+1. Libraries are about more than just lending out books.

It's very sad... I went to schools in Arlington that were quite good when I attended in the 70s and 80s. Our high school routinely ranked high on the academic achievement ratings (% of students going to college, average SAT score, etc.) _AND_ we routinely sent our high school football team to district and state competitions. Our soccer team was undefeated for years.

I've often thought it would be a good idea to separate academics from athletics. Have a "school district" that runs the schools in a building next to the football field run by the "athletic district." I think both are important, but you're right, North Texas public schools have fallen quite far from the academic standards they used to hold.

I presume if AI does come in, it won't be replacing those "geniuses running things now". They'll be fine; it's all the teachers who will be replaced. They're expensive, and all that money can go towards more sports!

> There's always money for ventures that have positive ROI.

If it can't help fund things like...checks notes...libraries then it's not really an effective ROI.

I seriously doubt that most highschool football teams make a profit. I would be surprised if ticket sales even cover the cost of the staff working the game.

They don't all make money. Why are you assuming that this one does?

[delayed]

> Looking forward to your down-votes. Instead of arguing, it's much easier to shout and jeer and press the downward facing arrow. I expect nothing less since we haven't taught critical thinking in most public schools for quite some time.

I believe that's uncalled for. If you're looking for a discussion, that's not the way to go about starting it. You're just turning it hostile before it can even begin; what sort of response do you expect from such hostility?

> The purpose of education past 8th grade is to keep young people out of the job market.

If not for that pesky education system we could all be hiring fully capable 14 year olds into our empty job postings!

Of course, they might have trouble getting to the workplace. Or doing anything that benefits from a high school education. Maybe shuttle them to the mines?

Sometimes, you see a take that's so far-removed from any take you've ever heard someone speak that you're not even sure how to interact with the one stating it. This is one of those cases; it sounds like an argument made by a Victorian factory owner in London, angered that children aren't being allowed to work because too many lost an arm last month reaching into the grain mills.

However, trying my best to answer sensibly:

> Every now and again there is an aberration where teachers actually teach something in a public school, but in the US, why take the chance?

You seem to be backing up your argument that a high school education doesn't have value (and shouldn't be funded) by stating that the US has an overall-poor standard of public education. That's a circular argument which doesn't even try to address the reasons that the quality of education is lacking or comment on whether a higher-quality education would have general value. I can't understand your viewpoint that the actual education of students shouldn't be funded, because the quality is already poor. You seem to be ignoring the fact that a well-funded and correctly-motivated (in terms of education, not just which high school can build the most football fields) education system can produce graduates who go on to add extra value to society.

Why should a decent high school education be reserved for the wealthy who can send their kids to private schools?

Also, I'd recommend against including statements like the one that you make in your last paragraph. Saying (paraphrasing) "I'm right, everyone who downvotes my high controversial and unpopular opinion without spending time to reply is an uneducated idiot" is starting from an unconstructive place.

I'm not sure this is all that unpopular of an opinion anymore. Government schools have been in decline for decades, and a lot of people were exposed to the truth of just how dysfunctional they had become during covid lock downs. Perhaps before that more people still believed in the noble myth of public education, but I, at least, have seen more and more people agreeing with the sentiment you put forward, minus the statement about keeping teens out of the job market.

Sounds very Florida public schooling. Just not the case in states like MA (re: quality and efficacy of education).

> The joke about football is often made but they pay for it, because people use it.

This is not a joke. At all. There are a LOT of high schools that actively prioritize football facilities over education. I grew up in one. It's very frustrating, and that's coming from someone who DID play football.

>This is not the subject of wood working

Sure it is, it's free wood for the woodshop. Unless the library is very new, those are probably solid planks. No shop teacher is going to say no to free wood.

The real mystery is how the woodshop survived longer than the library did. Usually woodshops are the first thing to go.

Libraries are more than checking out books, but your point is well made. I prefer printed books, but absolutely use e-books when they're more convenient. I still think it's useful to have a librarian AT THE SCHOOL to help students with all the things libraries do that aren't related to circulation or lending. Having the librarian at the point of use increases the chance that students, faculty and administration will make best use of the library's services.

