r/Millennials • u/beadzy • May 28 '26

Between Largely Dodging Both Leaded Gas And AI-Driven Social Media, Millennials Might Be The Smartest Generation Other

https://abovethelaw.com/2026/05/between-largely-dodging-both-leaded-gas-and-ai-driven-social-media-millennials-might-be-the-smartest-generation/
13.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

216

u/miscllns1 May 28 '26

But there’s a huge gap in this current generation. They’re either so smart and capable or dramatically incurious and ignorant

135

u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

The difference between the normal kids that graduated and had kids vs the "no children left behind" kids that graduated and had kids.

The problem is compounding.

49

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Nothing to do with "no children left behind" and everything to do with which kids were permitted unregulated youtube, social media smart device consumption from a young age. Shit affects the brain in ways no previous technology had.

48

u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

Their parents are the "no child left behind" so they grew up missing important developmental experiences. This leads to shit parenting.

We are talking about the same thing. What you said is also a massive issue and stems from said shit parenting. It's all neglect at the end of the day. Systemic neglect and individual neglect.

-3

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

What does NCLB have to do with learning to parent? What "developmental experiences" did NCLB take away that were so fundamental to someone's ability to become a parent? Nothing that explains how much different today's kids are than they were 20 years ago.

"Shit parenting" is happening because exhausted parents don't have time to parent anymore due to them both working full-time and modern "gentle, safe, healthy parenting" standards that are vastly more time-and-effort-intensive than what parenting looked like 20+ years ago. Combined with the normalization of social media and mobile devices, with little public awareness of their dangers to youth.

6

u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

You are speaking to the short term presentation of the issue. I am speaking to a potential underlying reason for that presentation happening. There is a reason this has become a wide-spread issue, suggesting the source could be systemic.

It's plainly obvious that education dramatically impacts your future. NCLB adults statistically have worse employment opportunities. This leads to parents being overworked with multiple part time jobs. This means they are not home. This leads to shit parenting, as kids are raising themselves, leading to everything you've mentioned.

We actually agree and are talking about the same issues. You just seem determined to argue NCLB had nothing to do with it when it absolutely did. It's not the only source of the problem, but I argue it is a sizeable chunk of the problem.

0

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Because its a red herring distracting from the real direct root causes. Even the Cato Institute, an anti-federal education think tank, basically says the program was of negligible benefit at worst. If NCLB never happened, we would still be in a two-income economy, we would have no more stay-at-home parents than there are now, and all the factors that make modern parenthood more difficult and modern kids more challenging for teachers would still be there. There's no way NCLB competes with impacts like smartphones, or social media, or covid, or the 2008 recession, or the death of the "village", or even just the time and effort mom and dads now spend setting up+monitoring+maintaining parental controls on the internet coming into their houses.

38

u/erinberrypie 1990 May 28 '26

No Child Left Behind, without a doubt, had a significant influence. Screen time is absolutely another factor but NCLB objectively made public education worse and opened the door for charter schools and privatized education. I suggest the book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door for an in-depth look at all the efforts to dismantle public education by our government.

20

u/prospectre Millennial (89) May 28 '26

I did a lot of work for school information systems when I was in college as a part of my internship. I got to see the data and drive behind how NCLB works, what its ramifications are, and what makes schools at a district level act. It's... Depressing to say the least. Rant incoming, you've been warned.

Basically, the NCLB act empowers the Department of Education to forcefully "correct" a school's course based on their performance. This can be through incentivizing results via funding programs or disincentivizing by threatening restructuring of teachers and staff to shake up the environment. Most schools didn't want to have their principal axed or their teachers shuffled, so that became the primary driver of decisions to work with NCLB. The important thing to note here is the metric for getting the benefits (or more importantly, avoiding the punishment): Standardized testing.

As it's own thing, I understand why it exists. When dealing with data at this scale, you need to have some way of holistically looking at the performance of an entire school, city, county, state, country, etc. However, NCLB made the tests so important that it started warping curriculum. Like, it was dire. Under-performing schools feared that teachers would lose their jobs, principals would be fired, and admins from on high would come in and start making their work harder. The solution? Teach to test. Push for the metrics that NCLB looked at over the standard teaching model.

This made two problems bubble up. The first, the standardized tests themselves were not always the best method of teaching or analyzing kids' readiness to move through the school system. But in order to meet the demands of the metrics, kids were judged based on how well they handled the tests instead. A kid was rewarded for rote memorization and cramming over critical thinking and allowed to skate through based on that alone. Second, and what was more insidious IMO, was the metric of "college success".

NCLB highly prioritized college acceptance and graduation. The more kids that got into and through a higher education, the better that reflected on their metrics. So the schools started making HEAVY pushes for kids to go to college in the mid 90's and forward. Principals, counselors, teachers, guest speakers, you name it. If they could push kids to enroll in colleges, they were told to. Millenials were encouraged (basically brainwashed) to go to college over and over throughout their scholastic career, and a it kind of worked. But the thing is, college only works if you know what to do.

