In other words, I think the kids that make it through are going to be okay.
The closest example to something like this happening is probably major teacher strikes. Kids in Argentina during the teachers strikes of the 1980s lost an average of 88 days of primary education and today make about 3% less per year than you would expect given their age.[0] This effect largely comes from lower income groups being less likely than usual to achieve higher levels of education and being more likely to be unemployed.
[0]: https://www.cedlas.econo.unlp.edu.ar/wp/wp-content/uploads/d...
The interesting question is whether there's a 20-year block with lower performance, or there are spikes at certain points. I imagine anyone starting professional work out of college in 2020 is effectively a year behind by now. Someone who started in 2015, not so much. I'm not sure if something similar applies to school.
This trend pre-dates the lockdowns. Web-induced changes in reading behavior is my #1 suspect for the culprit, though I'm also suspicious of the YA book genre—I have an unconfirmed hunch that, as it's risen to prominence, it's also chased more and more "palatable", if you will, writing styles, in the name of greater sales.
A bad teacher in adolescence can ruin an individual’s appreciation of a subject. Today’s kids are blessed with the best teachers in the world, only a few taps away.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with video content. But perhaps the recommendation algorithms need to be tweaked so that these websites have more social responsibility towards younger users.
Eh after spending the holidays with siblings around the age targeted by these things, I highly doubt the quality of Netflix material as well.
On the other hand, I was impressed by the ability of shows who’s IP is owned by massive corporations pump out material that looked worse than a HS video editing project.
Since streaming services are all terrible as far as letting you control what kids can watch, we've started just manually curating content for our kids. Took them almost no time to adjust to the new options, while if they were presented alongside Netflix, they almost never chose them. They're just as happy, and the average quality of what they watch is far higher.
Not that this should be dismissed. But I hazard it is not a panic item.
That's often because they are dropped in a single pace system, where they are forced to sit with kids learning the alphabet, wasting valuable time, getting bored.
Individuals will tend to learn things at their own pace. Individuals will tend to learn different things at different paces.
Example: I despised history in school. The only subject I ever scored less than a B in during a quarter. I discovered it was mostly just down to how it was being taught, as a series of factual but mostly disjointed events. I found that I enjoy learning about history, as long as I'm understanding the complex causation and linking between those different events.
Example: I've hired people that had zero experience in one of our programming languages. They typically end up completing their first PR in that language within a month or two -- with assistance, of course. People tend to pick things up pretty fast when it's part of their job expectations. (I always make it clear during interviewing and the hiring process that such an expectation would be present.)
Example: My son didn't begin to talk until after his third birthday. Now he is almost entirely caught up, with only minor speech issues.
This seems... extremely slow to me.
I've been doing this as a career for fifteen years, and in that time have taken three jobs in languages I'd never used. I started with JavaScript and PHP, because that was what was in use the first place I worked. I discovered Python and slowly transitioned to it and staying away from the front-end as much as possible. In the fifteen years since then, I've taken jobs where Ruby, Scala, and Clojure were the primary languages. In no case did it take me more than about a week before I was able to make minor changes, and within a month I was focusing mostly on making sure I understood the idioms in use by the language's community. At the company where Scala was the primary language, I was asked to learn Kotlin and re-implement a core part of the application stack in that language. I was able to begin that about two months after being hired, and launched the service into production about a month later. It only took that long because the ORM that I was using lacked a feature needed to support our legacy database layout, so I had to write, test, and submit a patch for it.
The above is n=1, obviously. I feel like picking up new concepts is one of my strengths, so it wouldn't surprise me much if I were able to progress more rapidly that is typical. That's not been what I've seen, though. I've mentored several junior developers who were in similar situations, including a handful whose only experience with programming with an eight week "bootcamp". I don't recall anyone who wasn't contributing simple changes without assistance a month after joining the team.
Perhaps by "with assistance", you mean that they were guided toward what concepts were important to learn quickly, and which were better deferred? If that's the case, then I completely agree: being able to ask "Should I spend time learning this?" is probably the most impactful thing that can be provided for someone learning a new skill.
Also, some of the people I'm referring to are also of non-traditional backgrounds. Meaning they don't have a foundation in abstract computer science in order to ground such transitions.
I'm also not counting changes like, "modify this one if-statement to work this way." I'm talking about actual meaningful changes.
While I don't technically have formal education in computer science, it's obvious that my mind just kind of... works that way. That's definitely an advantage both in learning new things and in teaching.
[edit] I think it's already happening, but with parents. My kid is not a bad learner, it's because of covid!
This is another factor increasing inequality, by the way - we were exceptionally privileged to be able to have work schedules able to handle this, and a nanny who could watch our kids while we worked. Most parents wouldn't be able to do that.
Most people that home school…not so much, in my experience.
Note that this is often relative. You may find the church to be full of people with bad values. Likewise, someone who is religious may not want their kids to socialize with kids that have parents that encourage things like transgenderism in pre-teen kids.
In other news Politicians Are Far, Far Advanced In Their Schemes.
Ed.: it may sound as if I'm calling out a major conspiracy and centralized but that's far from it, I'm just saying bad actors will increasingly have their way and bad intents will group themselves and plan out the short term ahead, step by step of public degradation. But that's been happening since the first fall and destruction of Babylon anyway.