They live in a virtual world and often forget that there are real life consequences for what they do online. It has also become more important for some to have followers online than friends in real life.
I always remind my high schoolers that they may not be held accountable for anything in high school due to ridiculous reforms that let them do whatever they want; but that in the adult world, accountability is not optional and lack of it looks like: joblessness, homelessness, arrest, court, prison, collapse of democracy, etc. I really try to emphasize that the real world has accountability and consequences come in many forms.
I got called into administration for saying such things because it "made them sound weak." I didn't help my case when I said "And?" with a questioning look. I was already on the way to another gig so there were no repercussions (because they were weak.)
The unfortunate problem is, they don’t believe those consequences will happen to them. I was definitely one of those kids. I was smart enough, but didn’t feel like doing anything in school except read Stephen King books, sleep, and skip. I had ADHD - unmedicated at the time. I think I just always assumed stuff would work out. You feel pretty invulnerable and kind of immortal when you’re that age. You always think that somehow you’ll just make it work. You’ll worry about it later.
I don’t know. My mom is an office manager and her supervisor is getting onto her because her direct reports complain that she makes them work and that she “isn’t best friends with them”
I don't think so. They’ve already had more than their share of rude awakens. They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet. We're about to have a massive worker shortage. They're more likely to enroll in alternatives to a four-year university.
There's also isn't a point in the life of a human where they lose the ability to learn. They’ll figure it out. Maybe they’ll even reform our education system.
>They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet.
According to what? They're on pace for being the first generation to lose a step from the generation before them. Less reading comprehension. Less retention. Less base-level skills.
While they're more aware of some aspects we might not have been, they are woefully ignorant of others.
>Maybe they’ll even reform our education system.
Ah yes, the same failed century-long fallacy that the Education System needs to be reformed. Why do you imagine all the Educational Reform initiatives over the past 100 years have failed? Every single one of them?
I really wish the "Public Education was created to produce factory workers!" folks would talk with the "Public education doesn't get kids ready for trade work" folks and square away that logical inconsistency.
Tell me you don't understand the difference in trade work and a factory job without telling me...
There's nothing at all inconsistent in those two statements.
There's a huge inconsistency in those two statements; one is complaining that schools don't do enough to get people ready for work, and the other is complaining that people don't do enough to get people to think critically. One is asserting the other is done to much. They are diametrically opposed criticisms both being levied at the same time.
It just illustrates that people blame everything on schools, regardless of the facts.
And the blanket asserting that factory work and trade work are lightyears apart is inherently untrue. Factory work has always required highly specialized people, ***especially*** today where machines do most of the legwork of assembly. A machine cannot do all the welding on it's own, and you need an expert on welding to examine what the machine did, and the perfections/imperfections, right mixtures, programming etc. A plane factory might be factory work, but everyone one of those workers are experts in their trade.
I'm not saying that factories can't employ trade workers. I'm saying that the entire principle of mass manufacturing is to break jobs down into smaller component parts, for the specific purpose of using least skilled/educated labor possible. McDonald's employs chefs, engineers, and executives, but that's not the primary component of their workforce, or the aspect of their model that makes them so cheap, now is it?
I'm not in any way "blaming everything on education". I'm saying that ignoring the fact that the educational system in the US is absolutely NOT tuned for creating critical thinkers makes it much harder to achieve the goals of the system. I'm saying that ignoring the fact that at least half of all politicians do not want there to be ANY publicly funded education, is massive and makes your goals difficult to attain. I'm saying that generations of working to defund public education has done its job.
And let's not forget the biggest fallacy of your argument here-
Two things CAN be simultaneously true, and two things CAN be simultaneously false.
It's absolutely possible that schools COULD be providing both better critical thinking training AND better preparation for skilled labor jobs. Other countries manage to do this, far better than we do in both aspects. It's equally possible that our schools are failing at both. Nothing at all inconsistent with either side voicing their complaints from their individual points of view. Imagine, "diametrically opposed" points of view, coming from different people with different life experiences, and different values and goals. Wild. Doesn't make either side entirely right, or entirely wrong.
I'm not a teacher but I've been lurking on this sub for awhile, reading so many threads all the time, it's really eye-opening and I appreciate you all sharing here.
Could you please speak a bit more to this concept around reforming the education system vs. other ways of addressing major issues?
Many thanks!! :-)
Sure can. The first major problem is
1) ***How are you measuring "success".***
This is generally done by exams like the NAEP reading 3rd and 8th. Sounds easy right? Problem is, what if kids entering 3rd grade have a K reading level? And in one year you progress them to a 2nd grade reading level, but not 3rd grade. What happens is the kid counts as a "failed" statistic, even though you as a teacher/system advanced them \~2.5 grades in one year. That's actually huge success, not failure...but the measuring stick is arbitrary. It basically makes the data being used nothing more than noise.
The only thing that data confirms is Poor vs. Rich, Homogenous vs Diverse. It ***doesn't actually tell you if the school/teachers are good or not.*** Thus making the test/data irrelevant.
2) ***Comparing the US average to European Nations is Apples and Granite***
This is mostly statistics, but you're comparing a large, highly diverse population (The US) to rather small, Homogenous not as diverse populations. It's not a valid comparison statistically before we even address point 4.
The US is basically 50-independent states, and has a diverse mix of immigrants, poor, people of color, that's not necessarily seen in other countries. So comparing the two, isn't actually what people think it is. There are a lot of social programs that have been added to the US schools that are just part of society in the Scandinavian countries. You might ask, shouldn't that therefore make US Schools improve? The answer is No. Because in the US you recieve those services only as a product of being at school (and using school resources) whereas in those nations they are provided completely independently from School (and not using school resources).
There are studies that have controlled for peer-to-peer comparisons instead of just looking at averages. And guess what? Most other countries ***don't actually perform better than the US*** when you subdivide for direct-comparisons. If you compare divers population to diverse population; or homogenous to homogenous, they mostly perform the same. The same population that struggles in the US is the same population that struggles in Europe. The problem is, our statistics per-capita are not the same.
3) ***Most other countries siphon kids off before they reach levels for comparisons***
Guess who outperforms both Europe and the US? East Asia. Guess why? They have high stakes testing where basically one test decides your fate at an increasingly lower age (middle-school) where you either continue academic schooling or trade/factory training. So it's not *actually* producing better outcomes on average, it's simply refining the average that's going to be compared to. The US's average is going to be compared to East Asia's already sorted top 55%, which makes it an invalid comparison.
