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Honestly - When I see these attitudes from 16-24 year-olds, I simply think, "Uneducated about reality, as you would expect at that age" I don't necessarily "wo

• s_kilk 11y ago
  Yeah, "young people" are dumbasses, but for some reason we give much credance to their survey answers.
  • Shivetya 11y ago
    you can be sure some politician will try to capitalize on it. the question I have is, where do they get the idea that this is acceptable? What are they teaching in schools?
    • smtddr 11y ago
      I think acceptable is the default for most behaviors. Give into whatever urge you have, etc. It's age/experience that eventually labels things as unacceptable.
      • s_kilk 11y ago
        Pretty much. They've yet to live in the real world, experience things and gain insight into how things work. Unless they've a good reason to believe otherwise most things will be 'acceptable' by default. I'm sure you could poll a cohort of <21s to tell you that thermonuclear obliteration is 'acceptable', if only because they've never actually thought about it or the consequences. That result wouldn't tell us the world at large is heading straight for nuclear war, it tells us our respondents are morons.
    • smorrow 11y ago
      Competitiveness, for one thing. Then there's the play deprivation, which isn't too good for the social skills in general, and externalises your locus of control. The topic at hand, paranoia, or at least distrustfulness, is practically defined by having an external locus of control. While we're on the topic of trust, kids today aren't exactly treated with much trust. Are they even trusted to stay at home unattended without getting themselves in some accident? And then there's the whole system of school, which is specifically founded on not trusting children (to self-educate, which is what they're genetically programmed to do...). The implicit message they're receiving is that people are guilty until proven otherwise.
• smorrow 11y ago
  If there's one thing we've established by now, it's that unsolicited instruction doesn't work: * Merrel et al, "How effective are school bullying intervention programs?" * Smith et al, "The effectiveness of whole-school antibullying programs". Not to mention all those ant-drug classes they have in America that don't work. It's true for academic subjects too. The declining interest in science as people go through school is well-documented: * Eccles et al, "Negative effects of traditional middle schools on students' motivation", * Harter, "A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic orientation in the classroom", * Lepper et al, "Instrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations in the classroom: Age differences and academic correlates", which, together with this result: Vedder-Weiss and Fortus, "Adolescent's declining motivation to learn science: Inevitable or not?", proves that it's the schooling that's causing it, and not, say, a natural part of growing up: this last paper uses schools that don't teach you anything you don't want to learn (democratic schools). (I think that compulsory, curriculum-based computer programming stuff should be kept out of schools for this reason, too.) Since democratic schools are private schools, you could make the argument that there's a socioeconomic status thing involved, where rich people "are just smarter". I'd counter by saying that homeschoolers don't show any significant variation in academics w.r.t. wealth, and that I don't see any reason why it should be different for democratic schooling, which is practically group homeschooling. > Uneducated about reality, as you would expect at that age People would know more about the real world if they weren't stuck in a building all day.