Then there’s this tale of woe (read it all for the full horror):
College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.” Wilson described that she is trying new pedagogical methods to convey the same information. “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”
Yeah, I know all about that. I think I’ve told the story of how Connie (as Global Director of Training at a Great Big Accounting Firm) had occasion to review some of her earlier training materials. These, she discovered, were about 80% text and the rest graphics. Only five years later, the ratio had been completely inverted: 80% graphics and the rest text. (And just so we know who we’re talking about, the trainees all had Masters degrees in either Finance or Business. Not yer typical Fem Studies or Art History grads, these.) When she tried to arrest that development and include more text, all that happened was that the training became less effective: less absorption and poorer retention.
So none of the above are at all surprising to me; only the extent is somewhat shocking.
At some point, all learning, innovation and civilization itself is going to plateau (or worse, #Muslims) instead of increasing with each generation, as before.
I had a history professor who said “the amount of intelligence available to the world is fixed, but the population is increasing.”
I don’t know why this is surprise to anyone. Educational institutions are staffed with ever poorer quality staff, who’s forebears were of lesser quality than the previous group. So its the stairway to Hell. In my case I got to see it because I happened to land during transition periods, where the old timers were getting out and the new crop was coming in.
I grew up in a small rural Elementary School staffed with largely old crones who were 2 years away from retirement, and got to see the transition. Those gals ran a tight ship, had high expectations, and didn’t put up with shit from the students, and we were scared to death of them (with justification).
Then we started to get the new crop of pedagogues in. The difference was striking, especially to us kids, all of a sudden we fucked off because we could, and (at least for me) grades & behavior declined proportionally. This was in the late 70’s–early 80’s. I can only imagine how bad it is now.
My High School staff was by and large nincompoops (with a couple of small exceptions). The one saving grace we had was that because everyone lived in a small community the school staff went to church/grocery store/community activities with the parents and kids of who they taught. So there was a certain “give a shit” factor if for no other reason than embarrassment.
Owing to the above I was woefully underprepared for University, and it showed in SOME classes. My degree path was History, so the STEM type classes I attended did not go beyond the required classes. But the History Dept. was also in transition where the old crusty types were being back filled by the douche-bag New Lefties who all thought they were the next Howard Zinn. I can’t begin to tell you how awful from an educational perspective they were. As far as prep for getting out into the world, fuggettabbouddit.
I see what my kids got at all 3 Ed. levels. It clearly hasn’t gotten better.
I blame this sad state on the NEA, race pimps and helicopter parents, all of whom either wanted to scam more government money or else just could not stand being told their precious Johnny or Shaniqua was lazy or dumb, and because their kids could not read at grade level, had to repeat a grade. The result was one social promotion after another which produced illiterate, untrainable, unemployable parasites living off others’ output and contributing nothing to society.
Even the ones who do manage to learn a little are indoctrinated to lead lives governed by feelings rather than reality, which is the very cornerstone of the Left’s pipe dream modus operandi.
My all-boys public high school was run and staffed 95% by men, many of them WW1 and WW2 veterans, and they would not stand for any crap from us. None of them had education degrees, but instead had BA/BS/MA/MS/PhD degrees in their field, and all were subject matter experts.
The curriculum was STEM oriented and the following quotation, which was drummed into us, is a corollary to the Socrates quote above:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.” – Lord Kelvin
Oh, that Lord Kelvin……he spoke a mouthful, and today he might as well be speaking Klingon.
The GoodWife teaches history at our N Texas public high school, and was told years ago that were she to issue failing grades to more than 3-4 kids (out of 125-ish kids) each year, her “contract would not be renewed.” I have talked to several teachers over the years at public HS’s in other parts of Texas who say the same thing. As a clear result, my college roommate who owns a head hunter agency in Dallas and recruits for CEO level jobs ($300K & up) has to give basic reading, writing, and arithmetic tests for his hires. Takeoff and nuke the education system from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Bizplan:
Cognitive recovery boot camp.