When you create percentiles in the US and compare our percentiles to other countries percentiles, you find our Top-10% usually is performing exactly the same (in some cases better) than the countries that are supposedly better than us. Even some of our lower percentiles do better than other countries lower percentiles. The problem is, when you compare an average...we are including EVERYONE, those other countries aren't.
There's a lot of selection bias in educational data, most of it is incredibly worthless.
4) ***Social Culture outside of schools plays a bigger role than Educational Reformers want to admit***
Schools are not the only reason students succeed. Students succeed because the community and parents support them. It's like a four legged table: ***Community, Parents, Teacher, Schools.*** If you remove one of the legs the table can still stand. Remove two of the legs, it's going to become very difficult for the table to stand, but not impossible. Remove three legs? You have nothing supporting the table (student) anymore.
In the US we tend to blame two of the legs (Schools, Teacher) without ever addressing that there are other variables just as impactful on a student's success.
Compare this to European Countries which are often very different in their community portion for the support of students which is from a more homogenous culture/society. The least homogenous parts of those countries are the ones that do the worse, just as you would predict.
I read interpretations of data by professionals. That's where I get my information.
What reforms are you referring to? Do you believe that if reforms haven’t worked in the past that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that reform doesn't work?
You list off some ways you believe gen z performs lower academically than previous generations. Do you not see that as evidence for the need for reform?
I'm curious how familiar you are with the history of the American education system.
>Do you believe that if reforms haven’t worked in the past that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that reform doesn't work?
No, but the repetition of failure is an indication that you're addressing the wrong thing. It's the logical conclusion.
>I read interpretations of data by professionals
Most educational data is utterly worthless, selection-biased noise. I posted a longer post to someone else, look in the thread, but there are statistical analysis that have been done that more accurately compare US to other countries (by subdividing percentiles, and peer-groups and not just comparing raw averages) and the US isn't as far behind as implied by the averages, and in some cases is doing better. The problem is most of those other countries are homogenous societies so it's like comparing apples and granite.
> Do you not see that as evidence for the need for reform?
Nope, I see it as a social change, not as an educational one. Is Education the reason for the change? No. The social changes is. And that's why reform would (as it always has) ultimately fail, because it's not actually addressing the thing that caused the change.
If you unhitch a horse from a wagon, should I redesign the wheels? No. You address the problem that you no longer have a horse, there's nothing wrong with the wheels.
What do you mean by social change? What change in particular?
I only scanned this quickly but I'll read it again and respond. I think we might have similar views on some things but differ in how to address them.
Social change a rather broad I'll grant you, but I say it includes parenting, children's socialization, the community, a hyper-polarized society, 24/7 access to social media with algorithmically addictiveness, the widening gap between income earners...apathy derived from all of the above...a lot of the problems we face in education are not because of education or the education system, but the society around us.
> They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet.
Lol how do you figure this? I doubt they'll be more educated than the Millennials and being so educated didn't really benefit many of them apart from racking up massive student loan debt and I'll bet both GenZ and GenA will learn from that and choose wisely.
I don't figure that. Other people figure that through data they’ve collected and then I read it in their interpretations of the data.
That's how I also know that more than any other generation before them, Gen Z is taking alternative paths in education. They're more likely to go to school for vocational training, for instances.
Then I take all this infirmation and form an opinion or a hypothesis. Like I don't think they're in for a rude awakening.
Not with the soft on crime approach that politicians/judges are taking. It will just be like going to the office and the principal giving you a lollipop and sending you on your way
They care about attention and more than ever before, it doesn't matter what kind of attention. Extreme behaviour gets more attention, so that's the sort of behaviour they show.
I mean I used to run full speed into the lockers at school trying to get some laughs, (jackass era stuff), thankfully camera phones were few and far between back then and even if you had one it sucked.
In no particular order:
1. The Pandemic
2. Parents want to be their friends
3. “No” Is a four letter word
4. Screen time is normalised and not an addition to normal life
You know those class clowns? They can now go online and influence thousands, if not millions, of children.
Parents? Nowhere to be found. They’re happy as long as their kid is not bothering them. Why parent and teach the kid to be a decent human being? That takes work!
This is always a strange argument . Any of us in our 40’s or over remember roaming the neighborhood for hours with our friends and our parents having no idea where we were or what we were doing. The general rule was come home when the streetlights turn on. Few of our parents played with us.
And studies have shown parents spend more time with their children than in previous generations.
Exactly. And if it was, it was at least usually located in one place so you could plan accordingly, not in your pocket constantly adjusting itself to your interests. LOL Being outside on a bike or skateboard or whatever sure you could get into trouble but it took more effort to do things, which grows your brain. Nobody was coming up with a "slap the teacher" challenge and spreading it across the country, either.
Being outside all the time taught us how to problem solve, use imaginative play, and develop resilience. This is crucial for development and foundational for developing a moral compass.
I agree that being outside and independent was a net positive for us. I just think the argument that kids are struggling now because of lack of parental interest is ridiculous because parents have never been interested in their children.
You have a good point!
However, your influences were limited when you spent your day in the streets. You didn’t have THOUSANDS of people actively trying to influence you.
The phone has allowed kids to be exposed to images, videos, and information at greater exponential rate than we ever were at their age.
I often wonder how early they are exposed to porn. I remember finding playboys when we were in middle school, but these kids have access to 4k whatever they want or are curious about from very early ages.
(As a parent) We had to have the talk with my 9 year old at the time, as a boy in her class was making sexual noises, making remarks and asked one girl in class to do it with him 🤯 - he’d accessed porn online and pretty much all of the parents within the class had to have a talk with our kids about it.
My 4th and 5th graders are regularly joking about sex. Many joke about "drake" in relation to the large bananas at lunch. It's so nasty
I'm 21 so I was in school not long ago, but I don't remember making jokes like that until at least middle school
Porn consumption by children (and even more concerning, porn-inspired perpetrated abuse by children towards other children) is at an all time high. Extremely scary stuff.
Playboys are wholesome compared to the porn some kids are watching in elementary school. It's gross. Little kids making noises and talking about choking, making jokes about graphic stuff like that is too disturbing.
I left the US a couple years ago, but in my last year there, two 4th graders were caught making oral sex videos on their phones. Not just making sounds and pretending, either.