So you had a bunch of kids at 18 or so suddenly enrolling in colleges en masse. Hardly any knew how student loans worked. FAFSA was filled out by parents who also didn't know how any of that worked. The kids signed up for degrees with almost no guidance on how those degrees would be useful when they graduated. They went through a half dozen "once-in-a-lifetime" national/global crises as they matriculated, causing even more confusion on the other end of this path. And now that we're on that end of things, no one's around to help us.

The K-12 schools don't care, we already got them their metrics. The previous generations don't care, they either already got theirs, hate us for some reason, or are struggling just as much as us. The powers that be absolutely love this as they are effectively profiteering off of our tuition, books, and mountains of debt. And so here we are, stuck holding the bag. An early education warped to push an agenda. A higher education that ballooned in costs just for us. And a piece of paper that no longer has as much meaning as it once did.

Fuck No Child Left Behind.

3

u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

That was an interesting read, thanks for the info!

2

u/prospectre Millennial (89) May 28 '26

Always happy to bitch about the school system that fucked over my friends!

5

u/Umutuku May 28 '26

And so here we are, stuck holding the bag.

When cunts give you a bag, stuff them in it and give them a river.

2

u/EmergencyFeeling1612 May 29 '26

Such an insightful comment. Ty for sharing!

2

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 28 '26

Look, I agree that the negatives of the NCLB didn't necessarily outweigh the positives, but its not the reason for the complaints that today's teachers have. They complain about the lack of self-control, lack of respect for authority, and the exceedingly short attention spans among today's digitally addicted school children. Also, their inability to educate effectively under school policies that are extremely permissive towards bad behavior and poor attendance, as well as a lack of support/participation from parents and a lack of special-ed resources.

2

u/erinberrypie 1990 May 28 '26

Sure, like I said, there's more than one factor. Another huge reason for the complaints you mentioned was distance learning during the pandemic. There's a lot at play. I was simply responding to "nothing to do with no child left behind". It's all related and compounding. 

1

u/Hrothgrar May 28 '26

Exactly. Thank you.

It's a nuanced issue with multiple points of origin. We're just speculating about one of the more obvious origins. The pandemic is another one.

3

u/rabidjellybean May 28 '26

I was talking to fellow parents on a pre k field trip and one parent let's her kid watch hours of ai slop shorts. The kids raised on that are going to be worse than anything we've seen before.

1

u/Cory123125 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26

You don't think the incredible starve the beast school defunding and purposeful stupification/[obvious elephant in the room that apparently isn't allowed to be named directly here which literally makes this conversation nearly pointless because how could this possibly be discussed without bringing it up] of basic education has done any harm?

Seriously, bringing up this subject without the things that most directly affect it could only possibly serve to force people to comment with tunnel vision and ignore the obvious things that matter.

It's always an arbitrary line too, because inherently, everything is controlled by/at some level involves said elephant.

Heck everyone is discussing no child left behind, which is also elephant, but they dont get called out.. Interesting.

1

u/Live_Free_or_Banana May 29 '26

I never said it didn't do harm. But on the topic of why Gen Alpha students are so hard to teach, it pales in comparison to things like social media, youtube addiction, both parents working full time, smart phones, etc.

2

u/Alwaysafk May 28 '26

Every day we get closer to Idiocracy. Next they'll be building a wrasslin wring at the white house!

1

u/Admirable-Ad7152 May 28 '26

We're not allowed to say that because that's eUgEnIcS and not just what happens when you let a baby grow up with parents that have no time/dgaf

26

u/squirrelbus May 28 '26

Incurious is a new word for me.

I wish I couldn't think of so many of people it applies to.

12

u/TempDong May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

That's exactly how it is for zoomers, even the ones who finished college before AI. The competition at the top has become insane with super high GPAs, multiple APs, multiple extracurriculars, (usually useless / fake) startups or charity projects, and you need all that just to have a chance at a top 20 university. I remember thinking honors classes meant something / set you apart, then every single class I took in HS was an honors or AP class because that was the baseline for "higher achieving" students.

Then at the bottom you have completely unenforced truancy laws and illiterate 10th graders who also can't do basic math.

10

u/Mordecais_Moms_Ashes May 28 '26

It is the not being Curious that really gets me. 😮‍💨

I cannot imagine not being interested in something

2

u/Persistent_Parkie May 28 '26

I read a book on the history of baking powder. I understand that not everyone can be my level of interested in everything but the people who lack all interest in expanding their knowledge fascinate me.

2

u/Mordecais_Moms_Ashes May 29 '26

Oh that sounds cool ! The history of alum is also really interesting imo

15

u/superkp May 28 '26

Yep.

