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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the trends we are seeing in education are mostly driven by the economics.

Good teaching is a highly-skilled profession. And it requires a lot of very robust interpersonal skill - (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at). This skill is rare, getting rarer, and becoming expensive.

Because these workers are expensive and rare, districts can only respond by making the jobs easier and more attractive. And a lot of the "equity" initiatives are just that - at their heart most of them sell teachers on a justification that methods which require less rigour are better.

And at current trends it is getting really hard to argue that a high school is much more valuable than just a daycare for teenagers (depending on who you ask, this may already be the case). If there is not much rigor or motivation being offered the students, there will be a natural regression towards student success entirely being driven by home life.

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Can you actually point to the data that says Millennial and Gen Z teachers have worse interpersonal skills than those of previous generations? Let alone point to data that says on aggregate Millennials and Gen Z workers have bad interpersonal skills? From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable.

You saying that good teachers with robust interpersonal skills are expensive and rare just shows that you haven't stepped into a school recently, or haven't conversed with a teacher for more than 20 seconds.

I'd like to piggy back on that and ask about any data that even supports the general thesis that Gen Z and younger Millennials have poor interpersonal skills, as that's how I took the assertion.

It's a hard thing to find hard data for, but it's documented: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2868990/

(We do however, have lots of studies that show grade inflation is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation)

> From the teachers I have come across within these 2 generations, they seem to be incredibly intelligent and personable.

I wouldn't argue that millenials are dumber or meaner (my generation, btw), but I think it would also be wrong to mistake our expressed sensitivity and aversion for conflict as actual interpersonal skill.

And if we are talking about needing to pay teachers more so that we can attract better skilled teachers, what other skill would we be talking about?

I couldn't find anything in that article that supports your assertion, but I only skimmed it. It does seem to imply the opposite:

> We review these purported characteristics, as well as Millennials’ more positive qualities—they work well in teams, are motivated to have an impact on their organizations, favor open and frequent communication with their supervisors, and are at ease with communication technologies.

Almost everything in that study points to newer generations seeking more open communication and a general skew towards more positive communication(which is seen as a weakness by boomers), which hardly seems like a downward trajectory for “interpersonal” anything.

Comparing inter generational differences seems like a pointless circus. For as much flack as gen z and millennials get, we are still building rockets to Mars, creating diverse workplaces, advancing medicine, etc…the world is still going onwards!

> (something the new batch of Millennial and Gen Z workers are bad at)

Let me remind you that the average Millenial is in their mid-to-late thirties now. Hardly the "new" batch.

For that matter, I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations other than the younger ones haven't had as much practice yet. They'll get there, though.

Sure. And I 100% accept there could be survivorship fallacy at play here. But I am just repeating what I have been told by SMEs - that teachers and administrators are less equipped for their jobs than they might have been a generation or two ago.

If there was a uneven distribution it would pretty easily be explainable as an inverse relationship to social media and screen time.

In the US at least I'd be more inclined to suspect brain drain than something generational. Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead.

I suspect we'd have better teachers if school systems didn't have constant teacher shortages. Being able to select teachers on merit would be an improvement over hiring anyone who can fog a mirror.

This is very much the case, the US is quickly becoming a playground for the wealthy who can pay to put their kids through private school, and skilled workers from abroad who didn't have to suffer through the American educational system. The only essential difference between education in a place like the Japan and the US is the level of funding--their school system is based off of America's, and yet their teachers are competent, their students often score far higher on standardized tests. I suppose I learned something in HS, but I was an absolutely shit student and my district did what they could for me but in the end it was my own drive to succeed, after graduating, that led me to becoming a top student at college and transferring to a very respectable university.

The whole system is fucked up, and while I might be one single individual who "pulled myself up by my bootstraps," there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, if not millions of young students just like me who either dropped out of highschool or barely finished and couldn't cut it at college and ended up doing unskilled labor. They suffer with no chance for a better life, no shot at a more comprehensive education, and no consciousness of their labor conditions such that they never even think about trying to fundamentally alter the system that has placed them in such an awful social position. I am not a success story, I am the exception that proves the rule.