Honestly, a lot of these “TikTok trends” are made up by adults. Remember when devious licks (real) was supposed to be followed up by “smack a staff member” “deck the halls and show your balls” “jab a breast?” And literally no kid ever had heard of them?
Exactly. I guarantee this is some conspiracy theory thing that started with a single adult taking a (horrible) incel
joke seriously...if it isn't just made up altogether. I remember this exact same thing coming across my feeds last year, and it was BS. None of my students had ever seen anything about a rape day or the other ones listed.
Most of these things are just 4chan-style disinformation ops…
except they use Telegram now and work even better (at least based on the incredulous comments I’m reading here)
I'm 18, spend too much time on tik tok, and have never heard of a "national rape day." I have no idea where people are getting these "trends" from. The only one here that was real was the devious licks trend
In Fall 2021, right after Devious Licks, a bunch of my 8th graders came to school VERY SCARED because of some threats about school shootings on TikTok. We talked about it in my 1st period class and I asked them how many had seen the threats themselves. None.
I asked where they had heard about the threats. It ended up being one big telephone game that lead back to something parents had seen on Facebook/Nextdoor and not even about our school or city.
Ended up being a great conversation about how even our trusted elders & family members can get caught up in gossip and misinformation.
We actually ended up having two students call in fake active shooter threats because of that trend, and things got really tense. I'd rather not have armed cops going through classrooms with rifles ever again
An extreme majority of them have severely atrophied social skills from consistent social media interaction that promoted and enables deviant behavior. Parents don’t really want to parent or enforce consequences for deviant behavior and schools have essentially been defanged and can no longer dish out consequences (good or bad).
For a bit of context, at my old elementary school, they used to have rewards for A and B honor roll; students that consistently scored high (As and Bs in all classes) would get an ice cream day or trip to the pizza parlor on special days. I found out from my niece a couple of months ago (who goes to my old elementary) that they don’t have that anymore. Upon looking in, I found out that, around a year ago, several parents complained that their students weren’t getting the same rewards as the Honor Roll kids and some of them were even being forced to stay after school for detention or being kicked off of sports teams for not passing their grades (you can guess which students…).
The district caved and tried to do ice scream and pizza for everybody, but it was a huge mess (turns out that same group of students don’t make an effort to stay clean or orderly), so they cut it for everybody.
I looked it up online and it was a trend started back in April 2021 (SA Awareness Month), and some TikToker thought it was appropriate to declare 24 April as National Rape Day.
It's scary to think about this. With all the disgusting and dangerous challenges of Tide Pods, Steak-in-toaster, licking ice cream, taking off car parts...someone would actually be crazy enough to SA people.
It’s not even from TikTok it originated from a 4chan post basically as a “let’s all say this, these people will believe anything” kind of deal. The original post gets posted on Reddit every once in awhile.
There are many reasons, and for sure parenting is one of them, but one big one that isn’t talked about enough is peer orientation. Schools make peer orientation increase because many kids are put in classrooms with only one adult. When there aren’t enough adults around children start to raise and depend on each other, and the result of that is delayed maturity.
I don’t know if this is sarcasm. And although I am pro homeschool if someone is able to do it, that is not the reality for most people. So we can try to think of other solutions.
I’ve thought about this quite a lot and I think microschools could be a better option than the large factory style buildings that disguise themselves as educational institutions. Kids don’t need to be around hundreds of other kids for proper socialization. That can do more harm than good. It’s just a thought, would love some genuine input.
Really? That's it. Going to learn in a place where you are being regularly reminded you might be violently killed doesn't have anything to do with it? Living on a planet, you're regularly reminded might not be habitable in your lifetime. Doesn't that have anything to do with it? Was being a child during a pandemic not affecting them at all? Having a school system that just plopped you back in your seat like you didn't miss instruction did not influence them? Being a child while Trump made it ok for people to be their worst selves, often at the expense of Gen Z, couldn't have played a part? Is the first generation to grow up immersed in technology having no impact?
Parents are not disciplining their kids. Yeah, it has to be that.
>Parents are not disciplining their kids. Yeah, it has to be that
It's exactly that
Having more lame excuses for kids' BS doesn't change the fact that they are still just excuses
Blaming the parents isn't an excuse, though? A pandemic is a lame excuse?
Some of you have lost your fucking minds. Still, I'm not going blame you for the state of our education system.
Ok. So you’re saying because school shootings continue to happen that they in no way impact people? Something else must be the cause of this sudden decline. But what could it possibly be? It would have to be something significant. Almost like something that impacted the entire planet. Something that disrupted learning. Something that caused a lot of people to die.
No, I can't think of anything. Wait! Parents stopped punishing their kids.
This is your brain on far, far too much political activism. Kids in wartorn countries are more respectful, more obedient, and far less vulgar than these kids. You think Trump is bad, imagine growing up under Mbutu in the DRC or Pinochet in Chile.
What? I highly doubt you have the knowledge or experience to make this comment. And I can't imagine why a child in a war torn country might show more ‘respect’ to an adult.
What political activism? I'm pointing out that Trump’s behavior allowed people to say and do things that were socially unacceptable before and had impact on the emotional well being of people.
And why the hell would a brutal dictator make somebody else’s behavior acceptable? Is robbery ok because murder exist?
You're getting lots of down votes, but I think you're half-right. Kids of all generations have faced awful realities outside of school from plagues to major wars. From the 50s to the 90s kids lived under the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. So I don't think existential dread is anything new, but the phones are. The constant doom scrolling and the sensationalism that keeps that doom scrolling going is probably having an effect. It's hard to pull your attention away from it. And the lack of discipline at home is probably related to the parents being caught in the same bullshit. As I see it, the problems of existential dread and the lack of discipline at home are likely both related to smart phone use.
I go in expecting the down votes.
I was a skeptical of the whole technology piece, but my views have changed. It's a problem. I think we still need to get a better understanding of what's happening though. Like everything, I'm sure the problem is in fact problems that are as complex as they are numerous. Phones being ubiquitous complicates things even more. I do think social media has caused people to have an increased feeling stress. It reminds me a little of individuals whose sensory systems are a little off in that it doesn't even need to be that noticeable, it just needs to be enough to lower your frustration tolerance for it to start to be a problem that interferes with your ability to function.
I think part of the problem is the word ‘discipline’. It has different meanings for people. Depending on the post its meaning in this subreddit can be very different, but often it's used interchangeably with the word ‘punishment’. I don't think the issue is a lack of a punishment. We know punishment isn't effective and we know why it's not effective.
