Comment by donatj
19 days ago
While I am usually pretty skeptical about this sort of thing complaining about "kids these days" I am genuinely unsure what is going on in our high schools. My niece recently graduated with a 4.0 GPA. We played Trivial Pursuit with her at a recent holiday party and she could not answer the most basic questions, and most egregious of all did not know who Winston Churchill was. My mother-in-law, her grandmother, even remarked "What are they teaching you in school these days?"
When I was in high school, the kids graduating with 4.0's were much smarter than me, and frankly probably smarter than I am now twenty years later. I just don't think that is the case anymore.
In the US, it was estimated that about half of HS grads had an A- (3.7) average or better. That was in 2016 and was ~10% higher than in 1998, so one should assume that it would be higher now.
Oh god, I remember when Gorbachev died, some late 20's person I was talking to at a party remarked something along the lines of "Who is that nobody?"
This was a person who considered themselves a socialist.