> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.
Teaching kids is incredibly challenging -- if they view school as torture or a prison then we have failed them.
I have three kids who've gone through K12 public schools and have been lucky enough to do so in well-funded school districts. Adding to that, we did our best to augment that with a parent organized weekly sessions with a host of different teachers hired to give lessons on things that the school curriculum did not cover.
We also had them participate in Odyssey of the Mind for many years (it's a really cool program worth checking out: https://odysseyofthemind.com/)
Even with all of that, it was clear that while much of their education stuck, other parts were effectively just tolerated.
I think there are really two core factors that lead to educational success:
1. A good teacher who can connect with students and inspire them to learn
2. A curriculum that can be understood by the student as having value and aligns with their life needs.
Teaching anyone is effectively futile unless they are curious or can find value in the subject material. Good teachers are the foundation of that, and outsourcing that to some sort of "educational platform" is doomed to failure.
It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.
Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.
I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
If you’d told me back then that people would actually watch this crap, I would not have believed you.
But not only do they watch it, but they largely prefer it to anything with substance.
Short form video in particular is brain poison, especially when paired with engagement algorithms.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol
“Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD.
And there may be some social-engineering intent there, or at least something approximating it? Like, I don't think the elites are all smoking cigars after their Bohemian grove owl orgy (or whatever Alex Jones coded nonsense) and saying "muah hahahaha, we can really make these kids dumber!" But I definitely think that "it sure would be nice if the workers didn't want raises" certainly comes up. No child left behind has certainly had an effect too... Then there's the shootings, the bullying (which appears much much better than when I was a kid at least), and the jingoism/patriotic nonsense.
My wife and I have actually been considering taking the kids out of "traditional school" and doing something more bespoke. Here in Alaska that's a lot more practical than in say, Washington? We have great home school programs here, and with our family members we have the education and qualifications to teach most of the core subjects (lots of retired teachers in our extended family). But, even with my kids in a fantastic school, it is a weird and almost carceral experience for the kids. They're constantly waiting around for stuff, constantly being tested with tests that don't seem to make a huge difference in what's taught, and they aren't really reading literature or doing much in math beyond simple rote work except for one of my sons who is 2 years ahead in math but is still bored.
I'm not saying it was all roses when I was in school 20-30 years ago, but, it feels qualitatively different? Also... even in the nice school they're in, the environment is just... I don't know, oppressive, crowded, and restrained. I'm sorry, it's messed up to make kids ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. I'm sorry, it's weird how authoritarian most of the classes are - I understand why, shrinking budgets mean bigger classes, but at least personally, I feel that there's a lot of merit to the idea that this thing that used to be about learning has become daycare so the parents can stay grinding away while their kids are safely sequestered. We will see if we can do it, but we're thinking pretty hard about just travelling in the winter while they do home school online or take college classes.
What's better: to have my kids sit in a box for 7 hours a day (but really only work for like 2-3 hours) and respond to bells on command or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties and guide them through projects that really push them all from another country in the winter where they can learn a second language, see a different world, etc? I understand that this is a privileged position for us - like, I work from my laptop and my wife has a commutable job, but each day I pick up the kids from their school it feels a little more like picking up a parolee.
The two categories of people I know who say this are elite-college graduates and parents of kids who crashed out of their standardized tests.
> or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties
We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
I legit had aircraft sheet metal snips and numerous exacto knives in my locker and a leatherman on my person most of the time and it wasn't a huge deal? Hell, I needed the leatherman to open the hood of my shitbox car. In contrast today, one of my kids brought a toy knife to school a few years ago (because he thought it was cool, great learning opportunity for a young kid about "the man" I suppose) and you'd have thought they caught Bin Laden or something?
Perhaps I was just lucky, but it feels way different now, though there seems to be a lot less bullying.
The system forces schools to increase enrollment by assigning a tuition price based on attaching a loan to it. It's basically for profit. Then, the loans can't be forgiven in bankruptcy when the outcome of the education platform fails to produce an income that supports repayment.