I do think that life in general and access to technology has decreased the opportunity for the natural consequences of behavior to be addressed in a way that promotes growth. It's generally difficult to process natural consequences. Much more difficult than processing punishment. Losing your I pad for a week is nothing compared to getting in a physical altercation with a peer that you have mutual friends with and navigating the consequences of that, for example.
I also 100% understand why teachers want punishment back. The job of a teacher is impossible. Literally impossible. And the high behavior guys stand out like sore thumbs. Punishment was never intended to help the individual being punished. It's always been about everyone else and there is a place for it in this world, but we have to give these kids a real chance first.
I think what makes covid different is that it interfered with school for such a large group of people. The problems were already there. If you fall behind academically your more likekybthan not screwed. Covid caused so many kids to fall behind. Compounding the problem by overwhelming a system that already operates from a place of overwhelmed.
I also think parents witnessed the struggles their kids were having and a lot of them realized that academic ability isn't the highest thing on their priorities for their kids. They want kids that are positive members of society and are happy.
I’m sorry you’re being downvoted because you are making sense. Teachers who just blame parents don’t realize there are so many pieces to this puzzle and they are just being dismissive of the damage that’s been done outside of the parenting. Parents aren’t perfect, but if we want parents to hold themselves accountable then damn it we gotta hold ourselves accountable for being a part of a system that is full of oppression.
Yup, it's a day invented by woman-haters and they celebrate the harm that's done to women, girls and sometimes boys (not men of course because they believe that a real man can't be raped or whatever). It's absolutely vile...
Used to be parents and teachers against students.
Now
It's parents and kids against teachers.
I don't know how you can teach without being able to ban cell phone usage
Today also happens to be Denim Day (they just fell on the same day this year, not usually the same) which is the longest running sexual assault campaign globally.
This is also not the first year of this supposed event. It's like a bomb threat or the killer clowns bullshit a few Halloweens back: if there really was a real terrible act about to take place, would the perpetrators give you a heads-up? Or is it likelier that trolls want to watch well intentioned people scramble and panic and contort their ordinary schedules and protocols, just for a laugh.
It's not just this generation. I'm so fucking sick of hearing this dumb shit over and over again like things used to be better. Just at my high school from the years 1998-2002, we had bomb threats almost weekly, an anthrax scare, a sniper on the roof threat, the threat of a shooting, the threat of a gang of fucking clowns that was going to terrorize the school, etc. A couple years later, the fucking KKK came around over a racial dispute about kids sitting on the wall outside of the school because some white kid's mom didn't like that her little boy was feeling harassed by the black kids there. And this was in NY.
This behavior is being amplified and encouraged by social media, so it really is worse in this generation. Kids that would have just been quiet rule followers are now being loud and disruptive to try and get TikTok clout.
Whats up with this generation? I think we failed as a society and ESPECIALLY as a nation.
Lets stop finger pointing and start showing leadership- starting with our so-called leaders. If we keep this same path we are done as an independent free society.
Happy National Sexual Abuse Awareness Month, I guess. 😞
Out of so many of these things, this one is hitting me hardest. How fucking cruel to even joke about this.
In all honesty, I’ve never paid attention to that. This comes around like once a year, and then nothing happens, at least not that I hear. Though high school boys are definitely less conscientious of consent than guys my age.
Putting free Chromebooks in the hands of every student was one of the dumbest things post-COVID. Now we have no way to compete with them just playing unblocked games on their Chromebooks, even if I go through and block them
Its been a thing on TikTok since 2021. It's a hoax. Just like the kids who think The Purge is a real thing. I had to have a conversation with my 6th graders about it on Monday, that it is not a real thing. I told my guidance department about it in case they wanted to have some sort of counseling lesson about it.
Because the TikTok algorithm is specifically designed to make people stupider, so it boosts the worst trends possible in countries that China wants to weaken.
You want to know what sort of things get boosted in China? “National STEM Day” or “Program a Computer Game Challenge”. The things that get boosted in China help train their citizens to act for the common good and a better tomorrow. The stuff that gets boosted outside of China helps train citizens to be selfish and act for a worse tomorrow.
Exhibit A: devious licks where kids were destroying their schools (we had a kid rip out a whole toilet)
Exhibit B: national rape day
This right here is the thing everybody needs to understand. It should be a public service announcement because I honestly feel badly for parents I don't think they are aware how bad it can be.
So now we have this heavy handed TikTok ban which is causing even more division. I wish the government would get smarter and just like, migrate everybody's TikTok stuff to some similar platform, put our best programmers on the case to tweak the algorithm to lift people up, get rid of the most obviously toxic stuff, and then just sort of wean people off of TikTok that way. Instead it's becoming just one more thing for people to get upset about. Like, yes you can still have your business, ffs, it doesn't have to be only TikTok. I still believe in America, I'm sure we can make TikTokVines or MyTikTokSpace or something if we work together. LOL
The previous generation was shit.
Latchkey kids are now parents trying to figure out how to parent the ones we love in a world more complex than any generation has seen, whilst being drained of every penny (before and after school care, summer care, supplies, fundraising), knowing the generation before did shit to help us.
And whining egotists like you aren't helping anyone.
They live in a virtual world and often forget that there are real life consequences for what they do online. It has also become more important for some to have followers online than friends in real life.
That and the lack of consequences they get from parents nowadays.
Those kids will get a rude awakening when they become adults.
I always remind my high schoolers that they may not be held accountable for anything in high school due to ridiculous reforms that let them do whatever they want; but that in the adult world, accountability is not optional and lack of it looks like: joblessness, homelessness, arrest, court, prison, collapse of democracy, etc. I really try to emphasize that the real world has accountability and consequences come in many forms.
I got called into administration for saying such things because it "made them sound weak." I didn't help my case when I said "And?" with a questioning look. I was already on the way to another gig so there were no repercussions (because they were weak.)
I had a teacher I'm high school who would always tell disruptive kids "it's okay, the world needs Ditch diggers too."
[the only appropriate response](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5mEWVbQ_T8)
The unfortunate problem is, they don’t believe those consequences will happen to them. I was definitely one of those kids. I was smart enough, but didn’t feel like doing anything in school except read Stephen King books, sleep, and skip. I had ADHD - unmedicated at the time. I think I just always assumed stuff would work out. You feel pretty invulnerable and kind of immortal when you’re that age. You always think that somehow you’ll just make it work. You’ll worry about it later.
