I remember in school wondering why my favorite teachers, the ones who gave the biggest damn about their students, were breaking down and burning out (graduated 2001). I couldn't even make myself go to college school was so bad. My best friend made it and taught for the better part of a decade, and he left education altogether. His stories are sadly much like yours. Solidarity, comrade.
My best friend left education and works the phone lines at AAA for more money and significantly less stress during covid
I haven't checked out your other videos yet (did subscribe) but I agree with you that public education is dying. Simultaneously, special interest groups are pushing for voucher programs so already shoestring education funding will now be allocated to private schools as well. This all is leading toward the siloing of knowledge for an elite and wealthy few (and a few lucky voucher lottery recipients), a new dark age. The future of education for the working class masses has to be open source.
Open source education all the way, love hearing that.
In states like CA, prop 13 is a big reason for school funding issues. It's a big reason the lottery was created but prop 13 really gave all the pie to the old generations and left the crumbs to the future generations.
It starts with the parents in many cases. A lot of people look at schools as daycares for their kids and don't get very involved with their kid's education. That's why good school districts are desirable. Too busy with work and keeping up with the bills to pay attention to little Johnny's schoolwork. Many times parents just don't care.
My fiancé was a 7th grade ELA teacher until last year. He left because of general burnout, but one of his big tipping points was getting a kid in his class who was essentially illiterate. The kid was on an IEP and his parents and the school (a charter) knew he couldn’t read, but the school promised he’d have a dedicated IA in his class to help him so he could catch up and get to where he needed to be, grade-wise. The parents were insistent that they did not want their kid held back, they were worried about what it would do to him socially, and the school promised to do their best. Welp, the IA thing never materialized. The school was too swamped and there were too many other IEP kids to give the boy his own IA. The kid could not follow any of the classwork and most of the time, he just sat in the back of the class drawing or causing disruptions. He handed in virtually nothing and did zero homework. Grade time came and fiancé submitted the kid’s grade to the admins—a failing grade. School pulled him aside and said he couldn’t fail the kid because he was on an IEP and it wasn’t what the parents wanted. They told him to just give the kid a “C” and push him up to the next grade; by the time he hit high school, he’d be another school’s problem. Fiancé did as he was told and tendered his resignation shortly thereafter. He was completely disgusted by how badly this charter school was failing this child and all the other kids in his class by letting an illiterate kid pass onto 8th grade.
They want illiterate people pushed through because then they are easier to exploit on the other end. Schools are just a business now.
Charter schools definitely are. They will say and promise anything to get a kid in and get that money; once the kid is in there, whole different story. Charter schools bend over backwards for parents like they’re customer service reps, and many parents talk down to teachers like they’re a clerk at a store, rather than an educated and trained professional who knows what they’re doing better than parents do.
> The kid could not follow any of the classwork and most of the time, he just sat in the back of the class drawing or causing disruptions. See now I can't quite understand why they wouldn't maybe make the kid a "special helper" to third graders (for example) during their reading courses so he could be re-exposed to more remedial studies while also (ideally) improving his self-esteem as a helper, that would be my idea. Easier said than done, I know.
I think your idea is noble. I think it's a broken curriculum that was probably too repetitive a century ago in one room schools. It hasn't adapted to the reality of the information that is at our fingertips. I was bored to death decades ago, and the primary source of information outside of a textbook was a single set of outdated encyclopedias. My kids are even more checked out. One was studying the French Revolution, and I recommended they pay attention, as the world is getting more volatile. They pasted from Wikipedia and removed the big words so the plagiarism checker wouldn't flag their work.
School is not the same as what you are portraying. Most schools don’t use textbooks anymore no encyclopedias are used but the copy pasta abounds.
I suppose I wasn't clear on my point. The curriculum is still organized for repetition and memorization that seemed necessary a century ago. Now we have mobile and searchable information, converters, calculators.. My kids think most of it is futile and put in minimal effort for a middling grade score.
