Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940 (as far back as the chart on Wikipedia shows): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

I am skeptical that this "deep literacy" is in fact eroding, since it's what lets you learn a topic well enough to get a degree. It's also hard work; I'll put in the effort on topics that matter -- as in topics that usefully inform my future actions, rather than topics that have abstract moral weight or whatever -- or sometimes for entertainment, but it's not a casual "all the time" thing and there seems to be a limit to how much I can do in a given day.

I learned growing up that TV rots your brain. Modern social media works the same way, except that sometimes you can actually engage with it and maybe it rots your brain a bit less in that case. This is called "mindless entertainment", and various forms of it have always been fairly popular. When I use shallow reading for mindless entertainment, it displaces whatever else I'd be doing for mindless entertainment. Which is different from displacing serious reading, or even from displacing learning things for entertainment / mental exercise.

I haven't read the article yet, but I want to say that I do not find your educational attainment stat to be a compelling counter argument. I don't think earning a degree represents deep literacy anymore if it ever really did--certainly not undergrad, and mostly not graduate level either. I think the incentives are wrong and the results are not "deep literacy" in any meaningful sense.

Your point about mindless entertainment replacing other mindless entertainment is pretty interesting. I guess my misgiving about that is the relative addictiveness or follow on effects of your chosen entertainment? Like if your mindless entertainment is heroin, that has effects on your mind that go beyond the time spent.

If our new mindless entertainment also saturates not only our time but our attention--not just at the moment, but our ability to attend to things in general, given the feedback cycle our brain is habituated to--that is potentially worth worrying about.

The author addresses this deep into the article:

"A greater percentage of Americans may be deep literate in 2019 than in 1819 or 1919, but probably not than in 1949, before television, the internet, and the iPhone. We have reached a stage at which many professors dare not assign entire books or large parts of moderately challenging ones to undergraduates because they know they won't read them. And while more Americans are graduating from four-year colleges than ever before, the educational standards of many of those institutions, and the distribution of study away from the humanities and social sciences, suggest that a concomitant rise in deep literacy has gone unrealized as the degree factories churn."

>Educational attainment has been increasing steadily since at least 1940

Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime.

This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

Except the number of people who received that education was much smaller than the number of people who go to average-quality schools today.

Here in Brazil people complain about the public schools of today, saying that 50 years ago it was great, there was latin, and french, and this and that. They all forget that the public schools from the 1960's were for the middle and upper classes (here in Brzil). The poor either had a couple of years of some very basic education, or just went to work and had none at all.

That is the main problem.

We don't have Elites or high class anymore.*

We only have "averages".

* Talking about education not economical status

> This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school

And thank goodness we've moved past such facile exams. Few of those questions test any sort of understanding, comprehension, or synthesis -- the hallmarks of the so-called "deep reading" lionized in the above-linked article.

There's no call to analyze a logical argument or to make a persuasive argument of one's own. The vast majority of questions amount to memorization and recall. The only thing truly tested here is whether the applicant was of the proper social class to have had the privilege of a preparatory school or private tutoring.

No dude; that's what they used to teach in High School. Shitty high schools. Vastly more than your average Ph.D. in classics in current year ever achieves; you can have a great laugh trolling modern classics profs in the US with latin limericks they can't possibly understand. Let alone the algebra parts.

I snork at the rest. The present Harvard entrance exam is a great test for social signalling that you're stinking rich. Not many actual high school students actually form a non profit and get 1600 SAT or whatever; unless mom and dad are loaded and did it for them.

How many people attended high school back in those days? Did people in every country have the same opportunities in terms of education? Remember that when people say education standards are improving, they are not talking about a particular country, but rather about an overall global measurement. I’m sure countries in the global south (where the majority of the world’s population lives) were not having those same education opportunities back in the 60s. But now they have widespread access to education.

Also, how useful it is/was reading in Anglo Saxon? And please, could you point out all those examples and arguments with verifiable evidence, rather than anecdotal ones?

Everyone went to HS in my parents day; you can look up the graduation rate in the US; it was lower than it is now ~70%.

Reading Anglo Saxon is "useful" if you wish to understand the english language, and appreciate the high literature available in Old English. Sort of like reading Shakespeare or Camoes is useful in appreciating what the human race has done and what can be done with older versions of the language. If you're a cretinous boob, I guess learning handwriting, grammar and so on are also entirely optional. We can just teach kids how to thumb twiddle their phones, take birth control and twerk their asses.

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