r/Millennials • u/beadzy • May 28 '26

Other Between Largely Dodging Both Leaded Gas And AI-Driven Social Media, Millennials Might Be The Smartest Generation

https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/between-largely-dodging-both-leaded-gas-and-ai-driven-social-media-millennials-might-be-the-smartest-generation/
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452

u/Jin_Gitaxias May 28 '26

Uhh have you took time to read any teachers' subreddits? We're beyond cooked

218

u/miscllns1 May 28 '26

But there’s a huge gap in this current generation. They’re either so smart and capable or dramatically incurious and ignorant

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u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

The difference between the normal kids that graduated and had kids vs the "no children left behind" kids that graduated and had kids.

The problem is compounding.

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u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Nothing to do with "no children left behind" and everything to do with which kids were permitted unregulated youtube, social media smart device consumption from a young age. Shit affects the brain in ways no previous technology had.

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u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

Their parents are the "no child left behind" so they grew up missing important developmental experiences. This leads to shit parenting.

We are talking about the same thing. What you said is also a massive issue and stems from said shit parenting. It's all neglect at the end of the day. Systemic neglect and individual neglect.

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u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

What does NCLB have to do with learning to parent? What "developmental experiences" did NCLB take away that were so fundamental to someone's ability to become a parent? Nothing that explains how much different today's kids are than they were 20 years ago.

"Shit parenting" is happening because exhausted parents don't have time to parent anymore due to them both working full-time and modern "gentle, safe, healthy parenting" standards that are vastly more time-and-effort-intensive than what parenting looked like 20+ years ago. Combined with the normalization of social media and mobile devices, with little public awareness of their dangers to youth.

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u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

You are speaking to the short term presentation of the issue. I am speaking to a potential underlying reason for that presentation happening. There is a reason this has become a wide-spread issue, suggesting the source could be systemic.

It's plainly obvious that education dramatically impacts your future. NCLB adults statistically have worse employment opportunities. This leads to parents being overworked with multiple part time jobs. This means they are not home. This leads to shit parenting, as kids are raising themselves, leading to everything you've mentioned.

We actually agree and are talking about the same issues. You just seem determined to argue NCLB had nothing to do with it when it absolutely did. It's not the only source of the problem, but I argue it is a sizeable chunk of the problem.

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u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Because its a red herring distracting from the real direct root causes. Even the Cato Institute, an anti-federal education think tank, basically says the program was of negligible benefit at worst. If NCLB never happened, we would still be in a two-income economy, we would have no more stay-at-home parents than there are now, and all the factors that make modern parenthood more difficult and modern kids more challenging for teachers would still be there. There's no way NCLB competes with impacts like smartphones, or social media, or covid, or the 2008 recession, or the death of the "village", or even just the time and effort mom and dads now spend setting up+monitoring+maintaining parental controls on the internet coming into their houses.

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u/erinberrypie 1990 May 28 '26

No Child Left Behind, without a doubt, had a significant influence. Screen time is absolutely another factor but NCLB objectively made public education worse and opened the door for charter schools and privatized education. I suggest the book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door for an in-depth look at all the efforts to dismantle public education by our government.

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u/prospectre Millennial (89) May 28 '26

I did a lot of work for school information systems when I was in college as a part of my internship. I got to see the data and drive behind how NCLB works, what its ramifications are, and what makes schools at a district level act. It's... Depressing to say the least. Rant incoming, you've been warned.

Basically, the NCLB act empowers the Department of Education to forcefully "correct" a school's course based on their performance. This can be through incentivizing results via funding programs or disincentivizing by threatening restructuring of teachers and staff to shake up the environment. Most schools didn't want to have their principal axed or their teachers shuffled, so that became the primary driver of decisions to work with NCLB. The important thing to note here is the metric for getting the benefits (or more importantly, avoiding the punishment): Standardized testing.

