For this pre-Christmas competition your suggestions, as always, should appear in Comments.
Author: Kim du Toit
Maybe A Good Reason
This piece from the redoubtable Joanne Jacobs makes a few interesting points:
Teens’ homework time fell significantly in the pandemic era, writes Jean M. Twenge on Generation Tech. new data from 2022 and 2023 shows the average time spent on homework fell 24 percent for 10th-graders — from an hour to about 45 minutes — and 17 percent for eighth-graders.
Furthermore, the percentage of students saying they do no homework “spiked,” she writes. In 2021, 6 percent of high school sophomores did no homework. That’s up to 10.3 percent. Eleven percent of eighth-graders said they did no work at home in 2021. Now it’s 15.2 percent.
As a longtime homeschooler, I have serious doubts about the efficacy of homework in the educational process anyway, unless it’s reading prep for the next day’s class, or revision for a test. But here’s an interesting observation:
Twenge thinks “students have given up on doing hours of homework, and teachers have given up on holding students to high standards.” Everybody’s “phoning it in.”
But here’s the really salient point:
The 15 percenters who are working for their A’s have a right to complain about stress. They’re doing homework and extracurriculars and community service to impress some jaded college admissions officer. But they’re not the norm.
Perhaps “the norm” as a group has decided that all that prep for college admission is a waste of time because they have no desire to attend college, get into serious debt and have no guarantee of a job once they graduate? Just a thought.
Then:
The homework research aligns with a slide in 18-year-olds’ work ethic: As they leave high school, they are less likely to say they plan to work overtime or make their jobs a priority. In a sense, they’re “quiet quitting” before they even enter the workforce. Teens are less likely to work after school and in the summer, missing out on lessons about how to meet workplace expectations and manage their time and money.
Hmm. Of course, at some point reality is going to kick in and they’ll either acquire that work ethic or, more likely, become life dropouts.
Or they’ll get a clue and start doing “muscular work”, as Mike Rowe and Victor Davis Hanson put it, and start trade apprenticeships — for which, it needs hardly be said, most of that shit they learned at school, never mind college, is unnecessary and there’s the added benefit of being paid to work instead of paying for a dubious benefit (e.g. college).
The motivated ones, as always, won’t have a problem: engineering, medicine and the like will always be attractive to a core group.
My guess is that Gen Z is looking at what we now call “education” and realizing that it’s all a waste of time. (I’m not even going to analyze the real bullshit like Gender Studies and similar fluff courses.)
Here’s the thing. As we all know, education occurs only under two conditions: fear and love.
- Fear: if I don’t learn this, bad things will happen to me, and
- Love: this topic really appeals to me and I want to pursue it.
We don’t have to worry about the “love” part: as I said above, there’ll always be a market for that — whether academic or practical.
What’s going to be really interesting is how Gen Z responds to fear.
Out Of Control
Why did I never have school trips like this one?
Head teacher struck off for school ski trip to Switzerland where one girl pupil slept with three boys, another had sex with a boy for £30
…and unbelievably, it gets even better from there.
Sheeesh… and all the school trips I ever experienced were to museums and other such boring nonsense.
As to how all this happened, this sentence may provide a clue:
A Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) misconduct panel heard Mrs Drury was principal of the CP Riverside school in Nottingham, a school which provides alternative education for children aged 13-18 with behavior or social issues.
Wow… who could have predicted this outcome? (“Only about 99% of all sentient adults, Kim.”)
Well, I guess that all falls under the umbrella of “alternative education” now, dunnit?
Oh, Stop It
Via Insty:
The old saying goes: “Nothing concentrates the mind like the threat of imminent execution.”
Well from Poland’s point of view, nothing would concentrate the mind like a belligerent Russia on its border. Hence the preparation of the youth for just such a scenario.
And before anyone of the hoplophobic persuasion starts wailing about “militarizing the youth” or some such twaddle, let it be known that one of the best preventative measures against predatory invasion is knowing that the intended victim is filled with a motivated — and armed — population, ready to flay the skin off the invaders.
Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s warning to Imperial Japan about America being a nation with “a rifle behind every blade of grass” seems appropriate here, as is a reminder of a universally-armed and never-invaded Switzerland.
And the video that accompanies the above tweet is especially tasty.
I’ve just added Poland to my bucket list of places I want to visit.
Scenes From A Parking Lot
…in this case, somewhere in north Texas:
Priceless.
Also, theft-proof.
Hold Off, Willya?
And now we are being treated to this little bagatelle:
President-elect Donald Trump told reporters at a press conference on Monday at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, that he would consider pardoning New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in September.
If I may be blunt, Mr. Soon-To-Be-POTUS: there’s way too much talk of “pardoning” going on for my liking.
Yeah, I know: FJB pardoned his son (of a gun-related conviction, no less), and so on and so forth. But that doesn’t mean that everyone — including you — should be throwing the stuff around like it’s confetti at a wedding.
Here’s my thought: save the pardons for the people who are really worthy of a pardon, such as the Jan 6 tribe, and leave the wheels of justice to grind assholes like Hizzoner into the same kind of dust that we ordinary folks would be facing. Now granted, these “corruption” charges were only brought by NYfC’s federal prosecutors after Adams give the Biden Administration the finger on border policy — in other words, said charges were of the same spiteful ilk that these shitheads brought to bear on Trump himself.
But why not just go after the federal prosecutors, who are surely as deserving of censure as anyone else? All this pardon stuff is like handing out snakebite anti-venom kits instead of just chopping off the poisonous snake’s bitey head with a shovel. (I know, decapitating government lawyers with a shovel may be problematic because of that Constitutional “krool & unyooshull” thing, but I think the point has been made.)
January 21, 2025 just cannot come quickly enough.