The curriculum would include:
-Digital detox
-Attention focus and sustainment exercises….building up from tens of seconds (!) to full length movies.
-Verbal comprehension exercises
-Written comprehension exercises
-Remedial math
-Remedial logic
-Remedial science
With dumb reasoning by low quality abstractions, concretenesses, and emotional substitutions punished by electroshock
Tinny-Peete, where are you now that we need you?
.
And now you see why Boomers are delaying retirement.
The quality of the labor pool coming up behind them is severely lacking.
Wow am I going to have a bunch of posts today! I live this bullshit every day. IT department at a alleged place of higher education. Let’s unpack this one to start:
“College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.”
First off education today is so backwards. The birth rate in the country has declined for decades. There are less kids in the system. Yet teacher salaries have skyrocketed, and the same teachers, many of whom in Massachusetts make 80 to 150 thousand dollars a year OR MORE and get summers off and all holidays off and nights and weekends off – cry and bitch and moan they do not make enough money. the budgets for other items other than salaries have skyrocketed as well. Free community college for anyone who does not already have a degree. Great so I and my parents paid for mine now our taxes have to pay for someone else’s education. Free doesn’t stop there. Free bus passes, Free laptops, free wifi hotspots, free food if you are hungry, an office that gives the food helps you sign up for govt bennies like food stamps. MOre and more staff hired all of the time. Bullshit titles and bullshit positions. again, less students than 10 and 20 years ago, so now the free college is not just regular aged people, it is anyone any age. Yes, there are people 60’s and 70’s getting free college? Are they going to launch a long successful career after they graduate? Does anyone seriously know a business where the customer base is shrinking yet the business hires more people and wastes more money?
Second the majority of the teachers are fucking retarded. I don’t know if they are acting that way on purpose out of their massive laziness (majority of teachers are lazy as fuck) or if these teachers are of a diminished capacity. I’m talking rock fucking stupid. Unable to login to their email half of the time, going into classrooms they have been in before and not knowing how to use a projector or show their screen on the projector, and then they call and email anyone who will listen and say they had massive issues in their class because it is all of the IT Departments fault.
Where I work, we are told when issuing a new laptop, we MUST offer a “choice” PC or MAC. Now I prefer Mac at home, PC at work. And if someone knows how to use it, I do not care.
These idiots? “GIVE ME A MAC”. You give it to them. THen comes 57,000 fucking questions. HOw do I login. How do I get to the internet? What do you mean VPN? (Many of these fools are allowed to work remote – more on that below). Then we are told we have to help them with their files. Many of These idiots do not save to their network or one drive, or google drive. They just hit save and say, what do you mean save it in a specific spot? They bring a dead machine or an old machine full of files and say “help me” and the overpaid IT management (of whom there are almost as many management in the IT department than workers) say – help means do it for them, but they say, you are guiding them, not training them. Because we are not supposed to train. Ya know, voodoo bullshit. SO you copy the idiots files then they come back 12 times in the next week blaming you for losing some of their most important files. Rinse and repeat.
Work from home – so much of this fuckery still happening. NOT done by job description. Done by YOUR BOSS. YOur boss decides. Who works from home? Whoeever is allowed by their boss
Some working from home – Library, mailroom, bursar, student accounts, and other student facing offices. 2 to 3 days a week. Many students come to the IT dept to complain they went to another department and either it had no one there or the person they needed to see was not there.
You must be “available” when working from home. Majority of times I reach out to someone working from home because they opened a ticket or I need something from them – they can’t be reached.
Then the people like me, onsite 5 days a week working my ass off? Management nit picks and fucks with us. Ill give an example in another post
and lots of the professors, if not most all, are liberal zealots who are filling the students heads with absolute fucking crazy nonsense.
Education today is fucked. There fore the kids will be fucked.
