42 Experiences With The Youngest Generation That Make People Feel The World Is Doomed

Eh, depends on where you teach. I went from a low income school, where most students were 2-3 grade levels behind, to a private school last year. My students are all reading and writing at a high school level in 6th grade.

The difference (in my opinion) is education level of the parents, which is also tied into socioeconomic factors. Parents have more time (flexible jobs, paid time off) to spend with their children. As well as access to extracurricular activities.

It’s an unacceptable (to me) inequality in 2026- the parents of the students at my old school don’t love their kids any less, the cards are stacked against them.

I've been teaching high school English for nearly a decade. It's bad. I go home and cry on nearly a weekly basis. Granted, I work in the toughest, poorest high school in 100 miles, but it shouldn't be like it is.

This is the first year the MAJORITY of my class cheated on their first essays. I had to go back to timed, paper and pencil essays for the rest of the year. It STILL took most of them 5 full class periods to write 5 paragraphs, ON AN ARTICLE WE HAD ALREADY ANALYZED TOGETHER, *with* multiple scaffolds. (I gave them sentence frames for their thesis, and they were allowed to use a notebook we made together that shows how each paragraph should be structured, sentence by sentence) Even with those tools, it took MOST of my 10th graders 5 full days to write 5 paragraphs. I STILL had a kid crash out and tell me I didn't give them enough time. I STILL had 25% of the overall class not pass the final.

It was also the first year a kid yelled "We don't care about your books, Miss!" while I was in front of the class presenting books they might be interested in for their book reviews. Even the most capable and the most bright kids side-stepped my attempts to get them to read anything at all. Almost all of them cheated on the book review they had to write. It was a major grade and I just dropped it from the grade book. 

I tried to get very honest with them about what this is all going to mean for their future but when I did, I was reported to my boss-for the first time ever-by a group of kids. I had to go in and explain that I had given them a quote about literacy for them to write about, and I had to bring all the receipts. 

I got into teaching because while I was a big reader as a kid, I hated school. I wanted to help kids and be someone in the school system who empowers children, rather than enjoys having power over children-there are plenty of those kinds of folks in school, too. I wanted to be one of the good ones.

But right now my job is the most difficult part of my life. I don't know if I can do this until retirement. Our school has experienced waves of cuts. We don't have enough custodians, we don't have enough bus drivers, and we don't have enough security. I have to stand out in the halls and tell kids to put their phones away and get to class every day during my prep period, and every day I get cussed at multiple times. There are no consequences and there are no real expectations that kids have any academic discipline or stamina. 

I think unless we get rid of ALL screens, the 1-to-1 Chromebooks, the phones, we are going to lose an entire generation of people who will live Wall-E style. Seriously, I can't stress enough how damaged these kids are, and they don't know it because they don't have anything to compare it to. No one but school staff sees it, because we're the ones dealing with the entire collective of young people day in and day out. They don't even bother to get to know their teachers' names. They are THAT buried into their phones all the time. They don't bother to get to know their classmates, 90% of the student body doesn't go to football games or dances or prom. The social aspects of school have been almost entirely gutted by online culture. Even at assemblies they mostly ignore what is going on in favor of staring at their screens.


As a society, we need to regulate it and DEFINITELY regulate AI, or we may very seriously lose the country for good. We simply won't have informed voters who know how to stave off political or financial propaganda.

The more I write here, the more upset I feel. I need to unplug and go stand in my garden awhile. .

Teacher for the last 15 years. Taught in a title 1 school for a decade and a fancy suburban school for the last five years.

It’s not a Gen Alpha crisis it’s a poverty crisis. It’s just much easier to blame kids and iPads than the systemic problems that got us here.

Teaching in my high poverty school all of the statements on this thread were true. High schoolers could barely read or do math. I regularly had 17 year olds who had never read a chapter book in their entire lives.

Teaching 45 minutes away in a fancy suburban school my students are all high scoring, thoughtful, and emotionally well rounded.

