It's even more general than that: effort is antithetical to cool. Being seen making effort is as embarrassing as failure itself, perhaps moreso -- there's a peculiar glory in spectacular failure. Parents these days are taught (well, speaking for myself here) to praise effort over results. As if parents can overturn culture so easily...

Is this still true? I thought the current school generation started to like nerds more because that's who's doing the coolest jobs / companies

Do they like nerds more but refuse to learn as much as nerds because tech like CoPilot enables you to not care about technical details?

To me it seems like “school is lame” is more tolerant of nerds, not necessarily interested in learning more.

It’s like the rise of popular science fiction movie genre. It’s good at a high level but not as impressive at the ground level if most of it is super hero sub-genre movies with all very similar content.

Well, when students are not kept back for failing, they are given an incentive to fail.

Students probably fail because of external factors (depression, anxiety from poor home life) not because they’re a dumb-dumb. When the course work requires you to understand subjects that have no real world use or your curriculum doesn’t teach you how to apply the education, you’re incentivized to fail as well.

> Students probably fail because of external factors (depression, anxiety from poor home life) not because they’re a dumb-dumb.

Standards may seem harsh, but eventually it's way harsher to have no effective standards at all.

> When the course work requires you to understand subjects that have no real world use or your curriculum doesn’t teach you how to apply the education, you’re incentivized to fail as well.

True. If students are not interested in learning, they should have a pragmatic curriculum.