MangoCats

that has been around since Bush, and 15 years ago it wasn’t as bad as it is today.

Real change takes time. Trickle down started with Reagan and it's still getting worse.

no child left behind on crack now.

Revenge of the Nerds came out in 1984. 40 years later we've got revenge of the stupid and proud of it. NCLB started the threats of de-funding failing schools, now we're just defunding all the schools.

obnoxious parents and admins who have no spines. Oh, and the shitty teachers who don’t teach but babysit. The whole industry is fucked.

Those issues were around in the 1970s, and probably for hundreds of years before as well - I just didn't experience any of it personally until the 1970s - both my parents were young teachers. Obnoxious parents aren't actually as bad as apathetic parents in a lot of ways and apathetic parents have dominated throughout history - 90%+ Admins with no spines, admins who serve the almighty dollar first last and always - I met plenty of those throughout my schooling from 2nd grade through my Masters' degree. Shitty teachers who just babysit, plenty of those 50 years ago. And to hear my parents tell it every day after work in the car, the whole industry was fucked then too. Sexism and racism was alive and well in Florida in those years I was in school, intolerance for gays was the norm, complete denial that lesbians actually existed was another norm... there has been actual progress on those fronts, but now the revenge of the proudly stupid is trying to push back. And the proudly stupid were always there, they just didn't have enough self-esteem to stand up for themselves as a group in the past.

As long as you've got somebody willing to feed you and change your diaper - you might actually be happier.

The ice pick has evolved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37313441/

Those phone cords were a mess, always tangled and over stretched... 5GHz house-range wireless landlines were peak.

We used to be a proper society

When was that?

Digital literacy should be exactly about not getting used by tech engineered to hook you and grab your attention, instead using the tech to give you actual value.

Bad administrators are the worst part of the school systems. There's a mix of good and bad at all levels, but a bad administrator can screw up the education of students even when the students have what would have been good teachers.

One of the more chilling moments of the '90s for me was when they put the child safety restraint seat laws in at federal level. Now, I had a newborn and a toddler at the time, and I was voluntarily putting them in the best safety seats we could get, but to me what those laws were was training the populace, from the earliest ages (up through age 5 I think) that they MUST COMPLY with the OVERWHELMING FORCE of adults bigger than them and submit to being physically restrained the whole time they are in a car. It's like they were prepping the population to be less resistant to arrest and physical restraints.

I always thought homework was some employers' wet dream about getting their employees to not only work for the company while in-office, but also to work all night long too. And I know some "go getter carreer oriented" people with aspirations to management who did exactly that for decades. Personally, I rate my work product and volume as "optimal" with around 30 hours a week of focused devotion to task, beyond that I do more bad work which has less total value than if I just did the 30 hours and knocked off to let my brain rest, refresh and reset to do another good 30 hours next week.

If you have any concern about "fair" - you haven't experienced much of real life.

everyone is getting passed along

In the US that was codified into "No Child Left Behind" - one of the worst things to happen to US education, ever.

I agree with all your points, but want to add one: cheating with AI should be redirected to effective use of AI as a tool. I would approach a writing class topic like this:

1. Welcome... as our first assignment you are going to switch off all technological assistance and write a paper for me on XYZ, just using what you know off the top of your head here during class. Turn this in and keep a copy.

2. In classroom, tech limited to non-AI research - read and cite original sources, improve your paper with the research, check all of your assumptions, correct them when appropriate, cite backup when you find it. Does your conclusion change? Again, freeze a copy of this iteration.

3. Homework "use AI" (with no instructor direction as to how). Write the paper using all available technological resources (including AI) now, provide helpful starter links to AI resources that "can help," then compare that to your previous versions.

Instructor / teaching assistants now grade papers 1, 2 and 3 with maybe 10% total weight in the final grade for each.

4. In classroom guidance on how to use AI well, with copious embarassing examples of AI used poorly (names withheld, but students might recognize their work...)

5. Homework: for any students who turned in "less than ideal" papers in 3), try again. Fail again. Fail better this time.

6. In classroom pop-quiz: just like the first assignment, switch off all technological assistance and write the paper on XYZ just using what you know during class.

Grade 5 and 6 for points, 30 points for 5, and 40 points for 6.

In mandatory attendance schools, some will do more poorly on 6) than 1), that's just the nature of the setting. Those who want to learn should be able to improve along the way, rather dramatically.

In the late 70s / 80s we didn't have cell phones, we had pocket electronic games - and that was just obvious: lunch / recess time only stuff, duh. Cell phones have that nasty "safety communication lifeline" hook that single purpose electronic games don't have, but in reality they're just 10,000x more addictive entertainment widgets than those old pocket games ever were.

I think a lot of U.S. schools got lazy about enforcing "phone off and put away" in class - to the point that kids feel like it's a right. Same thing actually has crept all the way up into the armed forces even on deployment. If anybody were to ask me where we need to start drawing the line, I'd say right there: if you're forward deployed at sea, you do NOT get unfettered access to a personal communication device that would have been the wet dream of every spy of the last century. Hell, if you're enlisted at all you should have an armed forces standard issue phone for all your communication needs, complete with a pre-enlistment acknowledgement that all those communications ARE recorded and you WILL be held accountable for EVERYTHING you communicate through them. Personal phones should be locked down and even less accessible than firearms, because they ARE more dangerous to the missions.