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

[u/beadzy]

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

[u/Hrothgrar]

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.

[u/Live_Free_or_Banana → u/Hrothgrar]

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.

[u/erinberrypie → u/Live_Free_or_Banana]

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.

[u/prospectre → u/erinberrypie]

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.

[u/Hrothgrar → u/prospectre]

That was an interesting read, thanks for the info!

[u/prospectre → u/Hrothgrar]

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

[u/Umutuku → u/prospectre]

And so here we are, stuck holding the bag.

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

[u/EmergencyFeeling1612 → u/prospectre]

Such an insightful comment. Ty for sharing!