In what US school are kids serving others lunch, cleaning, etc? There are huge differences in the systems. Even if the curriculum is similar (which I doubt, but having investigated) the execution is vastly different. The societal/cultural aspects are also very different.

I agree that there are vast social differences, but I think the primary difference is that teachers are not respected, both in terms of their wage and in terms of their social status, and education is not treated as sacred and liberating, but is used mostly (in the US) as a means of discipline and control, and the "educational" part is little more than propaganda. In the rare instances where it is not simply a means of state-control and propaganda, the would be teachers of math, science, and humanities subjects who are genuinely interested in education only for the purpose of showing what is beautiful and freeing in the world are never treated in a way which would make them want to do such a noble benefit for society.

Not responding to the differences in systems but there are US schools where kids do serve meals, clean, etc.

Military schools. I’m not talking West Point, the other Academies, or VMI and the others. There are military boarding high schools where they do this.

Definitely. They typically score very highly for academics (like most private schools).

Yuuuuup. Teaching has suffered some bad Baumol's Cost Disease... but wages haven't risen to compensate, and meanwhile a bunch of other crap has made the job even less pleasant than it was decades ago, and also costs of essentials like healthcare and housing and education have shot up, further encouraging people to maximize income just to not feel very poor.

[EDIT] That is, to keep teacher supply & quality roughly static, I'd have expected Baumol-like increases in the cost of teacher labor (because accessible alternative careers are paying a lot more than they used to) but instead wages have stayed fairly flat, or even slowly fallen in many places, once you take inflation into account.

Bingo. I think it's a strong case of Baumol.

If we want to have a consistent quality of education we either need to drastically increase the quality of teachers, or find a way to increase class size while keeping outcomes consistent.

There are states that pay their teachers well. We still see issue there. I think the majority of student performance issues are societal in nature. Just like the Harvard study about two parent households being the biggest factor for success.

> Almost everyone who could teach is doing something that pays better instead.

The US pays their teachers better than almost every other country in the world [0]. So while teachers aren’t the highest paid profession, in the US they make more than other countries. And the US has worse outcomes than those other countries that pay worse.

That makes me think that teacher pay isn’t the problem. Or at least isn’t the biggest problem.

#7 on this list, https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...

Consider that the issue isn't overall teacher salaries, but instead how teacher salaries compare against other professions in other places.

Have you ever seen Software Engineer salaries in the EU? Way less than America. Probably not much more than their teachers.

So if teaching is making the kinds of income that your top earners are, it becomes a lot more likely people will go into teaching than trying to go earn more elsewhere.

That’s a good point. But it also means we could do an h1b visa program for teachers and really clean up by scooping up all the best teachers from around the world.

Why would they come here to make shit-tier teacher pay? They'd have to completely uproot their lives, live in systems / cultures / languages drastically different from their normal, and in exchange get painfully median or sub-par pay?

If I'm gonna schlep my ass to another country it had better be for a stark improvement in pay, bennies, and lifestyle -- not corralling brats so they can figure out what a Sin, Cos, and Tan means.

Because they’d make significantly more than they could in their home country. (The same reason programmers and nurses do it).

The goal isn’t to convince you, but to convince the many others who would make 2-4x from in their home country (see the chart I referenced).

And pay isn’t shit tier in the US even as it’s above the median salary. It’s not the highest paying, but it pays more than most jobs in the US.

