To worry about life now that young people's basic skills are so poor

[CurdinHenry]

They're taking on responsibility for such important things and you have to check everything they do because the ways of thinking that used to be taught and hammered home just aren't any more and their concentration is shot (never mind their incentive to work hard since they often won't be able to afford to move out of home regardless).

Not their fault, the fault of the education system and wider society.

(Scotland specific, maybe England is better)

Honestly, that's good to know. Not being sarcastic.

I've never changed a fuse or wired a plug and I'm 50. I mean, I'd learn if I had to, but I've never had to.

You mean like being able to punctuate a sentence?

To be fair I’m mis40s and our parents were probably of the same thinking- I couldn’t fix a hole in clothes, bake the way my mum could, never wired a plug etc. every job I’ve worked in has had value added by the youngest people and I was in awe of watching my ds at his job when we assumed and worried he wouldn’t be the most ambitious person out there. And forget about how techy they are in this tech driven world!!! I think you have to give them leeway op and let them prove you wrong!!!

People will often learn things when they are needed as long as there is some foundation. My secondary school education didn't put much emphasis on grammar but when I started working I made myself learn how to punctuate properly because it was needed. Likewise I had to learn how to use a landline phone because this wasn't something I used outside of work. People don't always know what they need to know until it comes up.

Me too. The young people I work with (and my own DC) consistently impress me with their maturity and drive.

The education system has certainly been dumbed down. I did the old GCE of the 70s and scored a C in English language.
My reading, writing, punctuation and spelling was top class, as at primary school it was drummed into us daily.
Fast forward to the mid noughties and my DC did the English GCSE and also scored a C. I read some of the work DC had done and it was literally a full foolscap page of writing with no punctuation, no full stops, no paragraphs whatsoever.
How on earth they got C was a mystery to me

What about in mathematics?

Not all young people- to be honest I would rather have a fresh inexperienced but driven person than someone who is experienced but cynics and resistant to change

i have 2 teen daughters both can cook, use washing machine and iron. Both have an understanding of nutrition and fitness and self defence.

both are far better than e at technology which is more of a relevant skill these days

Your children being unable to write correctly is not a reflection on the abilities of others. Your own writing is not without fault considering you allege that it was ‘top class’.

My experience in Scotland doesn’t mirror your points. Yes, there are many people who are ill equipped to parent at all and as a result unfortunately a lot of youngsters are unable to self regulate their emotions. There are so much many more children & young people who are growing up having to navigate a complex world with less opportunities to be truly independent. Much of these opportunities were removed forcibly by either Brexit voting or Conservative voting over decades by the very same generation who benefited from
free education, inflation linked pay, affordable housing, jobs instead of university, European work options, the ability to leave home at 18. I mean, are you surprised things have changed…

@Dollymylove you have no idea whether the education system has been dumbed down. Sorry but a grade C at O' level was never top class.

I'm not offended by this post but simply puzzled.
My experience as a grandma is that the young people now are a delight. Helpful, hard working, kind, affectionate, skilled in basic life skills, very fair. I meet lots of young people, friends of my GC, and what I find is that they are ready to engage with adults in a way that we did not when I was younger. At a recent gig where my GS was playing jazz guitar all the young people around me were welcoming, articulate, communicative and polite ... even after a few drinks.
I am so fed up with people dissing others of a different age group .... what is the point of that?

Nail on the head. Lots of middle aged and older people who can't spell, have poor Maths skills, etc.

Just because the OP has come across some youngsters with poor skills doesn't mean all have poor skills - just like EVERY generation.

My son, aged 24, works for one of the UK's biggest financial services firms and has just completed his first £50 MILLION purchase of a defined benefit pension scheme to be bought in to his employer's pension system - that's taken him weeks of high level analysis of the underlying data for several thousand staff, i.e. pension scheme members, their ages, their lifetime earnings/estimated final earnings, life expectancy, etc etc. - all analysed till the pips squeak to run the figures through to work out what the scheme is "worth" to his employer, the different levels of probability/risk under various future investment return scenarios etc, the ongoing costs to his employer of administering/managing the scheme etc. He's the youngest ever in his department to do one single handed largest acquisition (obviously checked by his management structure but all the number crunching done on his own). Not bad for someone the OP claims is typical of the younger generation being illiterate and innumerate!!

Look at it this way - if someone had a situation in their teens that meant for months on end they couldn't go to school, couldn't see friends or family, missed out on birthdays, holidays and big life events, even missed exams and such, we'd be very sympathetic and understand if that kid struggled as an adult.

Every single person who was a teen in 2020 experienced that. Everyone. A individual teen who misses out can later rejoin and pick back up again, but the teens who missed out due to covid returned to a world that completely stopped and in lots of areas had lost momentum - things shut down, clubs stopped running, opportunities that were there in Feb 2020 disappeared permanently.

No person who was in favour of lockdown can utter one word of criticism against young people IMO. If you want to know what's wrong with them, look in the mirror. You were in favour of shutting their lives down - you can't now blame them for the totally predictable effect of that.

Well it seems that a whole generation of parents, teachers, mentors and role models failed then the. Doesn’t it.

because from your description, the things that they should’ve learnt should’ve been learned in their childhood

Really? Gosh.
It's dead easy BTW.

I can imagine generations before the older population thinking the young were feckless losers who make decisions that they themselves would never ever make. It's always been the case.

It doesn't make it true. Each person is an individual and branding their character and moral stranding in society insufficient for your standards simply based on their age isn't especially helpful.

@CurdinHenry

no need to worry clever capable robots will be in charge

Works for old people too.

Shocking I know.

Sound a bit out of touch, are you quite old

People have been complaining about the generations below them from time immemorial. There are plenty of skills that the younger generation has that are likely to be far better than us older folk - especially to do with technology.

😄😄😄

I got top GCSE grades in the 90s. My daughter is in Year 11 now and I've looked at some of the practice papers. They seem much harder than anything I ever had to do.

Yeah. People are individuals. You would never have someone saying 'all Belgians/Hindus/wheelchair users/people with freckles think/do this and it's crap' so why do it about age?