U.S. Workers Show Little Improvement in 21st Century Skills

I understand where you're coming from and I'm going to leave an unpopular opinion as a comment, but I think the society we're growing into one that wants to absolve anyone of personal responsibility. I understand that growing up in poor neighborhoods and shitty family situations makes it immensely more difficult to set yourself up for success, but I just think at some point you're responsible for your own person, not anyone else and not society.

I grew up in methland, appalachia and had countless crackhead friends and family. I didn't have any money and had to work starting at age 15. I think I'd be in my right to complain and want education to be fixed and my city to be improved so it'd be easy for me to be more successful.

I took an alternative and left home, educated myself, and turned myself into a halfway decent contributor to society. I really think the US still has a lot of ability to reward those who go after it even if that means becoming a carpenter and saving for 30 years to retire early.

I understand our society is not ideal, but I just think those problems are going to take generations to fix. Why not take care of yourself and do your best to fix your own shit.

As a disclaimer, I'm not writing this towards disabled people or others that need society's help. I'm 100% ok with helping in those situations. I'm talking about the average american who has their health and some direction over their destiny.

I just don't get why people sit on their asses and complain instead of getting out and making shit happen or at least trying to. I don't get the barely getting by mentality.

Pointing this out is off topic, but I'd like the community to get aware that this is what typically happens. Otherwise it feels bad to read the comments, and the mind starts to overgeneralize about it, e.g. "I can't believe that HN thinks X." HN doesn't "think" X; it is just the universal tendency to make objections and it's the same in both cases.

One could even call it the contrarian dialectic, but I suppose that's pretentious.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

We really need a system where people actually get opportunity to change careers and retrain instead of just being thrown away by companies as it’s happening now. I have seen a log n of perfectly capable but maybe older than 40 people being laid off without much advance warning and no opportunity to even try to adapt.

Companies throw people away and the whole country throws away whole regions when trends change.

I would suggest that the reason kids in rich neighborhoods turn out ok is not because their schools have more money but because their parents have set them up for success. I can say this confidently because my dad is in the military, and I've attended several years at a poor high school in Alabama where cheating and truancy was rampant.

See, here's the thing. People often greatly underestimate the role good parents have in producing good, contributing members of society. We like to pretend that everyone is born equal and that the reason some kids fail and other don't is because the public infrastructure they had access to was good or bad.

But I would wager that's only 10% of the issue. The other 90% of the issue is that all parents are on a spectrum. And it turns out that poor parents are at the end of the spectrum that sets up their kids for failure.

I totally get that it's not intentional; Nevertheless, they set bad examples to their kids (smoking, drinking, lotto), often times one parent (usually the male) is missing, they might not enforce school attendance/homework/chores, etc. Kids follow the example of their parents. If the parent is a single mom, pregnant at 14, smokes and drinks excessively, etc. chances are the kids are going to be the same way.

I am not convinced throwing money at schools is the solution. I think there needs to be some kind of mentorship between the poor and middle classes that essentially causes there to be better parents with each generation. Like temporary foster homes where poor kids can learn and observe how middle and upper class people do things.

Basically, I believe the ultimate solution to poverty is love - personal relationships with the poor. Actually making friends with poor people as a middle or upper class individual and helping lift them up a little. Money is part of the problem, yes, but my argument is that the importance of money is greatly overestimated in the poverty problem.

(OP has fixed typo, so below snark can be ignored:

And English is a really weird language, on top of that.

For example, "excepted" means almost the opposite of "accepted," but in most instances will be pronounced roughly the same way.)

Coupled with new belief in the effects of epigenetics, bad food and sleep becomes something that can pass down generationly, both in habit and in gene expression.

Finally, once you reach a certain age, structured education disappears, and most peoples continuous self improvement comes from newspapers and television news. As journalism has forgotten its duty and role in education and become almost exclusively about capturing attention and feeding lust for entertainment, the nightly news acts under a veil of appearing educational.

The "personal responsibility" line get touted around these conversations quite a bit. It's not so dissimilar from the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" line. Quite often by racists/racialists or wealthy classists.

Yes, people should be personally responsible and held responsible for their actions. And also yes, systemic problems are also problems that cannot be ignored or absolved by saying people should take personal responsibility for their actions.

Take crime, when the poor and disadvantaged find themselves in the US court system, oftentimes their crimes are punished more harshly than those from more well-to-do situations. That's not the fault of the poorer person, that's systemic.

You can say neither the rich nor poor person should have committed the crime (personal responsibility is a "good" thing) , but the fact that the rich person might get off or have a lighter sentence such as probation, isn't the fault of the poorer individual - that's where the systemic failures start to rear their ugly head.

Please note: I don't discount personal responsibility (quite the opposite) here at all - however I'm sure my comment will be met with criticism by those that beat the drum for "personal responsibility" as being the primary mitigating factor in all things around these types of topics.

https://twitter.com/3liza/status/1190843201315147776

It's been my experience as well. I used to read pop-sci books voraciously from ~1st grade onward, and as a result everything in science classes from middle school until the middle of college were basically review for me. (As a result, I was bored and did poorly in most science/math type courses)

Another example is a kid in my high school who was running a reptile business during his sophomore year. They had him doing algebra and writing papers about US history. Why? The kid already knew more than the biology teacher about reptiles. And he made more money than any of us did at 16. Why is he spending 8 hours a day training to take the SAT?

18 year olds can know quite a lot, they're just not allowed to spend time learning things. Instead they have to learn a bunch of useless crap in school, from elementary school onward. All the way up to upper div in college. This is only getting worse, since school (especially "college prep") is sucking all free time out of the lives of children.