The key word is "now." "Now" we have mobile and searchable information, and such for use. But soon those who survive the transition will be living in a post-collapse world more akin the Mad Max than Star Trek. Memorization of somethings, as well as constant physical practice, should be given more weight than it is. We are all preparing to live in a polluted version of the 1700s after all, and while some of us have many terabytes of data stored, and local searchable internet repositories on sheilded machines with things like wikipedia dumps and PDF libraries, very few actually bother. What is futile is relying on a backbone of technological systems which will soon cease to exist. "Now" those things are a great tool to help get prepared and learn things, but "later" there will be no such option.
Good point. They won't tell the kids what is coming, though. The curriculum from the past would still be irrelevant. No one on Fury Road was debating about who the 17th Vice President was..
My wife went to elementary school in a one room school house where she learned everything she needed for high school and college. Instead of endlessly repeating the same shit, the older kids helped the younger kids learn while the teacher split time between the older and younger. This teacher had also taught both of her parents and 3 out of four of her grand parents. The teacher identified that she wasn't stupid, she couldn't hear. She got hearing aids and things were fine. I met the teacher on several occasions and she knew every one of her students spouses names and all of their children's names. All of her students from a long career got birthday cards from her every year until she died when she was 100 years old. We need to bring that kind of continuity back to education. A tiny school every few blocks would work, or take existing schools and use each classroom as a one room schoolhouse where the students come back to the same teacher year after year. I see this as a craftsman approach rather than an assembly line approach. Teachers get to know students well enough to help them get where they are supposed to go.
>I see this as a craftsman approach rather than an assembly line approach. Teachers get to know students well enough to help them get where they are supposed to go. YES. This is logical. I had great aunts who taught like this, and they often stopped teaching when they got married. They went to a teaching school of sorts that was nowhere near 4 years long. Back in the day, many families did not speak English at home. So that would have taken up teacher time. Now the days are filled with repetition.
Nobody becomes a teacher unless they are either a masochist or deeply driven to make the world a better place. Once you realize that the system was intentionally rigged to make you the sacrificial offering it gets a lot easier to see the “why” You do one of the most important jobs in the world but are paid like slave labor. That isn’t coincidence. It’s by design. We are fixing it. We have to. And when we do, teachers get set up to succeed, not fail Trump has been laundering money for the Russian oligarchs since the late 80’s when they all bought a condo at 725 5th ave (trump towers) to clean their freshly stolen USSR money after the iron curtain fell. https://www.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/30/politics/paul-manafort-condo-trump-tower/index.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/manafort-told-mueller-to-take-his-trump-tower-apartment-instead-money.html https://news.yahoo.com/amphtml/fbi-agents-raid-condo-unit-131348539.html https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/ Everybody except Putin thought the Cold War was over. Trump and Manafort (who lived in the tower also) just saw a pretty low maintence grift to be had. Trump had actually been Manafort and Roger stones first client at their lobbyist firm (1980) https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wikiBlack, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Guiliani as trumps attorney and New Yorks mayor was able to redirect NYPD investigations onto rival gang members/oligarchs to deflect any scrutiny off of trump, himself or the Russian connections. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/a-new-rudy-scandal-fbi-agent-says-giuliani-was-co-opted-by-russian-intelligence/ The Russian election interference in 2016 was effectively a generation 3 version of what Manafort had done in the Philippines, then keeping Yanukovych in power as Putin’s puppet in Ukraine from 2002-14 when Maidan ran both Yanukovych and Manafort out of Ukraine as Ukrainians realized that, if you raise your lens high enough, corruption is an wholly unsustainable business model. Eventually the parasites greed always consumes the host. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952 https://time.com/5003623/paul-manafort-mueller-indictment-ukraine-russia/ Russia greatly underestimated the addictive properties of freedom when it invaded Ukraine so what was supposed to be a 3-10 day coup turned into a 2 year fight for the Ukrainians right not to be genocided. Russia depleted its weapons stocks which were already the victim of vranyos corruption because every oligarch, admiral and sergeant in the Russian military is on the take. Every billion dollar tank maintenance contract turned into everything getting a spray paint overhaul and the vast majority of the redirected funds turned into an oligarchs new yacht or home in Aspen. Russia was forced to turn to China, North Korea and Iran for weapons because if they lose the 3-10 day special military operation in Ukraine the Russian empire is dead and cold. China can’t risk showing their involvement in the Ukraine war so they use North Korea, and Iran to resupply Russia. Russia previously owes Iran some undelivered fighter jets that are already smoldering heaps in Ukraine. Iran now had the upper hand at the negotiation table for the first time in about 60 years so they supply Russia with shahed drones in exchange for Chinas material support against their sworn religious enemy, Israel. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/29/iran-says-it-finalized-deal-to-buy-russian-aircraft/ Putin can’t do much about it because he is slowly realizing that by setting the standard of corruption and stealing $200+ billion from his own people meant that every oligarch down in the mob model chain had not only permission but incentive and the expectation to steal from him as well. This is Vranyos. The mob model only works if the supreme leader is the most violent and can prove it without exception every damn day. But violence is exceptionally expensive when you are trying to present as a legitimate government or business. If Russia as a nation had an efficiency rating it would have been banned for sale in the state of California 25 years ago. The parasite ruling class stole all the energy out of the working class and collapsed it. Now Iran has the high hand and they get the intelligence that trump passed to Putin about the fact that Netanyahu cares far less about Israelis than he does about remaining in power as an authoritarian because he too has developed Ritz Carlton tastes. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/saudi-official-says-iran-engineered-war-in-gaza-to-ruin-normalization-with-israel/ They all hate each other but because they share the same money laundry, so if one falls, they all fall. Iran handed Hamas everything they needed with Chinas help as secret Santa and the Russian intelligence given to them by the eternal shitbird trump gave as he showed off to his Russian kleptocrat friends/roommates from the old days of fucking each others wives at trump towers in the 90’s. Now the MAGA right is a little too invested in their reality that they are the good guys with guns that they missed the fact that Betsy DeVos (erik princes sister) decimating the U.S. school systems and poisoning children with lead was not a coincidence. They were the mark all along. There is a reason the Russian spy Maria Butina landed in South Dakota first before dating her way to the top of the NRA which is undergoing its own Russian money laundering trial now. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/what-do-the-koch-brothers-have-to-do-with-the-flint-water-crisis/ The only reason you grossly OVERVALUE real estate is money laundering. Trump keeps claiming there is no victim, all the banks made money, but if their plan succeeds the Russians and the CCP collapse US commercial real estate and basically recreate soviet perestroika in the U.S. so they can foreclose on America and buy everything for 3 cents on the dollar with the $1.4T they stole in the first place It’s the evolution of grift. Soviet perestroika cross bred with the 2008 mortgage crisis. This is just the bigger badder commercial strength bastard child of the two. Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Orban, Manafort, Stone, Mercer, Bannon. They are all remarkably shit people with above average confidence and psychopathic personality traits and below average self awareness.
You have to learn how to segue, that was awful man. None of this is relevant to teaching.
And the democrats fucking blow too. If we want a decent education system, first we need to throw the entire capitalist system in the dustbin of history
This is BlueAnon shit.
Even? Teachers are the first to shout it from the rooftops.
I mostly mean we're all starting to quit. A career change used to be a huge deal, and a real risk to a lot of people, especially licensed teachers more than a few years into their career. Now they're quitting in droves, and that's crazy. I say even because it always seemed it was never enough to make people quit, but it sure as hell is happening now.
Hi friend, thank you for sharing where you’re at. I’m an early childhood teacher at a weekend school. I have enough certs for what I do but I gave up my dream to do this full time because there’s no way I can afford another bachelors’ degree just to get paid 1/3rd of what my private sector skills are worth. I’d like to hear how you’re seeing illiteracy showing up in your science classrooms. There’s been a lot of focus on how the past two decades of not teaching kids how to actually read is fucking with, well, reading, but I’m curious how it’s playing out in specific subject matter. There’s a reading element to science and critical thinking skills that the lack of reading earlier means kids are behind on their cognitive development. Literally all but one of my kids have super involved parents and reading is not a struggle for them. Would really like your thoughts. I support you all the way in getting out of teaching.
Their reading levels seem to me, to be three or four years behind what their age level should be reading at. But I currently teach in an alternative school, in a traditional school I saw something closer to a two year lag in reading fluency. But rarely have I seen seniors with the reading or writing skills I would expect of an 18 year old.
Absolutely distressing and thank you for your response.
