What's Happening to Students? | Hacker News Reader

What's Happening to Students?

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170 pointsatombender243 comments

Try talking to them. Try asking them questions about what they think about things and then challenging them to defend it. Above all, try listening to them. Truly listening. Not call and response. Not 3-second wait time followed by “good job” or “well, not exactly.” Students today, like kids always, eagerly seek connections with people, not content. Establish that first and the rest will fall into place.

(That’s the good news. The bad news is that our education system, from federal level on down to the individual school board, will readily jump in and agree, but then require metrics and other “measurables” to show that students are cranking out “learning outcomes.” So with the best will in the world, and genuine interest in our kids and their lives as a predicate to meaningful learning in an otherwise highly artificial classroom setting, you as a teacher are stuck banging your head against an immovable concrete wall that gets refreshed annually with million dollar consultant contracts for outsiders who spend two hours every two weeks in your school to tell you what you need to do to reach your students. And at some point, you just say fuck you to all of it.)

Your method works well as a tutor with a single student. Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.

I have for the past four years averaging 180-200 students on my rosters.

Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat.

Apply this to middle/high school students and you're going to get a lot of students being annoyed since they're being challenged, are feeling stupid, and don't know how to deal with that feeling of being stupid; especially given that many of them don't see the point in attending school since they feel like it isn't helping them.

There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

Wrong. Their profile clearly states high school teacher. Why assume?

Because I don't check every user's profile before responding.

I made an assumption based on class size. The person I was replying too stated 180-200 students. So the assumption was that they were meaning a lecture hall of 180-200 students, which is typical for a college course. That is not typical for a high school course, in which case, I'm going to go out on a limb again and say that it's 180-200 students over 5-6 ~30 student periods.

> Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat.

In the US, it is maybe not completely wrong that a majority of college students want to be in school, but it is definitely wrong that a majority of the students in a given typical teacher's typical course want to be in that class (possibly unless it is a major-only course).

This is true, however, when you have students that want to be in school, I think they're more likely to put the effort necessary in since they can clearly see what the end goal is.

> There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

Any school teacher can tell you: a single kid that refuses to engage easily holds back an entire class. The only way to get really well educated kids is to separate kids that engage. But do that, and the parents won't stop screaming at you ...

I think it depends on what you mean by “engage.” Hell, I was morbidly shy in high school, so I would virtually never talk, but I was engaged with the material. It’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. With class sizes being what they are, the best I can usually do is kind of figure out 2-3 groups of students based on types and intensities of engagement and manage from there.

Class sizes in private schools are a little less than half of what they are in public schools on average. That includes "private" schools (like a catholic school).

As a parent now, I must say I don't understand what you want parents to do. I want the best for my 3 daughters ... and public school isn't the best (and private school, while far from free, is certainly not as expensive as I keep reading. Tuition per year is in the thousands (close to 10000$), but not 50000. And if I chose the catholic school, which btw is a school with actually a better reputation than their current private school, it would be less than 2000$ (plus a third kid doesn't pay at all). One kid has a sponsorship in the private school, and doesn't pay.

When we went to check out the public school, the teacher didn't know where France was, and the 6th year math teacher didn't know what differentiation was. There were no advanced classes or study sessions outside of regular hours (they might refer you to a program that was organized by the state university ... a 45 minute drive away). There were some sport clubs, but nothing compared to either the private school or the catholic school we checked out (there the private school was far superior, you can even go horseback riding, but the catholic school still had 10 sports available, and another 10 activities)

It's close to 2000$ per month to have 3 kids in private school ... and me and my wife pay that because, well, in my opinion there's no alternative.

Yes, if you want to give your kids, a solid, college-bound education, you are more likely to find it in private schools than your local neighborhood public school. However, there are some really great public schools, it just depends on where you are and what the composition of the community is. My parents live in a town where you can’t turn your head sideways without bumping into an engineer of some kind. Very diverse place. Median household income in the district is like $80,000+. Best public schools in the state.

I don’t blame parents for making individual decisions for their own children. I blame us as a wider society for our willingness to throw kids away who have themselves done nothing but have them misfortune of being born into shitty situations.

I feel that society is blatantly choosing against education. I don't see that ending well, not just because the kids will suffer. They'll also become aggressive MAGA nutcases, or something equally horrible. But it is a case of "put up the money or shut up", which means for education to do better something else needs to lose budget, so this is a nonstarter.

A disruptive kid can hold back an entire class ... but disengaged student wont. Nor introverted shy student.

Disengaged can hold a class back, it spreads. But nowhere near as much as a disruptive kid. Or in the case of my worst class, 5 disruptive kids.

> Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes?

No. Title I urban school in the state’s third largest city.

> There will be some that engage….

First, if I were being nitpicky, i’d say that this assumes that it’s the student’s responsibility to take the initiative to engage with content. Rather, that’s just what the job of a high school teacher is… to lead them to a point, often sneakily, where they are engaging.

All that said, people are rather overlooking the “bad news” paragraph I included. Getting kids to at least respond to you as an individual teacher on an individual level is easy. But it’s often actively sabotaged by the systems and processes that govern day-to-day crap that happens in a public school. Sad.

My apologies. But I don't know how you can genuinely listen to hundreds of students every day, much less engage them each individually. Glad you're out there doing your best anyway.

Numbers vary, but we’re on a modified block schedule, so it’s 180ish every two days. ;)

Anyway, thanks for the kind words. I’ve been pretty down about it recently because it seems like we’re just papering over deep structural and systemic problems, which just hurts our kids more than acknowledging the realities would.

What is your view to get out of the deep structural and systemic problems?

Fully acknowledge and confront the fact that public education serves as essentially a catch-all social service agency for a significant chunk of our populace and stop pretending it’s just about knowledge-transfer. For kids who come from stable family backgrounds (of whatever composition—-stability and reliability are the keys), and a stable (not necessarily affluent or adjacent—-again, stability and reliability) socioeconomic environment, that model works. Kids routinely make it to high school without being able to read or do math at more than a third grade level, because at some point, we can say well, we can’t solve society’s problems, but we also can’t “penalize” these students by holding them back several years (gotta get ground up by the economic machine as soon as they’re 18), so… well, it’s above our pay-grade. I have seen some interesting work and individual charter schools that are like “full service schools.” The problem is, for every decent idea in a charter school, there are 25 charter schools that are pieces of shit.

I need to go take a shower and get ready for work, so I’m going to stop ranting, but the basic solution is to recognize that one size does not fit all. The career tech-normie hs-gifted division we operate with is too broad-brushed. The school I’ve been at has a shit ton of profound mental health problems among students. Poverty is real but it’s not as grinding as our rival school down the street (the “super ghetto” school I was told), nor is life-threatening violence necessarily a daily companion for our kids as for theirs. Yet we are both Title I urban schools.

It’s complicated, man.

Thanks for showing your insight and the problems you face.

I hear these experiences from many places. I know someone who started a buddy system from the sports coaches in his place. They made an on campus chill out room where kids can relax with coaches nearby in the next room. They are confidants and they keep them away from their homes which are sometimes terrible places.

They also get these kids a sports team so they have mates who are in the same situation.

Finally they got some local shops to sponsor it because the idea is that they and the police have less problems with the kids being of the street.

It’s not a 100% cure, but it does seem to take away the biggest strains on the system.

Thanks for posting. It sounds like you're doing a great job in difficult circumstances. And I really agree with you. A lot of this stuff is getting blamed on phones when the problems are elsewhere and the disengagement is just a symptom, but it's easier for educators to blame some distant third parties (tech companies) than it is to blame the education system.

Key things from the article blamed on phones/the internet/entertainment:

- Schoolteacher says "they don't care about grades, they don't care about college"

- College teacher says, "I am teaching Intro to Theatre and prisoners care more"

- Cheating in college.

All this has a simpler and much more direct explanation: college doesn't motivate students anymore, and especially not humanities courses. If college doesn't matter then high school grades matter much less, what professors teach in class matters much less, and all this is totally as expected because universities have been trashing their reputations very publicly for a very long time now. Roll back to the pre-smartphone era and it was taken for granted that any degree at all would grant you upward mobility into the world of easy-breezy office jobs. Why not study Plato for a few years, given that expectation? Roll forward to today's world and even teenagers got the message that this was a lie, that many degrees are nearly worthless, that the debt costs are huge and that if they're a straight white male the university staff will at best hate them for how they were born, and at worst try to make life deliberately hard for them.

The fact that most universities aren't even trying to stop LLM based cheating is the final nail in the coffin. Why tune in when you can get a computer to write your assignments for you, the professors won't notice and you'll get good grades without any effort.

This blasé attitude deeply offends the generation for whom university attendance was a quasi-sacred act, hence Gioia's astonishment that 40% of students would cheat in an ethics class. For younger generations they see it as a purely transactional interaction, in which they are forced to pay lots of money to listen to someone waffle about ethics despite having no particular claim to being an ethical person, in return for the ability to maybe get a job better than barista.

The fix for all this isn't to wage war on smartphones, although that is what the educational establishment will do. It's to recognize that schools have drifted too far from what kids actually need (especially boys), and to rethink the way they work to reflect a world where college degrees are devalued.

My favorite class I ever took was middle school algebra. We had a teacher, problem sets, and were put into groups of 3 or 4 to work through the problem sets together.

The teacher would give a bit of a spiel to intro the problems, but the problems themselves were very self-directed, things like "measure these triangles, square these numbers, do you notice anything?" then introing the pythagorean theorem.

The teacher would float around and basically help groups that were more stuck on things than others. But students would help each other a lot, meaning the teacher is not spending their time on people who can ultimately help themselves.

This is not a format that works for all students and all class types, but when it works it works so well, and it's extremely scalable.

it’s called a flipped classroom and students universally hate it.

Maybe I was in the massive minority then. Though part of it was that the format let me just work on stuff "by myself" rather than sit through a bunch of explanations I didn't need.

flipped classrooms seem to imply work ahead of time though? But here we'd show up hands in our pockets and start working on the material on site

Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learning with small group work and peer learning - which students tend to actually quite like. (Flipped classroom works better the more engaged the students are in the topic - for electives, fine, for mandatory courses, less good.)

Depends on a group and the available tutoring time. It can go well, but not in every environment. If most of your group is not interested in the first place, you're not getting anything out of it either.

