statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.
> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.
My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.
But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.
well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.
There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".
The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.
Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.
I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.
falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.
The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.
Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.