I'm sure you have some knowledge that I could learn from, but it requires both of us and most of that is inflammatory and hyperbole. Let's both try curiosity and bringing valuable knowledge to the table?

> 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult”

Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adult. In fact, any learning or training is about investing in the future. Any investment is about current sacrifice (time, money, etc.) for better future returns.

We could also ask the same question - and it was asked, by prior generations - about 12 year olds, who could become adults and work in coal mines. People used to get married at that age too. In Judaism, 13 year old males technically become adults by completing their Bar Mitzvahs (obviously an ancient tradition). Were they better off? Was our society better off? Is there some benefit to achieving adulthood sooner?

Taking it further, kids who lack effective parenting, either through accident or neglect, often grow up fast. And lacking that time to be kids, to learn and explore and grow themselves, costs them for the rest of their lives. I grew a lot in high school and college, and I would have missed so much if I had to be a full-fledged adult then.

The argument that prior generations lacked college educations and therefore future ones have nothing to gain, or that it's an insult to prior generations to say there is something to gain, seem very flawed for obvious reasons. It's wrong that so many people in Bangledesh, who are just as able to grow and benefit, are denied the opportunity and those benefits.

Let's keep building and improving a world so that they, like so many others over the last several decades, become the first in their families to benefit from college.

I never went to college, instead I got a job and worked like you say at age 18. I then worked my way into software engineering. Compared to my siblings (and virtually everyone else in my family, who took more traditional routes), I’m far more independent and have a stable career with no college debt.

I’ve heard of others talk up the college experience, but I fail to see what’s so special about it. What exactly did I miss in my development? How exactly am I different (besides having a 4-6 year head-start in the working world)?

Parties and friends are also made outside of campus, in the adult world. Working a job at a young age and having to be responsible for yourself builds life skills early. Some of which, my college-educated friends are still having trouble building well into their 30’s. I know some that are terrified of “growing up”: they keep earning degrees or still in their 2nd masters program, accumulating debt that is clearly unsustainable. Many are in fields that inside the sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia look nothing like what actually happens in the real world, and they are in for a very rude awakening when that house of cards comes tumbling down.

Every time I meet someone who went to college, if you’re in the same job as them without having a degree, the default response is “but I got the experience”. Part of me thinks this is some kind of rationalization so they don’t have to accept the fact that they might have just been swindled and could have just as easily did what I did and get the same outcome.

The “college experience” of living in a dorm for 4 years is probably overrated, but if you can afford it, there’s definitely a benefit to spending 4 years on directed learning. Both in subjects you’re interested and in being forced to learn subjects you would never touch on your own.

I went back to school after a decade of web development, and learned a ton. I think I’m a much better developer than I would have been had I learned only what I thought I needed for my job (could be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am). I’ve also worked with plenty of people without degrees who were better developers than me, but to a person, I think they would have greatly benefited from a broader theoretical foundation than what they built through self directed learning.

One thing you should think about is that rationalization likely applies to you just as much as it does to the college educated people you’re talking about.

I was in the college is useless boat before I went back and most of it was rationalizing my choices—plus a bit of feeling inferior.

It’s one thing to decide that college wasn’t the right decision for you (and maybe it wasn’t). It’s another entirely to write off everyone who went as suckers.

I graduated from college the first time; did both community college and university as a transfer. Still got the 'freshman experience' my first semester at uni, then lived on campus, except for my final semester where I commuted.

Yes, having dedicated time to focus on learning was great. But I was effective at that because I'd already learned to, well, learn, on my own, by homeschooling the latter half of high school (where I'd study, take CLEP tests).

College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means (and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it, ideally in the confines of that job, like an apprenticeship in the trades). Many of the other purported benefits (social, etc) are BS.

The main benefit I can think of outside of that dedicated study time is being forced into more of a cultural milieu than I had experienced prior. I think that is important, but I also think that entirely depends on the school, just as it depends on the job, so I'm not sure that's entirely a college benefit so much as a "get into the city if you're living somewhere suburban or rural" benefit.

