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▲ Ekaros a day ago | parent | next [-]

What changed with teachers? As if they were doing same thing as previously you would expect pretty much same result. But clearly something changed somewhere and it might not be the teachers. It might be for example be the tools they have...

▲ JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Perhaps teachers are just useless

Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort? They were fine until then, but then suddenly collectively and globally decided to start sucking?

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dan-robertson a day ago | parent [-]

I disagree with the grandparent comment, but you could imagine a few teacher related causes:

- Maybe the better teachers retired or quit due to burnout/better opportunities (the pando surely increased both of these and I think one could imagine reasons for better teachers to disproportionately stop teaching). One thing we observe is the best decile being a lot less affected than the average or worst, which vaguely lines up with the hypothesis. I didn’t try to look into attrition or retirement rates.

- There could be a new teaching method that is popular with teachers, teachers’ unions, administrators, or governments but which is actually quite ineffective. My weak understanding is that the quality of education research is very poor and that evidence-based decision making for how to teach is extremely rare, so this also feels plausible. I think many HN readers would have seen stories about math teaching in SF public schools, and there’s also the positive case of Mississippi seeing great successes from some teaching methods that are supported by good evidence. In some sense this isn’t really a case of teachers being bad.

	▲	upboundspiral a day ago \| parent [-]
		There is a concerted attack on the teaching profession, that's why education is terrible. Teachers at the middle / high school level are not allowed to fail kids anymore. Parents are extremely litigious in America, suing schools over every little thing. Admins don't want to deal with that + their school's funding is tied to attendance / outcomes, so together they pressure the teachers to lower their standards. Add into this the tech ologopoly trying to get kids hooked on their products young, pushing for chromebooks and google classroom when there have been numerous studies showing handwriting is important for retaining information. The quality of student (on average) has also decreased thanks to tech. On average, kids are watching brainrot while their parents are trying to make ends meet, instead of reading or educating themselves. Teaching is a thankless job. You have lots of unpaid hours (teachers need to prep lessons outside of school time, need to grade papers outside of school time, etc). I think a lot of people also severely underestimate the effort needed to keep 30 rambunctious kids on track. It truly drains you. Given all this, there is no surprise at the outcomes.

▲ Henchman21 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow, in just one comment you have demonized:

  - teachers
  - unions
  - history
    - as books
    - about specific people
    - about specific topics

You seem to be an incarnation of an actor acting in bad faith with a highly ideological agenda. Perhaps give it a rest?

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throw93038383 a day ago | parent [-]

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	▲	Henchman21 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		As the child of two public school teachers, you don’t have the first clue what you’re talking about. But then, I feel I was right in my initial assessment: you’re an ideological shit-stirrer. Stop stirring up shit.
	▲	wbxp99 a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		FOH “both sides”. Trump is a cretin

▲ watwut a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Black history and gender theory are super useful today.

Understanding them makes you understand Hegseth, Trump and Iran war a lot better.

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AlexandrB a day ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that understanding gender theory helps understand Iran a lot better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Iran

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throw93038383 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent [-]

I’d honestly argue—in 2026—it’s more important for Americans to understand black history today than the Vietnam war. The idiots who keep propelling Presidents into the Oval who repeat Vietnam’s mistakes in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran are folks with a terrible understanding of our racial history and way too much surface knowledge about big guns and materiel.

What currently constitutes these studies seems to be a mix of propaganda and bullshit. But that sort of underlines the point that we have an impoverished set of common facts.

	▲	ndriscoll a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's probably pretty important to teach that the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Saddam's WMDs, and that the history of the last half century has been the federal government constantly starting wars for no benefit to the American people, often under false pretenses. While we're at it we can teach how the government conducted a biological attack on San Francisco to see what would happen if there were a biological attack on San Francisco, sold weapons to terrorists, let people's syphilis go untreated intentionally so they could see what happens (to be fair that falls under black history), conducted torture experiments on Americans (possibly accidentally creating the unabomber), was caught spying on all of us, and developed plans that they brought to the president to conduct false flag attacks on Americans to start another war. But they definitely wouldn't still do any of that. And the other things people say are crazy conspiracy theories.