> why would the school entangle students with a task to be performed by professional vendors.

Why pay a vendor to do it when you can get the students to do it for free?

Convenient access is a huge deal. Students are at school every day whereas public libraries they are limited to their parents' schedule. I know I was able to read nearly twice as much fiction as a teen because I could checkout a new book the same day I finished the previous one rather than waiting a week or so until we could go to the public library. Having the library is also useful for integrating into classes, for example my English classes would alternate between assigned books and reading a book of your choice. Lastly, in rural areas the school libraries are often the only library.

Stereotyping white students as already fine and thus undeserving of any attention contributed this cultural mess in the first place, JD Vance wrote a book about white American struggles and now he’s VP.

The school district might be primarily white, it’s more clearly likely poor and rural, and the electoral college values it more than dense educated rich cities.

Man what is your obsession with skin colour? You're all over this thread going whites this, blacks that, it's incredible.

We want the kids unhealthy and stupid. At least that is what this country keeps voting for...as far back as 2017 they had to get rid of healthy food because...make things great.

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/01/526451207/trump-administratio...

States are starting to pass bans for phones in schools which is a wonderful thing so we are making progres there.

> In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them

Yes but they aren’t the things you said:

1. Schools are filled with disruptive kids who use up time and resources and are not removed. 2. Teachers have no enforcement authority so they cannot do any of what you said, including removing phones. 3. Teachers and administrators are generally not smart or capable and continue to spend resources on everything except time spent reading, writing, and doing math. 4. Teachers are trapped in a web of legal red tape, bad incentives, and horrible metrics. 5. The US is segregated by by class and education.

Re point 2: In Germany, among other countries, you have social education workers (a college-educated job) in school for these situations. Such behavior has underlying causes, e.g. problems at home (fresh divorce, drugs, poverty-related stress) recent trauma (accidents, death of a loved one, abuse), mental illness (AHDS etc.). Treat the cause and the behavior changes.

Point 5 has been a thing for a very long time with respect to sports. The kid is marked-up a few points on tests if they're the reason the basketball team is winning.

> 4. Too many parents aren’t parenting

You attribute this to increased laziness, and that might contribute, but there are other factors at play.

For one, it takes significantly more hours of work from both parents just to provide basic food & shelter than it did a few decades ago. Calling parents who work more hours than any previous generation in history "lazy" is itself lazy and misses the point.

I think a major issue is the lack of a feedback loop. Cheap money in america means that no matter what country you're currently in, it's financially beneficial to migrate to the US. One of the happy paths towards this end is migrating for college or higher education.

In other countries' colleges without this unlimited input second to local students, there is a feedback loop connecting the college back to the local schools. This ensures that schools keep up. In america this is not required, since no matter what standard say UW sets, the corresponding tutoring centres in India, China and Singapore will adapt to that within weeks. And they can send as many students as UW can possibly ever want.

It also doesn't help that international students bring in more money than local students.

On 2, the US DOEd has decided for at least the last couple decades that it is inherently racist if a school's punishment metrics are misaligned with their demographics (e.g. white kids are 50% of the school population but receive only 40% of suspensions).

That environment makes it risky to punish anyone, and a lack of order causes or compounds almost every other item on your list (which I largely agree with).

1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life.

2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education.

3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents.

Bonus: It's not hard, but we won't allocate the money. School lunch lady is a job considered a punch line because for some reason our culture thinks it's easy to serve food to several hundred people in 45 minutes when the people in question aren't old enough to buy cigarettes, but good fucking luck getting money and people allocated to actually do that.

Skin color isn't it, actually.

I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.

I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.

My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.

That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.

All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.

Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.

Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.

We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else.

Its like you've never lived in America.

Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

>culture averse to education

Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.

I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.

Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.

If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.

BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.

That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?

Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.

When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.

The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...

[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...

Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..

The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.

I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.

The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.

I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.

[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...

Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.

It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.

For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.

Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.

The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.

That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.

If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.

Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?

Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.

All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.

Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.

Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).

American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.

Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.

> 15 year old white american students

Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

That's all true, but this crowd also leans heavily progressive. Progressives have a great faith in processes and systems. Get the right top-down systems in place, and everything will be good. Naturally that includes the school system, especially government schools.