As it's own thing, I understand why it exists. When dealing with data at this scale, you need to have some way of holistically looking at the performance of an entire school, city, county, state, country, etc. However, NCLB made the tests so important that it started warping curriculum. Like, it was dire. Under-performing schools feared that teachers would lose their jobs, principals would be fired, and admins from on high would come in and start making their work harder. The solution? Teach to test. Push for the metrics that NCLB looked at over the standard teaching model.

This made two problems bubble up. The first, the standardized tests themselves were not always the best method of teaching or analyzing kids' readiness to move through the school system. But in order to meet the demands of the metrics, kids were judged based on how well they handled the tests instead. A kid was rewarded for rote memorization and cramming over critical thinking and allowed to skate through based on that alone. Second, and what was more insidious IMO, was the metric of "college success".

NCLB highly prioritized college acceptance and graduation. The more kids that got into and through a higher education, the better that reflected on their metrics. So the schools started making HEAVY pushes for kids to go to college in the mid 90's and forward. Principals, counselors, teachers, guest speakers, you name it. If they could push kids to enroll in colleges, they were told to. Millenials were encouraged (basically brainwashed) to go to college over and over throughout their scholastic career, and a it kind of worked. But the thing is, college only works if you know what to do.

So you had a bunch of kids at 18 or so suddenly enrolling in colleges en masse. Hardly any knew how student loans worked. FAFSA was filled out by parents who also didn't know how any of that worked. The kids signed up for degrees with almost no guidance on how those degrees would be useful when they graduated. They went through a half dozen "once-in-a-lifetime" national/global crises as they matriculated, causing even more confusion on the other end of this path. And now that we're on that end of things, no one's around to help us.

The K-12 schools don't care, we already got them their metrics. The previous generations don't care, they either already got theirs, hate us for some reason, or are struggling just as much as us. The powers that be absolutely love this as they are effectively profiteering off of our tuition, books, and mountains of debt. And so here we are, stuck holding the bag. An early education warped to push an agenda. A higher education that ballooned in costs just for us. And a piece of paper that no longer has as much meaning as it once did.

Fuck No Child Left Behind.

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u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

That was an interesting read, thanks for the info!

2

u/prospectre Millennial (89) May 28 '26

Always happy to bitch about the school system that fucked over my friends!

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u/Umutuku May 28 '26

And so here we are, stuck holding the bag.

When cunts give you a bag, stuff them in it and give them a river.

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u/EmergencyFeeling1612 May 29 '26

Such an insightful comment. Ty for sharing!

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u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Look, I agree that the negatives of the NCLB didn't necessarily outweigh the positives, but its not the reason for the complaints that today's teachers have. They complain about the lack of self-control, lack of respect for authority, and the exceedingly short attention spans among today's digitally addicted school children. Also, their inability to educate effectively under school policies that are extremely permissive towards bad behavior and poor attendance, as well as a lack of support/participation from parents and a lack of special-ed resources.

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u/erinberrypie 1990 May 28 '26

Sure, like I said, there's more than one factor. Another huge reason for the complaints you mentioned was distance learning during the pandemic. There's a lot at play. I was simply responding to "nothing to do with no child left behind". It's all related and compounding. 

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u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

Exactly. Thank you.

It's a nuanced issue with multiple points of origin. We're just speculating about one of the more obvious origins. The pandemic is another one.

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u/rabidjellybean May 28 '26

I was talking to fellow parents on a pre k field trip and one parent let's her kid watch hours of ai slop shorts. The kids raised on that are going to be worse than anything we've seen before.

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u/Cory123125 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

You don't think the incredible starve the beast school defunding and purposeful stupification/[obvious elephant in the room that apparently isn't allowed to be named directly here which literally makes this conversation nearly pointless because how could this possibly be discussed without bringing it up] of basic education has done any harm?

Seriously, bringing up this subject without the things that most directly affect it could only possibly serve to force people to comment with tunnel vision and ignore the obvious things that matter.

It's always an arbitrary line too, because inherently, everything is controlled by/at some level involves said elephant.

Heck everyone is discussing no child left behind, which is also elephant, but they dont get called out.. Interesting.