When you don’t grow up with both parents working 70 hours a week in minimum wage and constant threats to your housing, food insecurity and violence, turns out you’re great at school.

We burned down the middle class, shifted the entire tax burden of education onto property taxes and gave huge tax cuts to businesses that used to pay for them. Then we blame iPads for why kids can’t read.

Elementary principal here. It is bad.
Parts of the issues:
For the last five years, the only teachers I have been able to hire were those barely in a teaching program. It’s a challenging job even with the degree, but it’s near impossible without the education OR experience. They’ve been skipping their student teaching due to this. Bright side - this year was a high turnover year and all the teachers I have hired are fully licensed and with experience. I’m in a more rural area, but I have lived in various states across the US and hear similar issues in those states as well.

Parents. Parents. We are no longer professionals in their minds. I will call home, explain the investigation I’ve conducted and the conclusion. Nope, not my kid. He would never. Ma’am, I have him on video and with 3 witnesses. They will hold them out of school to avoid ISS, take them for ice cream, for “standing up to a bully.” They think every kid that looks at their kid wrong is a bully. Bullies are still in existence, and it’s challenging to deal with those situations as an administrator, but they aren’t all bullies, I promise. Sometimes it’s just a kid who is mean to everyone and I am trying my best to get a handle on it.

Laws. In special education, there are so many laws our hands are tied in most, if not all, cases. Sometimes kids hit, bite, kick, and sometimes that is toward adults. We have to put hands on kids to keep us and others safe. Yes, I get it. They are children. And some of those children kick, spit, threaten, pull hair, climb walls, turn over furniture. If I mess it up, I’m suddenly an educator with a case on my record. Who wants a career ending risk like that hanging over them? And also, there are a ton of crazy teachers out there who should NEVER put hands on kids. So I also get it.

Society. School is no longer school. It’s the only way some of our parents can work. It’s become daycare. We really need more universal supports like pre-k for all, which would help prepare students for school as well as help parents not have to afford an entire mortgage payment for daycare.

I’d share more but it’s summer break and my cortisol levels have been high for 220 days so I am going to zone out a bit longer.

I work at a library. The good news: I see many families there from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. The common thread is their parents are making the effort and leading by example.

Now onto what I see anecdotally. Many older kids and teens have a gap between the mechanics of reading and the actual real world component. If you ask them to fill out a form, they don’t understand how to format a street address (or what their own address even is — crazy), they fill out the wrong lines with the wrong information, too. Partly it’s because they don’t know what phrases like “zip code” mean, partly because they just zone out at the first sight of a challenge. It’s like they stopped learning/progressing beyond a certain point.

They do not have the mental endurance to read instructions and follow them when it comes to novel experiences. For example, they go to website with a list of instructions…they exclaim it’s all too confusing and ask how to do the thing. Only for me, who also has never seen this page to glance at the same instruction and figure it out in a couple of minutes. It’s actually very similar to dealing with the boomer population.

This is the issue with literacy. It’s not just being able to identify a bunch of words, it’s being able to utilize them, decipher context clues, etc. So many adults are walking around who can read words, but cannot comprehend or take action on documents that will affect their lives.

ETA: my goal was not to send people into an existential crisis. As I said I see kids here everyday who devour books and are brilliant.

I was simply answering the question with some of my personal experiences of what seems to be sticking out as unusual. For example, teenagers not knowing their home address. And yes, the literacy issue is far beyond kids. It’s something we have been grappling with in the US for quite a while.

Teacher in Sweden and it's pretty freaking bad here too. Parents have failed their kids by not having them read more at a young age, instead they gave them phones and social media. We the teachers can see that the kids that aren't always on their phones perform, in general, WAY better.

Not a teacher, but I find it odd my middle school kid's reading class listens to the audiobook, rather than, you know, reading.

I am not a teacher, but I do have a job in government working with a lot young kids.

It’s bad. Exceptionally bad.

