[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy

I can't blame teachers for any of this. The results seem like a reflection of the state of overall cultural changes that have been accelerated in concert with the ramp up of the internet age.

We are all deeply manipulated, dopamine-addled device junkies - now starting from age 2.

Culture preference bends towards a desire to exist in online space more often than meat space.

Communication preference bend towards lo-literacy symbology or conversation rather than text or numeracy.

Thought work is increasingly being outsourced to digital search tools, which are built on largely archaic infrastructures that will not be (easily) replaceable when they do inevitably fail.

Skill development continues to be outsourced to low status classes or "automation" because no one wants to be caught dead in those castes.

Status games and tribe signaling behaviours are soaked in feels and vibes with a preference towards non-confrontational violence and subject to super rapid context-shaping where words have completely different meanings depending on who uses them, or worse yet, no meaning at all. Truths are manufactured rather than revealed, and these rarely survive contact with extra-human reality, but who GAF so long as your team is bigger than the other side?

Effort-Reward pathways are so hammered that very few people bother to decline the easy to access, mid-grade good feelings for harder, high quality good feelings and the risks associated with that path. Moving towards a permanent state of empty satiation with zero nourishment or true contentment, and no capacity to self-regulate or process stress functionally.

Abrahamic Faith systems ushered in an era of individualism that was revolutionary and vital in many respects, but our own technology has hyper-stimulated this movement to a point of deep self-centeredness. We are abandoning important tenets of sacrifice, faith, forgiveness or pursuit of creating for the sake of celebrating the glory and beauty of it all.

The economic system is designed to focus on maximizing present value of violence backed fiat accumulation, willfully ignoring the true source of growth or the deeply meaningful purpose money has in fostering connection to one another now and in the future, or to our collective and personal integrity.

We have such a deep buffer of people that we can lose to the consequences of these choices that it doesn't really impact those who get to continue.

Intergenerational connection suffers deeply from all of these forces. Parent-aged groups don't seem to connect with their elders, each other, or their children deeply at the moment. Maybe I am alone in this, but this seems true.

The school system is... just completely antiquated compared to the way the world is. I cannot expect teachers to adapt in any meaningful way when the stated outcomes of the higher order system are so disconnected with what the world is actually like.

Are there opportunities waiting on the other side that align with what the system is designed to produce? What does getting into a "good" post-secondary program even mean anymore? Does being competent matter?

The decline of these measures don't matter at all. It pays to be stupid in today's world.

The School System has basically become nothing more than a publicly-funded daycare program at scale, focused on enabling the individual pursuits of parents and it's administrators rather than creating positive impacts on the future of it's students or the communities they are embedded in.

But that's what we want. So that's what we get.

Everyone knows I love cynicism but this is another level. Schools have nothing to do with educating kids nowadays? Not been my experience.

Are there problems? Yes. But this is hyperbolic.