My oldest daughter discovered that if she turns in an assignment with something vaguely related to the questions written on it, she is pretty much guaranteed a B, and will often get an A. The only thing she has learned from school is that nobody cares about the quality of her work. She did manage to get a C for one term in one class in middle school by not turning in a single assignment. When we met with the teacher after that, we surprised her by asking how she could justify giving our daughter such a high grade (she was expecting us to complain about how low it was).

My second oldest has been consistently a year behind since 1st grade, and now that she is in 6th grade, things are starting to fall apart (so much of what you learn is cumulative by this point). We've been asking for her to be retained since 3rd grade and been denied 3 times in a row. Everyone is worried about her "self esteem" but it's not like she doesn't know that she's at the bottom of her class, and that's not doing any wonders for her self esteem either.

Our youngest two haven't been fucked up by the system yet, but I feel at this point like it's more of a "when" rather than an "if" question.

Come now, that is blatant overstatement. When I was 18, I knew how to read, write, do calculus, use Microsoft Office, do a bit of coding, and even enough to work in a biological research lab.

The problem is most skills needed in the economy are not aligned with the skills taught in school. Is it necessary that a plumber can read Shakespeare and analyze it? Is it necessary that a nurse knows all about the Civil War? Well no, in a purely skills-based sense, their schooling was "not valuable" and they "don't know anything".

Well people learn something. What is interesting in the NCES national literacy surveys they've consistently found that around 45% of adults who didn't graduate high school are illiterate, about 20% of adults who did graduate high school (but no further schooling) are illiterate, and about 10% of the population overall is illiterate. There's also non-zero illiteracy results for various levels of college graduates, ranging from 1 to 4% depending on the degree level.

Now these students that are graduating high school and college illiterate are extremely interesting. What's going on? Do they have incredible memorization skills and learn from listening to books on tape? Or have they selected degrees and colleges where literacy is not required, perhaps an art or physical education major or something of the kind at a small private college. They are submitting at least some papers and taking tests in their classes most likely. Papers can be bought or ghost authored, is that happening to the extent that illiterates can get a degree? Test taking, perhaps some professors will give everyone a passing grade just for attending even if they turn in blank tests. Is that happening? Or perhaps the illiterate people self-reporting to NCES that they have a Masters degree (1% of Masters degrees holders are illiterate) are lying either about about their degrees or intentionally failing the literacy testing just because they thought it was funny?

At the high school level though I am pretty sure the case of large numbers of illiterate graduates is that a lot of schools pass you with Gentleman's C's just for showing up, remaining quiet and obedient, avoiding fights, and not causing any disturbances or problems for the teachers. If you do this and don't turn in a single assignment and guess randomly on all tests you can graduate from many US high schools.

I have met several illiterate high school graduates so I know it is a real thing that happens. They all had great personalities. Some of them are successful business owners. Graduating illiterate might require some people skills.

Either way, I do think that platforms like YouTube and Instagram give lots of influence to entrepreneurs - enough that Shark Tank started labeling some contestants as 'wanntrepreneurs' (wannabes) - and that the perceived value of self-driven diligence and the desire for intellect might become popular again. Actually, I think they already are starting to be popular again, especially among younger people.

> But American's have it in the their mind that the only way to gain skills is by going to a school and sitting in a classroom.

Ivory towers will come crumbling down in time.

These meme has got to stop. Americans value education but our system is failing us in many ways.

This isn't quite true. You're claiming that America used to value education, and this part isn't true at all. America has long been considered an anti-intellectual country. Various thinkers made fun of the country in this way a century ago. There's a famous quote, normally attributed to H.L. Mencken (though it's not sure that he said it): "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people".

is there a country where this ins't true?

Re 1: Mid-western/"fly-over" state folks have been hit by large amounts of change in the last few decades. The "white working class" (especially male) was overthrown by globalization, immigration, by a renewed push for women's rights, LGBTQ rights and so-on. Wages went down, social rank went down and opportunities dwindled. No training programs, no social programs, no healthcare, nothing.

This has led to a reactionary position of "returning to the good old days" of manufacturing, of mining, and conservative ideologies. To when they could pursue the American dream. I think it can come across the way you describe but it's driven more by fear and lack of opportunity than by some intrinsic arrogance characteristic.

These are the folks who were left behind by the Democrats in 2016. The status quo genuinely wasn't working for them. Not that the alternative was better, but it was an alternative to a system that wasn't working and from their perspective they had nothing to lose. That's why we find ourselves where we do.

Re 2: "There is no shortage if you pay enough" has more to do with the zero marginal cost business models that yield staggering quantities of revenue and profit per worker. Apple makes ~$40B per year in net profit off of 123,000 employees. That means could give each of them (including FTE geniuses and sales people) a $350,000 per year raise and still break even. There's tons of head-room here.

2. The idea that "There is no shortage if you pay enough" is BS is just whining because employers just really want to underpay and overwork people and are defensive anytime they aren't able to accomplish exactly that.

Tangentially related, this effects wage equality dissuasions as people get into the habit of comparing wages based on title and qualifications as opposed to value added to the company from your work. Some roles this happens to work ok for, but for lots of roles it just makes no sense, developers being a prime example.

Ah, but you’re confused about what “qualified” means. In addition to having the educational background and the experience, you have to be qualified to work for a third or a fourth the pay you want, be available 24/7 (and physically in the office from 7 AM to 8 PM), and never complain. Fortunately for employers, they’re recruiting from all over the world, and there’s always somebody desperate enough to be more “qualified” than you.