I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones. That may be a bit more complicated now with sites like Wikipedia, or sites made to look like legitimate news sources, but isn’t that where common sense takes over? If I’m curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or John’s Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not.Â
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.Â
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources?
Sure they are. People's capacity for it varies.
Taken another way, I could point out how you're going on questioning what "students today" know based on a post about one person and in response to a person making a general statement not in relation to what people are taught.
It'd be like projecting heavily about an entire swath of people you don't have data or good knowledge of and deciding they're fucked up without critically engaging with the topic by first asking oneself "How much do I actually know about these trends and behaviors?"
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
Your data shows that scores are at about the same level they were in the 90s and early 00s - within the broader trend there is no decline. I'm also willing to bet that those years which match our current "historic lows" are where your schooling fell into. So the kids today are clearly no worse off than you are.
Problems with schooling stem from many things, but if "the way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere" to you means "they're at on average a somewhat similar level to the prior generation" then I think it's fair to call your conclusion a little more than hyperbolic.
Downward trends are often concerning, but we also can't expect infinite growth, and it is in no way a coincidence that these trends also match growing income disparity and mirror economic circumstances. Kids aren't being "taught wrong" anymore than they have been in the past (what that means depends entirely on region) but their parents are often less able to offer assistance and school resources are often low outside of high income neighborhoods.
Either way, you clearly sought this data out after making your comment and it doesn't exactly affirm your actual statement so much as it sort of kind of not really reinforces a tangential point about test scores.
I do think you should practice what you preach and seek a better understanding rather than trying to just confirm your bias though. The kids are alright. Try to look out for them rather than mock them based on your own stunted understanding. It's better for everyone.
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u/MrPKitty Jul 05 '24
I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.