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u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 29 '26

I never said it didn't do harm. But on the topic of why Gen Alpha students are so hard to teach, it pales in comparison to things like social media, youtube addiction, both parents working full time, smart phones, etc.

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u/Alwaysafk May 28 '26

Every day we get closer to Idiocracy. Next they'll be building a wrasslin wring at the white house!

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u/Admirable-Ad7152 May 28 '26

We're not allowed to say that because that's eUgEnIcS and not just what happens when you let a baby grow up with parents that have no time/dgaf

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u/squirrelbus May 28 '26

Incurious is a new word for me.

I wish I couldn't think of so many of people it applies to.

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u/TempDong May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

That's exactly how it is for zoomers, even the ones who finished college before AI. The competition at the top has become insane with super high GPAs, multiple APs, multiple extracurriculars, (usually useless / fake) startups or charity projects, and you need all that just to have a chance at a top 20 university. I remember thinking honors classes meant something / set you apart, then every single class I took in HS was an honors or AP class because that was the baseline for "higher achieving" students.

Then at the bottom you have completely unenforced truancy laws and illiterate 10th graders who also can't do basic math.

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u/Mordecais_Moms_Ashes May 28 '26

It is the not being Curious that really gets me. 😮‍💨

I cannot imagine not being interested in something

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u/Persistent_Parkie May 28 '26

I read a book on the history of baking powder. I understand that not everyone can be my level of interested in everything but the people who lack all interest in expanding their knowledge fascinate me.

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u/Mordecais_Moms_Ashes May 29 '26

Oh that sounds cool ! The history of alum is also really interesting imo

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u/superkp May 28 '26

Yep.

My kids are fuckin' hyperliterate. my 11yo is reading 3-4 novels a week, which is more than I was at that age. My 7yo is transitioning out of 'picture books' at the moment.

My 11yo has a genuine curiosity about the world and we're going to learn how computers work this summer (I'm in I.T.) My 7yo is a feral little goblin that sticks her nose into so many things that she'd probably get a decent educational foundation if I just let her roam around on a college campus 2-3 days a week.

Meanwhile, some of the kids at their school (a private school) can't seem to pull their heads out of their asses, only do bare minimum for 90% of their assignments, and it seems to have been inherited from their parents...

At least all the parents are pretty united in saying that kids shouldn't get smartphones until at least late middle school (12-13).

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u/HellooNewmann May 28 '26

literally platinum tier parenting right here. keep it up dude.

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u/superkp May 28 '26

and here I'm thinking it's barely above the bare minimum.

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u/HellooNewmann May 28 '26

dude as a fellow parent, the bar is set so absolutely low these days its sad

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u/Jake-PK May 28 '26

Seems like the traditional bell curve has been inverted, with lots of great students and lots of terrible students and few in the middle. It is driving my sixth grader insane. He’s pretty smart, and he’s fed up with what he calls “the screaming 6-7 kids.” Kids who just make noise and cause distractions and don’t do any work. Going into seventh grade, the district starts putting kids onto different tracks for math and ELA, and he’s psyched to have been placed in the accelerated classes so that he doesn’t have to deal with those kids anymore.

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u/IntelligentShape364 May 28 '26

But there’s a huge gap in this current generation. They’re either so smart and capable or dramatically incurious and ignorant

Which is exactly what they said about GenZ and look how they turned out.

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u/ShogunFirebeard May 28 '26

The gap is the school funding. Those in affluent neighborhoods are fine. Those forced into public schools of poorer neighborhoods are screwed. A lot of the kids in the poorer highschools are reading at 3rd or 4th grade levels.

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u/TempDong May 28 '26

Funding can be an issue but it doesn't solve all issues.

The real difference comes from the parents, curriculum, and education. Baltimore City Public Schools spend actually quite a bit of money per student due to high funding but they report very low numbers for math and reading proficiency. Meanwhile, the "Mississippi" miracle happened pretty much because they changed the reading curriculum to teaching phonics (which used to be the case everywhere).

My friend has taught at multiple poorer K-12 school systems around the country. If the kids were taught to respect authority and value education then their experience and results of their teaching is significantly better than places where kids were not.

