this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Every generation complains how much worse the next generation is.
It's all a lie to make old people feel better about themselves declining with age.
We need to join the generations into one super generation. Why do we let people pit ourselves against each other? Father vs son, mother vs daughter, grandma vs nephew and so on...
Time to combine the bitterness and resentment of the older generations with the can do attitude of today's youth and inflate the numbers with gen x who will just act as fillers.
This isn’t just people whining cause they’re old, Gen Z really is less technically adept than Gen X and Millennials. I don’t know if anybody is sure exactly why, but articles I’ve read tend to attribute it to the tech we use being so easy to use that they don’t need to learn how to do things that would seem trivial to their elders.
Take archiving, like in the example above. These days, you don’t usually need to archive things. Everything is in the cloud, and sharing files is as easy as airdropping them, or sending access to a contact. Most people would look at how easy it is to do that, and not bother learning the manual way, because why would they? They have no idea how to use something like 7-zip or FTP, because all of their digital lives are carried with them everywhere they go, and are synced across all their devices. There’s no technical knowledge required.
The lack of curiosity is what kills me though. The amount of effort it took to figure things out that I didn’t know was far and away more effort than it would take to search with google how to open the associated archive. This has been something I’ve read up on also and I wonder if the intuitive spoon feeding of technology also impedes one’s willingness to tackle the easiest obstacles even if the solution is a literal search away. It feels like offloading their ignorance which rubs me wrong.
It's not the next generation that sucks. We suck for having made them this way.
I've noticed it a lot in my younger extended family: When something goes wrong, they wait for someone to tell them what to do next, rather than doing a rudimentary amount of googling to get the answer. I can imagine a few explanations (with the caveat that we are not talking about the top 1% of the class here):
1.) Learned helplessness. They feel they aren't expert enough in anything to be able to rely on their own industry or facilities to figure something out.
2.) Learned helplessness by coddling from authorities. Education has gone so far in the direction of teaching-to-the-test, that they are certain that anything they are confronted with should have been fully explained and taught to them ahead of time. When a .zip file appears in a workplace setting, and no one has officially told them in the workplace setting how to handle a .zip file, they "go find an adult."
3.) Purely applied-education, foregoing theory entirely. I am suspicious that, for example, teaching algebra through real-world application actually limits the students to using algebraic principles only when those specific real-world applications arise. I would love to run an experiment wherein you never told the students why they needed to know how to figure out 2x+3=5, and see if they are better able to apply such principles outside of school since they themselves would be the ones coming up with the situations to test out whether what they learned could help. Sort of like going back to phonics, instead of whole-language. I learned how to count to 10 in Spanish from Sesame Street songs that just (to my spacey young mind) popped up out of nowhere, with no accompanying explanation about when/where I was supposed to use this knowledge.
Essentially, I guess, my contention is that American K-12 (and, I think, college) schools are turning into concentrated animal feeding operations, where kids are not allowed to turn around in their cages, and are spoon/force-fed the specific nutrients that testing quotas demand on the other end. They learn and live in an environment of hyper-surveillance, which they are repeatedly told keeps them safe. They are not confronted with novel situations where they have to teach themselves how to apply what they have learned, because they are increasingly kept in a completely controlled environment.
I'm not saying that everyone needs to emerge at age 17 a scholar enjoying a completely un-alienated life of the mind, but I do think that we are actively NOT teaching kids how to think on their own, by the very nature of trying to teach things in the most relevant way, and in the safest-possible environment. Our good intentions are inhibiting the educational development of those who come after us.
So, to reiterate my original thesis, it's not that the next generation sucks. We suck for making them this way.
This is always important to remember. That new generation was in biggest part formed by us.
They don't suck because they're dumb or whatnot. They were taught to go a very streamlined way, and that way they go. This concern has actually been raised long ago, by Bradbury of all men, if I recall correctly. Zoomers are not the first, millenials already lack a lot, and it only gets worse with the new generation. We need to figure out a way to manage the next generation in a way that would break the vicious circle.