It might be okay that I was self-taught, because I'm special; but we can't let regular people be doing that sort of thing.

My daughter had no textbook for Freshman physics, which is obviously the hardest class she is going to have in high school (or top 2). It was ridiculous. We wound up supplementing learning materials and paying a tutor, but it all felt like making up for piss-poor course structure. Her (very intelligent but distracted) teacher barely knew where to send me for supplemental materials. And this is in the "advanced" high school that is very hard to get into.

That's kind of what I think but feel free to poke holes. It seems like there are three tiers. There's a closed off top tier of kids who get into top ranked universities. They go to highly ranked schools like selective high schools with high Ivy placement ranks. Those schools have different materials and more opportunities than most. These high schools are geographically mostly on the coasts. It's a totally different culture too where there's this years long effort.

Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.

Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.

> So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely...

Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.

And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.

So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.

Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.

Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.

On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.

So, basically the general distribution strikes again? I guess the floor fell out, but what evidence do we have that the ceiling also went up? Could just be the same or lower when we normalize for grade inflation and requirement destruction.

While HN users have various backgrounds, I suppose programmers make up quite a large proportion of this community.

Programmers are generally more anti-schooling, at least anti-college for a good reason. It's one of the high-paying jobs where a degree is optional in modern days. It's also one of the few fields where the best resources are not gatekept.

I noticed a weird disdain for education too.

I once posted in support of general education and it didn’t go so well.

I suppose the people on HN are a certain demographic.

The difference is that you can, quite successfully, keep "cheating" with an LLM while at a job. And people do, not just in lower-importance roles, but at law offices, etc.

I work in tech and I see this more and more every day. By "cheating", I mean deciding that you don't want to do the thinking or even spot-check the result; you just ask an LLM to vibe-write a design doc, send it out, and have others point out issues if they care.

> The real issue isn’t the availability of learning materials

Well, some people claim in these comments that their children don't get textbooks. Not saying that you're wrong, but it's gonna take a lot of 'healthy pressure and right pushes' to account for the fact that they don't have educational material.

From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.

I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.

Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.

But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).

Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.

And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.

> We sold out the younger generation [...] for some greater good, and if you dare question that you’re a fascist.

I think this is a very flawed argument. Immigration was tolerated/encouraged because it kept demographics stable, labor affordable and economic growth high.

Pretending now that the previous generations did this for some "greater good" or out of misguided kindness is disingenuous.

Wouldn't that be the expected result? The culture shifted precisely because colleges started promoting the idea that education outside of college doesn't count. Which, in the culture, has lead to rejecting any other source of education — and why you will hear strange things like high school graduates being called "uneducated".

Do you believe the average degree awarded today requires as much rigor as the average degree awarded half a century ago?

If you read his whole comment it was about how education is "just a piece of paper you need to get a job". That mentality could totally lead to worse proficiency and more degrees awarded.

[flagged]

Looking at the amount of contracts I have to read to even start software it should. Looking at how many people buy lottery tickets I guess the same for math.

yes, if you're in any job that interacts with a lot of people and is at least a little technical. writing for communication and math proficiency are both extremely important for being effective.

Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:

- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.

- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.

- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.

- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.

- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).

And constraints. To call this a cultural issue is insane. I have firsthand seen the structural problems with institutional education. My scholastic experience was hell and anti-intellectual from day one, and it was all institutional issues.

> intellectualism

It's interesting to blame anti-intellectualism because Republicans are usually labeled with that.

But simultaneously it's Democrats that will dumb down classes to make sure even the worst performing student will pass. And this is also anti-intellectualism, but of a different sort.

The combination is failing our students, doesn't matter the political orientation.

I'm involved in education, I see this every day - I spoke with someone taking a class on how to reach students, and due to no-child-left-behind, this is actually a class on how racism holds back black students and what to do about it (answer: Make simpler, easier classes). It's completely silent on any other type of student.

Tell us more about the cultural issue that can be observed by looking at demographics. What specifically stands out to you?

A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.

There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.

We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.

The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.

I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.

And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.

The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.