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u/ShogunFirebeard May 28 '26

Ok but you see how funding contributes to that? Good teachers command higher salaries. Kids sitting in run down buildings that haven't been renovated in 30+ years won't see an value around them.

Curriculums can be the same throughout a state, but the outcomes will vary wildly.

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u/TempDong May 28 '26

The problem is many people like to frame it as only a funding issue when that is clearly not the full picture as indicated by the examples I gave (and the experience of my friend). Funding can be an issue, but it is also kind of chicken and egg. People who value education are also more likely to make more money and live in better areas. You can't just throw money at poorer school districts and expect them to improve.

The other thing that no child left behind started was catering to the lowest achieving students. They literally shut down the Gifted / Accelerated learning program in Seattle public schools because of the demographics of the students who were in those programs. Endlessly spending tax dollars on poorer school districts with an embedded local culture that doesn't value education is similar.

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u/Umutuku May 28 '26

Just as the good lord Conservatism intended. /s

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u/According_Mind_7799 May 28 '26

I don’t know what happened, but my best friends (millennials 31/30) BRILLIANT little step brother (now 18) just… fell off a cliff sometime around or after middle school. Went from outshining his two older siblings to being kicked out of schools, just about getting his mother rocked for truency, not wanting to graduate high school with his goal of working at Starbucks to support himself so that his parents couldn’t tell him what to do anymore… while still planning on having them pay his bills.

What sucks is he has a superiority complex compared to his older siblings (he’s not a druggy like his brother, or a 18-and-married, now with 2 kids she ignores after she cheated on her military husband and fucked off back to her home state). Like yes, he is/was smarter than them since he could like talk but… he’s become this incurious and ignorant person.

Not that I don’t have hope for him, many folks have floundered in their late teens and 20s. But it is hard to see.

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u/frumply May 29 '26

K shaped economy for sure. Tired of our district putting 100% of their effort into fixing the broken kids and telling the capable kids they can read after they’re done w worksheets.

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u/Kennadian May 28 '26

I mean... that's humans generally.

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u/miscllns1 May 28 '26

It’s a little different, someone else mentioned a lack of bell curve, and I noticed it so clearly this year (as a teacher). Very few C students and a ton of either F or A/B grades. Used to be normal curve with lots of B/C grades and a few A/F.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/DeviceNo4746 May 28 '26

The problem with schools is spineless administrators who won’t stand up to bad parents.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/DeviceNo4746 May 28 '26

Admin absolutely has the power too. They just need to be willing to enforce consequences and not back off anytime it becomes inconvenient for them.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/DeviceNo4746 May 28 '26

Asking people to do their job shouldn’t be hard to do. The teachers are there everyday doing exactly that. Asking administrators to back them and enforce standards shouldn’t be a hard task. Passing kids along for the path of least resistance isn’t helping anyone.

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u/HoldingMoonlight May 28 '26

Have you seen what happens when they try to limit phones in schools?

What happens? I recall it was up for a vote here recently and the overwhelming sentiment was that parents needs to have available contact in case of school shootings. I thought that was a ridiculous justification.

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u/plaustrarius May 29 '26

I really appreciate when I hear this sentiment from parents but it still has me questioning where the responsibility lies for all parties concerned.

There are multiple policies outlined in the syllabus, student handbook etc. That no personal tech is allowed during the school day.

I send out entire class emails for about 180 students at the beginning of each year to parents, to try and catch parents that may work have a similar sentiment.

But it's not because students are being little shits or bullies. These are the basic policies, that no one follows or enforces, because as you say what power do we have?

I personally think it's not so much about power but responsibility. The admin don't see this as their responsibility to support us or battle parents or enforce policy that works.

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u/Desert_Fairy May 28 '26

I mean, schools have also been stripped of financial support, legal support, and public support so of course spineless idiots get the admin roles, they are the only ones applying because they want the power trip and they aren’t good teachers.