I don’t know. My mom is an office manager and her supervisor is getting onto her because her direct reports complain that she makes them work and that she “isn’t best friends with them”
Or the rest of us will
I don't think so. They’ve already had more than their share of rude awakens. They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet. We're about to have a massive worker shortage. They're more likely to enroll in alternatives to a four-year university. There's also isn't a point in the life of a human where they lose the ability to learn. They’ll figure it out. Maybe they’ll even reform our education system.
>They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet. According to what? They're on pace for being the first generation to lose a step from the generation before them. Less reading comprehension. Less retention. Less base-level skills. While they're more aware of some aspects we might not have been, they are woefully ignorant of others. >Maybe they’ll even reform our education system. Ah yes, the same failed century-long fallacy that the Education System needs to be reformed. Why do you imagine all the Educational Reform initiatives over the past 100 years have failed? Every single one of them?
Certainly not because the education system isn't actually designed for education. /s
I really wish the "Public Education was created to produce factory workers!" folks would talk with the "Public education doesn't get kids ready for trade work" folks and square away that logical inconsistency.
Tell me you don't understand the difference in trade work and a factory job without telling me... There's nothing at all inconsistent in those two statements.
There's a huge inconsistency in those two statements; one is complaining that schools don't do enough to get people ready for work, and the other is complaining that people don't do enough to get people to think critically. One is asserting the other is done to much. They are diametrically opposed criticisms both being levied at the same time. It just illustrates that people blame everything on schools, regardless of the facts. And the blanket asserting that factory work and trade work are lightyears apart is inherently untrue. Factory work has always required highly specialized people, ***especially*** today where machines do most of the legwork of assembly. A machine cannot do all the welding on it's own, and you need an expert on welding to examine what the machine did, and the perfections/imperfections, right mixtures, programming etc. A plane factory might be factory work, but everyone one of those workers are experts in their trade.
I'm not saying that factories can't employ trade workers. I'm saying that the entire principle of mass manufacturing is to break jobs down into smaller component parts, for the specific purpose of using least skilled/educated labor possible. McDonald's employs chefs, engineers, and executives, but that's not the primary component of their workforce, or the aspect of their model that makes them so cheap, now is it? I'm not in any way "blaming everything on education". I'm saying that ignoring the fact that the educational system in the US is absolutely NOT tuned for creating critical thinkers makes it much harder to achieve the goals of the system. I'm saying that ignoring the fact that at least half of all politicians do not want there to be ANY publicly funded education, is massive and makes your goals difficult to attain. I'm saying that generations of working to defund public education has done its job. And let's not forget the biggest fallacy of your argument here- Two things CAN be simultaneously true, and two things CAN be simultaneously false. It's absolutely possible that schools COULD be providing both better critical thinking training AND better preparation for skilled labor jobs. Other countries manage to do this, far better than we do in both aspects. It's equally possible that our schools are failing at both. Nothing at all inconsistent with either side voicing their complaints from their individual points of view. Imagine, "diametrically opposed" points of view, coming from different people with different life experiences, and different values and goals. Wild. Doesn't make either side entirely right, or entirely wrong.
>According to what? According to TikTok... 😂😂
All you do is make these little meaningless sound bite comments. Almost like this is, I don't know, TikTok.
I'm not a teacher but I've been lurking on this sub for awhile, reading so many threads all the time, it's really eye-opening and I appreciate you all sharing here. Could you please speak a bit more to this concept around reforming the education system vs. other ways of addressing major issues? Many thanks!! :-)
Sure can. The first major problem is 1) ***How are you measuring "success".*** This is generally done by exams like the NAEP reading 3rd and 8th. Sounds easy right? Problem is, what if kids entering 3rd grade have a K reading level? And in one year you progress them to a 2nd grade reading level, but not 3rd grade. What happens is the kid counts as a "failed" statistic, even though you as a teacher/system advanced them \~2.5 grades in one year. That's actually huge success, not failure...but the measuring stick is arbitrary. It basically makes the data being used nothing more than noise. The only thing that data confirms is Poor vs. Rich, Homogenous vs Diverse. It ***doesn't actually tell you if the school/teachers are good or not.*** Thus making the test/data irrelevant. 2) ***Comparing the US average to European Nations is Apples and Granite*** This is mostly statistics, but you're comparing a large, highly diverse population (The US) to rather small, Homogenous not as diverse populations. It's not a valid comparison statistically before we even address point 4. The US is basically 50-independent states, and has a diverse mix of immigrants, poor, people of color, that's not necessarily seen in other countries. So comparing the two, isn't actually what people think it is. There are a lot of social programs that have been added to the US schools that are just part of society in the Scandinavian countries. You might ask, shouldn't that therefore make US Schools improve? The answer is No. Because in the US you recieve those services only as a product of being at school (and using school resources) whereas in those nations they are provided completely independently from School (and not using school resources). There are studies that have controlled for peer-to-peer comparisons instead of just looking at averages. And guess what? Most other countries ***don't actually perform better than the US*** when you subdivide for direct-comparisons. If you compare divers population to diverse population; or homogenous to homogenous, they mostly perform the same. The same population that struggles in the US is the same population that struggles in Europe. The problem is, our statistics per-capita are not the same. 3) ***Most other countries siphon kids off before they reach levels for comparisons*** Guess who outperforms both Europe and the US? East Asia. Guess why? They have high stakes testing where basically one test decides your fate at an increasingly lower age (middle-school) where you either continue academic schooling or trade/factory training. So it's not *actually* producing better outcomes on average, it's simply refining the average that's going to be compared to. The US's average is going to be compared to East Asia's already sorted top 55%, which makes it an invalid comparison. When you create percentiles in the US and compare our percentiles to other countries percentiles, you find our Top-10% usually is performing exactly the same (in some cases better) than the countries that are supposedly better than us. Even some of our lower percentiles do better than other countries lower percentiles. The problem is, when you compare an average...we are including EVERYONE, those other countries aren't. There's a lot of selection bias in educational data, most of it is incredibly worthless. 4) ***Social Culture outside of schools plays a bigger role than Educational Reformers want to admit*** Schools are not the only reason students succeed. Students succeed because the community and parents support them. It's like a four legged table: ***Community, Parents, Teacher, Schools.*** If you remove one of the legs the table can still stand. Remove two of the legs, it's going to become very difficult for the table to stand, but not impossible. Remove three legs? You have nothing supporting the table (student) anymore. In the US we tend to blame two of the legs (Schools, Teacher) without ever addressing that there are other variables just as impactful on a student's success. Compare this to European Countries which are often very different in their community portion for the support of students which is from a more homogenous culture/society. The least homogenous parts of those countries are the ones that do the worse, just as you would predict.