I have had a 12 year old kids come to swim that walk up to the desk with a phone and just hand the phone to me, because they don’t understand how to pay for admission and assume the phone will just… do it for them. I have had a 16 year old dump eight $1 bills on my desk because he couldn’t count to three to pay for a $3 admission. I’ve had a 14 year old that injured his ankle need to sign an incident report ask me how to “draw the letter a” because they forgot how to spell “Matt”, his own name. I have witnessed numerous teens not be able to read the “Pool is closed on X/Y” with the date, and they didn’t understand how to interpret the numbers let alone know a 4 would represent April.

It’s crazy bad.

I’m a high school teacher. Specifically AP and regular level physics. Been at it for 15 years now.

I’m not teaching alpha yet, but I’m starting to wrap up the last parts of Z.

My perspective is interesting because I’m still interacting with the top kids of each group, but also each “level” of kids all the way down to the bottom.

The very top kids are about the same as they ever were, and potentially even more impressive than before. More access to technology and resources have done wonders. My biggest worry for this group is that college admissions are now completely broken and they don’t always get into great colleges.

The run of the mill AP/honors kids have sort of gotten worse, but not by that much. COVID hit them in the fundamentals, cheating is more rampant because of easy it is, and culturally there’s less pride in “overachieving” so it doesn’t happen as often. These kids are perfectly content doing the bare minimum and seem to lack internal true motivation.

HOWEVER, the run of the mill non honors kids have gotten really bad. Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening. This is the brainrotted/fried dopamine group. Blame the screens, the social media, and the parenting for this group. It’s the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I’d estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it’s probably 40-50% of each graduating class. THIS IS NOT THE GROUP that viral TikTok’s are talking about with being illiterate and not able to do math, but it’s the group I’m most concerned with. When I hear about the Gen Z stare and the general inability for minimum wage workers to do their jobs, I immediately recognize that it’s the same kids in this category, just a few years older, and they still haven’t made any progress. They don’t care, they’re AFRAID to look like they care, they seem depressed as a cultural baseline, they’re super socially awkward, and they don’t seem to feel like they need to change any of this. They can do basic math, but they’re far below what kids in this category were able to do 10 years ago. They can read, but their comprehension and analysis of it is low. They can write, but their writing is filled with errors and their thoughts seem incoherent or simple.

Then there’s of course the bottom 10-20% kids (excluding the special ed/severe/moderate learning disability kids). This is what the viral videos are about and it’s not an exaggeration. They can’t read, write, or do very basic math like multiplication or division as a 17 year old. When they read, it’s obvious that they are just looking at some of the letters and then guessing, and it’s obvious that they aren’t processing it while they say the words out loud. They write like 1st graders at the age of 17. If they have to add even basic numbers together, they’re still using their fingers. They seem to actively think school is stupid and that they’re not the problem at all. These kids existed 10 years ago, but there weren’t that many kids. In a class of 40, maybe 1 or 2 were like this. Now it’s like 4-6 kids in each class.

Now, I’m at a “good” school. Top 10% type of school in an affluent state, serving a moderately affluent suburban community. I believe the teachers who are teaching the inner city/rural communities where their entire class can’t read/write/do math. I don’t think they are exaggerating. Those kids do exist and it seems that it’s been a consistent trend my entire career that it’s heading in this direction.

I worked in a library for a few years. The highschoolers would come in with the “my teacher said I can use any book for the project” and just stare at me. I’d ask them what they like to read they say they don’t. I ask if they like any show or movie and they’d name one. Here would be the conversation:

Ok so you’ve watched fantasy show through like 20 times. Do you like fantasy?

What’s fantasy.

Like magic? Elves? Creatures?

What does that have to do with show?

Literally the entire show? Like the main character does magic constantly? And is friends with magical creature?

Oh I didn’t know that.

What do you know about it?

Uhhh.

I thought you watched it??

Yeah I’ve watched it on streaming like 20 times.

Ok how about I just get you a book similar to it.

Why?

So you enjoy it because you like the story?

I do?

You’ve watched it 20 times!!!!

