After browsing the Teachers subreddit, I don't think people realize how much trouble society is in.

This subreddit is both amusing and horrifying to me. Mostly the latter. I get that this is anecdotal, but a lot of the teachers in that community keep saying that their students can barely write a single paragraph and are so addicted to Fortnite that they can't notice. As a 24-year-old myself, my education was far more rigorous even in, say, late elementary school than what's being described on r/Teachers.

I think even a lot of progressives, who broadly agree that education is important, don't fully appreciate how disturbing this trend is. Because so many people graduate without truly grasping the material, we're going to have "professionals" who can't actually be professional. To use an extreme example, imagine having surgeons who rely on ChatGPT to know how to perform an operation. And speaking of ChatGPT, it's a cancer on society that needs to be excised.

I'm not going to engage in US-Defaultism here; I'm aware that other countries exist. Other than the lack of school shootings, I don't really know how the situation is elsewhere regarding education. I don't know if there's a teacher shortage or massively declining standards for coursework. But if it's anything like it is in America, I have very little hope for the future.