"I see no reason that robust interpersonal skill should be distributed unevenly across generations"

The difference probably isn't as large as it seems, but there is a difference. There is a lot less proper socialization today than previously. My grandparents had to actually talk to people growing up. You had to figure out how to get along with others because there were relatively few options of who to play with. Eventually they phones and radios. Then my parents had TVs, but not a lot of content and not everyone had one. So you might invite neighbors over to watch the game etc. Now we have hundreds of channels, the internet in our pockets (which is not as personal as the phone was), etc. Not to mention the legal and societal barriers to socialization, especially at a young age (helicopter parents, legal liabilities reducing freedom/openness, costing money, etc). Even if you age adjust, the younger generations will still score lower in these skills because less time is being spent in those environments, generally.

> There is a lot less proper socialization today than previously. My grandparents…

Wonder if there are any studies on this besides anecdata

It is an interesting question. A brief look yields this nugget.

”By relying on text messaging primarily for their interaction, Generation Zers have missed out on learning some vital rules of conversation. This in- cludes how to listen, ask questions, interject in a way that is seen as respectful to others, build re- lationships, solve problems in real time, and resolve conflicts.”

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publicatio...

Years ago, when training new employees there was a sudden shift where seemingly everyone new was afraid of using the phone to call customers back. They would all avoid doing it whenever possible and it had never been an issue in prior years. Now we know it as phone anxiety, and it’s pretty common.

"Proper socialization", unqualified, is a normative statement that has no basis other than some arbitrary definition of "proper" vis a vis "socialization" skills.

We would be remiss to ignore the very obvious factor that parents organize their children's social lives until they develop enough agency to do it for themselves. Of course, parenting patterns have a lot to do with the agency of their children to begin with. So how can anyone, with a straight face, assert that kids are somehow lacking when it's the parents that instill these skills and values into their kids?

You're going to have to do better than polemics.

"unqualified"

You can look at the comment history for context. To simplify, it's the amount of in-person socialization.

"So how can anyone, with a straight face, assert that kids are somehow lacking when it's the parents that instill these skills and values into their kids?"

Polemic? Areyou talking about your own comment, as it makes no sense. There are obviously parents who are not promoting social skills, or where their kids are not living up to their expectations. It's not like they say "make it so" and the kids are all perfect. There are also practical limits to their control and influence due to other societal factors (media, school, peers, lack of time/attention due to various factors).

You're going to have to do a lot better than making a comment you thought was clever but had no logical base.

Try as you might to employ rhetoric and deceit, you haven't actually defined what social skills are "proper" and by implication which are "improper", which makes your argument nothing more than unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable assertions of under-defined concepts.

I'm not debating you, just pointing out how little is said in so many words.

It's a telling sign of the times that even on "rationalist" communities such as this one, such obvious nothing-burgers are considered legitimate talking points.

Right... in the small chance you aren't trolling, Google is your friend.

https://dictionary.apa.org/social-skills

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publicatio...

You know as well as I do that social skills are culture- and context-dependent. I am merely pointing out the absurdity of defining "proper" social skills.

For instance, some people value "checking in" and "empathetic speech" as regular, proper features of conversation, while for some that can be grating and wholly improper. Some see no issue with talking down to service industry employees, while some consider that a grave sin.

That you've avoided answering what notion of "proper" you're interested in discussing this far into the comment thread is telling that you just want to assert your own viewpoint on this inherently subjective matter. It's intellectually dishonest which ultimately makes it irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Standards differ over time and between people.

Let's say that I agree with you, teaching is a highly-skilled profession and millennials are bad at interpersonal skills. All millennials? All genZ? I've read a while ago "The shock doctrine" from Naomi Klein, and there was a part where schools exploited natural disasters in order to fire all long term employees and hire new temporary employees with worse pay / benefits and contracts, I was wondering, is this lack of quality related to 2 whole generations of people being bad or is it that the offer doesn't attract people who would increase quality... because millennials are a lot of people, if you count genZ they're even, is it possible that billions of people are just bad point blank? Wtf.. maybe they poisoned the running water with some anti social germs that affected the whole generation... or you just said something extremely stupid classifying under a umbrella personality trait a lot a lot a lot of people

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