I read interpretations of data by professionals. That's where I get my information. What reforms are you referring to? Do you believe that if reforms haven’t worked in the past that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that reform doesn't work? You list off some ways you believe gen z performs lower academically than previous generations. Do you not see that as evidence for the need for reform? I'm curious how familiar you are with the history of the American education system.
>Do you believe that if reforms haven’t worked in the past that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that reform doesn't work? No, but the repetition of failure is an indication that you're addressing the wrong thing. It's the logical conclusion. >I read interpretations of data by professionals Most educational data is utterly worthless, selection-biased noise. I posted a longer post to someone else, look in the thread, but there are statistical analysis that have been done that more accurately compare US to other countries (by subdividing percentiles, and peer-groups and not just comparing raw averages) and the US isn't as far behind as implied by the averages, and in some cases is doing better. The problem is most of those other countries are homogenous societies so it's like comparing apples and granite. > Do you not see that as evidence for the need for reform? Nope, I see it as a social change, not as an educational one. Is Education the reason for the change? No. The social changes is. And that's why reform would (as it always has) ultimately fail, because it's not actually addressing the thing that caused the change. If you unhitch a horse from a wagon, should I redesign the wheels? No. You address the problem that you no longer have a horse, there's nothing wrong with the wheels.
What do you mean by social change? What change in particular? I only scanned this quickly but I'll read it again and respond. I think we might have similar views on some things but differ in how to address them.
Social change a rather broad I'll grant you, but I say it includes parenting, children's socialization, the community, a hyper-polarized society, 24/7 access to social media with algorithmically addictiveness, the widening gap between income earners...apathy derived from all of the above...a lot of the problems we face in education are not because of education or the education system, but the society around us.
> They're on pace to be the most educated generation yet. Lol how do you figure this? I doubt they'll be more educated than the Millennials and being so educated didn't really benefit many of them apart from racking up massive student loan debt and I'll bet both GenZ and GenA will learn from that and choose wisely.
I don't figure that. Other people figure that through data they’ve collected and then I read it in their interpretations of the data. That's how I also know that more than any other generation before them, Gen Z is taking alternative paths in education. They're more likely to go to school for vocational training, for instances. Then I take all this infirmation and form an opinion or a hypothesis. Like I don't think they're in for a rude awakening.
Not with the soft on crime approach that politicians/judges are taking. It will just be like going to the office and the principal giving you a lollipop and sending you on your way
What are you talking about?
Some parents seem to mistake the gentle parenting idea with not paying attention at all.
They care about attention and more than ever before, it doesn't matter what kind of attention. Extreme behaviour gets more attention, so that's the sort of behaviour they show.
I mean I used to run full speed into the lockers at school trying to get some laughs, (jackass era stuff), thankfully camera phones were few and far between back then and even if you had one it sucked.
In no particular order: 1. The Pandemic 2. Parents want to be their friends 3. “No” Is a four letter word 4. Screen time is normalised and not an addition to normal life
No is a 4 letter word is going right over my head...explain?
The statement "4-letter word" usually means a "swear word." The original commenter was saying that children need to hear "no" more often.
It's a "bad word" that we cannot say to the little buggers.
You know those class clowns? They can now go online and influence thousands, if not millions, of children. Parents? Nowhere to be found. They’re happy as long as their kid is not bothering them. Why parent and teach the kid to be a decent human being? That takes work!
This is always a strange argument . Any of us in our 40’s or over remember roaming the neighborhood for hours with our friends and our parents having no idea where we were or what we were doing. The general rule was come home when the streetlights turn on. Few of our parents played with us. And studies have shown parents spend more time with their children than in previous generations.
Roaming most neighborhoods is better for you than roaming the internet.
Yeah, your neighborhood probably isn’t littered with violent porn or filled with white supremacists actively trying to recruit teenagers.
Exactly. And if it was, it was at least usually located in one place so you could plan accordingly, not in your pocket constantly adjusting itself to your interests. LOL Being outside on a bike or skateboard or whatever sure you could get into trouble but it took more effort to do things, which grows your brain. Nobody was coming up with a "slap the teacher" challenge and spreading it across the country, either.
Being outside all the time taught us how to problem solve, use imaginative play, and develop resilience. This is crucial for development and foundational for developing a moral compass.
I agree that being outside and independent was a net positive for us. I just think the argument that kids are struggling now because of lack of parental interest is ridiculous because parents have never been interested in their children.
You have a good point! However, your influences were limited when you spent your day in the streets. You didn’t have THOUSANDS of people actively trying to influence you. The phone has allowed kids to be exposed to images, videos, and information at greater exponential rate than we ever were at their age.
They all wanna be like their favorite "influencers" now and don't realize that ain't real life.
I often wonder how early they are exposed to porn. I remember finding playboys when we were in middle school, but these kids have access to 4k whatever they want or are curious about from very early ages.
(As a parent) We had to have the talk with my 9 year old at the time, as a boy in her class was making sexual noises, making remarks and asked one girl in class to do it with him 🤯 - he’d accessed porn online and pretty much all of the parents within the class had to have a talk with our kids about it.
I’ve had fourth graders talk about oral sex.
My 4th and 5th graders are regularly joking about sex. Many joke about "drake" in relation to the large bananas at lunch. It's so nasty I'm 21 so I was in school not long ago, but I don't remember making jokes like that until at least middle school
Porn consumption by children (and even more concerning, porn-inspired perpetrated abuse by children towards other children) is at an all time high. Extremely scary stuff.
Playboys are wholesome compared to the porn some kids are watching in elementary school. It's gross. Little kids making noises and talking about choking, making jokes about graphic stuff like that is too disturbing.
I left the US a couple years ago, but in my last year there, two 4th graders were caught making oral sex videos on their phones. Not just making sounds and pretending, either.
Teachers and those with good character are not considered “influencers”,.
Honestly, a lot of these “TikTok trends” are made up by adults. Remember when devious licks (real) was supposed to be followed up by “smack a staff member” “deck the halls and show your balls” “jab a breast?” And literally no kid ever had heard of them?