That's definitely not flipped classroom. In flipped classroom students read or watch videos before class, then work on problems interactively in class. The concepts are introduced in the readings and videos, not in the problems.

>Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.

I believe that OP is saying that's exactly the problem.

What percentage of the population are in K-12 any given time -- 15%? 20%? To have 1-1 tuition for all of them, we'd have to have at least that many adults also in education.

It'll be quite possible in a few years with robots; there won't be any more need for shoving 20-30 kids together in a classroom.

One of the main points of the top level comments is that students seek connections with people, not content. We don't know yet whether they will seek connections with robots.

Yeah, they’ll figure out how to feed the robot whatever will get the robot to shut up, and then go do things teenagers do when they have no adult supervision. Great model lol.

So you go from 1:20 to 0:20?

Depends on the country.

In the US it's ~10% of the population. Completely doable, especially since the participation rate in the economy is still lower than at any point in the last 50 years (minus covid). If that seems to hard I guess we can increase class sizes by 100% and have 2 on 1 education.

I'm sure it's a sliding scale type thing. 24 students is slightly better than 25, and our numbers have slowly been increasing for a long time.

it also doesn't work for a single student case if you only start talking to them after they are already highly already at a point where you can say they have developed a sever attention deficit due to addictive dopamine loops

like you know the station most teachers are exposed to as the problem can already have takes deep root before the child goes to school

You can do it as a parent though.

no, it's not that simple. My supervisor, with whom I'm taking a combined undergrad/grad course, does this. It's like he's talking to a fucking wall. I did uni 30 years ago too, I remember what it was like. The blame does not belong to the teachers. Big tech's ability to make virtual crack if fucking kids up big time.

I think China is on the right track here. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ While I don't like the privacy implications, I like the screen time limits China establishes. Social media and internet must be treated with much care.

It's like a candy store open 24/7 - completely free and always within reach. Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like.

The Internet has changed since I was a kid browsing through GeoCities webrings and the Yahoo Directory while searching with AltaVista. Generations of technology enthusiasts have to acknowledge that the internet of the past is no more and cannot be brought to our children as such.

The temptations we faced then were nothing compared to what children today have to resist.

Just as many countries regulate advertisements aimed at minors, we need to start regulating screen time for kids - before they get pulled into the vortex of influencers and endlessly accessible, mentally corrosive entertainment.

It turns out that industry regulation can actually be a good thing sometimes.

There’s nothing wrong with moderation in moderation.

Always not sometimes.

Lead in fuel

Normal product warranty

ingridient list

The industry has few selfregularly motivations to regulate itself. If they do, they do it after customer complains and others stealing there thunder but than i t would be too late for a few

> Always not sometimes.

always if objectively non lobby-corrupt thought throught

if regulation is to much captured by lobby-corruption or ignore facts because of ideology thinking(:1) it can be very bad, then you can for example easily end up with what I like to call "red hearing regulation". A regulation which doesn't fix the problem at all but if you are naive looks like it might and prevent any further regulations from being done because it's already there. Or you can end up with monopoly-like companies cutting of access to markets for competition.

---

(:1) to be clear I mean the innocent interpretation of that phrase, not the one a lot of right wing propaganda in many countries is using regular where it often means "take this out of context potentially outright lying statements and treat them as obvious facts while claiming all other facts are ideologist driven fake news and then complain why no one want to have fact based discussions with you anymore"

> sometimes

The cratering Chinese birthrate is a pretty strong argument that what China's doing isn't working out well for young people. The only reason China limited screen time was so that kids would spend more time studying, because the government wants kids to focus on slaving their lives away in miserable jobs with 80-hour workweeks to keep the GDP growing.

The 80-hour workweek isn’t some grand anomaly; it’s simply the natural outcome of the fierce competition in China’s market. If you want a good job, you have to give it your all—because if you don’t, there will always be someone smarter, faster, and more determined waiting to take your place. It’s not personal; it’s just how the system works.

Yes, the government has made efforts to regulate this, but the root issue remains: if an economy can’t provide enough well-paid jobs, no amount of intervention will fundamentally change the situation. The pressure will persist—it’s a structural reality, not a moral failing.

As for the term "slave," it’s a dramatic and, frankly, amusing choice of words. It perfectly captures a certain U.S. perspective on China, one that’s often shaped by narrow assumptions and ideological filters. The lens of "communism" becomes a convenient, if overly simplistic, way to frame a complex society. It’s not wrong to critique, but sometimes the framing says more about the critic than the subject itself.

> The 80-hour workweek isn’t some grand anomaly; it’s simply the natural outcome of the fierce competition in China’s market. If you want a good job, you have to give it your all—because if you don’t, there will always be someone smarter, faster, and more determined waiting to take your place. It’s not personal; it’s just how the system works.

this is a very long way of saying "too many people"

> cratering Chinese birthrate is a pretty strong argument that what China's doing isn't working out well for young people.

yes but that is partially unrelated and has a lot to do with

- one child politics lead to abrupt fall of new young unemployed people

- so the reaming people have to work more

- and as they need to pay rent for the old people even more more more

I think they are on the right track in the sense that "the problem needs a regulatory fix", but not in the sense that "putting time limits on kid media consumption" is quite the right way to go.

There is quite a bit of analysis out there how to trigger addictive behavior for anything from news site to games. Mainly so that they can maximally abuse this.

I think the right way would be to regulate that, not so dissimilar to how we regulate drugs.

Which yes can, in a roundabout way, bring us back to age restricting some otherwise seemingly harmless games.

But its in generally a different approach as it also pulls in the adult, general public awareness both for childs and adult, tries to also reduce drug, eh dopamine fix, consumption in adults etc.

E.g. if auto scrolling short are classified as addictive similar to drugs (through not quite the same) you then can e.g. require YT to allow people to disable shorts, or "auto scrolling, swipe next" display of shorts. Or limit how they can be on search results etc. This probably will also help with addictive gamba games frequently bankrupting adults etc.

> Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like.

I removed them from YT using ad block, through there isn't a way to do so on a phone/tablet without using 3rd party YT apps :/

>but not in the sense that "putting time limits on kid media consumption" is quite the right way to go.

Why not? Isn't this what sensible parents should be doing? Supervising and regulating how much time their children spend online, playing videogames, watching TV, doing homework, being sedentary, eating junk food, etc? Especially in this age of parental controls and surveillance-ware on all digital devices, it's easier than ever to monitor what your kids are up to.

Should entire societies grant the government unlimited power over online media, online speech, kids and families just because some dumb parents hand their kids a blank iPad and their credit card and let them sit around all day on it frying their brain? What about regulating just those parents instead for being that stupid? Truthfully, a lot of the people having kids are unfit to be parents.

I do believe that targeted online advertising needs to be regulated ASAP. Ad-tech is a plague on society.

> Isn't this what sensible parents should be doing?

yes _parents_, but we are speaking about state actions (which could require companies to give parents tools to help them handle this this (:1))

and that affects parents, and teachers, and what is tough, and how society in general treats such things, and which things get which age rating etc. We need to convince society that this dopamine cycles are similar bad as drugs, only forcing it down their throat is not going to end well

and I was also focusing a lot in the comment on from which angle states approach that actions

> targeted online advertising

while that is a problem, it isn't the core problem here

the core problem is dark patterns intentionally designed to make apps/sites maximally addictive

even if we didn't had any ads at all many apps(and co) would likely still do that, so that they can e.g. sell more micro transaction (like think 0.2ct per short watched, small enough to seem nothing but if you doom scroll for two+ hours every day adds up (~120$/€ a year). Heck even without micro transactions it still does make "statistics look good" some it probably still would be applied quite often.

// Even adults have a hard time to resist //

and here we all are.

Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.

There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students.

> "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need."

https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents

Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents.

Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food.

It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible

No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.

I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting.

Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.

When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun.

All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.

This is such a lost experience. I was a “free range kid” well before that term was coined. It was wonderful. I occasionally got in trouble, but mostly I explored the world and learned a lot.

A student recently asked me if I was ever bored. I said no. They had a hard time believing me. I pointed out that the world is endlessly interesting if you just look at it. This table— who made it? Why was it made this way? What is it made from? How was THAT made? And so on. Even dirt is fascinating. I remember biology teacher demonstrating with a microscope that a small sample of soil contains countless microbes…

I hope that people will eventually grow out of the fascination with online/social media, but I am not optimistic. But if they do, come join the rest of the folks who are having fun in the real world.

I don’t think we should raise ‘fun in the real world’ on a pedestal higher than ‘fun in the digital world’. The problem isn’t whether the fun is digital or real, the problem is that the digital fun isn’t really fun, but drugs. Real drugs aren’t legal, and the same should be true for their digital equivalent.

There's been pushback against this, 8 states have passed “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws since 2018, Georgia in the last few days, and more will.

There are still places where you can experience these things without "Karen" ruining your life. Smaller towns basically anywhere provide the statistical cover you are looking for. When you dial the density up to a certain threshold, these people become unavoidable.

Yeah gotta love those 'cool' parents who even brag how they easily travel with small kids in their cars for a long time. Then you look at the car and of course there is a tablet in front of each kid.

'Bbbut kids then cry and scream!' Well yeah, thats how you raised them overall, don't expect miracles suddenly, world doesn't revolve around you and certainly kids don't.

Fyi our small kids (3 and 5) can handle that 'boredom' of day-long travel without any device just fine. But its due to them being raised without screens, and their parents not being constantly glued to same thing. So they just watch the country go by, go through a book or two, draw with pencil on paper (yes, its still a thing), we talk to them and entertain them and so on.

Your kids are soon going to notice the glowing entrancing screen that other kids (their friends) have access to, and they will absolutely hate you for denying them the same fun. Tale as old as time.

Admittedly not my kids, but my experience of how "tablet/phone banned" kids actually act in that case is "why are these other kids being so boring"

But these kids are pretty well looked after, 24/7 parent available, high engagement parenting. The kids just find stuff in the real world to do. They get 30 minutes of "group" screen time a day, as in the family sits down together and watches something.

I have the same feeling when I see adults on their phones to be honest, and I'm quite introverted. Just feels like a sterile community to be in.

I have a 5 year old, it takes effort to not expose them to phones and tablets, it's a conscious choice. We even avoid them when driving for a couple of hours, instead she can draw in a coloring book or we can play disney songs on the radio. It's all habits, how come our kid can sit alone in the back seat for an hour and not make a fuss, but her cousin needs mom to sit with her in the back seat for even a short drive. Mostly what I observe is parents using phones as a pacifier when they need the kid to sit still for awhile.