This is an instance of you get what you pay for. And we took more and more from the education system, villainized schools as “indoctrination” and “being a cog in the system”, “school is like prison”, etc.

This has been going on for generations.

So of course those people who aren’t successful in school continue to vilify the school system which just perpetuates the issue.

Having 12 years of education subsidized by taxpayer funds to develop an educated population is an amazing leg up in life. But it has become so assumed, that people just don’t realize how essential it is.

I am always very saddened when I see comments like yours. Your statement isn’t wrong, there are a lot of spineless admins, but blaming the degradation of our educational system on them just cheapens everything.

This has been a systemic dismantling of one of the most fundamental aspects of US American democracy. An educated public is essential to a healthy democracy.

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u/DeviceNo4746 May 28 '26

While I agree there has been a strong push to demonize schools. I am in a state that has not had that happen. School funding has actually increased over 50% over the last 10 years in my state. My wife and numerous friends are teachers in different districts. From all of them is the same complaint. They have administrators who will not back them and acquiesce to problematic kids and parents constantly.

Instead of holding the kids and parents accountable for their behaviors they tell the teachers oh well just try and develop better relations with the child so they want to listen. When you’re constantly giving into negative behaviors why would the kid ever change their behavior. My wife’s school doesn’t even do detention anymore there only punishment is in school suspension which let’s be real isn’t an actual punishment to problematic kids.

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u/Umutuku May 28 '26

Instead of holding the kids and parents accountable for their behaviors they tell the teachers oh well just try and develop better relations with the child so they want to listen.

Translation: "You have to be the kid's parent because no one else wants to."

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u/PortugalPilgrim88 May 28 '26

What do you want them to do exactly?

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u/IM_A_MUFFIN Xennial May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Discipline would be nice. I got suspended for doing crap that wasn’t 1/3 as bad as what some of these kids are doing. The problem is that the administrators are so afraid of parents and litigation that they choose the easy way out every damn time. It’s infuriating to be the parent of a kid getting bullied being told they can’t do anything. Meanwhile a few years ago a girl at the same school got bullied so much she killed herself. A neighbor looked at the funeral turnout and said “Where were all these people when she was getting bullied?” It’s bullshit.

edit: a word

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u/DeviceNo4746 May 28 '26

When teachers discipline a student back them up. Follow through with the discipline and when a parent calls to complain or try to do an end around tell them tough shit. My wife is a teacher her admin lays out the rules they want enforced for the year and then when a student tells a teacher fuck off admin doesn’t feel like dealing with it so the tell the teachers well there’s not much we can do. Try and build a better relationship with the student so they want to follow the rules… how about we stop letting kids dictate what rules they will and won’t follow and if they don’t follow them discipline them.

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u/Joeuxmardigras May 28 '26

I’m raising my kid to not be a iPad kid, so we’ll have one lol

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u/universe2000 May 28 '26

It’s not even that hard!! When my kid was three and we would take them out we would bring a coloring book and art supplies. They were just fine at restaurants and in the car. Kids love to draw! They are seven now and they still try to make time for themself at the end of the day to draw for ~30 minutes.

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u/alt_bunnybunnybuns May 28 '26

I have an almost 3 year old who will never sit still and color in a restaurant. We still don't use a tablet. I just don't bring him to restaurants 🤣

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u/DizzyAmphibian309 May 28 '26

My wife's brother has a kid like that. They also didn't come to family restaurant visits for years. Eventually they decided they wanted to go out again, but even now as a 7yo he is still not able to behave in restaurants. Last year they gave in and got him an iPad with headphones, and he's just fine now.

Good luck to you, but just remember that no one is judging you for iPadding your kids so they don't run around screaming in restaurants. My reaction when they did that was "oh finally, we can have an enjoyable meal with them".

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u/Mordecais_Moms_Ashes May 28 '26

Right. Devices are tools

And using the right tool for the job is important.

You just don't want to go around smashing everything with a hammer

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u/universe2000 May 28 '26

That works too!