To get an education that doesn't completely screw you over, you need to be a minority with a scholarship or actually have rich parents and attend for fun. But in either case, your only benefit financially is the hope of connecting with other students whose parents are richer than yours.
Exceptions for subjects with artificial barriers of entry (medicine, law, etc., and each of those has its own set of problems, mainly the price of education).
(Speaking about the United States, but probably a lot of this applies to many places.)
I disagree with the sentiment that the rich are dissuading college enrollment. I'm not rich. I don't hire college grads. They are broke, entitled, and lack work ethic. After 5 in a row, I started giving opportunities to smart kids, from good families, who exhibit an appreciation for hard work and good moral character. Those people learn in a month what takes a college grad 6. They appreciate opportunity, instead of expecting it.
As I should have always known, a good person is far, far more valuable than a piece of paper certifying victimhood.
I agree with the idea of giving opportunities to smart kids from good families who work hard and are ethical. But I also think it's pretty damn hard to get good at certain things outside of a classroom? I don't know, I have mixed emotions.
Still, despite my misgivings with traditional education, I think there remains some good that comes from going to a place where your only job is to learn.
> Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
It's not just a good idea. It's the law[0].
[0] https://www.governor.ny.gov/eliminating-distractions-new-yor...
The rest if your point is simply wrong. Focusing is a physical activity that you can train for. Every good chess player that plays classical trains for that. And so do (or rather so did) students in the education system. Taking mock tests before the finals is a way to train your endurance such that you will be better able to keep your focus throughout the test.
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
- Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.
On the other hand, you have the Mississippi miracle, achieved at a budget increase of $35 per student, and a total budget of around $12k per student-- a far cry from the more recent example of education failure in New York City at $26k/student (elementary) and $32k/student (middle school)
And we can not just change childrens habits, after we forced them to sit at home for 2 years with nothing but youtube! They missed key developmental phase!
Now, I will say that the Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it. Those people were somebody's neighbors, grandparents, uncles, etc. So maybe the realization that "nobody gives a shit about you except for your productivity" was a lesson they internalized?
Largely, I think it is the parents though. Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that.
So they got at least some of what a lot of kids missed out on: socialization.
With homeschooling, parents go out of their way to find other kids for theirs to socialize with, but during lockdowns this wasn't allowed (if the parents even had any idea about it, since it was forced on them and not something they chose to do).
I think the only thing that was really curtailed was my sons took a few months off of karate? A lot more traumatic was probably mom having to sleep in a hotel for a few nights because she got inadvertently exposed to COVID as nurse (when we really didn't know how dangerous things were), or me having to camp out in my folks' motorhome for a week because I was at the tip of the spear medevac-ing people out of camps in the arctic. I know that was scary for my kids because they told me it was.
Them not being able to have playdates being some generational trauma is nonsense. What wasn't nonsense was watching aunts and uncles die from a pandemic that we did next to nothing to fix in America until the vax came out. Also, I would not be surprised if there aren't some cognitive effects to COVID. Despite being very careful, we got it too. Everyone had it here. That probably ain't good for kids' development.
But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too. Read this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310
If people like doom scrolling more than they like screwing, it's probably not unlikely that they like doom scrolling better than studying.
Here in Illinois it was over a year, possibly two in some places. The schools didn't return to in-person right away after the government mandates were lifted.
Edit:
> But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too.
Please re-read the comment from the other person you originally replied to.
(2nd edit: removed something based on a misread)
> Staying at home with Grandma and Papa
Lockdown prevented relatives visits.
> Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it.
Millions die every year, that is normal for a country with 350 million people!
> You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices.
My kid did not had device before pandemic, we got tablet for lockdowns. My kid was social and full of energy, it always wanted to play outside and climb trees. Two years of isolation, in tiny apartment were pretty bad!
Now it does not want to go outside, it does not want to socialize! It adapted and got new hobies.
> Largely, I think it is the parents though
Yes, i blame myself. For not ignoring lockdowns and not fighting back! Against sociopaths who enforced this bs!
I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
That would have contributed to to the decline.
If you actually tied outcomes to test scores all these “causes” would disappear.