I think what you're referring to isn't actually "raising".

They tend to be. One of the issues is the dopamine withdrawals they experience while away from their phone:

"First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.

Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off."

Isn't the article suggesting that because students do not have access to their phones during the school day, they are suffering withdrawl?

I'm interpreting the message that students should not have a phone at all or at least in limited capacity.

The linked article is clearly sensationalist and focuses on "experts" who are trying to make their career off this "crisis" (I expect they all have books lined up and speaking engagements).

Meanwhile "As the New York Times reports, schools where smart devices have been partially or fully banned during instructional hours have seen incredible increases in student attentiveness and communication."

As much as their opinion page sucks, I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times instead of someone who says "zombie apologists" in all sincerity.

> I'm much more inclined to go with the reporting in the New York Times

Quite the opposite for me. I don't have a problem with their opinion pages, because it's labelled as such and is at times interesting. I wouldn't trust their reporting though, least of all the numbers.

    > I wouldn't trust their reporting though

If you don't trust the quality of reporting from the New York Times, who do you trust? Washington Post? Chicago Tribune? LA Times? SF Chronicle?

I use them (more than one) as signals, and draw my own conclusions. I had subscribed to the NYT for several years, and my view is that much of their reporting is just a narrative that the journalist prefers. There's a certain amount of wiggle room with facts and even numbers, and the journalists make good use of it.

Distrust all media deeply. Not because there's an organizational directive to say something in a certain way, but they staff themselves with people who want to say something in a certain way.

Man I don’t know. Schools can be genuinely awful. Easily half of the educational value I received during my school hours was found while messing around on my laptop instead of paying attention. I’m sure I’m a rare case there, but these devices were my only escape from a dull, incompetent education system.

The customers are captive (pay or sheriff with guns show up to toss your ass out), the employer is spending OPM (largely funded to administration or special interest segments or overhead), and the student consuming has essentially no say since his parents have no money left to choose somewhere else after paying already for the public school.

What could possibly go wrong where the only person with any real choice is an administrator who doesn't bear the cost or benefit of his own actions? The incentives could hardly be more misaligned.

Precisely. I moved around quite a bit as a kid, so I got a more wholistic picture of the public education system than most. I’m not sure I met a single teacher that wasn’t overworked. In the richer areas teachers typically wanted to teach; in the poorer areas even that often wasn’t true (An issue of filtering and work environment, not a personal failing thing). I once had a history teacher who only showed movies for the entire year I had her. With us placated, she’d go lounge in the corner. But even the teachers who gave a damn couldn’t do much with the absurd ratios; it was impressive they even managed to keep kids in their seats and fights from breaking out.

Any time the instinct to further police kids in schools arises, I get defensive. I know what that environment is like for the kids in it, and anyone would look for an escape while trapped in there. Schools right now function as weird little child prisons, somewhere to put kids while their parents (those who aren’t rich enough to do otherwise) go to work. If the schools aren’t gonna get any better (certainly not under this administration), then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

> then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

If the kids won’t learn anyways, we might as well give them their dopamine and depression machines so they can really double down on not learning?

Calling schools prisons?

Sorry, this is ridiculous. Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time, but it turns out playing video games all day has no value. It turns out, simply being a student with some anecdata gives one no insight into actual teaching.

This just reads as angsty teenage frustration.

> This just reads as angsty teenage frustration.

And it's a hacker news standby. Any discussion of schools will have at least one commenter calling them prisons.

I regret this because it makes for such an easy attack. Not an entirely unjustified comparison though.

It is entirely unjustified. Schools are nothing like prison.

This is sometimes too dramatic but does alright:

https://www.historytools.org/school/why-do-schools-look-like...

>During the 19th century Industrial Revolution, reformers explicitly modeled public schools after factories to habituate youth to regimented workplace environments.

>Cell-like classrooms with regimented rows of desks

>Rigid schedules and rules to control movement

>Obedience to authority figures

>Conformity and standardization

>In the 20th century, disciplinary issues led architects to also incorporate prison elements

>Enclosing perimeter fences up to 10 feet high

>Locked or monitored gates limiting entrance/exit

>Surveillance cameras blanketing hallways and grounds

>Metal detectors

>Mesh covered windows preventing exit attempts

>Sparse and durable interior materials resistant to damage

>Currently over 17% of schools possess 10 or more of these. Their prevalence continues rising yearly.

The article goes on but this should hopefully be illustrative of my point.

What is it about primary and secondary educate discussions that always bring out the doomers on HN? And, for most people, their sample size is very, very small, but they paint generalisations with a wide brush.

Ivan Illich argued that we should open the doors to the schools and let those that wanted to leave leave, and those that wanted to stay stay. And he meant this even for the teachers as for the students. Then, he said, true education would begin to be possible.

That'd be amazing for at most a decade.

Then you've suddenly a generation of students that don't know their heads from their asses out in the streets and useless to anyone.

This might have not been too terrible a century ago, but the day is coming when a warm body is effectively useless. Yeah, you can teach anyone to fry burgers, but we don't need that many of those and nobody wants to babysit a bunch of incredibly unreliable and stupid adults when they can get a far less troublesome burger cooking machine instead.

>Calling schools prisons?

Ma'am, may I go to the bathroom?

>Sorry, this is ridiculous.

Classy.

>Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time

Parent poster was complaining about the school system being unfit for the purpose of teaching, the "100% fun" thing is in your imagination.

>but it turns out playing video games all day has no value.

Neither has the system of formalized education, if we were to judge purely by your reading comprehension.

On the other hand, at least half of everyone I know learned the language that we are currently conversing in from videogames.

> Ma'am, may I go to the bathroom?

You think not having ten year olds wandering the halls at will makes an elementary school “like prison”? Really?

> Parent poster was complaining about the school system being unfit for the purpose of teaching, the "100% fun" thing is in your imagination.

The entire conversation spawned from a comment about how phones should be banned, and the poster I replied to talking about how it’s unfair to take them away from students, for “coping” or as a source of “escape”.

Would you like to re-discuss reading comprehension as an artifact of reading an entire comment chain to gain context before snarkily responding to only the last thing that was said, or are you good?

Maybe that video game didn’t do you quite as much service as you’d like to pretend.

>Maybe that video game didn’t do you quite as much service as you’d like to pretend.

No, I learned English at school from a teacher. Thus, I was a relative straggler in language learning, in comparison with those of my peers who could afford PCs able to run GTA3.

For your benefit, I re-read the whole thread just now and I still find your reasoning faulty and your premise, frankly, cruel.

Your only response to salient points such as, I quote, "incompetent education system", "The customers are captive", "The incentives could hardly be more misaligned" was, basically, "boo fucking hoo".

I'll leave you to ponder why your putative ten-year olds would even have anything to "cope" with or "escape" from. Maybe they're trying to cope with the traumatic realization that the world they've been born into is hell-bent on turning them into you.

Actually in high school (thats 14-18) we didn’t have to ask permission. We had to go over to a sign out sheet, write our names on the sheet, and take a hall pass which we’d be asked for if we ran into any adults. We then needed to sign in upon return, to ensure every sign out had a corresponding sign in, which the teacher would briefly check at the end of class.

> Learning isn’t always fun and it’s unfortunate that, as a child, you were asked to do things that weren’t 100% the most fun thing you could be doing at any given time

Are you kidding me? That’s your takeaway? My man, I wanted to learn. Most kids want to learn. The issue, which I brought up in various forms, is that the teachers were overworked, the schools underfunded (or administratively mismanaged), and that many teachers were uninterested in trying to teach their classes. I don’t want kids to rot on tik tok, I want schools that are effectively able to teach students. My reference to prisons was very exaggerated no doubt, but a reference nonetheless to the very real phenomenon of a highly securitized and policed model of schooling I experienced while in attendance. An elementary school I attended in downtown Memphis had police doing random bag checks on entry, and most of the places I went were surrounded by walls and fences, had small windows, etc that were quite reminiscent of a prison. This is a known phenomenon, not my personal invention.

>If the kids won’t learn anyways, we might as well give them their dopamine and depression machines so they can really double down on not learning?

Look I understand why you read me this way, but no. I don’t want kids to have phones in schools. My issue is that people act like phones are the issue here, when the phones’ rampant use and abuse is just one tiny symptom of a broken education system that necessitates coping mechanisms by the students. Taking the phones without any will to actually repair this situation is a bandaid on a gunshot.

No matter how good a teacher or school is it will never compete with the direct access to children tech companies have 24/7. They spend billions designing addictive apps that destroy attention spans and we are supposed to blame teachers and schools?

Modern mobiles should be banned from schools completely. Every kid who left school >15 years ago did fine without scrolling all day long.

To start, I’m not blaming anybody in schools. Teachers have no time nor capacity to police device usage. The issues here are structural.

> They spend billions designing addictive apps that destroy attention spans

Yes that’s precisely what they do, and they suck. It’s also not the first time someone’s thought to capitalize on the addictive tendencies of adolescents. Why is this one the one that’s ruining schools?

See my position is that phones haven’t had an outsized influence on the stagnation of our (US) educational outcomes. I think that other, deeper, system-wide problems are at fault. Phones’ presence in schools, the fact that they haven’t already been banned widely by a crowd of concerned parents, is itself evidence of the issues I’m talking about. Many parents don’t have the time to worry about such things. Many others are worried for their kids’ safety due to overwhelming reporting of a somewhat real threat in school shootings and violence, and want to make sure they can contact them. Addressing the phone issue would involve addressing parents directly, or those mechanisms influencing their behavior. Again, though, why the hell are we so fixated on the phones? Is this really the big issue with schools? If we’re going to have energy directed towards reforming schools, can’t we maybe direct it towards something more useful and impactful than banning the phones? That’s my problem.

The article lays out why the students are “coping”. It’s not because teaching them geometry is “broken” - it’s because learning it is hard and there’s no dopa hit when you memorize sohcahtoa. Watching TikTok is easy, and there is a dopa hit every time.

This isn’t a “schools are bad” thing - this is a fundamental attack on young people by meta, Google, TikTok and the rest. Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre.

>Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre

Pretending that this is what the parent poster is saying is absurd. They made an effort to express a nuanced and humane view in an exceedingly clear manner. They are also doing a great job at handling this interaction with you in an open-minded and non-confrontational way.