> the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means

Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.

As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.

How do you know what classes to take?

That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

> How do you know what classes to take?

You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.

> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.

Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.

> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.

I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.

Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?

Didn't see this response - but yes. Computer Science. From a top 10 school. Some of what I'm saying is mostly true of the two years of 'core' classes, and then some of the softer CS classes. Others include classes 'taught' by professors there for research. Literally the only classes that felt like "yeah, this was worth attending" were the ones being taught by 'instructors', not professors, i.e., people with Masters degrees rather than Ph Ds, who weren't being pressured to publish and bring in grant money. Meaning I can think of roughly...4, of the dozens of classes I took, that felt worth it. And chunky classes, like Data Structures and Algorithms, and Computer Graphics, there was no point to attending the class; an hour invested in the textbook was worth more than an hour attending.

Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.

> College isn't for suckers, but the scholastic benefits of it can be gotten through other means

Of course it’s possible, but the number of people who have the discipline/inclination to get through a degree’s worth (or even a significant fraction of a degree’s worth) of education on their own is very small. Small enough that if the reason you’re skipping college is because you think you can/will learn everything they can teach you on your own, you’re most likely kidding yourself.

With self directed learning it’s also shockingly easy to develop huge blind spots that you have no idea you have.

> and should probably be done because a job you're interested in requires it

I’ve personally benefited a good deal from taking the year of physics I was forced to take, despite no job having ever required it.

The same goes for all the papers I had to write in non CS classes.

I don't know you at all, so I have nothing to say about you, of course. Nothing personal.

Regarding the assertions: Of course, one anecdoctal experience says nothing about a population, and in the population, career and other outcomes are far better for college graduates.

We are all by not knowing what we missed and, as you say about others, to rationalize our choices. Framing the question - always the most powerful mode of argument - by saying someone meets the standard (i.e., you are happy in your life), so why do something else, makes any possible alternative useless. What good is a winning lottery ticket either? But the question is, what are the different sets of outcomes from each alternative choice? Each alternative, such as college, makes us better off in some ways, worse off in others - and that includes impacting things that the other alternatives don't touch.

You're defining the question as if college benefits are social life and speed of acquiring adult life skills and responsibilities. If those are someone's aims, I'd agree - don't go! College is about critical thinking skills, knowledge, and learning skills, which last a lifetime. Are your thinking skills so good that they can't be improved? Do you have nothing to learn? Not me. How do improve those things? Imagine studying with an expert who not only guides you in what to study, but explains the works based many other works, context, etc.; answers your questions regularly, person-to-person, in their office and via computer; pushes you to see dimensions and angles that you didn't know about, and to do it at a high level; and reviews your understanding and gives you feedback. And then it would be great to do that with others studying the same thing. And if the study needs it, if they provided other resources: A huge library of other works and every reseach paper ever written (along with experts in each field that help you discover excellent, relevant materials); labs with specialized equipment; etc. etc.

If college didn't exist for learning, it would be too good to be invented.

Also, don't you want to learn about yourself, the world, etc.? What you read on the Internet is so far removed from the quality of knowledge, it's laughable, and it's tragic.

> I know some that are terrified of “growing up”

> sheltered and honestly, kind of bizarre world of academia

These are well-worn stereotypes. People inside and outside school have trouble growing up; handling a college workload is no joke - much harder than early jobs, which often are 40 hours and not challenging (many service jobs). And academia is no more bizarre than other industries. You should see what goes on in SV or on Wall Street if you want bizarre.

I went to work when I was 18. I don't think I've spent my career doing menial work.

Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion!

Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.

With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).

I'm not taking offense so much as refuting your argument.

Did I use that word right?

I dunno (I'm being kinda folksy!). It was just arguing and not really qualifying as a refutation, which generally but not always implies proof. (I did look that up to check my suspicion, but in a big dictionary.)