No jard data, but from talking to teachers there was a shift sometime in the last few decades were parents got really aggressive towards teachers when they should have been aggressive towards their children. This idea that their kids were no longer accountable and that poor performance or discipline had to be the fault of the teachers.

I think social norms in child rearing have changed drastically, though I think, at least in my neighborhood, they are swinging back.

Growing up in the 80s, I remember having a lot of free time and autonomy. I had soccer or baseballaybe twice a week and guitar lessons once a week, but the other days, I was doing what I wanted, I was expected to get my homework done, but once that was done,I was free to roam the neighborhood or my backyard.

This parenting mindset changed, by the late 80s early 90s and kids started getting more and more scheduled activities and less free time.

Even personally, 6 years ago my wife was very apprehensive about letting our oldest who was then 8, walk to his friend's house who was a 1/4 mile away in the neighborhood. Our youngest, who is 7, walks or bikes to his friend's house the same distance away. And we have other neighborhood kids that also go between people houses. That is the childhood I remember.

I don't think HW I got in elementary school necessarily helped me learn more, but the act of being given work with expectation that I would complete it on my own was a growth activity for me, and that is something that is starting to come back in elementary school, homework for the sake of learning how to do homework.

If parents could perfectly pass their culture down to their children, no religious country would ever turn secular. Gay marriage would never have been legalized. Black people would have no right to cast vote today.

All these things are not true in the real world, so the conclusion is that a generation doesn't copy the previous generation's culture like a spit image.

Every cultural/policy/etc change in society has huge delays. Especially in education - changes you implement have an impact 10+ years later. Culture, even if it's dying, dies slowly. Here in Estonia where I live at the moment educational systems is falling completely apart – overworked and bullied teachers escape from schools in unprecedented rate, there is 20% less teachers than there is a need etc. But Estonia is still in top of the PISA. Why? Because this culture of personal responsibility and valuing education is still alive in the generation of todays parents. But it's certainly dying here as well.

It became politicized because politicians latched onto it as a way to cutback entitlement spending which is unfortunate.

People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one.

Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently.

Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.

Get off the phone! I see so many parents are restaurants, both glued to their phones while their kid is bored our on their tablet.

Wait, you’re literally on your phone while your kids entertain you…?

Yes? You mention it too - parents glued to their phones, part of the problem. Kids seeing their parents reading a book vs being glued to their phones really isn't the same thing, far from it. They can come and see pages of printed text in a book, vs some endless tiktok/instagram feeds of shallow video entertainment. Guess which they will stay around and stare endlessly without even blinking.

Screens and especially active content are incredibly addictive and small kids have no way of being rational and throttle their use. If they see the same behavior in their parents that's it.

Its not about having stay-at-home parent, but about spending the time with kids to be 100% physically there for them and them only, no running screen of any type anywhere in sight. Lets be honest, this is a rather rare sight.

People like that guy like to jerk off to their thoughts and think they alone know the issue, and that it’s because people are lazy!!

Reality check, income inequality makes it so that parents have to slave away to earn the bar minimum to survive, participate in the gig economy, and then deal with tax cuts that give the richest of the rich even more money, while suffocating social services in their neighborhoods.

This is end stage capitalism, squeeze the rubes for every cent they have and damn their kids

> Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues.

Is that wrong? The government takes away your kid for 12 years, every weekday all day, they might as well solve social issues in the country even if that means, say, kids are 1 year behind Asian kids, or their parents 30 years ago. If they figure out how to solve personal issues, that's even better.

I think there is a logical fallacy here. People assume that the only purpose of school is education. The more the education the better, even if that means deepening social issues, or making kids unhappy (BTW being a kid is like ~20% of someones life, not insignificant in itself). I think they assume it just because 'school' is called 'school', but I don't think the name of an object should determine its purpose.

- - -

When I look at the social issues in my country, I think the school system would be a very natural place to start to solve them (and arguably the current school system just worsens them). Even at the cost of "fall in reading and math scores".

They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.

> more School Bullshit System as a Service

I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis.

I hate it.

Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education.

The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."

Which county in New Jersey?

At a certain level “homeschool” is going to be more effective. Ive seen parents get together with 3-6 similar aged students, and then do a combination of hiring a teacher/tutor for them and splitting duting to making it tenable.

