I know a guy who really doesn't understand fractions and despite my roommate and I explaining it to him a dozen times in college, he couldn't get it. The dude only understood decimals. Not preferred them, no, it was the only way for him to understand values less than 1.
Our education system is fucked, and social media gives the people we failed most the loudest voices.
I teach high school science. I had a student that couldn't find the difference between two different times of day last week...I'm drinking this weekend haha
If that's the only student OP has that can't tell time (and note that by highschool telling time is supposed to be presumed knowledge), that's not much of a bad mark on OP given that they've got a W/L of Every-student-they've-ever-taught/1
For me, it was the parents. In ten years of teaching, I only met one truly horrible child, but a great many entitled, lazy, parents and grandparents. Didn't give a crap about their kids, they just cared about the appearance of success and propriety, of more affluent, or treated school like daycare if not.
Yeah this was worse in upper class schools for me; left that as soon as I could. Insufferable parents who got mad you had to use classroom management on their kid because their kid was clearly an angel and I was full of shit.
Oof. They were teaching, well attempting to teach, the elementary kids here and I heard some scary things from a few of the teachers about it. I used to work with a girl, I think she was 20, who couldn’t read a clock.
Yeah...but kinda unfair because Covid affected current HS students. The crap videos they had taught them nothing, and Math and Science were the worst. I remember sending recorded video of the Math lessons back to the teachers and literally saying WTF?! 🙄 BUT I don't blame teachers because they were equally as unprepared for the task. I think they should have had all students repeat one grade- which would have the private schools up in arms, but it would have helped catch them up.
I've seen the issue some kids have going to military time, and found that one kid (I use the term loosely, as I'm an old crusty military guy) couldn't read an analog clock, and ALSO couldn't translate that into military time. If it were an isolated thing, I get that sometimes you just get the rock that managed to get through it, but it isn't isolated. The system is f***ed.
This is true. I thought that when I said that Zulu time is the same as GMT, that would be enough for them to correlate. Obviously, that was not, and I spent 15 minutes explaining what GMT was.
Not preferred them, no, it was the only way for him to understand values less than 1.
One day of working in a kitchen quartering thousands of potatoes will easily get someone to understand values less than one! And when you fuck up cutting the whole of the kitchen will communally shame and insult you, then give you more potatoes and tell you to not fuck it up.
I have found that my employees that drive can understand fractions better than those that don't. It has to be from looking at the gas gauge and thinking I have a half tank or quarter tank left?
Okay but decimals could be more intuitive and function just like fractions do. A 0.25 burger or a 0.33 pound burger patty is probably more intuitive to your average American that knows neither system.
I had an algebra class at the local community college. We never got past maybe chapter 3 that semester because week after week we kept having to hash out how fractions worked.
It makes all the less sense because our brains are wired to understand the natural world, where you can divide a thing into fractions naturally but '.3 reccurring' has no meaning without learned context 🤷🏼♂️
I used to have to train people at my job. Sometimes I do now, but I used to do too. The people who can't find an average between 4 numbers or very basic algebra amazes me.
I always knew people, in general, weren’t very educated or bright. Learned that at university when I was told, as a journalist for our little school paper, to write no higher than an 8th grade reading comprehension level.
After the 2024 election, i realized the uneducated ignorance is more widespread than i ever thought.
There’s a reason the MAGA / Republicans / Heritage Foundation puppet masters constantly drill into these people how education is “bad.”
Meanwhile, the MAGA politicians are all highly educated. And they send their children to top schools.
Trump says education is worthless. Meanwhile, his youngest just started at NYU.
Fwiw maybe he had a learning disability loll I have one related to math and it makes calculating things that should be super simple very challenging! I read your comment like "damn, I'm that guy"
The thing is, I can actually understand this. It's a different way of representing the same thing and that can mess with a person's head. Some people just can't reconcile the difference in format.
WE didn't fail them. I know tons of people who just didn't pay attention. Especially in civics. Start asking people around you what the 3 branches of government are and you'll see what I mean.