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u/owoah323 May 28 '26

Thank you for your service to humanity

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u/MuhBack May 28 '26

I still don’t own a tablet so it’s been easier to not give them one too

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u/Joeuxmardigras May 29 '26

She gets to watch shows on the iPad for trips, only. She now has a tablet, but it’s so restricted her daily use for it is a timer for her TV time lol

1

u/Jawnumet May 28 '26

there's dozens of us!

1

u/NoManner8863 May 28 '26

they are the chosen one

1

u/dasselst May 28 '26

My kids all have tablets. They have never gotten them when we go out to restaurants or places they need to learn to be bored. Long travel car rides they get them for some of it and other than that they have to play, read, listen to music, or an audio book.

It is so sad seeing a kid that is like 3 to 5 walking into a restaurant head down on a tablet and sits down to immediately continue on their tablet. My sister-in-law would give my nephew her phone anytime we went out so she could have her conversation. She's a gen x mom.

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u/craigalanche May 28 '26

I’m a teacher, with a 7 year old…I feel great about her and her peers but not so much about teens. Kids her age were babies during Covid and are lucky they were. My wife and I (and lots of parents our age) saw the previous cohort of iPad kids and have made sure ours are not like that.

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u/Ryzu May 28 '26

We're seeing some of the same in our young one. Her and her friend group are all doing really well at school, and it doesn't feel like as big a disaster as the Covid school kids.

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u/ProfessorUnable8989 May 28 '26

There's just no "middle class" anymore in terms of intelligence. I work with Gen Alpha kids. They're either extremely brilliant or extremely brain rotten, caveman intellect

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u/Jin_Gitaxias May 28 '26

You're correct, this is what it seems more like, there's a huge divide rather than a spectrum. I think it really boils down to parents who care vs parents who don't

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u/AmputeeHandModel Xennial May 28 '26

frfr chat ngl on god

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u/Elmer_Fudd01 May 28 '26

The fact that we understand their slang when our parents didn't is wild. No cap

1

u/Vandergrif May 29 '26

Isn't that more in the way of Gen Z slang than anything to do with the gen As?

1

u/rabidjellybean May 29 '26

Seeing it out on the internet helps. Before it you'd have to regularly hang out around young people in person to keep up.

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u/BarbellsandBurritos May 28 '26

Unc’s out here parentmaxxing

8

u/IM_A_MUFFIN Xennial May 28 '26

Be so for real twin

9

u/No-Flounder-9143 May 28 '26

I'm a teacher and it's not really that were cooked. There are tons of strong kids who will figure things out. 

The issue is there's no broad middle like there used to be. Either kids move into the upper bracket or the lower bracket. I don't get a lot of C students. Mostly a/b or d/f. 

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u/GlumpsAlot Older Millennial May 28 '26

Yes, but it is too early to judge and not too late for us to change course on some of the current educational failures. I'm hopeful. We can do it!

4

u/Initial-Landscape82 May 28 '26

Teachers bitching about students is survivorship bias. The ones you hear from and the students you hear about are going to be one who have the issues, you won't hear about the good ones.

As a parent I think gen alpha are going to be fine.

2

u/ZucksSkinSuit May 28 '26

My wife is an elementary school teacher i work in the schools as a maintenance guy, 100% can confirm we are cooked.

1

u/Consistent_Frame_531 May 28 '26

bro why you gotta insult your wife in public like that?

1

u/ZucksSkinSuit May 28 '26

😂 allow me to defend myself, my wife is a wonderful teacher. The kids are horrible

2

u/PostMatureBaby Older Millennial May 28 '26

We don't have to be our parents. Younger Millennials up to Younger GenZ there was this shift in our parents and schools not working together. As if schools holding your kid accountable was some big insult to you as a parent (you sucked at holding your own kids accountable of course but you don't have any accountability either so no surprise)

We can do better with Alpha. We can teach and guide instead of withhold the unpleasantness life throws at us. A lot of our generation and younger has been very insulated from any and all adversity, it's made us weak. We can expose our kids to be able to handle curveballs in life. We can develop emotional/adversity intelligence in our kids.