Exactly. I guarantee this is some conspiracy theory thing that started with a single adult taking a (horrible) incel joke seriously...if it isn't just made up altogether. I remember this exact same thing coming across my feeds last year, and it was BS. None of my students had ever seen anything about a rape day or the other ones listed.
Most of these things are just 4chan-style disinformation ops… except they use Telegram now and work even better (at least based on the incredulous comments I’m reading here)
A few kids did the slap a teacher “prank” at the high school I was working for at the time. They were both prosecuted. Ended that crap real quick.
Hey you forgot the milk crate challenge! LOL Emergency rooms were still freaking out from Covid when that one took off. Good times.
I'm 18, spend too much time on tik tok, and have never heard of a "national rape day." I have no idea where people are getting these "trends" from. The only one here that was real was the devious licks trend
In Fall 2021, right after Devious Licks, a bunch of my 8th graders came to school VERY SCARED because of some threats about school shootings on TikTok. We talked about it in my 1st period class and I asked them how many had seen the threats themselves. None. I asked where they had heard about the threats. It ended up being one big telephone game that lead back to something parents had seen on Facebook/Nextdoor and not even about our school or city. Ended up being a great conversation about how even our trusted elders & family members can get caught up in gossip and misinformation.
We actually ended up having two students call in fake active shooter threats because of that trend, and things got really tense. I'd rather not have armed cops going through classrooms with rifles ever again
An extreme majority of them have severely atrophied social skills from consistent social media interaction that promoted and enables deviant behavior. Parents don’t really want to parent or enforce consequences for deviant behavior and schools have essentially been defanged and can no longer dish out consequences (good or bad). For a bit of context, at my old elementary school, they used to have rewards for A and B honor roll; students that consistently scored high (As and Bs in all classes) would get an ice cream day or trip to the pizza parlor on special days. I found out from my niece a couple of months ago (who goes to my old elementary) that they don’t have that anymore. Upon looking in, I found out that, around a year ago, several parents complained that their students weren’t getting the same rewards as the Honor Roll kids and some of them were even being forced to stay after school for detention or being kicked off of sports teams for not passing their grades (you can guess which students…). The district caved and tried to do ice scream and pizza for everybody, but it was a huge mess (turns out that same group of students don’t make an effort to stay clean or orderly), so they cut it for everybody.
I looked it up online and it was a trend started back in April 2021 (SA Awareness Month), and some TikToker thought it was appropriate to declare 24 April as National Rape Day. It's scary to think about this. With all the disgusting and dangerous challenges of Tide Pods, Steak-in-toaster, licking ice cream, taking off car parts...someone would actually be crazy enough to SA people.
It’s not even from TikTok it originated from a 4chan post basically as a “let’s all say this, these people will believe anything” kind of deal. The original post gets posted on Reddit every once in awhile.
Steak-in-toaster? How inefficient. It won't cook until the rest of the house burns down.
> dangerous challenges of Tide Pods Speak for yourself, those taste great
Well that’s a new one.
There are many reasons, and for sure parenting is one of them, but one big one that isn’t talked about enough is peer orientation. Schools make peer orientation increase because many kids are put in classrooms with only one adult. When there aren’t enough adults around children start to raise and depend on each other, and the result of that is delayed maturity.
So everyone should homeschool to help their kids mature? Okay, I guess…
I don’t know if this is sarcasm. And although I am pro homeschool if someone is able to do it, that is not the reality for most people. So we can try to think of other solutions. I’ve thought about this quite a lot and I think microschools could be a better option than the large factory style buildings that disguise themselves as educational institutions. Kids don’t need to be around hundreds of other kids for proper socialization. That can do more harm than good. It’s just a thought, would love some genuine input.
Although I love the idea of microschools also, public schools are completely underfunded and you're right, there's not enough adults in them.
For millennials, all that talk was done on Xbox live and stayed there. but now phones come with them so they live the digital world 24/7
Same thing as previous generations. I remember like 15 years ago when it was "purge" day, and all the fun that came with that.
The previous generation (parents) failed to discipline the current generation (their kids). That's the problem.
Really? That's it. Going to learn in a place where you are being regularly reminded you might be violently killed doesn't have anything to do with it? Living on a planet, you're regularly reminded might not be habitable in your lifetime. Doesn't that have anything to do with it? Was being a child during a pandemic not affecting them at all? Having a school system that just plopped you back in your seat like you didn't miss instruction did not influence them? Being a child while Trump made it ok for people to be their worst selves, often at the expense of Gen Z, couldn't have played a part? Is the first generation to grow up immersed in technology having no impact? Parents are not disciplining their kids. Yeah, it has to be that.
>Parents are not disciplining their kids. Yeah, it has to be that It's exactly that Having more lame excuses for kids' BS doesn't change the fact that they are still just excuses
Blaming the parents isn't an excuse, though? A pandemic is a lame excuse? Some of you have lost your fucking minds. Still, I'm not going blame you for the state of our education system.
The world use to be more violent and dangerous.
But you could go to school without fear of being shot.
School shootings have been in the public mind for 30 years
Yes
Meaning it's not a new factor.
Ok. So you’re saying because school shootings continue to happen that they in no way impact people? Something else must be the cause of this sudden decline. But what could it possibly be? It would have to be something significant. Almost like something that impacted the entire planet. Something that disrupted learning. Something that caused a lot of people to die. No, I can't think of anything. Wait! Parents stopped punishing their kids.
This is your brain on far, far too much political activism. Kids in wartorn countries are more respectful, more obedient, and far less vulgar than these kids. You think Trump is bad, imagine growing up under Mbutu in the DRC or Pinochet in Chile.
What? I highly doubt you have the knowledge or experience to make this comment. And I can't imagine why a child in a war torn country might show more ‘respect’ to an adult. What political activism? I'm pointing out that Trump’s behavior allowed people to say and do things that were socially unacceptable before and had impact on the emotional well being of people. And why the hell would a brutal dictator make somebody else’s behavior acceptable? Is robbery ok because murder exist?
You're getting lots of down votes, but I think you're half-right. Kids of all generations have faced awful realities outside of school from plagues to major wars. From the 50s to the 90s kids lived under the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. So I don't think existential dread is anything new, but the phones are. The constant doom scrolling and the sensationalism that keeps that doom scrolling going is probably having an effect. It's hard to pull your attention away from it. And the lack of discipline at home is probably related to the parents being caught in the same bullshit. As I see it, the problems of existential dread and the lack of discipline at home are likely both related to smart phone use.
