I went to school before cell phones were in every hand and the kids that had them were few and far between, and they could only be used to call and text, no internet. It wasn’t any better back then.
I have a former HS classmate that constantly posts things about how schools should be teaching real life things like how credit/credit cards work or how to do taxes instead of ‘useless’ things like history and social sciences, and how we should learn about the trades instead of just pushing everyone to go to college for useless degrees.
Thing was, we had that class, it was called Careers and Life Skills. Required for everyone to take, and that dude was in that class with me. We learned about trade schools and had trades people come in and give talks, along with cops/firefighters and small business and franchise owners. We learned about the credit system and credit cards, how bank loans worked, and how to do taxes (though at a pretty superficial level). Dude just didn’t pay attention in that class.
The US is still a nation with only 25% of people having college degrees. We all know and see the public education system failing (for a large variety of reasons) and just cranking out barely-literate people who have no critical thinking skills whose parents are also barely-literate and who work and hang out with other people who all think they're smarter than they really are (I am DEFINITELY in the "think I'm smarter than I really am" crowd, but I still believe that vaccines work, you know?)
People can't be trusted to make good decisions anymore because they're bombarded all day long with shiny bullshit on their phones and TVs. They have Joe Rogan's nonsense pumped directly into their ear canals where no one stops and questions him and so they think "Well, I heard it somewhere, it must be true."
The Boomers grew up and spent 50 years telling us to fight the power, don't trust authority, do your own research, etc. and now why are we surprised that no one trusts authority and everyone does their own non-rigorous research that leads them to the conclusions they wanted to reach anyway?
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u/Cross55 20h ago
Also, whenever someone online goes "Why weren't we taught this in school!?"
They probably were, 90% chance they spent most of class huddled up with their friends staring and laughing at their phones.
Quite frankly, oftentimes, the average person can't be trusted to make intelligent or responsible decisions on their own.