As an old guy, and long out of college, I feel the comment about shame is the most useful. It seems as though no one is responsible for anything in this new world. As a teenager, my father gave me some excellent advice that has guided my life: "The world didn't know when you got here, and won't know when you leave, and won't care. It is up to you to take care of yourself." Harsh but true words. I continue to learn new things daily, and my quest for knowledge makes every day enjoyable.
The current system has created a caste of functionally illiterate peasants lacking impulse control and the ability to sustain attention. If I had the resources, I'd create a closed off environment where students worked with their hands, had mandated meditation sessions, and were trained in foundational academic skills. These would serve to reinstitute an understanding of causality, rebuild atrophied concentration abilities, and remediate reading and writing skills, respectively.
Short of that, I'm not really sure what you can do. These last generations have been dealt a terrible hand. Smart phones are the cigarettes of the 50s. We're just now starting to understand how detrimental they are to psyche. I'm guessing that scientists are going to start looking at neurological development in young adults, and the results won't be pretty. Worse yet, I don't think that society has the wherewithal to shift gears quickly enough to reverse course before lobotomizing another ten years of young people. Too little too late.
Instead, inertia will keep things chugging along until reality intervenes. Internal contradictions (like education as cargo cult) will continue mounting until there's widespread collapse of the complex systems that sustain modern life. There are still very smart people diligently keeping the lights on, but I anticipate a slow slide into third world status over the long term. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll just be a situation where there's a tiny, tiny core of educated people holding things together. I'm sure there will always be good engineers, lawyers, and doctors, but the challenge is in the middle. It's not about having a few high IQ folks governing from up high. The key to a functional society is in the armies of reasonably smart, capable people who make up the bulk of the middle class work force and electorate.
Your state school is a great canary in the coal mine. It serves a very important role in educating people of modestly above average intelligence who will be community pillars. Those are the people who could one day run HVAC companies, serve as trained technicians, be middle managers, nurses etc. That's who we're losing. In terms of having a functioning society, these people run the show, and *shudder* they vote). To use a military example, they are the NCOs without whom the military could not function, officer class be damned.
This decline is already happening. Political discourse is laughably stupid. Appliances work for a fraction of the time (see my fridge in the garage from the 90s that's still kickin', whereas I've run through 3 newer models in my kitchen). New cars have endless recalls. These examples might seem risible, but I think they foreshadow a painful reckoning.
As an old guy, and long out of college, I feel the comment about shame is the most useful. It seems as though no one is responsible for anything in this new world. As a teenager, my father gave me some excellent advice that has guided my life: "The world didn't know when you got here, and won't know when you leave, and won't care. It is up to you to take care of yourself." Harsh but true words. I continue to learn new things daily, and my quest for knowledge makes every day enjoyable.
The current system has created a caste of functionally illiterate peasants lacking impulse control and the ability to sustain attention. If I had the resources, I'd create a closed off environment where students worked with their hands, had mandated meditation sessions, and were trained in foundational academic skills. These would serve to reinstitute an understanding of causality, rebuild atrophied concentration abilities, and remediate reading and writing skills, respectively.
Short of that, I'm not really sure what you can do. These last generations have been dealt a terrible hand. Smart phones are the cigarettes of the 50s. We're just now starting to understand how detrimental they are to psyche. I'm guessing that scientists are going to start looking at neurological development in young adults, and the results won't be pretty. Worse yet, I don't think that society has the wherewithal to shift gears quickly enough to reverse course before lobotomizing another ten years of young people. Too little too late.
Instead, inertia will keep things chugging along until reality intervenes. Internal contradictions (like education as cargo cult) will continue mounting until there's widespread collapse of the complex systems that sustain modern life. There are still very smart people diligently keeping the lights on, but I anticipate a slow slide into third world status over the long term. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it'll just be a situation where there's a tiny, tiny core of educated people holding things together. I'm sure there will always be good engineers, lawyers, and doctors, but the challenge is in the middle. It's not about having a few high IQ folks governing from up high. The key to a functional society is in the armies of reasonably smart, capable people who make up the bulk of the middle class work force and electorate.
Your state school is a great canary in the coal mine. It serves a very important role in educating people of modestly above average intelligence who will be community pillars. Those are the people who could one day run HVAC companies, serve as trained technicians, be middle managers, nurses etc. That's who we're losing. In terms of having a functioning society, these people run the show, and *shudder* they vote). To use a military example, they are the NCOs without whom the military could not function, officer class be damned.
This decline is already happening. Political discourse is laughably stupid. Appliances work for a fraction of the time (see my fridge in the garage from the 90s that's still kickin', whereas I've run through 3 newer models in my kitchen). New cars have endless recalls. These examples might seem risible, but I think they foreshadow a painful reckoning.