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'Everything got worse': Gen Z express frustration, regret after Trump vote
(navigatorresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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related:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gen-z-is-the-first-generation-dumber-than-their-parents-neuroscientist-claims/
It's not about the kids tho...
It's about how instead of making them think, we taught them to just fucking Google shit and believe what it says.
"Oregon Trail generation" who grew up using computers but still having to learn legacy methods was the sweet spot, and there's absolutely nothing stopping us from returning to that.
Absolutely none of us use the Dewey Decimal system, but having to go to libraries and physically walk around pulling cards and finding books built critical thinking.
Typing in "Harry Potter" on a computer and getting a PDF doesn't build any skills.
The human brains biggest strength is offloading and being lazy. If the system thinks it doesn't need skills because they can be offloaded, it just won't learn them. Then at 22-23 when it's harder to learn those skills, gen z is finding out they actually need them.
They can be helped, but what's more important is making sure all those little kids right now start getting real educations again.
yea, that's the problem. dumb parents, not only raising their own kids to be dumb, but also voting to raise everyone's kids to be dumb
No.
This may shock you but dumb people have become parents thru all of human history.
We corrected that as a society by creating an education system, shockingly recently in America. I have an uncle who "went to school" in a one room schoolhouse with an outhouse. There was one other student withing 4 years of his age. He's not dumb, but he's always been uneducated. A real education and he could have done anything he wanted.
We fixed it as a society and then stopped caring about education as society because for some reason people thought IQ would just magically always increase naturally, and prior gains weren't just getting everyone on the same level of education.
Stop acting like a conservative and pretending the next generation is only the responsibility of their parents.
The next generation of society is everyone's problem, so it's society's job to educate them.
yea. "society." which i guess is distinct from the parents that make up society?
yea, everyone wants to be able to tell everyone else how to raise their kids, but unfortunately that's not how the world works. if some kid comes home and says the history teacher told them the civil war was about ending slavery, and the parents say that's all lies, it was about the north victimizing the south, then do you honestly think that kid is going to listen to the teacher (society) over their parents?
good job putting me in my place though
I'm just shocked to see people agree with MAGA on the topic of education but claim to not be MAGA...
Like, can you at least say that you think public education should be a thing tho?
yes, public education should be a thing, is important, etc.
but despite all this public education, if parents are negating it at every turn, then what that means is that dumb kids come from dumb parents. yes, dumb kids come from smart parents too, thanks to society telling them they need to be on instagram 20 hours a day.
you can call me maga if that makes you feel like you've hurt my feelings, but i assure you, i don't care what you think. parents have a bigger role in raising kids than society ever has, and ever will. i'm not claiming whether that's good or bad either way, just that it's how it is. we do absolutely need high quality public education rooted in facts and science.
but who is sabotaging this? dumb parents
How utterly ignorant of you, on what schooling is, and education is not.
wandering around lemmy pretty much proves this.
i work at a community college which includes the county's "early college" which is pretty much 9th-12th grade high school age kids who qualified to take AA/AS courses for higher ed credit at the same time as their high school curriculum. what i see is pretty much it's not the kids that are the problem. for the most part, dumb kids are the result of dumb parents, which there are a lot of in my redneck mountain town. and, surprise, dumb parents have a lot more kids than smart parents.
yea, gen z may be dumb, but it's not gen z that made them that way
edit: i want to add, there's nothing inherently wrong with a lack of intelligence. some of the best people i've ever known are not intellectuals. it's character that makes people worthwhile. empathy. how you treat people who can't do anything for you. if you're accepting of people regardless of whether they hold the same beliefs, values, religion, have the same skin color, and everything else, then i would choose to be around you instead of the dickhead who's the smartest person in the room. fuck that guy
it's telling that these fucking dickheads are trying, desperately, to paint empathy as some kind of flaw or weakness. empathy is how the human species survived past the stone age
FYI the "Early college" thing is called dual enrollment.
yea, there's dual enrollment where the local high school kids take some classes, but there's also early college whose campus is on our campus. they are separate; not the same thing.
thanks though