The public needs to know the ugly truth. Students are SIGNIFICANTLY behind

I've been hearing this for decades -- it was a common refrain after the passing of NCLB -- and it's always presented as some dramatic new thing. I suspect the reality is that people who become teachers value education higher than the general populace and are dismayed to see first hand how little the average person has ever cared.

(I'm open to be persuaded by actual data, just to be clear; the rapid and substantial changes in pedagogy during the pandemic may very well have had some unique impact. I'm just not interested in one or two teachers' anecdata.)

Point 1: Negative "kids these days" sentiments are as old as humanity, and so far they are universally incorrect[1].

Point 2: This is a link to a reddit post with zero citations. It is anecdote, not data.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916

In general, the educational system is more affordable and available for a lot more people than it was before. And technology made it more accessible in a sense of fast education. Now you just can Google anything and your knowledge is not so deep. By some researchers technology can damage our attention and analyzation abilities, so we cannot really say that people became stupid in someways. I think the way we think is becoming different

Zillow has ratings for schools. I looked up the ones near my house, and they are all half of what I expected. I guess I will send my kids to public then teach at home too.

> But even if their search phrases are good, they do not click on the links. They just read the excerpt Google provided them. If the answer is not in the excerpts, they give up.

I have seen this behavior A LOT with my middle school aged child and friends here in the USA. It baffles me and I try to encourage clicking through as well as evaluating sources whenever it comes up.

A lot of stuff that isn't a big deal if you don't have kids becomes a big deal when you do, because you can no longer say "any intelligent person will just critically think and not (for example) blindly trust the AI generated Q&As on the top of google search results, even when they occasionally give subtly wrong or even blatantly absurd info" -- because kids are still developing and don't yet have good critical thinking skills. Yes, they need to learn those skills, but that takes time, years even, and in the meantime, Google becomes a pipeline for misinformation for them.

Between this and the way they abuse their Google Classroom and Google Chromebook products to push addictive feeds (Youtube shorts) in the schools, Google is the new Joe Camel and I regret ever having worked for them.

I have to hope this is mostly FUD or these teachers are using examples from dysfunctional communities drowning in poverty and crime.

Otherwise we are headed towards idiocracy where anything complicated was just automatically handled by AI created when the populace was capable which let the society stagnate on auto pilot.