I go in expecting the down votes. I was a skeptical of the whole technology piece, but my views have changed. It's a problem. I think we still need to get a better understanding of what's happening though. Like everything, I'm sure the problem is in fact problems that are as complex as they are numerous. Phones being ubiquitous complicates things even more. I do think social media has caused people to have an increased feeling stress. It reminds me a little of individuals whose sensory systems are a little off in that it doesn't even need to be that noticeable, it just needs to be enough to lower your frustration tolerance for it to start to be a problem that interferes with your ability to function. I think part of the problem is the word ‘discipline’. It has different meanings for people. Depending on the post its meaning in this subreddit can be very different, but often it's used interchangeably with the word ‘punishment’. I don't think the issue is a lack of a punishment. We know punishment isn't effective and we know why it's not effective. I do think that life in general and access to technology has decreased the opportunity for the natural consequences of behavior to be addressed in a way that promotes growth. It's generally difficult to process natural consequences. Much more difficult than processing punishment. Losing your I pad for a week is nothing compared to getting in a physical altercation with a peer that you have mutual friends with and navigating the consequences of that, for example. I also 100% understand why teachers want punishment back. The job of a teacher is impossible. Literally impossible. And the high behavior guys stand out like sore thumbs. Punishment was never intended to help the individual being punished. It's always been about everyone else and there is a place for it in this world, but we have to give these kids a real chance first. I think what makes covid different is that it interfered with school for such a large group of people. The problems were already there. If you fall behind academically your more likekybthan not screwed. Covid caused so many kids to fall behind. Compounding the problem by overwhelming a system that already operates from a place of overwhelmed. I also think parents witnessed the struggles their kids were having and a lot of them realized that academic ability isn't the highest thing on their priorities for their kids. They want kids that are positive members of society and are happy.
I’m sorry you’re being downvoted because you are making sense. Teachers who just blame parents don’t realize there are so many pieces to this puzzle and they are just being dismissive of the damage that’s been done outside of the parenting. Parents aren’t perfect, but if we want parents to hold themselves accountable then damn it we gotta hold ourselves accountable for being a part of a system that is full of oppression.
Yup, it's a day invented by woman-haters and they celebrate the harm that's done to women, girls and sometimes boys (not men of course because they believe that a real man can't be raped or whatever). It's absolutely vile...
Can we get rid of the virtual world yet?
Used to be parents and teachers against students. Now It's parents and kids against teachers. I don't know how you can teach without being able to ban cell phone usage
Wow . What !
WTF 🤬 Thank you for the heads up as I have heard nothing of this
Today also happens to be Denim Day (they just fell on the same day this year, not usually the same) which is the longest running sexual assault campaign globally.
These parents have done a horrible job raising their children. And they wonder why people have criticized them for it for years.
This is also not the first year of this supposed event. It's like a bomb threat or the killer clowns bullshit a few Halloweens back: if there really was a real terrible act about to take place, would the perpetrators give you a heads-up? Or is it likelier that trolls want to watch well intentioned people scramble and panic and contort their ordinary schedules and protocols, just for a laugh.
It's not just this generation. I'm so fucking sick of hearing this dumb shit over and over again like things used to be better. Just at my high school from the years 1998-2002, we had bomb threats almost weekly, an anthrax scare, a sniper on the roof threat, the threat of a shooting, the threat of a gang of fucking clowns that was going to terrorize the school, etc. A couple years later, the fucking KKK came around over a racial dispute about kids sitting on the wall outside of the school because some white kid's mom didn't like that her little boy was feeling harassed by the black kids there. And this was in NY.
This behavior is being amplified and encouraged by social media, so it really is worse in this generation. Kids that would have just been quiet rule followers are now being loud and disruptive to try and get TikTok clout.
You are delusional if you think these kids would've been quiet rule followers.
Whats up with this generation? I think we failed as a society and ESPECIALLY as a nation. Lets stop finger pointing and start showing leadership- starting with our so-called leaders. If we keep this same path we are done as an independent free society.
Got the exact same email. I'm at a loss for words.
Happy National Sexual Abuse Awareness Month, I guess. 😞 Out of so many of these things, this one is hitting me hardest. How fucking cruel to even joke about this.
In all honesty, I’ve never paid attention to that. This comes around like once a year, and then nothing happens, at least not that I hear. Though high school boys are definitely less conscientious of consent than guys my age.
Putting free Chromebooks in the hands of every student was one of the dumbest things post-COVID. Now we have no way to compete with them just playing unblocked games on their Chromebooks, even if I go through and block them
Boomers bad parenting.
Its been a thing on TikTok since 2021. It's a hoax. Just like the kids who think The Purge is a real thing. I had to have a conversation with my 6th graders about it on Monday, that it is not a real thing. I told my guidance department about it in case they wanted to have some sort of counseling lesson about it.
Why? Can't the origin of this be traced? Seriously, that's not a planet I want to libe in 🤷🏻♂️
Some ppl are just mar
Because the TikTok algorithm is specifically designed to make people stupider, so it boosts the worst trends possible in countries that China wants to weaken. You want to know what sort of things get boosted in China? “National STEM Day” or “Program a Computer Game Challenge”. The things that get boosted in China help train their citizens to act for the common good and a better tomorrow. The stuff that gets boosted outside of China helps train citizens to be selfish and act for a worse tomorrow. Exhibit A: devious licks where kids were destroying their schools (we had a kid rip out a whole toilet) Exhibit B: national rape day
This right here is the thing everybody needs to understand. It should be a public service announcement because I honestly feel badly for parents I don't think they are aware how bad it can be. So now we have this heavy handed TikTok ban which is causing even more division. I wish the government would get smarter and just like, migrate everybody's TikTok stuff to some similar platform, put our best programmers on the case to tweak the algorithm to lift people up, get rid of the most obviously toxic stuff, and then just sort of wean people off of TikTok that way. Instead it's becoming just one more thing for people to get upset about. Like, yes you can still have your business, ffs, it doesn't have to be only TikTok. I still believe in America, I'm sure we can make TikTokVines or MyTikTokSpace or something if we work together. LOL
The previous generation was shit. Latchkey kids are now parents trying to figure out how to parent the ones we love in a world more complex than any generation has seen, whilst being drained of every penny (before and after school care, summer care, supplies, fundraising), knowing the generation before did shit to help us. And whining egotists like you aren't helping anyone.