It's not just about parents, it's about our (western) society as a whole. While Germany has a bigger problems because of massive immigration, all this sound familiar for all teachers from Eastern-Europe to the US. We stopped treating people as being accountable for their own actions. This is true for parents, children etc. It's OK to have every possible excuse – "I'm immigrant, single mother, immature, don't have an education etc" not to take any responsibility and people take advantage of it. This is the idea that you just have to treat people well and it fixes all sorts issues in society failing.
I somewhat agree, with the caveat being when your citizens do it, you're stuck with the poor behavior because they have rights to be on the soil. You get another chance to do better when their kids become adults (and either choose to be childfree [1], or become parents, but hopefully engaged and active in the effort). When immigrants do it, you have options, because depending on your residency model, you can ask them to leave if they are not adhering to your systems designed to lead to desired outcomes. You can treat people well and they still don't perform to expectations. Broadly speaking, you don't want an endless obligation of having to provide material amounts of support and services (which comes out of the pocket of taxpayer citizens) to people who don't give AF, but we should be accepting of inevitable drag when people did try and still fail (such is life). It's a poor outcome for everyone involved imho, but accountability is very important in the context of child rearing.
That's what I'm really afraid of – we will be drowning in the AI slop as a society and we'll loose the most important thing that made free and democratic society possible - a trust. People just don't tust anyone and/or anything any more. And the lack of trust, especially in scale, is very expensive.
No. It might be much much worse than 38% outside of these elite schools, but a little bit different. This is in fact one of the reasons public education falls off the cliff. I've seen a teacher leaving elementary after she found out that 19 kids out of 24 in her class had some kind of learning disability needing special treatment, special help, assignments specially designed for them etc. In her own words all of them were completely normal kids except maybe 1 or 2.
I've heard people working in construction industry mentioning that quality of design fell off the cliff when industry began to use computers more widely – less time and less people involved. The same is true about printing – there was much more time and people in the loop before computers. My grandmother worked with linotype machine printing newspapers. They were really good at catching and fixing grammar errors, sometimes catching even factual errors etc.
There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
This is a huge factor, and heavily influenced by the purveyors of the technologies involved. A factor I hadn't realized that is implicated in this transition is the shift from the Teacher-led classroom to the device-led classroom. The teacher is no longer seen as the expert, the interpreter, the model figure of the subject when the laptop or tablet is the delivery tool. Students learn that the teacher is a facilitator, likely not up to date on the latest changes to the app interface, and not an authority on the subject.
Device-delivery instead of teacher-delivery puts the student first, even when the student knows nothing, and has zero impulse control.
So instead of modelling a productive and enriching data accessing environment, we're actually just tearing down the walls of the school and asking teachers to babysit the mayhem.
