Tee Yaps

The Covid-19 changed the world in a rapid fashion. One facet I want to focus on are social institutions.

Insitutions like police departments, schools, health agencies like the CDC, and workplaces seemed to have experienced a change in perceptions of their legitimacy.

Law Enforcement

Here is a graph of the violent crime rate over the years. We see that violent crime has decreased drastically. Link if you care.

We can see over the years, the crime rate in the US has been decreasing. A lot of criminologists argue that one of the reasons for this is because policing has become professionalized. By standardizing practices and giving them uniforms. People see officers as more legitimate.

And there is also a bigger emphasis on procedural justice. By ensuring people are treated fairly by showing them respect, taking their input into consideration, and by showing they are impartial when decisions are made, citizens are more likely to comply even if it goes against their interests. And they see law enforcement as legitimate authorities to be obeyed.

Perceptions of procedural justice and professionalism were shattered when mask mandates, curfews, and the breakup of large gatherings were being enforced.. This also coincided with the death of george floyd, which demonized police in the media showing that they are procedurally UNjust and UNprofessional.

Education

We see the educational landscape has changed drastically as well. we see now that learning is more physically distant. Students and children are physically disconnected from their learning environment.

While covid created physical distance between students and their learning. The learning in modern public school has alway been distant. Socially. The material is not relavant to them.

Students are aware of this when they say “When am I ever going to use this?”, referring to the class material.

Additionally the education profession is female dominated. I want to be clear. This is not a bad thing. But it is important that children have good MALE role models. both girls and boys need good male role models. which the teaching profession is lacking.

Students like teachers who are similar to them. It makes them be able to relate to them. But most teachers (I believe) are only there for a paycheck. They would rather ignore the students who are “difficult” instead of help them because that makes their job easier. Students not being able to relate to teachers, and the teachers not caring for students makes the learning even more distant.

With COVID, learning became physically distant. This made it easier for students to pass the class, without knowing the material. We saw grading standards were lowered. Students were able to use calculators, phones, chegg, and their friends as resources when taking closed book exams. The craftier students were able to outsource all of our assignments without even looking at the syllabus.

We are seeing the effects of it now. according to edweek.org. 8th grade students’ math and reading scores were steady over the years, but then in 2019(COVID), they start to decrease. Now we see that 1/3 of 8th graders are below the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) benchmark for reading.

Link if you care

Its so easy improve reading score. just give students a book about something they like. and they’ll read. and theyll get better because theyll be practicing reading.

CDC

The cdc seems to have lost its legitmacy as well.

Workplaces.

Gone are the days where you stay at one company for 30 years and retire comfortably. Companies are quick to lay off thousands of their employees when we see a rise in interest rates. As a response, we dont have any loyalty to our companies. We stay for a couple years to get experience and skills, put them on our resume and leverage it for higher pay at a different company. We look at what they can do for us. Not what we can do for them.

To conclude.

We see across the board that Americans are rejecting these institutional authorities, practices and guidelines. Are we headed in the right direction?

Our president trump is even more anti regulation and institution. he is obliterating all these government agencies left and right. the dep of education. USAID. He wants to reorganize the entire structure of the IRS.

The waning percieved legitimacy of these institutions coupled with:

• our anti-regulation president (Trump) ,

• Gen Z (The generation of workers entering the workforce. A generation that doesn’t like being told what to do.)

may be a recipe for ????disaster????

Time will tell.

Thank you for reading