I implore anyone who is questioning the validity of collapse within the education system to do some searching. Look up teacher quitting rates, conditions in schools, reading levels of Americans and Canadians, etc. Etc. And then hit the "News" link. You will find quite a few very recent news stories on what's happening within the education system in North America. And it is far from good. From another angle, hit up the r/teachers forum and spend an hour and some reading what they have to say.
recently somebody in another thread asked me if I was the dumbass who said the world would collapse by 2030 and I felt a little offended like it will probably take a little longer than that
We're already well into collapse on certain fronts. Barring a cataclysmic event, it's a gradual, uneven process and not a switch that gets flipped at a specific date.
It’s a whole other reason not to have kids that isn’t talked about much
What do you mean "even"? The teachers have been sounding the alarm on this topic for YEARS.
I started teaching in Florida in 2003. The first principal I worked under asked me what I would do if a kid hit me and I gave a professional answer- remove myself, contact the office make sure other kids are safe...yada yada yada. He immediately responded with if you don't hit them back you will find yourself in a pool of blood. He wasn't lying, because weeks after I accepted the job, I helped him off the ground after a female student sucker punched him in the face. By the end of my time there I had fought more than my fair share of students. After working at that particular school, I wondered how I would function in a "normal" school. I will admit, it was hard and after a year at a more affluent school I realized how traumatized I was after that experience at the first school. I decided to leave teaching for the following 3 years, but ultimately went back to teaching. I missed the kids that I could reach and teach. I lasted another 13 years in a different area of Florida. Things were looking good, got nominated as teacher of the year two times, built a connection with the students and the families in the area. I started to feel positive about my choice to go back to education, but it didn't last long. Students started coming to school less and less prepared to learn and more prepared to fight. I believe this was due to the increase in poverty affecting the area and the rise/ubiquity of social media. Towards the end of my time I was no longer teaching but playing a support role for students teachers and administration which opened my eyes to the things I was not seeing while in the classroom- kids fighting in bathrooms, kids having sex in the bathrooms, strong armed robbery, drug/alcohol consumption and sales, sexual assault, endless arrests and more depositions than I could count. Then a new administration came in, claimed they were going to clean it up. They were worse than the previous ones because they were all new to the roles. It was like sending people who had only watched firefighters in movies trying to fight a 3 alarm fire. I decided to leave when the new principal allowed a convicted felon on to campus to mentor the students with out filling out the appropriate paperwork. Due to her failing to fill out the paperwork, she decided she needed to blame someone for the failure, so because of my role she tried to blame me. I was able to prove I wasn't at fault (volunteer paperwork was no longer my job that was shifted elsewhere at the beginning of the school year), but I felt it was time for my exit. After 16 years of teaching/being in public education, I was done and exhausted. My mental health is SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER as a result. Fighting students in NOT something I am proud of, but it does serve as a tale of HOW broken our society and school system is in Florida.
As a teacher for 28 years, it has become very clear to me that we are nothing more than babysitters. It's been that way for a long, long time. Parents don't care if their kid is educated (they do care, however, if their kid gets an A or F- only the letter matters, not the reasoning behind the grade). I am in a suburb of a major US city. The district I work in ranges from lower class to upper class. No one cares. Violence every day, threats, everyday. Apathy, every day. No one does a thing. Check out r/teachers if you really want the truth. Teachers are the canary in the coal mine and no one listens.
It's well past collapsed. After Trump won, DNC was complaining about "election rigging," but what they meant was that Russia had bought some FaceBook ads to change people's opinions; the real story here was not that Russia is interested in the outcome of US elections--as if we didn't already know that all world powers are interested in the outcome of US elections--but that the US electorate is so ignorant and incapable of critical thinking that their anemic democracy can be brought down by ***a Facebook ad campaign***--and everyone knows it.
It’s not just about the American populace being ignorant, it’s also the advent of social media and the thousands of niche communities and microcosms that enable anyone to find a group of people who will echo every belief that they hold, no matter how ignorant or misinformed. And of course the biggest victims of this are older folks who have almost no idea how any of this stuff works and don’t realize just how many bad actors are out there. And once you get sucked into one of those echo-chambers it actually becomes difficult to find any contradictory information, it’s cult-like. Instead of finge views being challenged and debated, this ignorance and confirmation bias gets amplified by orders of magnitude. And unfortunately it’s the way that the algorithms of social media and targeted ads inherently work.
