Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.
The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.
Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.
Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...
test taking is not a valuable skill. it's mostly pattern matching against the question
people need new skills in a new age. the education system hasn't even kept pace with the existence of the internet, let alone AI
I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.
> people need new skills in a new age.
If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.
If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.
Tell us more?
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
Such as?
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?