Check the private schools a few more times - some offer quite competitive financial aid packages that even people who feel they’re “high wage” can take advantage of.

Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?

do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?

In what state are public high schools allowed to "how to pray"? It sounds like her new high school isn't that good. I have a daughter at a good public high school in California in a quite liberal area. There was none of what you mentioned. One day of reviewing the syllabi and rules and quizzes in most subjects starting less than a week later.

>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray

When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.

Either this is a bizarre backwards school, or your niece is exaggerating for effect.

> kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

Not a thing at public schools (despite some attempts to force it)

Between this and the prayer comment, I suspect this comment is either exaggerated or mixed with internet anecdotes rather than actual experience.

I went to public high school in the 70s. The honors chemistry class spent an entire semester on what a molar mass was.

Among other things an entire day on active shooter drills?

Is it possible your niece was joking?

Would you be open to identifying the state where this school is?

"My niece is a high school pupil so I know how it REALLY is." Surely, you must realize how dumb this argument is?

I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority.

What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.

Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.

The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:

> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.

("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)

Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.

Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.

> Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science.

This is part of it. A friend is a teacher and is now in an admin position where he manages teachers. His big gripe is the higher ups have no formal system - every time a new person comes in they bring with them their system and politics, burning down the previous efforts while doing little to nothing for students. Then they leave for greener pastures and the next ideologue comes along with their matches.

Parents need to take responsibility for outcomes. Education happens as much at home as it does in school. You need engaged teachers AND parents.

Teacher salaries need to keep up. The problem is teacher salaries aren’t a state or a national setup. They depend on the school district you’re in. If you’re in a high income district where higher taxes are afforded. Teacher salaries are good. But then these places also have VERY engaged parents - which makes the scores much better.

If you want rural and inner city scores to improve it will need real funding - 1. For teachers to want to move to small town USA and teach there, 2. Or for them to risk life and limb going to inner cities and 3. Having an extremely high teacher to student ratio - probably 5-10 per teacher to compensate for lack of engagement at home.

> There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

Where is your evidence of this? Schools are one of the most locally controlled institutions of our government.

> systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government

So you support shutting down the federal Dept. of Education? Or is the answer more centralized control of education?

Chicago public school teachers salaries will reach over $110,000 by 2029 or earlier. Just going by the track record, this will not result in a better quality of education.

You are hilarious.

Schools are dominated by leftwing CRT ideology. It's the rare exception when there is real pushback against dinosaurs or evolution. I very much doubt that you are as angry about Islamic pushback against sex topics in school.

The reward structures, the dumbing down of courses, removing accelerated courses, passing everyone, the move against merit, the removal of structure, discipline, and punishment for bad behavior all come from liberal ideas on teaching.

Anyone who demands standards, values merit, values hard work with high expectations is labeled a fascist, colonizer, or some other pejorative. "Ways of knowing" is an idea that permeates modern teaching where we can't judge or grade anyone for what they know or don't know because different people just "know" differently. Grades are racist. Expectations are racist. Math is racist.

My friend has kids, 8 and 10, who run around outside and play with neighborhood kids as well as read books. They are very active in their kids lives and constantly bring them to events and other social gatherings. This keeps them active physically and socially making things like screen time seem boring.

The shitty parents are the ones who let meta and the like hack them to the point where their children are just following by example - if you stare at the screen all day, so will they.

Of course kids are reading less. When I was growing, there was frequently not much else to do. Reading was replaced by movies and shows on demand and wont come back no matter what educators or parents do.

It is cheaper, easily available and more fun.

Sure kids also use social networks. But the role reading had was mostly taken over by Netflix, youtube, disney and such.

Add a couple thoughts to that general idea:

- There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1]

[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in...

- Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature."

[2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91...

- The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money.

- There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3]

[3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa...

- You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4]

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...

I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home.

It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.

I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.

The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.

Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches.

Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers.

What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.

Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.

I think it’s more a matter of both extremes.

I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them.

IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.