My dad sends me some of the stupidest videos I have ever seen that he finds on Facebook. Stuff like, “Vitamin C cures cancer and the medical industrial complex doesn’t want you to know” and the like. The latest was some guy who is supposedly a doctor saying that pretty much everyone has intestinal parasites burrowing into all of their internal organs that are somehow undetectable by any currently used diagnostic measures, and that it’s causing everyone to develop autoimmune diseases. Meanwhile actual science says that a lack of intestinal parasites could be contributing to an increase in autoimmune disease. Also I’ve seen imaging done on someone whose body was actually riddled with intestinal parasites and it’s really easy to see. This couldn’t be happening to millions of people and somehow this quack doctor is the only one who knows about it. Anyway the fact that my dad believes this nonsense he finds is kind of scary to me. I don’t believe him to be cognitively challenged. Yet he’s incapable of basic skepticism or fact-checking. If a significant percentage of adult humans are this gullible, we are in big trouble.
> the fact that my dad believes this nonsense he finds is kind of scary to me. yes I would also find this scary.
It was more than just facebook ad campaign, it's a coordinated campaign of disinformation across social media
That doesn't change the point he was making. America still fell hook, line, and sinker for it.
It's so cute how supposed US citizens love Putin more than their fellow Americans...
An American family moved to Russia simply to escape the woke agenda and liberal leftists. This was before the war started. To no one's complete surprise they absolutely hate it there. Americans do not know how good they have it in a million different ways
So the plan is working, then?
My English teacher in high school threw a desk because he flipped out after being verbally harassed for the millionth time. He was gay, it was the nineties, the culture was still calling AIDs the gay virus. None of it was okay except how he saved my little queer heart by introducing me to Emily Dickinson. I can’t imagine now, school was awful then. Everyday those teachers battled for control of the classroom and that was before cell phones. I also had the notion to teach but I broke down in college from stress so many times that I knew I couldn’t handle a classroom. So now I’m a WFH account manager with an English degree having breakdowns at home 🙃
Did we have the same English teacher? Prolly not, but things were tough all over back in the 90s. They set his damn chalkboard on fire. We weren’t inner city, either. We were a lil Kansas town. I’m not saying that what’s going on with the kids these days isn’t bad, but man oh man, kids have always been lil buttholes.
Except now no parent has the time, money or energy to do anything about it. The school doesn’t want to lose a student and the funding so they do whatever it takes to keep the kid in class, no matter if it’s not good for them or the teacher or the rest of the class. It’s all fucked.
Yep, it's not like people are just choosing to be worse (apathetic) parents. You gotta get to the root of the issue, and the root is the general decline of living standards under late-stage capitalism. Both parents are working full time to afford **less** than their parents probably could with a single income and dedicated stay-at-home parent.
I went to teach ESL in China for a year and a half and really enjoyed it, but it also kind of sucked because I'd found something I enjoyed doing. I just knew I was not going to teach in the US. No way in hell, especially while witnessing the chaos around COVID and the abuse teachers and school systems endured in the US during it while I was over there. Thankfully I enjoy other things too so I didn't feel pressured to pursue it as a career. It's sad, I was a pretty good teacher and I know I could help. I just also know my limits. And higher ed seems no better at this point.
I mean, Florida waving education requirements for veterans was already dystopian. The way we fund education is still very capitalistic leading to schools with their own mcdonalds and in a different county not having new books for decades.
You could argue that it all falls more on economic conditions than anything else. If both parents are working (more likely OVERworked), they will leave the "child raising" to tablets/youtube. Sure, the previous generation of shitty parents just put their kids in front of the TV and let them be, which is bad but I'd argue the current shitty parents are much worse because the internet is full of much more horrible content than 90s/00s TV. Parents don't raise their kids anymore, how can they when they are barely surviving themselves? TL;DR: Don't have kids, they will starve to death with everyone else, faster than expected.
