i work at a community college which includes the county’s “early college” which is pretty much 9th-12th grade high school age kids who qualified to take AA/AS courses for higher ed credit at the same time as their high school curriculum. what i see is pretty much it’s not the kids that are the problem. for the most part, dumb kids are the result of dumb parents, which there are a lot of in my redneck mountain town. and, surprise, dumb parents have a lot more kids than smart parents.

yea, gen z may be dumb, but it’s not gen z that made them that way

edit: i want to add, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a lack of intelligence. some of the best people i’ve ever known are not intellectuals. it’s character that makes people worthwhile. empathy. how you treat people who can’t do anything for you. if you’re accepting of people regardless of whether they hold the same beliefs, values, religion, have the same skin color, and everything else, then i would choose to be around you instead of the dickhead who’s the smartest person in the room. fuck that guy

it’s telling that these fucking dickheads are trying, desperately, to paint empathy as some kind of flaw or weakness. empathy is how the human species survived past the stone age