BeepCollege core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself
BarneyPiccoloMy 26 yo son recently went back to college to get a degree that might lead to an actual job, and he is shocked at how awful the younger students are. They watch YouTube and TikTok videos in class instead of paying attention, they are openly hostile to profs’ teaching choices, they think they know everything when they clearly don’t know anything, everything is too hard, etc.
And some of the Profs are just as bad.
Covid blew a big hole in our educational system, and messed up that whole generation.
our education has been declining for as long as I’ve been alive. I think it still succeeds in it’s systemic goal of creating drone slaves for the empire… anyhow dunning-kruger is a bitch. It’s easy to mistake information available to you through your phone as knowledge you actually possess, If I was in charge of educating people I would challenge those notions by putting them in situations where they have to apply that knowledge and how it’s dangerous to assume everyone with a platform is a credible source of information
What you are talking about are Critical Thinking Skills, which is how humans are supposed to think, but it has to be taught to us, and we have to learn it, and we have to practice it until it becomes second nature to just think that way. It starts with just questioning an assertion and picking it apart on its face, to offering sources for your arguments, and insisting on sources for the other side.
If you don’t learn how to automatically apply Critical Thinking Skills, then your brain substitutes a chaotic form of thinking that could settle into anything. It’s like tossing a box of LEGOs in the air, and hoping they land as a fully constructed house.
They become easily susceptible to manipulation, because they never learn how to spot it. So a guy like Trump is easily manipulated by the most insincere flattery, a quality that surprised the Soviets on his first visit to Moscow in 1987, that they recognized his value as a Useful Idiot, and gave him the code name Krasnov.
They also take unrelated facts and connect them, filling in the gaps with “obviously logical” fabrications, and declare them the truth, and a conspiracy theory is born.
Or they become Sociopaths, because they never learned to see the value in empathy or honesty.
Or they become White Supremacists, for the same reasons.
All of them are easily attracted to sophisticated propaganda, which manipulates them by rewarding their Dopamine receptors. Their hate is literally addictive.
The only cure is Critical Thinking Skills. It’s best to adopt them early, and be able to resist the propaganda from the start. That’s the way we are supposed to think.