I would be interested in people's experiences, good and bad, with having (not) gone to college, and serious analysis - everyone seems to be trying to shut down any serious discussion and exploration.

I went to college and I've had many times that I wished I'd studied harder. I've also wished at times that I skipped college then and went later in life, when I would benefit far more. I haven't wished that I didn't go; I learned so much that forms my understanding of the world, my thinking skills, etc.; I would be a different person without it. You can't tell me that I didn't benefit greatly from college but I'm just one person. But can you tell anyone that they studied for four years, hard, and didn't learn much? That's a big stretch for anyone; you need to learn enough to pass ~32 classes at various college levels, and that's a minimum.

Many people say here that 'I didn't go and I'm fine'. Fine isn't the question; nobody said we'd die without it, but that's not our standard for our choices. Each path leads to different collections of outcomes, better and worse and completely different, and we have blind spots about what the other path could be like (having no experience of it). Maybe college emphasizes different skills, develops different tools, with different advantages and disadvantages, as an example of how that would work.

I also wonder how much HN readers think of or have experienced STEM only. The humanities is more important (unpopular, I know, and both are essential IMHO); it addresses the most critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them.

I watched a bunch of Shakespeare plays recently, fictionalized histories of Rome and England [0]. From them you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

[0] Without knowing the reader's experience with the Bard, let me recommend Julius Caesar especially, also Henry VI Part 2 and Part 3, and of course their sequel, Richard III. Richard II is good too. I'd skip Henry VI Part 1 but read a synopsis as context for Part 2: Part 1 is clearly substandard IMHO and, it turns out, is believed to be mostly written by a collaborator, Christopher Marlowe. It does constrast the difference between an excellent playwright of their day using the same forms and an all-time genius of character and language.

No one denies that humanities are useful. What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them. For example, everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is. This is because Shakespeare's plays are just pop culture from the 16th and 17th centuries, and in a hundred years, people like you will be applauding Star Wars and looking down on others who prefer that century's pop culture and don't see the point in studying an old screenplay written in archaic language.

There also isn't a single person on HN who has a American STEM degree who has only experienced STEM. Nearly all STEM college degrees require a significant portion of classes to be humanities (the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes), and every single high school graduate has spent 13 years studying the humanities, including Shakespeare which is a part of most high school English curriculums. What you view as naivety is actually an opinion born from experience.

> What people deny is that humanities as taught in universities are useful and that one has to go to school to learn them.

We must stand on the shoulders of giants; you can't reinvent all the wheels, all the insights, all the knowledge and tools created by all the humans in history by yourself. Why would you? Economic specialization, including in literature, yields talented experts who learn all those things for you (they don't reinvent the wheels either, or just one or two), and unless you think you know everything, you can learn a lot from them.

> everything you describe about Shakespeare also applies to Star Wars. The prequel trilogy is a fictionalized account of the fall of the Roman Republic, and is just as useful for learning about history as Julius Caesar is.

Imagine two or ten or a hundred pieces of media that fictionalize the fall of the Roman Republic. Because they refer to the same real-life history, are all of the stories therefore of equal value (and in the same ways)? That doesn't follow at all. One could be complete BS, the other transcendent genius.

The value of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and of Star Wars, are not learning history. I've never heard someone credit Star Wars as a resource for that before now, nor Shakespeare for that matter. Read a history book. Shakespeare uses the historical setting to talk about humanity, to - like most great art - talk about ourselves, to hold up a mirror to ourselves that looks inside. To learn about ourselves, now.

I enjoy and learn from plenty of sci-fi, including parts of Star Wars (not the prequal trilogy!). Nothing I've encountered is on the same planet as Shakespeare, but that's an impossible standard. Shakespeare was popular when alive, but is also more popular than everyone since, and in languages around the world. The works of Shakespeare are not just pop culture or nothing is more than pop culture (and then we have to differentiate between pop cultural forms so the term means nothing). Einstein and many others have studied physics; their work is not all of the same value.

