Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.
Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. You literally have retarded development. Kids like that will never be able to achieve to the same level.
Here's the article if you're interested:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
...like how all of the GOP voted against federal aid for the hurricane victims, esp. several in southern states that got hit.
What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.
Are all the people parroting this stuff actually believers? My instinct is that the majority tried to grab the bull by the horns by jumping on the Trump schtick when he took power and are now left riding this increasingly deranged and unpredictable animal. At this point they can do nothing but try to keep holding on lest they be trampled by the beast they created.
But there's also gotta be true believers in there, and yeah, I don't know what those people actually want, and it's pretty scary.
I have a friend who teaches journalism at a small, private liberal arts school in the midwest. He's been teaching for over 40 years. He says that, beggining in the late 2010s he noticed incoming students began to really struggle. Then, pre-pandemic he would recommend that they use the on-campus reading and writing labs to get help, lean on TAs, use office hours, etc. Post-pandemic, he says he now recommends that they drop his course because they aren't prepared at all, even with all of the help the campus provides. He says that this went from a small % of his course enrollment to being > 50% in the span of a decade.
Small N but I've gone into overdrive to teach my own (very young) children how to read and interpret literature.
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.