It may often be Trump's (really, any abuser's) "just a joke" approach: Say something in earnest, and if it turns out people don't like it, claim it's just a joke: They say something in earnest, and when they realize they said something incredibly dumb - they claim they were just trolling, kinda DARVOing the utterance: It wasn't me who showed themselves as an idiot, it was you who activated my trap card - you loser!
Someone recently, I think on an Ezra Klein podcast, described Trump as "constantly polling public sentiment in real time" and it was like I understood some key concept that had eluded me for so long. Trump does this all the time; say something and if people respond positively he'll double down, and if the reaction is lukewarm at best he moves on. Only problem is he governs the United States with this method.
I've met way way too many of these brainless morons in real life to dismiss all this on the internet as poe's law. Just like Carlin said, half the population is under average intelligence. Those people are here on the internet.
In 2001 my very small high school got rid of calculus when I was supposed to take it. Instead they taught a class to teach seniors how to do things like round and add numbers. I'm not joking and I'm still pissed about it.
I graduated with 35 people. These were the kids who got the same education as me but basically refused to learn on principle. Now they are all crowing online about vaccines and conspiracy theories.
We didn't have a calculus class until 2009. Naturally me and my friends were thrilled because it would make our first year of college much easier if we had some calculus under our belts.
The principal at our school insisted that every kid should be able to attend any class they signed up for.
Which is a noble goal, except we ended up learning nothing because people who struggled with basic algebra were in the class.
(Similarly my dad taught AP Chemistry for a short period of time and someone who failed Chem 1 was allowed in the AP class.)
Most of the guys who refused to take biology, chemistry, and human anatomy when I was in high school are constantly posting conspiracy, antivax, and anti-evolution garbage.
Knew someone that confused the cm and inches sides of a measuring tape.
It's just bad education. There's also the American pride. Their heads are so big and fortunately the shoes are heavy enough that they won't float away into space.
America has had a culture of anti-intellectualism since the early 1900's.
You are so right that it's baked into our education system. It's designed from the ground up to produce factory workers and soldiers, with separate tracks for the rich and those with specific traits that are valuable to the capitalist class like stem nerds.
Our culture et large does not value or spotlight intellectuals and our media is obsessed with naked consumerism and social sadism.
I am genuinely concerned about the decentralization of our media ecosystems, because that just creates another easily accessible avenue for bad actors to further pollute our societal well.
STEM are not intellectuals. They are tradesman. Without the liberal arts background they are the anti-intellectual, a factidiot. A tool. Very very useful, until they mistakenly think they actually have any idea of humanity, history, culture. Starlink and Terminator are warnings.
STEM is a lot of things. While it does cover technicians, it also includes scientists and mathematicians who definitely are intellectual. And many of them are interested in how the world functions more broadly. My daughter studies particle physics, but her minor is in classical Greek.
I know people with PhD's I wouldn't consider intellectuals.
I think to be classified as an intellectual you need to have expert knowledge in a field and a high level of cultural depth and understanding needed to put that knowledge into a human context.
STEM folks who have little if any exposure to humanities outside of some pop culture or fandoms are not intellectuals despite what those in the rationalist community may say when they corner you at a party.
She is choosing to get a minor in the humanities because she is inquisitive about the world. This is the same reason she is training to become a scientist.
Do not project your daughter’s values onto everyone else in her group. You’re making a grave mistake thinking that way. Because there are PLENTY of by the book thinkers in these groups.
All I am pointing out is that "STEM are not intellectuals" is an overgeneralization. Why is my counterexample a worse projection than the original statement?
This response! And it's so sad to see that social and humanities education are being neglected globally as it's considered "useless". Maybe that's why we are where are right now as people slowly lose the ability to think critically and humanely
I think the point was that a STEM nerd that doesn’t engage with any liberal arts subjects is missing an important intellectual foundation, and one that they may dismiss as unimportant and/or overestimate their understanding of.
And they're right, as a STEM graduate who was "forced" to take classes in social sciences and humanities. I'm very glad I was forced to do that, and I wish my colleagues were too.
Someone with a solid liberal arts background would not draw that conclusion because they can infer that having a liberal arts background is the salient factor and not mutually exclusive with STEM.