>this is a fundamental attack on young people by meta, Google, TikTok and the rest

I agree with that. But, funny thing, I thought these companies consisted of human beings who had excelled at their formal educations?

From the article:

> I’m dumbfounded when I hear ‘experts’ claim that phones are not the problem. Like tobacco companies—whose hired experts long denied the connection between smoking and cancer—they say that “correlation does not prove causation.”

> But that’s just sophistry and spin.

Ah, you see, the article man, a man who clearly possesses no biases whatsoever, has simply declared it to be sophistry and spin from these so-called “experts,” therefore indeed it must be.

In all seriousness, the article shows that students are doing worse inside and outside of schools, increasingly since 2010 or so, and it shows that phone use has risen over roughly the same period. I’m happy to attribute some of the issue to phones, especially the students’ complaints of focus issues, but this period also encapsulates fucking covid 19, which is where the charts show the biggest rise in complaints. Why would I blindly assume the phones are the biggest causative factor here without the author providing an argument for it? Ah but that’s just “sophistry and spin” I’m sure. Jesus.

There’s other issues in this article too that a more honest author would have addressed. Why might prison students be more willing to learn? I tried to track this comment down, but it’s on one of his own articles (very unbiased stuff) and is thus subscribe(pay?)-walled. Because of that, I’m left to assume these are adult prisoners taking advantage of a voluntary program in their prison. Gee why might an adult who wants to go to school, whose alternative is prison, be more interested than a kid who doesn’t want to be there? Really strains the mind that one.

>Pretending that if your Memphis school just let kids bring guns or pot to school you’d have not needed your phone (there’s a reason they were searching bags, after all) is bizarre.

I didn’t have a phone in elementary school, my cope was fantasy novels. The reason was indeed largely to keep knives and drugs out. See, perhaps the fact that some of the kids were flirting with gang violence before age 10, and that others were bringing weapons to school to defend themselves against said gangs, indicates problems more significant than TikTok in school.

> The article lays out why the students are “coping”. It’s not because teaching them geometry is “broken” - it’s because learning it is hard and there’s no dopa hit when you memorize sohcahtoa. Watching TikTok is easy, and there is a dopa hit every time.

The article doesn’t even try to show that the learning outcomes are related to phones, much less that the reason for any mental distress of students is because “learning is hard.” Do the kids of billionaires with private tutors have a similarly negative experience with the process of learning? No I’m not delusional, we can’t give everyone private tutors. I am delusional enough, however, to think that a series of drastic reforms and restructurings could bring the student to teacher ratio more in line with that of the more successful developed nations.

> then why bother taking away the coping mechanisms people have available?

Firstly, I use TikTok myself so this isn't coming from a place of "old man yells at clouds", but why does it have to be smartphones and addictive algorithms? There's a practically unlimited number of ways to cope, they can daydream about their interests, draw and sketch things, read, interact with others, at least that's what we used to do, but just about anything that doesn't involve algorithmic content is practically harmless in comparison.

When overused, streams of dopamine such as TikTok can completely drain your desire to do anything creative, productive, to learn things, to experiment, to be curious, to do anything that delivers less than immediate, consistent reward (even video games can be low-reward in comparison).

I've been on both sides of this. I've gone years without engaging with these algorithms at all while harnessing my creative energy, and I've gotten stuck in the depths of these algorithms for weeks at a time.

It's questionable whether they're going to be able to get out of it, much like kids who start doing drugs in their tween years. It may be a coping mechanism, but in kids and teenagers it's probably about as healthy as daily cannabis consumption.

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I more or less completely agree with you about the harms. Regarding your weed comparison, I knew kids in middle school smoking tons of pot to get through the day; no doubt they were messing themselves up for life (at least a bit) with that habit. I hope social media isn’t quite so harmful, but I bet it’s not a ton better.

The weed example is a good comparison though. I view kids smoking lots of weed as a failure of a system. Knowing some of them, we’re usually talking about shitty family situations on top of a shitty school they’re made to attend for a solid amount of their waking life. The school should take their pot, of course it should, but it’s a marker far down a road that shouldn’t have been started along to begin with. There’s an enormously complicated set of social reasons that those kids’ schools, and their families, are messed up, but it’s as though there’s no will to tackle these issues. It’s much easier to attack the simple things you can see, the smoking and the phone use, with bandaid solutions that ignore the underlying causes. I almost see it as a distraction from really fixing anything. That’s where my frustration comes from, I really have no problem with the banning of the phones itself.

Daydreaming is what they're doing and it's what the teachers are complaining about: "When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in… They’re not there."

It's a bit hard to notice because Gioia is a polemicist trying to whip up a crowd, but what he brings up isn't actually complaints about kids using smartphones in the classroom. Rather they're about students being uninterested in the material (or less charitably, perhaps in the teacher's presentation of it), and then he implies very strongly that this must be due to smartphones but doesn't try to argue that case. Instead he gets mad at people who point out that correlation is not causation, claims they're engaging in "sophistry and spin", that's he's "dumbfounded" anyone could possibly disagree with this amazing argument, then immediately goes off on a tangent about AI cheating (a form of sophistry).

Actually, at no point in this article is smartphone usage in the classroom ever brought up as an actual problem. The link is implied to be causal whenever children have any access to "tech" in general, anywhere at all.

Nah I agree 100%.

My computer studies teacher would teach us about ergonomics and warcraft.

Whereas, exploiting the school systems taught me far more.

Heck we had VB6 compilers installed on school systems, but got maybe 1 week of curriculum over 3 years. However they were very good for building my first nefarious apps.

Theres an expectation by many students that you can just meet all class obligations and receive a proper education. But really, class metrics are for ass covering. You need to use that time, when the world isnt trying to squeeze you for labor, to actually learn things.

Its crazy to me that they are not. I was in high school in the mid 2000s, and if the teachers saw a phone it was immediately confinscated. What happened since then?

Kids who were in high school in the 2000s grew up and became teachers.

You meant parents for sure. It all starts at home, don't expect better behavior than parent is showing and enforcing.

You raise an interesting point.

In the years when I was forced to consume the mandatory blessings of the Prussian system, a common occurrence was teachers constantly blowing up at the class, with the common theme of blaming our unruly behavior on how our parents hadn't taught us how to behave. In turn, it's my understanding that my parents weren't the only parents who believed that to be the teachers' job.

Neither side seemed to realize that they were setting an example with their behavior; nor acknowledge that we were actual conscious human beings who are choosing our behaviors in response to our environment, and were we to be presented with any remotely convincing reason to shut up and listen, why, we would've gladly done so!

And of course the only reason teachers could ever muster was threats of scarier teachers or the headmaster or expulsion. Which usually worked for about a minute, threats of violence not being particularly interesting. Especially as it turned out how the new, sterner teachers actually cared to teach us stuff; the evil Director turned out to be a nice intelligent lady who was totally fed up with herding "credentialed experts" in shrill schoolmarming; and expulsion would've been the path to salvation, were it not for the parents who feared it like the devil.

To think how good-faith we were as kids, and how ridiculously did society fail so many of us. Our only responsibilities as such were to inform our parents of the frequent irregular parent-teacher conferences which were mainly teachers begging for money and complaining about our behavior and, and twice a year have the teachers sign a note confirming that we were going to school, so the parents could claim some form of welfare payment.

Therefore, we had to learn it all from TV, CS1.6, GTA and later PornHub. Now we're in the White House -- or in the trenches by Kharkiv.

They are banned from the classroom at the school I send my kids to. I think it gets tricky when you have classes where you are expected to use a tablet or laptop, which is surprisingly common now. The same school has pretty sophisticated IT, so the wifi the kids are on blacklists a lot of websites. But still somehow my son said there was a kid in one of his classes watching a TV show during class.

> Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple.

It's not that simple, because as the article says, "these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system" and "they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school".

Is "dopamine withdrawal" really a thing? Is there any studies about it?

To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems of social feeds and especially short form content. But is there any science behind it that could classify it as an addiction?

I would find it hard to imagine that kids at school are in physical pain and psychically unable to do something (which would be symptoms of real withdrawal). I think it's more reasonable that they are just bored and annoyed because they can't access their favorite form of entertainment. I remember how bored (and restless to go home) I was in middle school the day after I bought and started playing GTA: San Andreas, is it that different?

I'm sure the education system need to update a lot of ways of teaching as they are indeed outdated and extremely uninteresting to a young audience, but I also think that phones should absolutely not be allowed in a class rooms (same way we couldn't play a videogame or watch tv in there).

> To me "dopamine addiction" feels a bit of a figure of speech to make people quickly understand and relate to the problems

I agree. I think the key point from the article is this: "they behave like addicts". The "dopamine" part is inessential to the diagnosis. Smartphones are like a drug, similar to or analogous to a drug. If they were literally a drug, causing overt physical withdrawal symptoms, then we might have taken the problem more seriously already.

dopamine self regulation is easier to think of.

Then they grow up to be parents and realize that it's a pain and don't turn their kids into screen addicts.

It's really that simple. By day 3 they'll be used to it.

Phones are banned in the school my kid attends. It’s fine. Students put them away when they arrive, and can take em out again when they leave.

We've had a problem for a very long time that kids are convinced that school is 1) not worth it, 2) not necessary, and often 3) a waste of time and in some cases 4) harmful to them.

I think we should take a look at the education system and figure out how to make it better align with what actually interests kids instead of trying to force them to learn what we think suits them.

Most kids would get off their phones if school was interesting to them. Sure, you'll always have bad apples.

Rather than trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, we should realize there's a mismatch and try to correct it.

Phones are a problem, but they aren't THE problem.

School itself is the problem, and has been for a VERY long time.

My son is in high school, and at the Parent's assembly at the beginning of the year the Principal announced that he would be doing what he could to ban phones at school (kids can have them, but they can't be out during class). Half the parents cheered, the other half booed.

FWIW, I was one of the cheering parents. But you can't enact policy when half of the parents are against it. And this is at a school that is top 20 (out of 1100) in the state, I can't imagine what it is like for the bottom 50% of schools.

I live in a country where almost no one under 35 is able to purchase a house, no matter how educated you are. We live to pay the rent, the system is broken and we all know it, so we don't need to toil anymore; there is no incentive. As simple as that.

