American Idiots

A Pink Floyd meme about double negatives taken from Flickr.

People often say that children are our future. This is in fact the case; today’s children are going to one day be adults, and they will have to keep our society going via the wide variety of jobs that must be done. We will need future doctors, future construction workers, future custodians, future air traffic controllers…you get the idea.

Despite the importance of training current children to be prepared for adult life and the workforce, K-12 teachers are notoriously underpaid, at least in the United States. The average American public school teacher made just under $70,000 during the 2022-23 school year. Maybe it’s more in other countries, but in one of the nations with the most “hard power” globally, this is a crisis.

Teaching has always been a difficult, demanding job, but it’s only become more so in recent years with both the rise of school violence and the increasingly-unhinged school board Karens. It’s gotten a lot worse since 2021 or so…more on that later.

Now, it’s commonly said that the Republican Party wants students to be dumb. If kids don’t know how to think critically, if they have no idea what’s going on, they will vote for the GOP because they don’t know any better. That’s what they say.

For what it’s worth, I agree with that assessment.

As a progressive myself, I agree that education is incredibly important, and that teachers should be paid more. I’m disturbed by the increasing number of school boards that have promoted the teaching of falsehoods like creationism or the idea that systemic racism has never existed in the United States. To be clear, I was only taught about creationism in the context of “here’s what some people think, and here’s the evidence that they’re wrong”, and I graduated high school prior to the critical race theory panic. 

But then again, I live in Massachusetts, considered to have some of the world’s best schools (if you don’t get shot, that is). Forrest Valkai, on the other hand, is from Oklahoma, where the educational standards are more…questionable. This video of Valkai’s, for instance, claims that only 28% of American students are properly taught evolution, which is just insane. If students aren’t even taught basic biology, perhaps it’s no wonder so many adults here deny climate change. 

However, the creation-evolution “controversy” is just the tip of the iceberg. I think even a lot of progressives, who by and large value education, don’t fully appreciate the crisis that’s barreling toward us like one of Japan’s bullet trains.

First, let’s talk about the dumbing down of educational curricula. I graduated from a pretty small high school in 2019. In 11th grade, we read classic American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. They’re considered contenders, in fact, for the title of Great American Novel, and even if you don’t personally enjoy them, you can appreciate that they’re well-written and contain complex themes. 

In 12th grade, my English course was about British literature. I had to read Pride and Prejudice and conduct a research project on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. During both my junior and senior years of high school, there was a lot of writing involved, as should be expected of a course on literature. Even beyond what my educational institution required of me, I started writing fanfiction around my sixteenth birthday and continued off and on for a number of years. 

The point is, I knew how to write. And the sad truth is, lots of kids these days don’t.

More than that, however, is the fact that today’s students don’t even know how to read. According to this piece on the Education Trust website, the “nation’s report card” found that less than half of U.S. fourth-graders (43%, to be exact) scored at or above a proficient level in reading. For what it’s worth, this number was considerably lower for students of color or those with disabilities; given the aforementioned systemic racism, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Author Jeff Kinney with Pope Francis, who is reading one of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books. Image taken from the Wall Street Journal.

One of America’s foremost literacy advocates these days is Jeff Kinney, the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Given that those books aren’t the most intellectually stimulating fare out there, Kinney may appear an unlikely face of this movement. But he apparently runs his own bookstore, and the efforts of Kinney, a practicing Catholic, even caught the attention of Pope Francis some years ago.

Even though my brother and I are both in our mid-twenties, we still think Wimpy Kid is the funniest shit ever. It’s basically a realistic dystopia told in the most hilarious way possible. And hey, if it gets today’s children reading, then that’s awesome.

However, Kinney himself stated in a 2018 BBC interview that he “couldn’t get his kids off Fortnite”. He was able to save other peoples’ children from the brain-rot, but not his own. And indeed, Fortnite, theoretically one of the most addictive video games ever developed, is not the only obstacle to making kids read.

There’s also TikTok. Earlier today as I write this, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the social media platform could be banned in the United States. To be clear, this is a worrying case of censorship, and something else will fill the void of brain-rot like Skibidi Toilet or whatnot. 

That being said, I’m not going to shed too many tears for TikTok, because it’s a cancer on society. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s reduced the average attention span, which makes sense considering how that platform really emphasizes instant gratification and entertainment. 

And hey, I get it - I’m autistic. I still adore rocking chairs and hammocks. Even now, I need stimulation sometimes; it just takes the form of vocal stims and off-key singing these days. But we need to be able to tolerate boredom sometimes, something I’ve learned the hard way all too often. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, a time period during which many of us were on our screens constantly.

Now let’s talk about the horrifying implications of declining attention spans and dramatically reduced academic performance. 

Imagine a world where a heart surgeon needs to consult ChatGPT in order to know how to perform a bypass operation. Imagine an architect who’s unaware which construction materials are most resistant to hurricanes, an ever-increasing threat in an age of climate crisis. Imagine a shortage of pilots because students can’t study for their exams. 

And picture a world where there aren’t nearly enough teachers to instill a work ethic in modern children. Given the difficulties and dangers I’ve highlighted above, I don’t blame any individual for not wanting to go into the field of education. However, someone’s gotta do it. 

Ultimately, this is why I read. Yes, it keeps me from doomscrolling and gives me something to do whenever I just want to run my fist through a wall at Trump’s threats to invade Canada or Greenland. 

But I also want to keep my mind sharp and resist the brain-rot. I’m going to maintain my intellectual curiosity and academic integrity, because the alternative is that society will get…

Movie poster for “Dumb and Dumber.” Image taken from eBay.