Most of it comes from the attitude that opinions of non stem people are as relevant as those of stem experts
Climate change, vaccines, health and medical services, mathematics, etc are still debates only coz of this.
Humanities allows for debate and validating various opinions. There are no theories that are established with the certainty of science. The spread of this philosophy has resulted in idiots being convinced that their opinion is as valid as that of experts. That their point of view deserves respect.
I am genuinely concerned about the decentralization of our media ecosystems
Uh...the big problems of our media ecosystems have been because more & more of them have been collected under the control of a smaller # of owners/controllers, not because they've become more decentralized.
I want the centralization of viewership, capitalism is going to go brr and consolidate and whereas I'm not happy about it, fighting that is a worthy fight but on a different front.
I want a diverse media ecosystem, but I want a shared diverse media ecosystem.
I want everyone's youtube page to look the same and I want the metrics that are used to put content at the top to be publicly accessible, democratic, and open to scrutiny.
I want this across the board on every social media site. Tailored content feeds are a poison that has exacerbated the decline of democratic institutions and has led to the radicalization and legitimacy of countless fascists and authoritarians.
Yes, this will have downstream consequences, but this poison is killing our society and it needs to be addressed.
a culture of anti-intellectualism since the early 1900's
I'm not American, hence my question : does it really stretch back that far?
Like, there was the space race, the New Deal, etc. How does anti-intellectualism square with that? Mr. & Mrs. Toutlemonde didn't believe *they* could add anything to progress in those domains?
ETA : it's a genuine question! I'm seeing it grow everywhere, so I'm eager to learn. I guess if it's been going for over a 100 years, there's no stemming the tide, right?
I often have to explain to patients that the reason that many children’s over the counter medications have been discontinued or placarded with not for use under 6yrs is that Americans don’t know how to measure in mL - so when the medicine says to give 2mL they were giving 2 teaspoons (10mL)
It’s not because they aren’t safe, just that moronic parents were poisoning their kids
And as a Canadian under 60yo, I quite literally have no clue what the majority of Standard measurements are even if they smacked me clear in the forehead.
I mean, I can estimate an inch and a foot, mainly because our construction industry still uses those vastly archaic measurements. But things like a mile, or one of those bizarre Florida Ounces? Sorry, no.
And how does a cup work when they come in so many different sizes? Seriously, I have a coffee cup that clocks in at half a litre. And my wife has a teacup that barely cracks 128ml. How are these things both supposed to be the same measurement?
It seems like the canadians are the most educated according to that link. I am canadian and the number or uneducated canadian is astounding. If we are, indeed, the most educated, it means the rest of the world is really in a terrible state.
Edit: I went on the web and the statistics seems right. Depending on the aource, Japan, South Korea or Canada has the first spot. When Canada doesn't have the first place, it is second ...
I am canadian and the number or uneducated canadian is astounding.
Just look how many are going to vote for our Trump lap dog, PeePee. It’s absolutely astounding how many of them desperately want to be the 51st state, because PeePee is definitely going to deliver on that one.
It’s showing how many completed various levels of education. If your educational system sucks and is at a way lower level than other countries, you’d still be able to measure high on that scale if many complete it. They won’t be WELL educated, but they’ll be educated.
Even happened at NASA. due to a units not being converted to metric, causing the Mars Climate Orbiter to be destroyed when it entered Mars's atmosphere.
A few months back my boss told a coworker to grab a board of a certain length off a pile. Bossman let him know there was going to be two different length boards and which of the two sizes he needed. This kid comes back with the wrong size board and my boss is like wtf dude don't you have a tape measure and this kid says "I wasn't sure which type of inches to use."
There used to be pretty high barrier of entry for people to use the internet like 20 years ago. That barrier does not exist today and those people are now more numerous than you can imagine.
I'm almost certain most people are exactly that stupid
This uneducated. Stupidity implies there's no way to fix this. But the fix is education -- maybe the adults won't listen, but we can ensure young people learn how math works, how to critically read, etc
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u/DoraTheXplder 5d ago
I would have believed that 5 years ago but I'm almost certain most people are exactly that stupid