Buy a small parcel of land and park a trailer on it or build something expedient.

My house cost like 20% of almost anyone else in my area by just doing it myself without any code inspections. All it takes is courage to bypass the conventional system, society was wrong and I won by calling bullshit.

What about utilities? Unlimited electricity, fresh water, sewer?

Generator, a cistern, and a diy septic system will get you started

I don't think there is any place in the Schengen area (and I have a hunch that parent lives there) where this isn't absolutely illegal. At least in Germany, if you just buy a small parcel of land (and even that is really expensive), and "build something expedient", you won't be able to register that address with the government (which you are, by the way, legally required to, even if you're homeless). The local government will find hundreds of reasons, why your expedient building is not up to code (besides fire safety, which would be enough reasons in itself) and has to be torn down. But of course they don't have to, because you didn't even apply to get permission to build something (which is mandatory here), it wouldn't be granted anyways, because you bought a cheap parcel of land and those are outside the areas where permission to build something can even be granted.

Of course people still do it. But the threat that you might be forced to tear down your home at any moment just to be homeless really is not that much fun.

Edit: Oh, and a parked trailer is a building as well, of course. Just that tearing it down is a lot easier

Don't we all love German law...

Where I live, code requires that if you build a fence, it should not block the view and should be lower than 1.6/1.7m. So you cannot build a full fence for privacy or to block road noises.

Some neighbours wanted to build such a fence, because the road passing by is busy and noisy. So they build a "fake" pre-fence to code, next to the road, and 2 meters back, the first allowed distance for any construction, they build a "natural" 2.5 meter high "fence" of stacked wood to dampen the noise and have some privacy.

The town hall is furious, but cannot do anything, because nothing prevents you from stacking wood 2.5 meters high. The winters are harsh in the mountains, after all. And even the locals a few villages down the valley were impressed and laughing about it.

Sadly doing this is illegal in many, many places. Though you could start a halting site perhaps.

Great approach, when your shoddy installation burns down half the neighborhood and kills 7 people you may not feel so heroic and braggish. Thats not courage but arrogance.

Regulations came into effect as they are now due to a very long line of horrible disasters & regulatory reactions to them.

Cool story but most houses here are old and grandfathered (think baloon framing without blocking) in and built before modern codes whereas mine incorporates modern fire mitigating materials and techniques like platform framing with blocking, egress windows, fire rated drywall, etc. Mine is actually safer than most of the neighborhood, I am poor not stupid.

I like it. Fix something for yourself without hurting others and without complaining. Getting shit done in optima forma.

May I ask you where this is, without getting into specifics of course. Western Europe?

Western USA. Due to rarely used loophole in my county this is all legal if you DIY everything (no commerce so most regulation drops off) and I got permit explicitly exempting from code inspection.

Ah okay, that explains. I recently watched a video from a couple that did the same thing, but still made some minor mistake (not technical, but a little bureaucratic mistake) and had to rebuild it or something. I guess it had to do with the surface area.

Did you build with wood?

I built a block foundation and above that wood.

If all you have is trees though you can build a permanent treated wood foundation.

England?

Must be, because in Germany no one under 45 can afford a house.

I laughed.

(And by the time we're 45, the bar will have moved up to 50+)

I've seen the same attitude in Australia. "What's the point in saving because I'll never be able to afford a house?"

Kids don't really realize those concerns. However that's the reason why adults have stop caring as well.

Seriously what's the point of even having a national identity if you are a renter in your own country.

Housing is the biggest crisis that no government truly wants to fix

> Kids don't really realize those concerns.

You often see that argument being made that the youngest generation has lost hope and has so many mental issues because the "system is broken".

Yet, as you rightly point out, kids don't really realize those concerns. I mean, being able to afford a house or a car was the least of my concerns at that age, and I can't really see why this would have changed for the next generation.

So I'm genuinely intrigued: what could be the underlying cause(s) of that feeling of hopelessness?

>So I'm genuinely intrigued: what could be the underlying cause(s) of that feeling of hopelessness?

As another commenter pointed out, the teenagers are already well aware of the world around them. But for the kids, the point stands.

Maybe it has something to do with the other adults' attitude? When I was a child, my parents were poor and I was a rather bright one. I distinctly remember adults around me viewing education as a ticket to a better life. Nowadays, it feels like this is not really the case. Maybe the children don't understand what is going on, but maybe they do understand what adults/teenagers around them feel?

Kids DO realize those concerns though. It may not be at the same conscious, rational level as an adult, but they absolutely recognize that they are living in a broken world and being forced to play a rigged game.

I disagree. They are well aware of these issues as teenagers, especially now that they are affecting their parents' lives.

> There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example.

This seems wildly naive. Everyone working at Meta knows that the sum total of their work is giving teen girls depression more efficiently.

They don’t care or they’ve made excuses or they’ve made up a story about how that’s not really what they’re working on - that’s those other people, their work is different.

Also:

> Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles.

The children of tech workers and tech leaders are not harmed as much by their products.

I'm in my 50's and looking forward, I just don't see anything good in the future for this world.

Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

> Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

In my 30s and I make a habit of asking people in the generations above me if they felt the same when they were younger / my age. As in, did things always seem this futile, clogged, and broken?

The answer is always "no".

Cold War? World Wars? There's been a ton of doom. Perhaps elder millennial and younger Gen X got to go through their 30s without some of this worry?

Today's situation is not very similar. Previously we worried about specific threats. The Axis Powers, the Soviet world and its influence, even nuclear war. We had a pretty good characterization of what the threat was, even if it was devastating, even if we didn't have a great plan to prevent it. We knew how it would manifest.

Today we are facing a sort of nebulous destabilization of social institutions and norms that seems to be related to digital computing and communication technologies but we can't nail down what particular aspects cause the problem or how it manifests. We are not sure if any particular problem is related to The Problem or not. Some people don't believe that The Problem exists at all. We have no idea what the consequences could be if The Problem is not addressed, nor do we have a good way to tell if it's currently getting worse, barring some kind of unexpected catastrophe like a bunch of high-ranking government officials accidentally inviting a journalist to an illegal chat room where they are planning air strikes.

Perhaps none of this means that The Problem is worse than anything we have faced before, or even as bad. But humans have always gotten through our problems by turning our intellect onto them, and it frightens us when our best weapon doesn't seem to be working.

What is the Internet doing to society? That's the trillion-dollar question.

The threats of the 20th century were not that specific. Unless you lived in a particularly sheltered part of the world, your neighbors (the people you knew) were the threat. They supported a different world order, and if the right (or wrong) situation arose, they were often ready to kill you to further their goals.

Capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization had left many people behind. Communism and fascism arose as responses to that, along with more moderate ideologies that ended up joining forces with capitalism. Today we have globalization and a different flavor of capitalism, with a new set of ideologies offering solutions to those who were left behind.

Internet unites the world. It must be united, but there are two ways to do that: it can be a union of the free or it can be a tyranny of one. The two futures may happen simultaneously, but for different people, based on their preferences. This is what's fueling the feeling of doom for many. Moreover, the world must be united at three levels: mental, emotional and physical. The grand empires of the past tried to unite the world with armies at the physical level. The hierocraties of the mediaeval ages tried to do the same with religion at the emotional level. The Internet is trying to do this now at the mental level. Just like in the past, some want to inspire the people with a common ideal, while others want to unite the people by force, only this time it will be mainly applied to our thoughts.

I remember being scared of nuclear war as a child in the 80s. But even though that cast a pall of fear, only 2 superpowers had them in world-ending capacity, and they were self-interested enough that MAD could maintain the precarious balance.

World War I was long and devastating but there would be an end to it; wars don't continue forever by default. WWII was potentially cataclysmic but we were fighting coherently with a unified front, throwing everything we had towards beating it. You could buy war bonds, grow a victory garden, ration your use of gasoline/rubber/steel; do your part and we'll get through this.

The modern issues like climate change are global, imminent, and increasingly present, and there's no contemporary feeling of solidarity and effort against them. We've been told annually that the window to save ourselves is closing rapidly, and yet carbon emissions are still increasing. That's right, they're not going down too slowly, they're still going up.

Pick another modern issue, like education (which is arguably a root solution to these other issues). It's getting worse, so are we trying like hell to improve it? Teachers are trying but can't seem to move the needle. And the US is about to dismantle its national Department of Education to improve "efficiency".

I've looked at the situation and despite a desire for optimism, I have to be realistic. All efforts against the current slate of problems are off by an order of magnitude. Please, tell me a story, any story at all, for how this gets better within our lifetimes, without science fantasy like colonizing Mars or limitless fusion power (as though either of those things would help anyway).

> World War I was long and devastating but there would be an end to it; wars don't continue forever by default. WWII was potentially cataclysmic but we were fighting coherently with a unified front, throwing everything we had towards beating it. You could buy war bonds, grow a victory garden, ration your use of gasoline/rubber/steel; do your part and we'll get through this.

This is a very American view. In Europe/China/Japan/USSR, you could do all those things, and you and your family could still die tomorrow in an aerial bombing or get rounded up by the Gestapo/Kempeitai/KGB and sent to a concentration camp/human experiment lab/gulag.

But, there was still a way to win overall, and we were organized and invested in winning.

This really highly depends on the person. Also, people always tend to view the past with more rose-eyed-glasses compared to how they actually felt at the time they are remembering.

Here is an interview with kids in 1966 about what they think life will be like in future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c

They were more worried about dying than getting likes on Instagram.

>Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

You're assuming that people in the past were wrong when they felt that way. People love to bring up Socrates being charged with "corrupting the youth" in 399 BC but always seem to forget that Athens was conquered by the more rural, agrarian, and presumably more socially conservative Macedonians 60 years later.

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misanthropy

I hear ya. Early 50s here too. The world feels too "coupled", so that the same sorts of things are happening everywhere, so you can't really "get away" in any sense anymore.

Being "connected" is basically a requirement instead of a cool hobby you can do after hours now, and so your data gets stolen 24x7, and you get advertised / marketed to, regardless of how resistant you are, eventually, it gets you.

And well.. feeling a bit like those people in 1930s germany.. "No good can come of this".. Just not sure where to run to anymore - most countries have their (virtual) walls up too (no visas), and the one out (Canada) isn't necessarily a sure thing as a backup..

I’m slightly older and you know, in high school I bought Cliff’s Notes to avoid the boring long books I was supposed to read. Are kids today really different?

>Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

There’s good comedy in recognizing how you feel about it isn’t unique in time and then following up with thinking this time it’s different.

Everyone thinks this time is different. The kids think they’re the first ones to really want change and the old folks thinks this new generation is really the bad one. The kids are rebelling against you and when you were a kid you weren’t paying enough attention to understand what was going on in the world.

If the world stayed the same and you thought the same way as you did when you were a kid and the next generation thought the same way as you do now, we’d still be living as animals.

I find it incredibly amusing to see people in my generation complain about things like slang from the generation after us when it wasn't barely over a decade ago when I was having to answer to my uncle jokingly demanding to know why my generation was (according to an article he read) responsible for the demise of the can opener as a household applicance. In retrospect, maybe being out of touch with whatever people my age thought was cool as a kid was really good practice for me now that we're _all_ old and out of touch!

Actually this is the best time in human history since you get to choose your universe (where you live and who you interact with)

I'm in my 40s, and I see self-driving cars, humanoid robotics, and the explosion of AI as something that will bring incredible wealth to humanity. It seems like the 21st century is on the cusp of becoming like the one everyone dreamed about in the 20th century.

You can focus on whatever is wrong in the world or you can be fearful of new tech as everyone who ages is wont to do, or you can focus on the excitement of entering a new age and the inevitable good that will bring. One day soon deaths from car wrecks may go to near zero. Robotics will be able to produce healthy food cheaply as well as handle all sorts of menial labor. AI is empowering people to "vibe code" and build games and software with just their imagination. It's a very groovy time.

> as something that will bring incredible wealth to humanity.

As things are going, it looks like it's more going to bring incredible wealth to the very few. That don't pay taxes.

> It seems like the 21st century is on the cusp of becoming like the one everyone dreamed about in the 20th century.

No, to be honest, for the time being it looks like it's going to turn into a techno-fascist hell-hole.

It's literally never been the case that a new technology brings wealth to just a few. Cars, cell phones, computers, air conditioning, running water, etc etc were all once things for rich people. In short order they became commonplace.

Ah yes, a future where you can only get around in a box on wheels owned by someone else, can only afford garbage food produced by robots that are owned by someone else, and can only do computing using "AI" owned by someone else.

This is a world that brings wealth to a few. It's just deeper down into the same hole we've been digging for the past 50+ years. It's a world in which individuals own nothing and have no control over their lives.

Robotics will make healthy food more accessible. Robotic cooks will be able to prepare healthy food 24/7 and deliver it anywhere in minutes. Housing becomes cheaper to build with reduced labor requirements. Robotics are going to be as transformative as electricity.

Yes, it's different because this time democracy is under attack.

I tend to think that students preferring internet trash over schooling is more an indictment of the state of schooling than internet trash. Of course, that reflects on the kinds of worker units society is directed to produce as well, and their alignment with the economy as it actually exists and works.

If I'd had handheld toys in class as a child, and no one stopped me from using them... ?

Think Gameboy, or Sony Watchman w/ MTV.

Well, no school subject could have competed with that. Certainly not those that require a bit of work.

Even if this is true, the condition can go as far back as your childhood as well. When it is clear that the organism should be doing something, it does it. If it is somehow not clear, it is likely just not necessary.

A significant confounding factor is the lack of awareness of the productive forces. The average suburban school kid has relatively little idea of how the world works and what workers actually do, and why, in part due to a culture of corporate secrecy.

"No phones in school" can be a stopgap but really produces a dead end arms-race situation, even if it worked for a time. The only solution is to make school genuinely interesting and relevant. Until institutionalized education is no longer interesting and relevant on the face of it.

Yep, one of my favorite tradesmen is Larry Haun. He started carrying tools for carpenters for pay as a young kid -- which today would be illegal. Imagine being in school and learning math and science in the context of how it tied into building a house . Suddenly the majority of it is useful.

Perhaps the problem is in part kids aren't economically 'exploited' enough so they have basically nill solidifying the utility of their schooling.

Spot on.

I’d like to see more of this as well, but it’s not practical/economical for most subjects. Construction + arithmetic is straightforward, but imagine kids huddled over a word processor while a writer hammers out a manuscript, or even corporate memo.

Arithmetic is sufficient math for at least half of workers for the foreseeable future. Realistically if you can read/write, do arithmetic, show up on time, follow orders, and put in effort you can succeed in most trades.

> The average suburban school kid has relatively little idea of how the world works and what workers actually do, and why, in part due to a culture of corporate secrecy.

What workers actually do is easy to find out. The problem is rather: for quite a lot of jobs, as a school kid, you'd rather come to the conclusion that if this is what life is about, you should rather commit suicide as soon as possible.

Similarly, understanding how the world works, gives you an insane hate for a lot of people (i.e. makes you a misanthropist). Beginning from politicians, ending with basically everybody (you get to understand that the (irrational and clearly not in their long-term self-interest) behaviour of many people around you causes perverse incentives for the markets).

Are these really the lessons that children should get?

Yes, I am very black-pilld.

I don't think you can draw that conclusion. With respect to Internet trash, the only real metrics are (along the lines of): how many eyes can you captivate, and how long can you keep them captive. There is no real incentive to encourage people to think about what they are viewing, retain what they are viewing, or even apply what they are viewing. If anything, these thing are disincentivized. At the very least, you don't want people to realize they are viewing trash (otherwise many would go elsewhere, and quality content takes more effort to produe). You also run the risk of the audience not wanting to put in the effort, and shifting to something easier.

That said, my initial response when I read "When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant" was, "back in my day, we had to do that without the benefits of smartphones." The whole article struck me as the type of ramblings we have heard from educators for millenia.

I think this view is not appreciative of the power of innate animal intelligence applied to the direct world as superior to abstract advertising models. The latter only stands a chance when the first is not functioning properly.

I tend to think that kids preferring candy and preprocessed trash over vegetables is more an indictment of the state of seasonings than candy and preprocessed trash. Of course, that reflects on the kinds of worker units society is directed to produce as well, and their alignment with the economy as it actually exists and works.

This is not as ironic as you think if you learn about plant defense chemicals in vegetables. The preference for something with usable sucrose over a pile of carcinogens and anti nutrients in undercooked leafy greens is understandable.

for sure; leafy greens don't "want" to be eaten. "Eat your veggies" is very understandable though. And the lack of seasoning and preparation is a big problem for why kids don't like their veggies. Soggy mash from the microwave with no salt? No thanks.

Veggies prepared well is great. So is education. Most of public school is simply mass market soggy, saltless, microwave veggie plates.

Nothing to worry about. They don't need to learn anything anyway. Anything they would do in the future will be done by agentic AI, and generative AI will produce all the content they could possibly consume. They will be free to spend all day on their phones.

I remember watching hours of TV as a child in the 80s. I remember my cousins, born in the 90s staring like zombies at Cartoon Network when they were toddlers. We're all reasonably functional adults (most high achievers academically, and holding down well-paid jobs, with families). We also had huge amounts of screen time playing games, mostly on PCs.

If screens per-se are the problem, we'd have seen the same issues manifesting decades ago.

I think phones are the issue, rather than screens, specifically social media and notifications in particular. Someone suggested turning notifications off for social media, and it was a big change in my life, and something I've urged my own children to do as well.

It's an interesting question. If I were to speculate, I think the difference is the sheer volume of choices available now.

When I was a kid, the choices were very limited. There were only 3 TV networks, and TV shows were on a fixed schedule, so you couldn't watch whatever you liked whenever you liked. Often, there was absolutely nothing good on. Moreover, watching a TV show required at least some degree of attention span: 30 or 60 minutes on one TV show. You couldn't scroll through an endless stream of 30 or 60 second videos.

As for video games, we couldn't download them from the internet. We had a very limited number of physical game cartridges. So yes, you could spend hours playing a video game, but that again required a level of focus and attention, and you were stuck with the few games you had at home.

Given the limited number of choices available to kids at the time, it was much easier to get bored with those choices, as the article mentions: "the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever".

And add to that, the phone is with you all the time. A TV or video game was fixed to one place.

And we did go out to play.

After some repeated encouragement.

Yeah I saw a study that didnt find the link everyone suggests between screen time and childhood issues.

The issue is what kind of screen time. Stuff that just constantly presses dopamine buttons is what needs to be avoided.

Stupid OJ Simpson Trial interrupting valuable cartoon time.

> kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever

Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.

> incarcerated students really want to learn

They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.

> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens

Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.

> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.

Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.

The ability to cope with boredom is an essential skill, and boredom is a necessary aspect of life. Great ideas come from boredom. Great questions do too. Boredom is not the problem, attention spans are.

Not to mention, who actually cares? Not every aspect of learning is going to be fun. Sometimes you have to sit down and memorize times tables, or read about an important historical event you just have zero passion for. That’s okay.

As for the screen-time, it’s not about having enough hours in the day, it’s about the concerns regarding what this is doing to kids. Losing out on interaction with your parents because they throw the iPad at you when they’re tired of parenting is probably affecting kids in some unknown way. If it were just an hour a day, probably nobody would be complaining about it.

As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.

>As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.

It's pretty evident at this point. A degree has gone from something you get if you are genuinely interested in further learning and a career in that area to an absolute must-have if you don't want to be stuck in dead-end low-paying jobs. So yeah, the process is being seen as a gatekeeper to a successful adulthood as opposed to an opportunity, because while for some kids it may still be the latter, for all kids it is most definitely the former (and one that's likely to saddle them with a lot of debt in the process).

As a society, or I guess even as a species, we need to figure out how to deal with digital drugs, fast. I mean it, they are drugs. That doesn't mean ban them, but getting serious about understanding how to integrate them safely into our lives is important. Just like the chemical versions, digital drugs come in different potencies and with different effects and we need to think about classifying them as such. FB, Fox, HN, you name it. What is a 'safe' experience? How do we introduce our kids to them or how do we keep them away if it is too harmful? These are not easy questions for sure.

It's a good analogy, one that I think also applies to other things that really are "drugs" that people don't normally associate with the word: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, fast food, and sugar.

I think a way to maintain agency as well as avoiding overly restrictive regulations is an AI 'guardian' app that uses coherent extrapolated volition to nudge you toward your ideal self. Blocking sites, pushing productive content (aligned with what you deem productive of course). You can't stop digital drugs from being made, you can only stop yourself from accessing them. And you must find ways to do that for you and the people you care about. AI guardian aligned with your best interests would make this a lot easier.