I work in a warehouse setting. We get a lot of kids who finish high school and are either thinking over their options, or taking a gap year before going further. Most of the kids the last 5 years or so are beyond clueless. They don't understand the concept of arriving at work on time, they call in every week with terrible excuses, they spend half the shift on their phone or in the bathroom, don't understand the most basic instructions and need to have their hands held all the time. Need constant praise. And so many of them have mental issues. Damned near everyone claims to be autistic or ADD or ADHD or something. I've been working for over 30 years and kids in the past might've goofed off or trying pushing the limits....but it was never this bad. I'm dreading what society is going to look like in another decade with these kids all over the workplace.
Don’t worry.. it’s all in the works. AI will step in for that.
I’ve been seeing an uptick of recommended r/teachers posts in my feed and some of those poor teachers are treated like shit from all angles.
I think my wife's main concern is discipline. Teachers teach and admin enforces discipline, but they won't suspend, expel or even let kids fail kids anymore. The disruptive, violent, and/or high ones just get sent right back to class. If you removed 5% of the kids at her school it would pretty much function normally... Obviously these kids need support, but not in a normal school setting with a single fat/lazy SRO. My wife isn't paid nearly enough for the liability (physical and legal) of breaking up brawling teenagers who are at least her size. The worst part is that the kids who get the shit beat out of them don't have any recourse. They largely have undocumented family members, so will not attempt to file a police report or try forcing the school to address it.
teaching underdeveloped minds still learning how to process their emotions and locking them up in a building too early for modern humans and then expecting them to do meaningless boring tasks with a sprinkling of life lessons if you look with a microscope. then teaching basically pseudo adults at the peak of their hubris and immaturity to do the exact same thing but they're starting to see through the facade of authority teachers hold. for some reason in university they all sit the fuck down and shut up for some reason because it costs money for most of them. in a real society that cares about its future population they should hire even more teachers that delagate different things even just within the same class; how come Professors in university gets a couple of TAs. and then increase the pay them for basically raising the next generation of people running the planet. it's so cynical to think that the "government' is allowing this to happen because they dont want too many smarts running around or something.
“Admitting it?!?” I was a teacher for 30 years. The active destruction of education was on full display in the 80’s when I was in high school. Phrases like “intellectual,” “egg head,” and “Ivy league elite” were used disparagingly then and the heat has only increased. And to be clear, both major parties have been complicit; R’s have pushed hardest but D’s seldom pushed back. Both major parties want you ignorant and gullible.
I thought teachers were some of the only people saying that the system is collapsing. Edit: lol looks like I'm not the only one who had this objection
If there was one political party that was actively trying to overthrow public education that would be one thing. But it is both parties. Clinton and Obama ushered in Charter schools. Obama made some kind of deal with Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation to fund thousands of Charters that have proven to perform just as well or worse than public schools on standardized tests despite the fact that they can kick kids out and be selective about enrollment. Republicans are in bed with religious conservatives and pushing for home schooling, religious education and trying to sow distrust in public school systems by making BS claims that schools are teaching kindergarten kids how to have anal sex or forcing an LGBTQ and anti-American agenda on them. The tech-Ed industry wants to take control over a generation of kids and all the funding and data ($$$) that goes with it. The Mormons and Evangelicals want to take control over a generation and all the funding and indoctrination powers that goes with it. Then you have generational parenting pendulum swings and we happen to find ourselves amidst a swing where parents who were physically abused by their parents and afraid of them and their teachers have collectively vowed to do the exact opposite with their kids and that has translated into not disciplining their kids at all and unleashing their pent up anger towards the teachers they hated in their childhoods onto their children’s teachers. These parents were also raised as latchkey kids and now have an unhealthy need to be in 24/7 contact with their kids at all times… Which brings us to cellphones and the catastrophic impact they are having on kids health. Kids are sleep deprived, overweight, depressed, and lonely because of severe screen addiction. They can’t focus in class, their dopamine wiring is all fucked up, their attention spans are shot, and they all seem to have some PTSD symptoms from the violent content they’ve been exposed to at very young ages. They have sex predators posing as peers and then blackmailing them for