> the reverse is not true for humanities majors as they can graduate having never taken any real science or math classes

That's not my experience! My experience is that STEM majors usually take lightweight humanities-for-STEM-students (apparently some think they are taking the heavyweight stuff), and humanities majors usually take STEM-for-humanities majors. I almost never saw a STEM major in high-level humanities classes (and in fairness, it would be very difficult without the prerequisites of knowledge and skill - they wouldn't know much of what was being talked about or how to address it), and I almost never saw a humanities major in high-level STEM classes, for similar reasons.

And IME both sets of majors thought there was little purpose to taking the other. 'Why are you doing that?'

Both Julius Caesar and Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III use the historical/fictional setting of the fall of the Roman/Galactic Republic to talk tell a deeper story than what first appears. The fact that Lucas intended the movies to be an allegory for the fall of the Roman Republic is well known and even cited on the trilogy's Wikipedia page.

In the original post I replied to, you said:

>From [Shakespeare] you learn more about our current society and humanity in general, including today's crazy disfuntion, the mis/disinformation and people's responses, than from all the quantitative research combined; art is a mirror that looks into ourselves. And as objects of another human being's creation, they are incredibly inspirational and beautiful. I'm wiser and have grown since a week ago. Would I turn to Shakespeare and get so much from the plays without studying literature in college? I doubt it, though that's just me.

The plot of the prequels revolves around Palpatine's manipulations to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over the Republic. He does so by manipulating people like the CIS/Trade Federation with misinformation and promising to take care of their legitimate grievances. He gets them to start a war, which is legitimized through a complex legal system but immoral and unjust in reality. He then uses this war to justify the creation of an army loyal to him, which he later uses to seize power. It doesn't take a genius to realize how lessons learned from the movies could be applied to real life, in the same manner that you described Shakespeare's plays doing for you. Shakespeare doesn't talk about misinformation or modern society's disfunction directly, you inferred that, and there is nothing stopping someone from drawing similar life lessons from more modern material. It's the entire concept of allegories/fables which are thousands of years old!

I noticed that you didn't make a single argument about why Shakespeare is above being pop culture; you only asserted that it is somehow better. Since future humanities students won't have grown up viewing Star Wars as plebian content, it is possible that they will worship Star Wars the same way present day ones worship Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other historical writers who wrote for primarily to entertain. Your casual dismissal of the prequels while implying that you like the original trilogy also doesn't bode well for your argument that university education in the humanities is useful for being able to analyze and draw conclusions from literature, since the prequels have a much more complex plot and fleshed out world than the originals do. The movies have just as deep of a story as any Shakespeare play and one can draw any of the conclusions you mentioned from them, and in fact many do even without having the "proper" education. There are no analysis skills that one gains from a university humanities education, which is also likely why you didn't list any of the "tools" the "giants" have created.

A humanities education is definitely not necessary, and possibly even determinantal, to address the "critical issues in the world and life, the ones beyond quantitative understanding, which is most of them", and to think otherwise is to think that being a member of an expensive book club makes you qualified to rule the world.

This strenuous denial consumes life and effort, and for what? What do you win? Why do you care? All I can tell you is good news: These are wonderful, incredible things in the humanities, in Shakespeare, that will change you.

An experienced developer looks at code and forms perceptions 100x faster and more accurately than someone without expertise. Their brain is wired differently by their experiences, and they look for and pick out patterns, process their meaning, and understand them, all in moments without conscious thought. Similarly, someone with expertise in wine can perceive far more in a glass than someone who doesn't. I'm mostly in the latter group; often I don't know the difference.

