Right now there is a loneliness epidemic throughout the world. More and more people aren’t entering relationships. Gen Z men are having significant trouble dating while there are some economic factors in the mix. From my own view and experiences combined with what I’ve read most Gen Z men are lack the social and communication skills to even enter a relationship. This has and in the future will lead to extreme issues. There’s already been a marked rise in hostility towards women by young men (think Andrew Tate and his ilk) that’s likely born out of this frustration. I would definitely say there’s been a rise in gender hostility ever since the pandemic.
Back in the 50s there was arranged marriages. All a person had to do was just show but now that’s gone because it was an unequal system and I think society missed its chance to establish something much healthier and better in its wake. Now we have people that are unable to connect with each other. We just toss people blindly into the mess that is human interaction and relationships and no one knows what to do anymore. We could be have the most fulfilling relationships humans have ever had. Think of the amount of people who would of never have entered abusive relationships had there been someone around them that showed them what love exactly is.
The way we teach is so heavily focused on teaching people how to be worker drones that we forget the human part of the person. This is why a lot of people who do extreme well in school and college fare so poorly in relationships and have higher rates of depression. We are the most educated and advanced in human history, we know psychology, we can teach this shit rather than tossing people blindly into the meat grinder.
I mean, to be fair, that’s kind of always been the case to some extent. Not that it’s an excuse or a good thing to have, of course.
It is true that schools don’t teach many or any life skills, and it’s unfortunate. Schools should also teach budgeting and real day-to-day life stuff but they just don’t.
This is the closest to correct answer.
The real issue here is that school is a series of trade-offs, and the local community gets a say. When programs are cut, or content doesn’t match your expectations, people like to blame something big - “it’s the Republicans,” or “it’s the gays” - and in reality it’s just your neighbors prioritize different things than you do.
My school had an entire personal finance class. We learned about compounding interest in math, but some kids really learned it for the first time in PF. They’d learned the math 3 years earlier but didn’t care because “it’s just math.”
The community believed the lie that schools did not teach budgeting, when schools taught all the building blocks of how to budget, and kids couldn’t put it together without the set course.
So, they prioritized that course - and the trade-off was that we lost other courses, because there is only so much money and time.