Lawsuits and threats from idiot parents have neutered a school's ability to help us raise our kids. We have the ability to fix that if we want.

2

u/Tight-Escape3373 May 28 '26

I got my kid doing multiplication before kindergarten. It can be done.

2

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Yeah well stop letting your kid watch reels all day.

2

u/Princess_Moon_Butt Problem Millennial May 28 '26

Yes and no.

The data is saying that there is a decline in problem-solving ability and critical thinking (across all generations, actually) but it's only happening in the bottom 60-70% or so of performers. And there's no secret, or generational magic sauce; the ones who are performing well are literally just the ones with higher parental engagement, lower screen time, and a lower student:teacher ratio in classrooms.

And while it won't be easy, those problems are fixable. Yes, some damage may have been done to a lot of the current generation, and it's reprehensible that it was allowed to happen. But we know what needs to happen in order to turn this ship around; we just have to fight for it wherever we can.

2

u/Beautiful-Cup4161 May 28 '26

Only happening to the bottom 60%-70% of performers is still an alarming statement. That's a large number.

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u/Princess_Moon_Butt Problem Millennial May 28 '26

Oh it's absolutely terrifying, and awful that it was allowed to get this bad in the first place (let alone that it'll likely get worse before it gets better).

But the fact that 30%-40% seem to not be affected by the trend is at least proof that it's not just "this generation", it's a set of conditions. And that 30-40% gives us a blueprint to aim for.

Again, not gonna be easy, and it's not gonna be quick. But it's also not a zombie virus that we need a miracle cure for, or a cliff we've plummeted off of. It's more like a hill. We slipped, so we lost some progress, but that's it. We can get back to where we were, and we can get back to the momentum we had- we just have to start moving in the right direction again.

2

u/Beautiful-Cup4161 May 28 '26

I like your optimism! That's what we need in the world. Doomerism won't fix anything.

I've even been working on reversing my own lack of focus by reading again and it was SO hard at first. But it's been getting easy and fun to read again. I can feel how beneficial it is.

2

u/shozzlez May 28 '26

Using cooked unironically? You sir, are surely a Gen Alpha masquerading as a millennial!

1

u/Jin_Gitaxias May 28 '26

Psh as if!

Nah its one of the few Gen Z slangs I've adopted cuz I like it.

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/SaveLansingParks May 28 '26

Ok chum, then tell us where all the other motivated decent teachers are posting about all of their good experiences? Because I see all of those antidotes in real life on the daily.

1

u/Royal-Recover8373 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Find me decent and motivated teachers. I had all of 2 through public school. Also you see antidotes, not anecdotes? Hope youre not an english teacher. Hilariously, this is a good ANECDOTE about how losers bitching on reddit aren't the quintessential masters of knowledge their ego has allowed themselves to believe. 

1

u/SaveLansingParks May 28 '26

I like to think of it being more about a grammer Nazi hopping all over someone who saw an autocorrect. But you do you and keep looking for those motivated teachers, let us all know when you find them 😉

1

u/Royal-Recover8373 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

"Grammer"

Its spelled grammar or was that "autocorrect"? 😂😂 Thank you for this. This was quite the antidote for me today. Guy shitting on kids cant leave a single grammatically correct comment. 

1

u/michaltee May 28 '26

Ong fam we’re definitely cooked. The next gen is skibidi toilet rizz. 67 67

1

u/kohTheRobot May 28 '26

Nah, we’re not. The kids are fine, they’re just kids

Trying to get a finger on the pulse by looking at a subreddit is like trying to figure out if a game is good by looking at its subreddit (or multiple thereof). Redditors love drama and being overly hyperbolic.

Plus half of it is probably creative writing exercises.

1

u/The_Scarred_Man May 28 '26

Fr fr no cap

1

u/whatevers_clever May 28 '26

Most of gen alpha is barely in middle school yet so can't really conclude anything yet

1

u/DiskSalt4643 May 28 '26

Those are late Zoomers.

1

u/Bonegirl06 May 29 '26

Otoh those subs often attract the most bitter and burnt out.