But that doesn't imply that no difference exists; reality doesn't exist or not because I perceive it. I have no doubt that those differences exist and that the person with expertise gets far more out of that glass than I do, sees far more color and detail and shapes and images, and I take the gap between my experience and theirs as a signal that it's a fruitful territory for learning. If I denied that, and things like it, I would wall myself off from much learning.

But I can watch Shakespeare and see far more than most people who haven't studied and learned literature and arts more generally. In case you think it, I don't worship William Shakespeare, I love the works. Shakespeare is not a god and the plays are not scripture that I've been instructed to praise, but Shakespeare is just a person - like HN commenters - who made something incredible, and my experience has led me to the same response as so many others over 400 years.

My god, get some reading comprehension. You are destroying your own argument that humanities education is useful outside of academia. At no point did I deride Shakespeare and the very first sentence I wrote in this comment chain was "No one denies that the humanities are useful". Instead, I pointed out that the qualities you derive from it are available in other cultural items and that everyone draws connections from media to real life. No one needs special training to do that, and it is a waste to force students spend two years and tens of thousands of dollars to write glorified book reports.

> the main function of college in America seems to be extending adolescence and deferring dealing with the real world.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it is the other "main function" but ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more. I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college. College gives a clear path forward for years, each time you're admitted into a program. Give that up and what do you have? For the people I know, the answer to that question is a minimum wage job outside of their field of study.

> ohhh boy does this need to be discussed more

It's discussed all the time, for decades.

> I know a few people that seemingly couldn't break out of college.

Many people have trouble moving forward, regardless of college.

My 19 year old mother in Pakistan might have been a lot more adult because she had me, but I'm sure having to forego her career for a marriage with a Rs 10000 mehr was something she would have liked to have had a few more choices about. Get a grip on yourself, man. (And yes, she went to college there too)

People have more choices in America because of the country’s economic and technological advancement. For women, in particular, there are more job opportunities in an advanced economy than in one based on subsistence farming. Having more choices is one of the luxuries of living in America.

But that’s orthogonal to my point. If I were looking for people to rebuild America (or even just maintain it) I’d much rather have adults like your mom (or my mom) than the children graduating from American colleges these days.

Your mom might be better off. Look at what's happening with educated American women. They forgo children until it's too late to have them, focusing on career instead of on family, and then find that they can not do both.

My mom flipped the order, working until she had us, then taking about a decade off her career and doing an MS in Computer Science in the meanwhile, before returning to her career.

She got an MIS about a decade after having us but couldn’t get internships because she had to take care of us as a single mother so it really never helped her land a job

college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.

on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe. That's the root cause we need import so many STEMs from overseas, the culture smothered STEM from K-12. K-12 is anything but success IMHO.

middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color...high school students must show how caring they're to the community or everyone must be some leader somehow while the truth is that they can barely take care of themselves without parents' caring, for academics nowadays SAT/ACT/school-ranking/etc are either racism or unfair...I will stop here.

A road to hell.

It's not (just) college. Even if you do make it past college, hitting what older generations would consider typical markers of adulthood (having your own place, a good job, a stable relationship, a family, etc.) are all delayed and/or more difficult to achieve.

Meanwhile many jobs are trying to sell themselves not through a TC that would let one hit these markers, but through football tables, pizza parties, drinks and other social outings. Not to hate on fun activities, but it sure does feel like trying to keep young adults in a perpetual student lifestyle when you keep the booze but not give them the wage to advance in life.

There are plenty of young adults who want to grow up, meeting a ridiculous amount of resistance.

When I was a teen, teenagers had after school jobs. McDonald's, stores, etc., were populated with teen workers at minimum wage.

Today those jobs are held by adults, expecting to be able to raise a family on it. Teenagers rarely have jobs, their first job waits until after they graduate from college.

Cherry on top: once they graduate, they are met with "entry-level jobs" asking for years of experience, giant requirements lists and an overall predatory environment, only to be reinforced that failure is a personal fault and not one of the system.