This is really happening. I like taking courses, so I've been doing part time university studies (now into a PhD) for about 15 years now. I'm 50, so I remember uni before the internet was even really a big thing. The drop in engagement in students is shocking. I take some combined undergrad/grad level courses in my PhD program, and half the time I'm the only one, in a class of like 100, who says anything. And then so many do homework with ChatGPT and have no actual understanding.

I shudder thinking what managing theses people will be like. I've heard from someone who is managing recent grads that it's awful.

Obviously these are generalizations, not everyone is like that, etc. But this is a real problem. Pretending it's just old people not like change is sweeping it under the carpet. Tech has (deliberately) gotten more and more addictive and it's badly screwing people up.

Ironically AI has the ability to improve education exponentially and it's being used to cheat on assignments to leave time for more AI-powered video addiction. It's the job of capitalism to ruthlessly seek profit but it's the job of regulators to ensure that profit is in long-term socially productive direction.

It's about time for Education to adapt to the new generations

Watching people in the tech industry make proclamations like this is like watching a Crack dealer tell teachers how to do their jobs.

For the time being, the crack dealers are hacking through the US government instances..

Teachers are severly underpaid, classrooms are overcrowded, many parents believe teachers are out to indoctrinate their kids into transhood or whatever other conspiracy the right currently fancies. Republicans have been attacking public schooling for 50 years, they hate the idea of providing fair eduction. Democrats have been doing nothing to fight this. Here are the results.

You can, and probably should, ban phones from school, but that won't fix that cult of ignorance [1] dictating every policy made on education.

[1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

What we are seeing with students is that it's harder to get them to do work if they are demotivated, but that there's so many more tools for them to learn quickly and effectively when they are. Yes, LLMs can be used to cheat on an assignment, but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement.

This has always been the issue of the internet: It's good at giving us what we want. It's just that many times, what we want is really bad for us. The same tool that finds friends that share a hobby is the same whether the hobby is building gundams or participating in conspiracy thinking.

So what I expect we'll see is outcome divergence. For some people it's a great boon. For others, the worst thing we could have done for them. What made someone successful in the 1980s might be very different in the 2030s

> but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement.

Honestly, the "advice" that I got from basically all of these chatterbots when I presented them some provocative, polarizing, "very different from ordinary thinking" political statements was far more "bossy" and "lecturing" than the judgements that basically every teacher would give. It was rather easy to get some AI models to actually stop willing to continue the communication with me.

Without context of what you mean, it's hard to tell how "different" your take is. I mean, are we taking "pineapple on a pizza", "sex with kids is OK actually", or something else in between? For many "very different from ordinary thinking" ideas, failing to engage/continue is not a bad result at all.

I'm a (finishing) grad student and do a lot of teaching. While I definitely experience a lot of what's said in here I think a lot of people are getting things wrong. It is easy to point at technology and just say the youngins are dumb/lazy/have no attention.

  > Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.

First, I have mixed feelings about this. The first part is right but the second part isn't. And it illustrates part of the problem. They can learn new things but we are not incentivizing them to.

The thing is we need to rethink how we educate people. In fact, I think we need to rethink a lot of things. The problem here is you need to ask a lot of "why" questions. What I do like about the article is that it does talk about the addiction in short form mediums. That instant gratification. This is definitely part of the problem, but I'd argue extends far beyond students and isn't just from social media.

Further upstream, I think a problem we have is over-metricization. Or what one might call bureaucracy. I've been calling it "Goodhart's Hell". The reason Goodhart's Law is a thing is because you can never perfectly align a metric to the thing you actually want to measure. So no matter how good your algorithm is[0] it won't be perfectly aligned. You need to evaluate beyond the metric and watch for drift. Goodhart's Law is more a warning about how people are good optimizers, so if you strongly incentivize the metric and only the metric, you end up with a billion cobras while trying to eradicate them[1].

So students are kinda doing what students have done for awhile. We've been having this conversation with cheating and we've had jokes about how you remember material for the test and immediately forget it after. These things are indicative of misalignment! Part of the problem here is that so much pressure is put on getting good grades that you will punish students for being honest. You punish students for struggling and gaining deep learning while you reward those who look up solution manuals and get homeworks from peers or even ask GPT. This is the root of the problem, and we can't solve these things until we rethink this. This is in the same way that we've created these addiction machines like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and others. We strongly fit the metric at the expense of fitting our goal. We all know people who did really bad in school and on tests like SATs and stuff but are brilliant. Similarly we also know people who did amazing on all those things yet are bumbling idiots. Those are just examples of misalignment. Weirdly the more meritocratic you try to make things the less meritocratic things become. Not because you impose metrics, but because you overfit metrics.

What's happening to students? It's the same thing that's happening to everyone else.

I think we really need to rethink a lot of this. Luckily, there is action that a lot of you on HN can do! The problem is created through lots of small effects, thus the solution needs to be too. If you are just a junior engineer, ask questions about how well aligned a metric is to the goal. At worst you learn something, at best you make the product better. If you are a senior, think carefully about these things and encourage your team to too. Expertise is about understanding depth and nuance, so encourage that! If you're a manager, IT IS YOUR JOB TO CAREFULLY ENSURE THINGS ARE WELL ALIGNED. That's one of the most important things you can do!

I know a lot of the pushback, and I hear "but you can't assign value to <x>". But here's the thing, all those numbers are fucking made up anyways. Use your expertise and try to make products better. Not better defined by what makes share value go up or your manager says is "value" but just make the user experience better! Make things that make peoples' lives better! That was the promise of computing in the first place and why it created these billion dollar companies. I promise the money will follow. There is nothing stopping us from making money hand over fist WHILE making good products that make peoples lives better. If you believe these are at odds with one another, then do you really just want to build a dystopian Sci-Fi future? Are you really just okay "sacrificing your soul" for a paycheck? While I understand the calculus isn't so easy for everyone, we are talking about a field where $100k-$400k salaries are not uncommon, and you definitely have a choice in those ranges. But importantly, be a little grumpy. After all, that's your job as a developer/engineer/researcher: to find problems and fix them.

Tldr: think carefully if you want to enable others to think carefully

[0] I'll admit the irony of me saying this. I am extremely math oriented and work in machine learning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

I hesitated a little bit before attempted to respond, because I think this subject returns often, maybe even too often. I am not saying this because I disagree with you. I am not saying this because I really disagree with the premise presented by author. I am simply not sure we can really add anything truly new.

<< Tldr: think carefully if you want to enable others to think carefully

It is not a secret on what works in education. There is no real secret sauce. Some things are well known and apparent even to the casual observer, but, and it is not a small but, it does not pay the bills of the cottage industry that has grown around education. For example, it is easier to throw money at everything, but ensuring small class sizes, which dramatically affect long term outcomes. I am not cynical. At least in US, I do not understand how anyone can pretend anything else is true.

I'm not sure I really disagree much. We both agree on the main part about the perverse incentives. But

  > I am simply not sure we can really add anything truly new.

I do not like these types of attitudes. Defeatist (I apologize if I'm misinterpreting).

Our world has progressed so we have strong evidence that we can add new things. Not only that, but we can make things better! It wasn't long ago people shit in a bucket and threw it out their window. While there's a lot of shit now I have no doubt things, in the long run, have improved. Even if things are worse now than 5 or 10 years, in the long run things improve.

The other part is that just because you're a small cog in a large machine doesn't mean you can't change things. I very much understand this feeling and I think it's natural too! But the cog is needed, even if there's some redundancy. You don't have to be a giant cog to have impact.

The reason so much goes wrong is also why this last part is true. Things exist in an unstable equilibrium, like an inverted pendulum. It takes little to throw things off balance (I can explain more if needed, with examples). Which is the very reason why small things matter. But there's observation bias and we can't forget. When things work smoothly we often don't think about it and all the little things that needed to go right to make that happen. But we do think when things go wrong. Of course we have this bias, because we want to relax and reduce cognitive load. But the world has gotten more complex and so we probably need to think about this more. It's becoming more important. Because as things get more complex low order approximations become less useful. It's the bitter curse of advancement. The bitter curse of adding new things. But I believe we can do it

<< Things exist in an unstable equilibrium, like an inverted pendulum. It takes little to throw things off balance (I can explain more if needed, with examples).

I think it may not be a bad idea. I think I understand what you are referring to, but some examples would be great.

<< Defeatist (I apologize if I'm misinterpreting).

I want to believe it is pragmatic, but I do take your points seriously and will do some self-reflection on it. I believe you are especially right about the ease with which we allow ourselves to reduce cognitive load.

  > some examples would be great.

Our modern world has resulted in many things being extremely complex. Many things these days require many steps to create and with each part of the process being dependent upon the previous one. Take something as simple as creating a nail. You got to mine the iron, gather the carbon. You got to transport the iron from the mine, to a ship, that travels across the world to go get processed and turned into iron, then transported again to get processed into steel, that steel is then sold to be reheated and reformed into the nail, which is then shipped across the world into a warehouse to your local home depot. There's so many steps missing from that, with like acquiring the tools to mine the materials, to even your car and the fact you need to repeat the whole process for all that including the hammer you will use to hit the nail.

Suppose you have a process with many steps and each step has an error rate of 0.1% (99.9% success rate). If your process has 10 steps, your success rate is only 99%, but if 100 steps it is 90%, 200 it is 81.9%, and 500 steps and it is only 60%. You can probably see with the above that things are going to take thousands of steps.

Most of this operates pretty well and there is redundancy built in. But there's a reason the whole world shuts down when a ship gets stuck in a canal. While most things aren't as critical of a choke point, but things aren't running on such efficiency that it can handle hard disruptions. Just see how quickly things fell apart in the pandemic.

  > I want to believe it is pragmatic

I'm not sure what is pragmatic about it. That you can do nothing? You can't make things better? I'm not trying to say to go change the world for everyone and be someone they write about in history books. I'm saying focus on your local world, the things around you. You can definitely change that. I'm trying to say that by changing that that it does make a difference at the larger scale. The butterfly effect is a very real thing and it isn't all just doom and gloom.

