The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen | Hacker News Reader

The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen

vox.com

17 pointsrntn13 comments

From the article:

>>>> struggling to put away their laptops when asked

"One of my principles generally is look at what rich people are doing and see whether or not they know what they're doing and that could be more broadly learned. And, you do see this sport red shirt, "academic" red shirting. So, it's for academic reasons, not athletic reasons, but this is relatively common in upper middle class circles. (parents will have their kids restart the grade, voluntarily). And, indeed some private schools do it almost by default. They have a second year of pre-K [pre-Kindergarten]. And that second year of pre-K skews very male".[1]

Rich men like Bill Gates and famously severely restricted access to computers to their kids [2]. Members of the "All In" podcast, including FB exec Palihapitiya do not allow any screen time [3]

COVID turbocharged negative trends, but maybe our leaders could look at what people with resources are doing, then help our kids with simple solutions: Start by taking computers back, away from 6-8 year olds.

[1] Richard Reeves: Author "of Boys and Men" (how boys are completely falling behind)

[2] https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gat...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-capital-ceo-chamath-pali...

I'm not sure if emulating the wealthy is really a path to success for a broad swatch of American children, but I do agree that there is more at play here than the pandemic.

Children who hadn't even started school yet are still impacted.

While the years of missed classroom learning have definitely had a huge impact, the prolonged and unrelenting nature of the downturn in academic progress points to something more persistent.

I think we have to blame "phones" and computer time at a young age for a lot of these problems...

On one hand I'm admittedly slightly terrified about what happens when our population escapes the treadmill of Taylorism, which school is a primary promoter of. Do the assigned work, keep things steaming along according to the rubric: it's anodyne as hell but also regardable as basic discipline to, and even the rebels need some of that tempering.

And it's scary to see such a fall. We seem less competent.

Reciprocally there's some - not vast but some - challenge that I deeply welcome. The blood of tyrant flows these days; those who kept us tied to the machines, who have been the expressed way things are, aren't getting such tight controls. Some regression in scores is acceptable if youth are finding authentic their own ways to engage, are more deeply pursuing their own value systems, rather than that which is imposed.

It's entirely unclear what degrees of constructivist building our own values is at play here. Far too soon to tell. But education has maintained the course for a long long time now, has kept their captive audience enthralled to a certain achievement based system. These are the first signs of wavering, the very first. In many many many decades of belief in education. I have no desire to see education (as we've seen it) thrown away, but I hope it can adapt & respond & better serve it's people, as they are less cohesive & less managed a people.

It will also be deeply interesting to see how things go as time marches on, if this is blip is isolated or if it ripples recur.

If we are attributing these results to the the mass homeschooling experiment that was remote learning, what does that say about regular homeschooling that is still practiced?

> If we are attributing these results to the the mass homeschooling experiment that was remote learning, what does that say about regular homeschooling that is still practiced?

Probably not much? It seems pretty reasonable to expect that people that self-select to homeschool their children are going to diverge from the general population (I.e., people en masse that had no desire nor means to do it).

The story’s probably much the same for people working from home. People that sought it out and had established routines before the pandemic probably handled it a heck of a lot better than the general population that was forced into it with little to no prep time and a lack of equipment and support.

>> people that self-select to homeschool their children are going to diverge from the general population

Yes, but not necessarily in a way that is correlated with higher educational performance for their children.

True, but it's not necessarily not correlated either. So the answer to the question

> what does that say about regular homeschooling that is still practiced?

is still "not much".

I would say not much, given regular homeschooling is an intentional choice that self-selects families willing to put in the research and effort to homeschool.

It self-selects some of those families. It also self-selects a lot of families who are paranoid about secular education or fail to understand the value of education at all or of having teachers who know their subjects well and are trained in educational theory and teaching methods.

Probably the homeschoolers on this site largely fall into the former category. The stories you hear from a broader cross section online of home-schooled kids skew heavily toward the latter.

As well as families that disagree with the politics and curriculum their public schools practice...

speaking from the sample size of all the other kids i knew in homeschooling groups, the modal outcome (for my 90s / early aughts cohort) is bad.

Academically, maybe, but what about spiritually and engaging with piety? Those are core fundamentals of the American public, ones that we deliberately want to promote and encourage in our youth. Can the rest of the world say that they follow our freedoms as much as we do?

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