This school year I went "undercover" at my local school district. Long story short, I'm in a position in life where I don't really have to work so I can do more or less what I want (once I see to it my children are taken care of that is).
So I decided to become a substitute teacher. It's shockingly easy. They'll let anyone with a pulse do it apparently because I just applied on the website and a week later I was in a room with 40 other people in an orientation.
I went to elementary, middle schools and high schools throughout the district to get a good idea of what's going on all levels. I know we all have a basic understanding that public education is bad but what I saw shocked even me.
My district has begun a policy called "inclusion" wherein all the special ed kids are put in regular classes in the name of, well, inclusion. This goes about like you'd expect. The teachers spend all their time trying to control the screaming autistic kid while all the others play Fortnite on their school issued laptops. The gen-ed teachers told me they were given no extra training about how to deal with kids with special needs. They just got an email a week before school started letting them know of the new policy.
The lowest grade any student can be given is a 50%. If a student puts their name on a paper and turns it in blank, congratulations! Automatic 50%. This was done in the name of "equity" because certain demographics were performing poorly compared to others (you know who). The fudging of the grades serves to eliminate some of that gap and also boost graduation rates so they get that sweet, sweet federal funding.
The most shocking thing to me though was the absolute lawlessness in the high schools. Teachers told me they have no way to discipline a kid now. The admin will side with the kid every time (especially if they have a certain baseline of melanin) so the teachers don't bother. There were a minimum of two fights every day and the video was circulating on snapchat 20 minutes later every time.
Kids do basically no work and learn nothing at any time. Assignments are either ignored or the kids get the answers from a group chat.
I looked up the district's budget to see if maybe a lack of funds was causing some of this. Nope. My district's total budget for this year was 200 million (!!!) dollars. No doubt all that money is lining someone's pocket because it hasn't gone to any of the classrooms that are the same as they were in the nineties when I was in them.
The kicker? I live in one of the reddest states in the US. Get your kids out of public schools as fast as you can.
As Samuel pointed out earlier, they tried copying the model of the classroom online but as ANY of us that has been through western education can testify, it was already failing way before the 2000s let alone recently.
I don't see school's being of benefit to society if all we do is chase out the freaks, there needs to be a fundamental shift if we want more kids to learn the skills required for future more technical jobs.
Schools are basically just government funded babysitters at this point.
Expecting them to train kids for the future is a mistake for a few reasons, but the most obvious is probably - what if the current AI obsession is a fad and the kids are all trained to work with something that's only used to make memes and porn now?
That one I heavily doubt as it's the next stage of further automation, like computers before it and industrialisation before that.
If I'm honest, the only way you could find enough work for humanity in the future is massively investing in space travel which governments SHOULD be doing especially in the resource area since we're low on helium, rare earth materials and that asteroid belt after Mars is literally a treasure trove.
The only way you'll find enough work for humanity in the future is if there's way less of humanity. Which is probably going to happen anyway, given that there's unprecedented war on the horizon as the United States continues to collapse under the irresponsible and malicious rule of foreigners.
The alternative is paying taxes in blood and plasma if you're unskilled, because you can't contribute any other way. Either way, in the future it's going to be a very bad thing to be a proverbial grasshopper.
I don't think ChatGPT is that impressive, honestly. It also can't be relied on for accuracy because it will talk utter bullshit and make up sources for it. I remember when I asked it for the earnings reports for some of my ADRs and it spat out nonsensical data like a company with a market cap in the billions having revenues of under a million.
There's a lot of things governments should invest in but don't...artificial wombs. There is definitely something to be said about the idea of asteroid mining, but won't that completely erode the value of precious metals? It would make for an interesting crisis.
Every time I see one of those ChatGPT articles it reminds me of one of those 500 word essays I'd do the night before it was due. In reality, it was garbage, but the way school was being on topic with your mindless drivel, spelling words correctly, and using decent grammar was good enough for a B.
That is the risk as I watched a megaproject on it and one asteroid already identified has enough palladium (used in things like smart phones) to essentially provide more than enough for humanity for the next 100,000 years so it'd crash the market to be worthless if done commercially.
The TRUE worth is mining water and hydrogen since it costs a lot to get it into space compared to if you can mine it IN space.