We did something similar with our now 12yo. She self-regulates and tries to stay off the worst doom scrolling garbage sites, and tries to explore different sites and such like Pinterest cards and so on. She knows intellectually that the apps and services are designed to suck away attention. This kinda broke my heart but the other day she made a "bored jar" probably based on a Pinterest card which is a jar filled with little scraps of paper with ideas for what to do when you're bored. It felt like I was watching a drowning person trying their best to stay afloat if that makes sense.

How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this?

We should do whatever they do.

On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.

> e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, seems super popular especially among the Fussellian middle class, I think in part for status reasons, like, "well if my kid doesn't have a phone people will think it's because we can't afford it!" which of course Fussell's upper-middle and higher don't give a shit about, so there's less child phone-ownership among them)

Great onservation and great Fussell reference.

Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.

Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.

It's weird to me that cell phones in the classroom is even controversial. When I was in school, some kids had Walkmans, CD players, and game boys. You could bring them to school but they weren't allowed in the classroom without prior approval. In class, you were expected to pay attention to the teacher, even if you didn't want to. If you got caught with a device instead of listening, the teacher simply took it away until after class. If you kept bringing it in, you'd lose it until the end of the week, semester, or school year.

This doesn't seem to be a thing anymore, and there probably multiple sad reasons why.

It's a cascading failure. I live in another part of the world, and we have been witnessing the actual toll of the pandemic unravel in the past couple of years.

Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.

That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.

Is that signal, or is it just mean-reversion, because first-generation immigrant groups tend to have strong academic performance?

Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!

Perhaps, but the percentage of Americans foreign-born is at a 100 year high. And the percentage of under 18s who have a foreign-born parent is at an all-time high (25.6% of students, the previous peak was 21.6% in 1920).

And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.

There are very large regional effects. We talk about Finland's scores being great, but I have no idea what France's scores are... We should compare US scores to all of the EU if we want to fair comparison.

Fixing problems intelligently requires addressing root causes.

>>IQ is highly linked to genetics.

Citation desperately needed.

How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty?

Say it with your chest: the comment is implying USA has more immigrants, and the immigrants arriving have lower outcomes on IQ related tasks.

There is in fact not good evidence for IQ being "highly linked to genetics".

Tabula Rasa remains the axiom upon which the entire post-war world is founded. Regardless of its truth, to question it is to question this world's fundamental belief. To speak against it is to speak against existence itself. The emperor's robes are fine indeed.

[flagged]

Or you could just not imply that people are racist when they want to discuss the truth.

I don’t see where race comes in, necessarily.

We just need to compare with country of origin performance. If a family relocates from a place with low scores to a place with high scores, can you explain why you think we would expect their scores to rapidly increase to match the new place? I can think of many factors that would work against this that have nothing to do with race or genetics.

If the study is not controlled for this, then the education system at large may not have the kind of problem we would think about if we ignored this aspect. That seems pretty important to the discussion, I think?

This is just a long-winded way of calling them racist and threatening them with a ban.

"Their class sizes are also 12:1 students:teacher ratio, and 6:1 in Pre-K/Kindergarten. So that's also probably important."

Absolutely.

It's hard to talk about public education on HN because so many people posting here live in exclusive and expensive Bay Area communities with some of the best public schools in the world.

[dead]

Well, someone has to write the page. They don't self-manifest. The draft is currently here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:James_W._Stigler but was rejected for mainspace because it was written too promotionally. It will take some work, but he looks to be notable enough to deserve the article.

> I think this is because Asian governments want their populations to more educated and American governments want their populations to be less educated.

On the American side it’s not that they want people to be less educated. It’s the adversarial system of education being run by people whose interests are not aligned with students excelling.

Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children. They’re in the business of raising costs (their salaries and benefits) and lowering requirements (the work they actually have to do). They’re against measuring progress. They’re against firing for lack of progress.

Compare that to a private system where you only stay employed if you’re actually doing a good job of educating kids. There’s also the advantage of private schools being able to fire their students, but that’s more of an anti-disruption thing.

Guns. /s

They are cutting paper. You can see scraps of paper on the desk.

Of course “active” learning is better than passively sitting in a lecture. But these kids are not learning. They’re sitting in a group with scissors and markers making a X-y coordinate graph.

Your long diatribe fails to recognize the obvious: that middle school math class has turned into an art and hand labor class / day care.

