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Reading All-Star
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Systemic failure we’re all dealing with. You did all you were told to do, you went to school, you sat down, you listened and you got the degree. Then maybe you got the job, maybe you just now lost the job, and the wages didn’t keep up with inflation, so you can’t get the house and you can’t get the family, too expensive.
Everything got expensive, then the world complains why you aren’t having any children, why you’re not consuming. You turn on the tv or your podcasts and you see illiterate people get platformed spouting nonsense about conspiracy theories and to do your research.
Then you see this comic and you see the connection. You see that a promise was broken. You did your part but the system ripped you off. You’re angry or depressed. It’s time to take action. Vote for Count Binface.
For every millennial called "gifted, " there was a Boomer parent crowing about how smart their kid was.
Boomers gave us all trophies so they wouldn't have the kid without the trophy. The same thing tricked down generations.
The whole thing is a scam to placate middle class parents. It has very little to do with the kids.
I just couldn't disagree more, as the millennial you're describing and the parent to an 8 year old. There's nothing at all wrong with a participation trophy, in fact, it boosts kids' interest and it helps them feel like they belong. Don't think they're not also acutely aware of losing a game, or who on the team are the most and least skilled.
At the same time, I'm of the mind that sports should be fun. Cutthroat competition sucks for kids, there's no reason for it
I never thought of it that way, but now that I look back at it, it's true. It was all way more for the parents. The kid was an essential asset for their ego. They were competing for who had the most successful child.
What can kids do? Read, and books=smart, so they were competing with each other at how good their kid was at... reading. So they came up with bullshit metrics like, "my child is in 4th grade but just finished a book at a 9th grade level... isn't your child in 8th grade? Wow, my child is reading books he can't even understand yet."
It was always about the fucking parents.
You get it.
My parents, and dozens of others, got a hard sell to plop my useless-ass name into the book "Who's Who of American High School Students." As if it mattered at all. It was an ad for kids with dickbag parents that wanted to spend $150 to be in an asshole phonebook. And many did. And their parents were proud and bought the hard copy book for that year, and none of us gave two shits. It had no value, no bearing on anything. A complete waste of money for a fleeting ego boost to the parents.
Yeah, i think we were raised in similar narcissistic households and maybe others didn't share that experience as much. My parents got a scent of the gifted child effect and tried to do everything to nurture it.
For so long they made me feel like I was super special but as an adult I can see how unhealthy it all was, and how much they fed off that attention.
Maybe for some children it was a normal gauge of how well the child is doing, but for myself every little achievement felt like, "oh so you felt okay with x? let's see how well you can do x+1. You know there's a kid who took college classes at 16? I think we should sign you up. What about astronomy? Have you heard of space camp?"
I felt like failure was terrible because of how disappointed they'd look if i didn't take well to some new assignment. Completely fucked way to grow up.
Mine wasn't narcissistic, but my parents didn't mind a little free classicism. Then, after years of "your child is so smart!" in high school I didn't want to do work because I was a teenager. So years of "just apply yourself!" lectures. Y'all, I can only do so much calc homework before I lose the will to live.
That you're equating your parents signing you up for inclusion in "Who's Who" with being assigned to gifted classes as kid is perhaps a testament to the failures of the American education system
Ironic you would make this comment as a slam on the American education system without having understood I only said my parents got a hard sell. I never said they went for it. The sales people filled the library with students in more than one AP course, and a few of the wealthier families with kids on sports teams.
Anyway, my point is that parents were pulled in and sold this, not a single student even knew what these books were, especially since the "Who's Who" other titles are all about adults paying to be in a national registry of self-important people.
The idea of reading level targets is from decades of research in education and human development. It has zero to do with parents' egos
Lol doing everything right and taking the advice of people that never actually did anything all that exciting without someone else to hand them that opportunity is pretty funny. Here’s an alternate translation of this: “I did the exact same thing everyone else did and expected that to lead to anything but what everyone else got, which considering everyone did it already, was very little “.
The answer is always to break the mold and disrupt shit.