Personal responsibility is a good thing. People need to fail, this is one of the few ways to see critical feedback that fosters growth.

Ironic considering this is the market where feedback has been gradually taken away to the point of being so vague it is effectively useless, if there is any. Because ghosting and poor one-liners are more cost-effective.

Let's not cover up bad systems because a few individuals rise to the artificial challenge and bite through.

Based on my experience, the primary reason high school kids had jobs was to buy a car.

For various reasons (safety regulation, emissions requirements, minimum wage not keeping up with inflation, insurance outpacing inflation, cash for clunkers etc…) it’s now almost impossible to afford a car working a few hours at McDonald’s.

There’s also far more fast food restaurants per capita than there used to be, and food service/retail make up a larger part of the economy in general.

To top it off, the age of the average American has increased almost 10 years since 1960, so there are just fewer kids to do the jobs.

I still regret not buying that '68 Chevelle Super Sport for $600 when I was in h.s. That thing was a rocket with that giant V8 and very little car. I did wind up with a 67 289 Mustang. It was an automatic, and my buddy & I converted it to a 4 speed because muscle cars with automatics were for weeners.

We sure had fun shredding tires with it. I was lucky to survive the accident that terminated it.

And adults have always occupied those jobs too. How else did you get McDonalds Breakfast 30 years ago on a Wednesday at 8 AM in October going into the office?

Are you sure? I don't ever remember an adult behind the counter in those days. 18 and 19 year-olds are still teens.

And they are also considered legally adults, are they not?

I remember at 18 signing up for 5 years in the Navy. I'd say that is pretty adult. If it isn't, you should consider contacting your senator about raising the age of enlistment.

Legally adult, yes. They're still commonly regarded as kids, though, despite being eligible for the military. Note the drinking age is 21.

The ones that do sign up, though, grow up fast.

> Note the drinking age is 21.

All the more reason to contact your Senator. Lower the drinking age or make the age of enlistment higher. Adult enough to decide to become a sacrificial pawn, but not adult enough to drink a beer.

Kinda changing the subject.

I asked my high school math teacher to write me a recommendation letter for college. He politely refused, saying he could not in good conscience recommend me. I am grateful for him for letting me know, so I could ask another teacher.

More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.

Suffice to say we didn't get along.

> More than once he'd announced in class that he was grading the class on a curve, but me separately.

What was his public reason for doing so?

Let's just say the other kids complained that I was raising the curve.

So he didn't reject you because you were a poor student, but for some other reason? Sounds like you might want to consider what you could have done differently to improve on that outcome. Regardless of whether you agree with what s/he tells you, it's a chance to gain some valuable insights into what others think about you.

Apparently, I was pretty obnoxious in high school. It took me far too long to learn this. (And to learn when not to speak my opinion.) I would have been well served if I had swallowed pride and asked teachers (and peers) for some perspective on how my attitude was, frankly, self destructive.

You’re victim blaming somebody when they were a teenager with a power tripping asshole for a teacher…?

Oh, I know why. I was a brat.

I think your views on how kids view their peers who are good at math are outdated. For example, NASA gear has, fairly recently, become a fashion trend [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9tk0jw/w...

I graduated high school in 1998, was great at math, and most teachers liked me, some loved me. MAYBE if you're talking about going to high school in the 70's or 80's, or in a more small football-centered town or something, this was accurate at some point.

good to know. a drop in the ocean is a good start. I will buy a few.

my kids are still in k-12, nothing has really changed for them though.

>college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days,

A good interpretation of humans generally is 'giant baby monkeys', in that we have curiosity and openness consistent with juveniles but not with most adult animals.

>on the STEM subject, teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest,

This doesn't bear any resemblance to my experience of a not-so-special US public school in the 2000s.

I'm not saying your comment is without valid points, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater on your attitude about childhood.

> college is delaying young people to become mature, we're producing giant babies these days, thanks to endless parenting, online gaming, social screen time, now probably even metaverse, you name it.