I don't intend this as a dig against Spanish-speaking students. But many school systems in the US have tons of Spanish-speaking students who know very little English. But all of the homework, readings, and classroom instruction are given in English. If you don't know the language of instruction then it puts you at an immediate disadvantage. This might be what they're referring to.

Using a metric like SAT math scores, the demographic breakdown is: Asian > White > Hispanic > Black. The youth population is becoming less White and more Hispanic, therefore we should expect lower math scores.

I'm not referring to the gap between the countries, I was focused on the historic development of the one population.

The old paradigm produced results(arguably?), but was "gutted". By this train of reasoning, this old, and still "current" teaching paradigm simply does not work without violent coercion is the point I was really trying to drive.

The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015.

Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform.

NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math.

Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. The best all-income schools are catholic schools, averaging at 1 grade level higher. Then private schools do even better, but aren't accessible to everyone, and then the top spot is left to selective high-performing schools, unsurprisingly.

The no child left behind act was enacted in 2001. If you check the article, it has a nice little chart, showing a decline that starts in 2015. Prior to 2013, the results show a clear trend of improvement (in regards to the percentage of students achieving a minimum level of proficiency).

How would you explain that temporal gap? If the No Child Left Behind Act is the problem, why was the trend positive for the first 12-14 years of the time it's been in force?

I'm sorry but some F rated schools getting closed down needed to happen. There are institutions either so toxic at the administrative level or so heavily populated with kids with behavioral issues that it's impossible to fix without divvying up the student population into other schools that can better handle the load.

NCLB had some flaws but that wasn't one of them. Before NCLB you were stuck in the poor school district your likely single parent could afford to live in, inevitably doomed to poor education.

Sure, but you could do the same in pretty much any country.

Social media AND smartphones became popular around that time. I think it's the toxic combination that's the worst - easy, low effort dopamine hits that are available everywhere via your phone, whenever you are bored.

From 2011 to 2013 smartphone adoption in the US went from 35 to 55%, and by 2016 was 75%. While not proof of causation, the correlation is very strong.

Pfft, it started in 2007. Kids couldn’t deal with the orange box, cod4, halo3, all coming out at once.

There's a difference between reading and writing, and reading and writing well. I would expect the tests to expect higher proficiency than what is expected in your usual text messages.

Disturbing % of people just consume tiktok style video and that's it.

There is also quite a difference between being able to type out and read short messages to friends like "who wants to go to the park today" or read a menu and know if a sandwich has mustard on it or not and being able to have deeper inferential and evaluative understandings of written thoughts and ideas.

I think back to some college peers who even in some more basic classes could clearly read the words of the assigned writings, they couldn't then parse out the deeper meanings behind the assignments. They weren't illiterate, you could ask them to read a passage, and they'd be able to say all the words. You could ask them face value questions about the text, and they'd probably be able to answer most questions right. But any deeper analysis was just beyond them. So, when the professor would ask deeper questions, they'd say "I don't know where he's getting this, the book didn't talk about that at all".

NYC, DC, and LA all have over $20k of funding per student, with NYC projecting to hit $42k/student this year and are scoring at 12-56% ELA and Math.

It's definitely not just funding.

How can it be "defunding" while the US spends far more per student than just about any other country in the world?

Education spending by all metrics has only gone up - beating inflation nearly every single year since I've been alive.

It might not make it down to teacher salaries or more educators, but the money is absolutely being spent at massive levels.

The best schools where I grew up and around me today have the lowest per-pupil cost. There is basically no correlation between budget spent on education until you get to the extremes on both ends.

Except for a brief blip around the housing crash inflation adjusted per pupil spending has steadily increased for decades.

Do you have evidence of this? I have never seen a shred of it even though the claim is repeated endlessly. I think it's a conspiracy theory.

The curriculum can be amazing, but it doesn't matter if the students don't care. And frankly, a lot of them don't.

Some of that is cultural, some of that is due to parenting. A lot of parents aren't involved in their kids education. Frankly, a lot of them are barely involved in parenting in general.

25% of kids in the US don't have a father present.

They used to look up to professional athletes.

It is more statistically realistic for them to want to be a successful influencer than it is for them to be a professional athlete.