Yes, it really is a crisis. They depend on autocorrect so much on their phones, spelling is atrocious. Handwriting is actual chicken scratch. They’re glued to their devices with zero questions about what the AI tells them is correct.

Some schools in California are working on banning screens and switching back to pen and paper. I think it’s the only way forward to fixing education.

I teach Pre-K (4.5-5yo getting ready for kindergarten) and I am genuinely worried for my current group of kids. To give an example, the other day we were doing an open ended craft where they had to make trees out of materials. One boy looked at me and asked how to do the craft I told him to use his imagination! He then looks me in the eyes and goes "how do I do that?". I've also realized that a lot of these kids don't know how to handle boredom or how to play by themselves. So it's not just an academic thing, its a social-emotional thing as well.

Soon to be retired teacher here… it’s more than just a crisis, it’s an existential crisis right now.

Kids with a level of self entitlement that is beyond measure… parents who a) think their kids can do no wrong and feed into that self entitlement, b) are too busy just trying to survive today’s economy that they’re working multiple jobs to keep kids fed/housed that they’re don’t have time to monitor their kids, c) parents who should have never had kids in the first place for a variety of reasons… building administration that is terrified of the Stupidintendent in charge so that they’ll cook the books to make it seem like nothing is wrong… Stupidintendents who only care about “test scores” so that they can keep their extremely cushy jobs… and politicians who think they know better than the actual front line teachers who are in in the trenches day in and day out coming down with ridiculous mandates/laws that are practically unenforceable but hold us accountable to them anyway with a threat to our careers if we don’t follow their stupid rules.

All the while, everything is our fault?!? And for all you jerks out there that will respond about having summers off, etc… the vast majority of us go get summer jobs because a) don’t get paid for summer vacation and b) we don’t make enough to save enough to get through the summer without working because of the economy and just how much everything costs, especially nowadays! Let’s not talk about all the unpaid overtime we do because we don’t get enough time to take care of it during the day because of all the nonsense listed above

You ever see the documentary “Idiocracy” starring Luke Wilson? Yup… we’re heading there faster than it took me to type this out. And it seems like most of the USA is happy that it’s going to happen.

It’s a shame because there are really great kids out there that deserve so much better than to be stuck in a classroom full of kids that are walking, talking cases for retroactive abortion.

So yes, unless the USA actually starts to value what teachers try and do on a daily basis…this country is well and truly doomed.

In first year college chemistry we gave students the same exam in 2023 that we gave in 2015. The average went from 73% to 35%.


When I was teaching these classes I notice kids put up their hands and ask for help before they have even bothered to read their worksheets. .

Its not even that. They have the virtual library of Alexandria on the palm of their hands and when i told them to google it, they asked me, how?

I’m a Kindergarten and 1st Grade teacher. I constantly tell parents that the best thing they can do for early literacy is to read to/with their kids every night, and to have real conversations with their child, where they ask them questions, and get them to think about their world and how things work.

Then I’ll have parents clearly blow that off and ask me if I can just print them some worksheets for their kid to do.

So, you just want your kid occupied and out of your hair? Got it. I won’t be doing that. Read with your kid and talk to your kid.

Yesterday I bought something with cash, and not only could the cashier not calculate the change, she had to ask her older coworker which coins were which.

Every teacher I know tells me kids have no basic concept of right or wrong and no respect for authority. Like a kid will just sit on their desk with their phone out and the teacher will tell them to put it away and the kid will be like "why?" And not in an edgy contrarian way but in a genuine "I don't understand why" way. And they just don't listen to teachers and when the teachers speak to the parents the parents either go full Karen "you don't tell my kid what to do" or they basically admit that they don't listen to them either and they're just out of control.

This is in stark contrast with just a few years ago when teachers and parents were generally a united front and kids listened to them or at the very least understood why something was wrong even if they didn't care for it.

I had a university student who didn't understand that 50% was the same as 1/2.

It’s pretty freaking bad. I always go back to the instance where a junior in my class was giving a presentation and couldn’t read the word “thought”.