It persists into the professional space, just look at how infantilizing Silicon Valley became, trying to turn the workplace into a playpen complete with propeller head hats.

My propeller hat is a dignified part of my professional attire, thank you very much.

Can you explain how those things are "infantilizing" beyond pure bias?

Instead of playing foosball and gaming online, we should be playing cards and drinking like previous generations?

Or maybe, the entire west is increasingly a gerontocracy, with the 18-64 working age group being squeezed harder in every way to support a constantly growing number of retirees, who also as a group obstruct construction and make the traditional markers of adulthood harder to achieve. To a 70 year old, everyone below 40 must look like a baby.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-dependency-ratio-old?...

> middle school kids are more keen about their gender or identities, or how awful US was in the past, or their hair color

Do you genuinely believe this stuff that youre typing? I know that conservative medias say this and use it as a boogeyman to get themselves into power, but do you truly believe it? Ive worked with elementary, middle, and high school kids for the last 5 years, in an area that conservatives constantly make fun of and call awful things, but none of that is even close to the reality.

Kids know that gay people exist (and are okay with that), and they know that they might want to look or act differently than they wouldve been forced to in the past.

Kids today are significantly more accepting of tech and STEM subjects than they were even just a few years ago. Its significantly more common and accepted to play video games, kids are interested in video and picture editing because of social media (like TikTok), and they are increasingly tech literate. None of these boogeyman topics you claim are true, but they are continually parroted by people who want to move our education system backwards.

And as a side note, > high school students must show how caring they're to the community

I personally think this is a great thing. We should encourage more community involvement with young people, especially things that help out disadvantaged community members and educate them about our government. Im surprised someone who parrots the original phrases from your comment would be against something like being caring in your community.

yes I believe it genuinely, as these are my three k-12 kids told me what's going on at school, and I got involved with school quite often, I can see those myself to some extent too. the middle school one actually told me she thinks at least 1/3 of her classmates are hard to tell their genders these days, and to greet a classmate the first sentence now should be: how should I address you? otherwise her classmates actually got offended if you got it wrong on the gender side.

my high school kids told me they are aware of those sensitive gender subjects at middle school and they feel it's more frequent these days.

Google will show you some data points, e.g. Gen Z (from 1995+) has close to 20% claiming to be LGBT+. Things changed a lot.

I'm neither a liberal or conservative, I consider myself independent.

What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what? We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember? How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too. Are we going to do the same?

The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves. When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right! With power has come all those things - not a commitment to truth, but disdain for being made to learn anything. God I hope the next generation doesn't follow or accomodate us. And to this day, some people I know in the prior generation still don't understand things that are normal to us now as adults, because we grew up with them. I know some that won't wear blue jeans because they see jeans as a symbol of a challenging culture.

They say progress happens one funeral at a time! :)

> What's wrong with those things? They are different from what I (and I guess you) knew and know, but so what?

The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.

> We did plenty that was shocking and new to our parents, and equally mocked - do you remember?

Who is “we?” Millennials, as a group, are the good kids compared to baby boomers. They have less sex, do less drugs, etc.

> How absurdly narrow-minded our parents seemed? We were mostly right too.

Our parents started down this road of self expression and denying the realities of life. Mostly they sobered up after the drug binges of the 1960s, but left millennials poorly positioned to handle the real world. We are lucky to live in a society our grandparents built, because I don’t think we could build that society again today.

> The next generation should not tether themselves at all to what is in our comfort zones; if they aren't going far beyond them, they aren't thinking for themselves.

The realities of human existence don’t change so fast. The basic mechanics of American life aren’t much different today compared to 1989. If people are rushing past the comfort zones of their parents, that means they’re increasingly living in a delusion detached from reality.

> When I was young I remember thinking that the old people were jaded, corrupt, and didn't even try to address their ignorance - and now that I'm 'old', I can see I was right!

