> There was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are society "heros".

Is this true today? It's repeated pretty often, but I have my doubts. It almost seems like it's one of those things that gets repeated through the years ("back in the day, it was cool to be smart, but now we have Idiocracy IRL") over and over.

I might be wrong, but I'm guessing I'm on the younger side here (given your reference to the 70s), having graduated college a few years ago. From looking at my generation and interacting with our successors I get the impression that culture has (for a long time now) kinda shifted towards it being fine and good (if not cool per se) to be smart / a nerd / whatever. If anything it seems like, IDK, 70s and 80s? pop culture had the whole "the jocks vs. the nerds" thing, there were stereotypes of smart people having no friends, it was a social death sentence to have a geeky hobby, etc. That doesn't seem like it's the case anymore. Part of this is probably down to schools not really having centralized, stereotypical "popular kids" anymore, but if I had to pick out popular people from my high school, they were plenty smart. And it was never seen as uncool or weird (outside of jokes) to play video games, play DnD, do theater or robotics, or whatever.

The way people talk about this stuff you'd think the whole 80s movie stereotype of "he's reading a book, what a nerd!" and giving someone a swirly still exists in real life. I don't think I ever saw anything close to that, nor do I ever get that impression from people younger than me. Obviously, this is all super regional and dependent on socioeconomic groups and all that stuff, but I'm just sharing my perspective.

There is, of course, a distinction between being smart/nerdy/geeky/whatever and having crappy social skills. They overlap, obviously (and probably correlate), but they are distinct. The latter was never cool or admirable, and I wonder if people miss that and conflate the two.

statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.

The median is slowly falling, but the quartiles are where the extremes really highlight. On one side (which sounds like it might be you) you have colleges more competitive than ever that basically require your entire middle and high school career to revolve around minmaxing a resume before you are even an adult. On the other end you have high schoolers unable to spell that are being passed. So there's polarization on the ends where kids are smarter and dumber than ever at the same time.

Can't really speak about reputation. it all depends on your group and who you want to appeal to. There are "cool smart kids" and "uncool smart kids" for a variety of reasons. Because social skills are relative. Social skills are all about making others feel good in your presence and there's no one style that will universally do this.

> statistically, yes. We've been falling in rankings for K-12 for decades now. Schools have been gettting less funding, especially teachers that are starting to leave for other careers like a starbucks barista due to pay.

My bad, I'm not looking to contest that part, there are definitely serious issues with the school system. I just don't think very much if any of it boils down to "there was a time being smart was considered good and to be admired. Now, stupid people and bullies are heroes" as if the kids are intentionally being dumb because it's cool / peer pressure. It's easy to be dumb - especially when we have so many distractions available to us - but I wouldn't call it cool or pin it on some kind of peer pressure thing.

But yes I agree with you, the school system has its troubles (the stats obviously speak for themselves). Funding and teacher pay are probably the biggest factor, though I'd also include classroom distractions (phones, basically), a lack of ability to enforce order in the classroom, and probably parental support as well, off the top of my head.

well, "cool" is too subjective to really say much, especially when only thinking on a micro level. I think a better phrasing of that is that "dumbness" is being more mainstream today (in the US) than before. Some states are back to banning more books than ever in schools, the country was split over something as basic as medicine ( a few choosing horse de-wormer over a professionally approved vaccine), etc.

There was always such conspiracy, but never talked about at such a scale. But not too much of this has to do with techies outside of "tech made it easy for conspirators to gather".

When you look at data, it is not as bad as you paint it to be.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/the-u-s-is-losing-its-compet...

  The U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science when testing was last administered in 2022.
  
  The top five math-scoring countries in 2022 were all in Asia.
   
  U.S. students' math scores have remained steady since 2003.   

  Their science scores have been about the same since 2006.
  
  The IMD World Competitiveness Center reports that the U.S. ranked 12th in its 2024 Competitiveness Report after ranking first in 2018.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/most-amer...

I'd say 16th (<20th percentile) is really bad when the US is 2nd in spending (behind Luxemburg, apparently) per student in the world. especially if science is the best statistic to show to begin with.

falling from 1st to 12th in 6 years in competitiveness is even more concerning. Maybe COVID really did ruin attention span.

If you removed the reference to the 70s, This comment could have been stated at any time from 1750 to today and only by grammar would you be able to pick out when it was made.

A slightly different take on this was a school I attended in Mississippi --- classes were divided between academic and social --- academic classes (science, math, languages) were attended at one's ability level (w/ a four grade cap for students through 4th grade, so a 4th grader couldn't take higher than 8th grade classes), while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were taken at one's grade level.

Some faculty members were accredited as faculty at a local college, so students could take college classes once they finished high school classes --- it was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and also be awarded a four-year college degree.

Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court ruled it an illegal educational system since it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.

> it conferred an advantage on those students who were able to take advantage of it, without a matching compensation for those students who weren't.

Waiting for them to go after the entire private school system. Any day now...

It will be interesting to see (as someone without skin in the game 'cause I live in Sweden but having seen a similar type of downward development towards 'equity' here) whether the incoming government will make good on its promise to abolish the department of education which was put in place by Carter in 1979. While the press is doing its best to portray this as a terrible idea which will create mayhem and lead to the quality of education to fall even further it is a fact that the quality of education has markedly deteriorated since its inception while its mission is supposed to be the opposite [1]. Most of the news I've seen regarding education in the USA has trended towards the negative: programs for gifted pupils are shut down because they lead to a decrease in 'equity' where some pupils gain advantages over others, the debacle around extended school closures during the SARS2 unpleasantness, the oversized influence of the (extremely politically biased) teachers' unions, the lack of school choice in many places combined with the influence of districting - where you live decided which school you attend - and more. To me it seems clear the department has failed in its mission and with that needs to be either closed down or overhauled. Given that it is a relatively young department and that educational outcomes were better before it was created - keeping in mind that this does not necessarily indicate a causal relation - it makes sense to abolish this department and relegate essential tasks back to where they were before it was created.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/US-Department-of-Education

The private school system (absent vouchers) is not subject to the legal entanglements and requirements of a public education system.

Sounds like a great argument for someone with a special interest to make private schools more appealing (not that I think you have that. Just people who can tell public schools not to be too good).