Here is some fuckery of me allegedly being rude – when an employee who worked from home, a manager, was complaining about his employee onsite who had something nto working. I tried to help her and she was rude and didnt want to try things I asked so I could see the problem on her end. I then tried emailing her boss back. GOt the below – This is the bullshit of “higher education”
On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 1:48 PM BOSS NAME REDACTED
EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
If you are willing, I am hoping we could discuss tomorrow and I have a little project we can do to help answer your question.
The overall tone of the email would be what I’m referencing.
I’ve copied it here:
————————
EMPLOYEE WHO COMPLAINED ABOUT MY EMAIL TO HIM REDACTED,
A ticket was put into the helpdesk with zero details – other than not working
This provides no context into the issue
In addition – we typically interface with the user to try and resolve issues
Having a 3rd party reach out with no details on the issue does not help to resolve an issue –
For future tickets – can the user themselves experiencing an issue reach out with specifics so we can start to resolve
the issue?
Thanks,
EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
———————————
BOSS NAME REDACTED
On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 11:51 AM EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
Hi BOSS NAME REDACTED
For my future benefit, can you let me know what part of the email conversation was rude or unprofessional? I was simply trying to better assist the user by requesting details of the issue. I don’t see where the rudeness or unprofessionalism is, I was trying to gather information to resolve the ticket.
Thanks,
EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
PS Everything ended up getting resolved by using the proper group in AD, which there was some question over in Hudu and in the all IT meeting yesterday. ANOTHER WORK NAME REDACTED and ANOTHER WORKER NAME REDACTED mentioned they were going to look into this further to streamline usage and groups of the User Creation Tool.
EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 10:53 AM BOSS NAME REDACTED wrote:
EMPLOYEE NAME REDACTED
This is a recap of what we discussed in our 1:1 meeting yesterday in regards to customer service and professionalism when dealing with staff, faculty, and students.
There are certain things we can control as we interact with others and things we are unable to control.
We are responsible for our attitude and how we respond to the people we serve.
For things that are in our realm of responsibility as an IT focused team, such as setting up devices/office space for an end user, assigning the ticket quickly to our group is exactly what I want to happen so we can work with the end user to determine what they need and fulfill the request. I don’t think we can or should expect that the ticket has every detail we need to resolve the request or has every field/category filled. I would say it is the responsibility of the person who ultimately closes the ticket to make sure we have those fields filled out as accurately as possible for later internal reporting.
I expect our team to be professional, courteous, and respectful of the folks we serve regardless of how we are feeling, how the request made it to our attention, or what information was or was not provided on the initial request.
We briefly discussed a recent response to a staff member which was not as professional and courteous as would be expected of our team. I have attached a PDF of the email exchange to this email as a reference.
Please let me know if you have any questions or anything is unclear.
BOSS NAME REDACTED
I think wanting some detail beyond “‘puter no workee” is necessary for a proper diagnosis. We expect to be able to explain to a medical doctor what ails us, even if it’s nothing more than “I hurt here.” That isn’t a layperson diagnosing the whole problem before they can get an IT professional out to see if the problem can be replicated.
“For things that are in our realm of responsibility as an IT focused team…”
That sounds like DEI manager corporate talk for “Whew, for a moment there I was almost found out to be ignorant and incompetent, a Dilbert pointy-haired boss, and worse, having to take future responsibility. However, I dodged the blame and smoothly shuffled off the responsibility to my white male subordinate.”
I just read something yesterday that pointed out that in less than 100 years we’ve gone from high schools teaching Latin and Greek to universities teaching remedial english and math.
Yeah. Fucked.
Years ago I encountered the aphorism, “Against Stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain.”
I first encountered it in German language class, and its source shouldn’t have been such a puzzle to me, because it came from Friedrich Schiller, and appears in his play, “The Maid of Orleans.”
Albert Einstein is alleged to have said “There are two things that are infinite, the Universe and Human Stupidity, and I am not sure about the Universe.”
I frequently say that God must like stupid people, he made so many of them.
Nothing has happened in my life of watching others and myself, to persuade me otherwise.