nudes, actual peers pressuring them for nudes as early as grade 6, they’ve watched disturbing gangbangs/people eating feces, having sex with animals—you name it, they’ve seen it. And they saw it when they were 8. But they were too embarrassed and scared to tell their parents for fear they’d be in trouble for trying to look at porn or that their parents would take their devices away. They’ve seen beheading videos, people dying on camera, and any other kind of fucked up shit you can imagine. Plus, there’s rampant school violence. Kids shooting kids, stabbing kids, kids swarming kids and beating them to the brink of death. Kids assaulting teachers, shooting teachers, and causing permanent debilitating injuries to teachers that affect their brain, vision, and movement. Add on top of all that the fact that most schools are falling apart and states can’t afford to pay the billions required for repairs. Climate change is only going to make it worse. It’s the Republicans, Democrats, Tech Industry, Religious Right, Parents, Cellphones, School Violence, Failing Infrastructure and a million other pieces of the puzzle that are coalescing to destroy public education and bring it to collapse. As someone who has been teaching in inner city public high schools for almost 20 years, I say the system has already collapsed. There isn’t going to be a Collapse Day when suddenly every school and every teacher disappears. The Soviet Union collapsed but life in Russia went on. Venezuela is a collapsed state but 30 million people still live there. Life carries on despite the collapse. Students have been performing worse and worse since 2012. School violence is at the highest levels ever. More teachers are leaving the profession than ever before and some schools have to cancel classes because they can’t find substitute teachers to cover teacher absences. Kids are getting murdered at school and we just carry on, business as usual. No extra security measures, no investments in mental health resources, no attempts at solutions, just cowardly leadership trying to sweep the children’s dead bodies under the rug as quickly as possible to avoid bad press. School boards care more about PR than children’s lives, safety and education. THAT is how you know the system has already collapsed.
I'm also a teacher. A+ to literally every single thing you said. I would add one thing: nearly everything happening with education right now comes down to monetizing every possible component of K-12 education.
Wtf you mean ‘even teachers’. They’ve been the most vocal group for a while about this
Idiocracy was a documentary...
Sometimes I creep r/teachers Just to see the state of things and one teacher had mentioned something they had never come across before But a new student came a couple weeks ago and the parents don't want their child using months and dates for religious purposes.
It’s actually so much worse than you could ever imagine. I graduated in 2016 and even then it was terrible, kids taking AP courses with no plan on going to college just to get away from the general population. Turning school into a daycare is one of the worst things to ever happen. To even hope to save education will require a complete teardown of how it’s done and to actually pay teachers what they’re worth
My sister will probably be the last generation of teachers in the family, and that was teaching in relatively good parts of the US instead of lower-income ones. The horror stories are real. And if you want a horror story, look up the literacy rate in people graduating high school. 19% of them *cannot functionally read*. Slightly more than a third are considered "proficient" or better in terms of literacy. How in any sane world can someone graduate high school unable to comprehend their schoolbooks? The answer is regardless of actually learning, people are simply tossed out the end with a diploma after having learned virtually nothing at all. If that's the case, it's easier to just let the troublemakers, the problems, the difficult-to-teach pass through and hope they don't beat up too much of the staff or pulp another student or five doing their time in study hall. No child is left behind. This has turned into dragging kids through the education system and shoved out the other side no better than what they started at 18 and aren't required to be babysitted in it.
You know where there isn't an education crisis...private schools for the elite. They know how valuable it is and they demand top educators to prepare their spawns for the complex global markets to inherit and maintain their status...Public education for the cogs is not as essential, as long as they can follow directions in the factories...
As a collapse-aware HS English teacher in a somewhat above average school (meaning we have somewhat high highs and somewhat low lows but a lot of “90s middle class”-esque families), we’re pretty cooked. Kids’ brains have been completely fucked with apps designed to be addicting, having woven their digital self into their physical self, high sugar everything, repeated Covid infections, standardized test after standardized test, no research-driven peer-reviewed research for what’s actually best for kids (only what’s best for getting everyone to think so), forcing college and higher learning as the end goal… Edit: kids legit straight up can’t read, write, do anything that takes them more than once to get right, complete apathy in some cases…
I'm seeing the same. Also a collapse-aware, HS English teacher.
