Comment by ffujdefvjg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ffujdefvjg | Hacker News Reader

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I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.

I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.

I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.

Befriend any professor at any school who teaches reading, writing, or anything adjacent.

I have a friend who teaches journalism at a small, private liberal arts school in the midwest. He's been teaching for over 40 years. He says that, beggining in the late 2010s he noticed incoming students began to really struggle. Then, pre-pandemic he would recommend that they use the on-campus reading and writing labs to get help, lean on TAs, use office hours, etc. Post-pandemic, he says he now recommends that they drop his course because they aren't prepared at all, even with all of the help the campus provides. He says that this went from a small % of his course enrollment to being > 50% in the span of a decade.

Small N but I've gone into overdrive to teach my own (very young) children how to read and interpret literature.

There’s a difference between stupid and ignorance. They aren’t “stupider”

But, ignorance predisposes you to stupidity. In the absence of knowledge, you can either admit you don't know enough about a topic to have an informed opinion on it, or, you can cobble together some bullshit, making up stuff as you go.

Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.

Ignorance wouldn't prevent you from concentrating on a 14-line poem, or from understanding the immediate plot details of a book and how they fit into the plot more broadly.

Things like this are foundational for learning. If you can't do them, you can't learn very well. Even if you do learn to do these things in college, you're literally learning as an adult what previous generations learned in elementary-, middle- and highschool. This is delayed development. People like that will never be able to achieve at the same level.

Here's the article if you're interested:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...

https://archive.is/TJ18n

Why are we blaming kids when elected representatives are parroting these conspiracy theories? MTG isn't seeking Gen Z approval.

And MTG is 50 and she has to know what she's spouting is nonsense, so why does she spout it? Is her audience really that dimwitted, or is there something else at play? For example, is this part of some mass brainwashing ploy? Are they Jim Jonesing millions of Americans? If so, then to what end?

That's where I'm at a loss.

Are all the people parroting this stuff actually believers? My instinct is that the majority tried to grab the bull by the horns by jumping on the Trump schtick when he took power and are now left riding this increasingly deranged and unpredictable animal. At this point they can do nothing but try to keep holding on lest they be trampled by the beast they created.

But there's also gotta be true believers in there, and yeah, I don't know what those people actually want, and it's pretty scary.

If you can establish a base of support populated by the easily fooled then you can grift them indefinitely.

I guess my point is that we as a society have allowed things to get to a point where some of our brightest students have graduated highschool without ever reading a book, or having to focus their attention undivided for the duration of a short poem.

What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.

MTG is playing a character to get votes. She isn’t stupid.

She's also not the only one, she's just low hanging fruit. This same point can be made about Trump, and as you know, he has a lot of dedicated followers who are smart, functioning adults. Not Gen Z.

votes are part of it; she's also drawing attention away from other topics the GOP would prefer to not get looked at...

...like how all of the GOP voted against federal aid for the hurricane victims, esp. several in southern states that got hit.

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