People’s brains don’t fully develop until they’re 25. So if you believe the same things now as you did when you were young…

> The numbers are vastly higher than scientific estimates of how many people are in these groups. That suggests it’s become a form of self expression, which is just a way of denying reality.

I thought the data was based on surveys of how people identify themselves, which only shows that identification has changed with time. Maybe fluid gender identity is a stage of development that has been denied before; who knows? Why do you have to tell these people what to do with their lives?

Self-expression is denying reality? I don't know what that means, what one has to do with the other. One way of looking at it is that what is inside you is part of reality; you are part of reality. Anyway, you are criticizing middle schoolers for denying reality?

Again, why do you have to tell them what to do, what to feel? Who are you to do it?

> ...

The rest is mostly your self-expression, not some objective reality. You are welcome to it, of course.

> teens good at math are never teacher's favorites, instead they're called nerds and some are even isolated from the rest, it's quite the opposite in Asia, or even in Europe

Nah, no on is going to isolate you for being good at math. Literally, that does not happen. Isolation of kids that cant fit it does happen and some of those are good at math. But, the "being good at math" part is not what gets them isolated. It is the other stuff and behaviors, roughly in the "poor social skills" (may include "have hard time being assertive about own boundaries") that gets you isolated.

The quote I believe corresponds to "the expected civic responsibilities that an individual has in that society."

There are many ways to prepare an individual for that responsibility. In western nations, that is often done more through a formal educational program than through the community and family.

This also isn't a "you must have X amount of civic responsibility" as different societies are looking for adults to have different amounts of responsibility within that society.

While American college is to an extent the deferment of responsibility, in many cases it is also the exposure to a wider range of cultures than one experienced up through high school. It is that exposure to other people and culture - learning to get along with a roommate or doing your own laundry in a gradual process that college presents.

In that respect, it is not a deferment of dealing with the real world, but rather a gradual introduction to the broader world. While the 18 year old American may be able to do unskilled labor and get along (tolerably) with siblings, being able to work in an office or understand that the upbringing of the driver of the carpool isn't the same as yours - that comes from that exposure to other people and cultures.

We talk and I've commented on posts about 'misinformation' 'propaganda' the role of social media and pernicious tentacles of marketing. The amount of surveillance, terrible software promoted as amazing (remember the articles about Shotspotter? or LIDAR? or facial recognition by airlines?)

We're already doing a pretty terrible job educating people and it shows. How much worse does it get when its outsourced to the 'community'? Communities in the US (and everywhere) are fragmented, class stratified, religiously bound structures that we have seen the detriment of when it comes to civic participation. Just check out the IG page of any former evangelical or mormon female.

A secular democracy requires education and time to participate in civic and civil society. That education must imho be grounded in not just how to think, but also the history of humanity. Otherwise we are signing ourselves up for a return to much darker days.

Yes. I fear that this is exactly what is missed by people who expect University to operate as a transaction where middle class people invest money in order to obtain membership in to an elite cast, which is a system where the state is treating these investments as a private enterprise which needs public-sector subsidy, and the university is put in to a system of economic incentives where it becomes an institution for producing people who corporations need, and in turn, the indebted student is lumbered with economic constraints which channel them into being who a corporation needs.

Since you brought Bangladeshis into it, my experience with those that came to the US (mostly for graduate studies) (all guys):

1. They complain that they have to cook

2. They complain that they have to do laundry.

3. They complain they have to iron their clothes.

4. They complain they have to tidy up the apartments.

5. They mostly care about sports, movies, and if they're not religious, getting drunk. Of course, that's not necessarily true for those that go to top universities for their PhDs, but those are the minority, in any case.

6. They boast about how great it was that they didn't take humanities in their undergrad. Talking to them, it's also clear they have little understanding of the arts.

I've also met some very responsible, intellectual Bangladeshis.

There are problem people in every society.