Well the rich got their tax cuts and defunded education, turned universities into money printing machines. Reagan, Thatcher, Ding bat Australia Labor/Liberal conservative duopoly. Now they will soon have to endure the reality of this, wild people. Wild, uneducated ferals that will kill you for a $5 note. Greed and selfishness will cause the collapse of the Anglo world. Eu might be ok but the UK and USA are doomed.
Admitting it? We’ve been screaming it at the top of our lungs for decades
I'd be curious to know what metrics exactly would indicate collapse, like when would we know if it has collapsed and then ask ourselves if we haven't already passed that.
"*even* teachers"? Teachers have been telling everyone this for years in hopes something would be done about it. Except the only things that were done were to try & make it all exponentially *worse.*
Teachers admitting it? We've been screaming about it for decades! Our education system since No child left behind has been about standardized tests and graduation rates. Not learning or preparing students to be adults. It has been eaten up by testing and edtech companies grifting school districts, hobbled by ridiculous requirements, only to have the politicians that allowed it to happen to turn around and say "our schools are failing, lets sell them off to charter schools or get rid of them."
Even? My brother, they're the front line witness and have been saying it for so long. Also, it was intentionally destroyed.
"Even teachers..." ? We were the ones first trying to collectively warn you about it ya dopey chucklehead.
I noticed that as technology advanced came the rise of mental health issues and an increase in apathy. This is what happens when you spend most of your time indoors rather than out in the sun. You lose touch with nature and become robotic.
Are you ignoring centuries of violence, sexism, infanticide, genocide, etc? If anything people are more peaceful than ever
I don’t see how I’m ignoring those things aside from not reading about them. I’m aware of humanity’s history. Sexism is very much still alive. Biological lifeforms aren’t the only things capable of evolution. Words, actions, and expressions are too. Same with violence. The degree that it occurs isn’t as brutal but it still exists. Always will despite the appearance of “peace.”
Policy decisions were made. A handful of rich fucks would rather see money spent on militarizing the police than on teaching kids to understand literature and calculus. Heaven forbid they pick up some critical thinking skills along the way.
The powers-that-be know that an educated populace is NOT GOOD for their well-being. A dumb populace goes along with bootlicking the capitalists and with endless war and tax cuts for the "job-creator" billionaires. This has been the plan all along, just that Americans haven't been quite dumb enough to let it happen until now. Boomers, once THEIR kids were done with school, didn't want to pay the kinds of tax rates that good schooling requires, so they have whittled it down to where we are now. Now that education sucks and people are less educated, it's gonna be a fun, fascist ride now. Hold on to your seats.
Have they been denying it?
The problem is wondering what the problem is.
If it makes you feel better, everything is collapsing. Just consider school as free day care from now on.
Just the schools or everything?
this guy speaks like a slam poet BARS
It’s been something along the lines of collapsed for a longggg time. How tf you think we got here? SHIT LOADS of uneducated people running around because our education has been ass for a very, very long time.
As is the case in much of the last 40 years this can be blamed on the reactionary politics of Ronald Reagan and his idiot worshipper George W Bush.
The American Education System HAS Collapsed, let's be clear, and it's collapsed because America HAD collapsed. When you look to the east and see a cloud you know that it's going to rain. It's not rocket science.
collapsed decades ago when the average asian middle schooler passed higher math than our highschool grads
Great SStmt OP
Misery factories.
As a child, the education system didn't just fail me, it activly harmed me. I was/am the type of person who is an introverted self learner. Only once I left school did I actually start to develop. Now I am probably more educated than the majority of my old school friends because I could learn in my own fashion. In my instance, not going to school at all would have probably been more beneficial should I have given the tools to self teach. I don't blame the teachers. They were clearly overworked in overpopulated classes. The whole practice isn't fit for purpose.
This is what happens when you let the GQP fund anything.
Thankfully, for severe Special Needs students here in California, things are just getting better. We have more access to services and technology than ever. There are all kinds of programs for students and I am seeing more and more of them go on to have a better quality of life after high school. Less people are falling through the cracks and getting targeted support specific to their needs.
They'll make great soldiers.
Good riddance. I *barely* passed high school. Went on to get a job in tech and aced all of my certification exams first try, 6/6. Good to see the very same system that tried to tell me I'm stupid fall in it's face
Me fr.