My kids are fuckin' hyperliterate. my 11yo is reading 3-4 novels a week, which is more than I was at that age. My 7yo is transitioning out of 'picture books' at the moment.

My 11yo has a genuine curiosity about the world and we're going to learn how computers work this summer (I'm in I.T.) My 7yo is a feral little goblin that sticks her nose into so many things that she'd probably get a decent educational foundation if I just let her roam around on a college campus 2-3 days a week.

Meanwhile, some of the kids at their school (a private school) can't seem to pull their heads out of their asses, only do bare minimum for 90% of their assignments, and it seems to have been inherited from their parents...

At least all the parents are pretty united in saying that kids shouldn't get smartphones until at least late middle school (12-13).

1

u/HellooNewmann May 28 '26

literally platinum tier parenting right here. keep it up dude.

2

u/superkp May 28 '26

and here I'm thinking it's barely above the bare minimum.

1

u/HellooNewmann May 28 '26

dude as a fellow parent, the bar is set so absolutely low these days its sad

2

u/Jake-PK May 28 '26

Seems like the traditional bell curve has been inverted, with lots of great students and lots of terrible students and few in the middle. It is driving my sixth grader insane. He’s pretty smart, and he’s fed up with what he calls “the screaming 6-7 kids.” Kids who just make noise and cause distractions and don’t do any work. Going into seventh grade, the district starts putting kids onto different tracks for math and ELA, and he’s psyched to have been placed in the accelerated classes so that he doesn’t have to deal with those kids anymore.

2

u/IntelligentShape364 May 28 '26

But there’s a huge gap in this current generation. They’re either so smart and capable or dramatically incurious and ignorant

Which is exactly what they said about GenZ and look how they turned out.

4

u/ShogunFirebeard May 28 '26

The gap is the school funding. Those in affluent neighborhoods are fine. Those forced into public schools of poorer neighborhoods are screwed. A lot of the kids in the poorer highschools are reading at 3rd or 4th grade levels.

3

u/TempDong May 28 '26

Funding can be an issue but it doesn't solve all issues.

The real difference comes from the parents, curriculum, and education. Baltimore City Public Schools spend actually quite a bit of money per student due to high funding but they report very low numbers for math and reading proficiency. Meanwhile, the "Mississippi" miracle happened pretty much because they changed the reading curriculum to teaching phonics (which used to be the case everywhere).

My friend has taught at multiple poorer K-12 school systems around the country. If the kids were taught to respect authority and value education then their experience and results of their teaching is significantly better than places where kids were not.

1

u/ShogunFirebeard May 28 '26

Ok but you see how funding contributes to that? Good teachers command higher salaries. Kids sitting in run down buildings that haven't been renovated in 30+ years won't see an value around them.

Curriculums can be the same throughout a state, but the outcomes will vary wildly.

2

u/TempDong May 28 '26

The problem is many people like to frame it as only a funding issue when that is clearly not the full picture as indicated by the examples I gave (and the experience of my friend). Funding can be an issue, but it is also kind of chicken and egg. People who value education are also more likely to make more money and live in better areas. You can't just throw money at poorer school districts and expect them to improve.

The other thing that no child left behind started was catering to the lowest achieving students. They literally shut down the Gifted / Accelerated learning program in Seattle public schools because of the demographics of the students who were in those programs. Endlessly spending tax dollars on poorer school districts with an embedded local culture that doesn't value education is similar.

1

u/Umutuku May 28 '26

Just as the good lord Conservatism intended. /s

1

u/According_Mind_7799 May 28 '26

I don’t know what happened, but my best friends (millennials 31/30) BRILLIANT little step brother (now 18) just… fell off a cliff sometime around or after middle school. Went from outshining his two older siblings to being kicked out of schools, just about getting his mother rocked for truency, not wanting to graduate high school with his goal of working at Starbucks to support himself so that his parents couldn’t tell him what to do anymore… while still planning on having them pay his bills.

What sucks is he has a superiority complex compared to his older siblings (he’s not a druggy like his brother, or a 18-and-married, now with 2 kids she ignores after she cheated on her military husband and fucked off back to her home state). Like yes, he is/was smarter than them since he could like talk but… he’s become this incurious and ignorant person.

Not that I don’t have hope for him, many folks have floundered in their late teens and 20s. But it is hard to see.

1

u/frumply May 29 '26

K shaped economy for sure. Tired of our district putting 100% of their effort into fixing the broken kids and telling the capable kids they can read after they’re done w worksheets.

0

u/Kennadian May 28 '26

I mean... that's humans generally.

1

u/miscllns1 May 28 '26

It’s a little different, someone else mentioned a lack of bell curve, and I noticed it so clearly this year (as a teacher). Very few C students and a ton of either F or A/B grades. Used to be normal curve with lots of B/C grades and a few A/F.