Good points, in my country we speak of inflation of top grades. Basically it's become the norm to be an A-grade student and anything below that is seen as failure. It used to be that 1 is fail and 2 is a passing grade, meaning 2 should mean that you've mastered the material, 3 is good, 4 is very good, and 5 is excellent. And today 2 is more like charity, 3 is bad, 4 is ok, and 5 is expected. Ideally, in a class of 20 students, only a handful should ever get grade 5 on a test. But that's not the case anymore, parents demand good grades. So you get all the wrong incentives.

Now I wonder if we're from the same country or it's a widespread phenomenon

Widespread

I looked at your profile, we are.

Personally I think the phones, social media, dopamine addiction, etc. are all symptoms, not the systemic rot at the root of things here.

Young people today simply realize, either consciously, or subconsciously, that they live in a broken world and are being forced against their will to play a rigged game they cannot win. Distraction and apathy are the only logical reactions to world that exclusively measures a person's value in monetary terms and does not give a single fuck about them beyond whatever "Value" they can create for soulless corporations their self-serving, narcissistic billionaire owners.

Sure they could buckle down, study hard, get into a good college and work 60-80 hours a week for the rest of their lives, but even if they did all that they're still not guaranteed a decent life. They're not guaranteed to own a home, drive a nice car, take an annual vacation, or put away money for retirement. They're not even guaranteed a roof over their heads and meal on the table.

The social contract that underwrites the entire western world has been fundamentally altered, as where once studying hard and doing all the things you're "Supposed to do" as a young person could at least guarantee you a pretty decent life, young people today have no guarantee of a better future whatsoever regardless of how hard they work or how talented they might be.

This is an odd metaphor, but it just popped it my head so I'm going to try it out.

It's like for generations there's been a boat and a dock. The young people while away their days on the dock, swimming and fishing for minnows and the adults take the boat out each day (generation) and return with a fish. Each day (generation) the fish the adults have come back with has gotten bigger and bigger, and so the youngsters would get excited that when it was their turn to go out fishing they might catch an even bigger fish. The last couple days (generations) the adults have come how with fish that were the same size as the day (generation) before or maybe even a little smaller, but the kids didn't think to much of it and were still excited to get out fishing and catch their own fish. This most recent generation the adults came back with the smallest fish yet, and oh, by, the way, the boat has a leak and is sinking and its also on fire.

We're basically wondering why the kids aren't excited to go fishing when we're giving them a sinking boat that's also on fire.

Of course they'd rather splash around in the shallows and fish for minnows when the best alternative we're giving them is a sinking ship.

Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating.

Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers.

Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy.

The question is, "Why?"

First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others.

Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car).

We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent.

And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight.

My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit.

The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them.

I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot.

My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations".

They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect.

They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves.

So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about.

Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake.

"There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven

And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied,

"She fucked him before she fucked him."

I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.

> The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!

A bit concerned about the hyper-stimulation but this actually gives me a lot of hope and I think it'll be worth it. What the teachers are concerned about here is their pathetic institution of teaching which has not revolutionized with the time. It's amazing (is that the right word?) that the teacher is annoyed by his students "cheating" on the test but they don't see the fallacy of determining one's trajectory through a single point (1 hour exam).

The system is pathetic and hopefully the new generation is smarter, sees it for what it is, spends its time on screen/video games and let these bureaucrats infinitely scratch their heads.

This made my day...

I'm sorry what? Exams aren't a fallacy, they're the only way to actually test someone's knowledge. There is no replacement for that. If you let students cheat on exams they will never learn anything.

A traditional school exam is not the only way to test knowledge. Project work, for example. At work, your knowledge is tested by the output you produce.

Project work is even easier to cheat on than exams.

You cheat at delivering projects at work?

Complaining about students is just as much of a crutch as parents using iPads as childcare.

Things (gasp) change. Teachers should be looking for funding to keep up with changes, not shitting on kids. If you dont like the kids, get out of education.

Honestly, its very likely that the vast majority of your curriculum is simply not useful or relevant to them, they have no interest or connection with you, and you have made no effort to engage them.

Seems like it's clear to children that "education" has become nothing more than empty credential sold by a corrupt system.

And of course the author likes criminals more.

Education might be poor but that's not the reason they're disengaging. No, they're addicted to their digital cocaine. Nothing, not even video games (and certainly not education of any kind) can compete with the perfectly engineered dopamine delivery system found in these apps.

The article is just someone trying to save their job as an educator.

I invite the author to count the percentage of people or students looking at their phone screen while crossing the road. That's the percent that need saving. The rest are fine.

What are you suggesting that percentage is? I've been in many situations where it's well above 50%.

This is just the latest episode of “Blame the Tech” for why kids supposedly suck now. Telephones, rock music, comic books, TV, video games—every generation has its boogeyman. Now it’s smartphones. Honestly, I’m more curious what’s gonna freak everyone out next, but I’m definitely not losing sleep over “the kids.”

True to a degree, although I know from myself that if I had something resembling a computer in class, the result of my education would probably be different.

I believe there to be a difference between slide rule/calculator - calculator/smart phone that cannot be generalized.

This is a great point. To me, calculators are very rarely entertaining. A smart phone is mostly a device to deliver ads and entertainment, and allow communication.

That's a useful strawman for this issue, but you know as well as I do that none of those bogeymans were anywhere near as transformative as the smartphone. They were not networked, they were static, and they had limits (eg. TVs limited programming). They are incomparable to a never-ending firehose of stimulus, algorithmically engineered to be appealing to your personality and optimised for "engagement" (read: more screen time).

What do you make of the charts that show a marked increase is "Difficulty thinking or concentrating" and "Trouble learning new things"?

I reckon I'll just join an anti-phone cult.

Idk why everyone's freaking out.

A new technology has made old modes of thought obsolete. A generation which grew up fetishising those things when they were young is now upset they are no longer valuable or meaningful.

Or to quote Socrates on the invention of writing:

>For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.

> old modes of thought obsolete

I would say all modes of thought. Again, "Difficulty thinking or concentrating" and "Trouble learning new things".

> A generation which grew up fetishising those things

A generation? One generation? Which generation specifically are you saying fetishized thinking, concentrating, and learning new things?

> Or to quote Socrates on the invention of writing

You have to go back 2500 years to find someone else to dunk on? And do I need to point out that our knowledge of Socrates is based entirely on writing, mostly the writing of Plato, which you quote from and which consists of semi-fictional dialogues, thought experiments, not pure historical transcription?

Please chill a bit.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Serious question: do you think that the comment by noosphr was kind, curious, and not snarky?

I would say that my response was actually pretty chill. It could have been much less chill. ;-)

I find nothing unchill in that exchange. Meta comment: people read emotion into things based on their interpretation, sometimes very incorrectly. I have found that assuming best intent moves most things forward. Of course, caveats exist.

One "trick" I try as a writer of sometimes-misunderstood comms is to avoid making statements about a person I am responding to. Instead of "you," I may sub in "someone" and I try to stick to events if possible.

Instead of "the best you can do is pull up an even from 2k years ago" to "an example from 2k years ago, surely we can find more recent events." (As a trite example). Note I moved away from isolating the other person and who they are to more broad language that let's us focus on the idea at hand, not the person who raised it.

</insomnia_thoughts>

It does seem like middle america has a new crisis every 10 years or so. That said, other than the "dungeons and dragons is gonna make everyone satanic" phase, I think there's often some truth to the concerns.

New technology changes the context for raising young people. Phones probably won't turn the globe into deliquents, but we do need to consider how to teach children long term focus, educate them to spot misinformation, and give them a whole bunch of skills they wouldn't have needed 15 years ago.

New technology probably won't stop the next generation from thriving, but the current generation of parents, teachers and voters completely ignoring new issues facing kids, and hoping they fix themselves, just might.

>but we do need to consider how to teach children long term focus, educate them to spot misinformation

The kids are already much better at spotting misinformation than the older generations are, as I'm sure anyone with boomer relatives on Facebook will have noticed.

Not really, I literally feel the dopamine withdrawal myself when I'm not looking reddit or imgur, the craving its quite strong and I am 36 years old, just going to the bathroom without my phone feels like a chore, does that happen with other of the "boogyemans" you mention? I don't think so, I love rock since a very young age but never had too much of an urge to take my music to the bathroom, same with comic book, they do produce dopamine but in a much more spaced manageable way. I really can't imagine trying to handle that plus any sort of intensive education program.

There are two reactions against smartphones:

There’s the predictable boogeyman reactions. All phone/tablet use is bad. But that’s not what this article is about.

The other reactions are from those of us looking at measurable changes in kids behaviour, that started with the introduction of the smart phone, and can easily be explained by fairly solid studies linking it to the kind of media kids consume on these devices.

Phones/tablets can be both good and bad, like any technology. But the level to which it can be bad for us humans (not just kids) is on a completely different level.

It’s funny that you mention TV, because there’s a solid argument to be made that TV has also ruined a generation, but it doesn’t really hit until they get older, and start to be glued to day time TV, which rapidly deteriorates them physically and mentally, and has caused some serious political issues from having a huge block of voters voting based on companies trying to scare them all day every day with made-up issues so they stay engaged.

Now it’s not just old folks that have 24/7 access to addictive media. It’s kids, and depending on your job situation, working age adults as well.

The form that TV and (talk show) radio has taken in the last few decades in USA was perhaps the first iteration of the true underlying issue we have with phones/tablets: companies becoming way too good at keeping people from engaged, addicted, anxious and angry, all to make more and more profit above all else.

This is different. It's nonstop, personalized, and built to keep you hooked. It's not about freaking out, just about setting some boundaries like we do with anything that can go overboard.

I just want to note that this seems to be bad reasoning. There is no implication that because blaming all these technologies is perceived to have turned out to be mistaken, these new concerns must be mistaken also. Though I want to state that without providing an opinion on whether these concerns are warranted or not.

Everyone with a mobile is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along doom-scrolling celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...

Everyone with an imagination is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along daydreaming about celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...

There is a very big difference between engaging with your own stream of consciousness and being spoon-fed stimuli without any effortful engagement. While I get the sentiment that the parent comment may be snarkily over-generalizing (for the record, I don't think that it does), this retort doesn't land at all.

Reductionist statement is reductionist.

I'm sure that Jasleen Kaur, Kendrick Lamar, and Bethany Baptiste all have mobile phones, and yet, they were all recognized as top creators in 2024. Plenty of people with jobs they hate were dead inside long before mobile phones were invented -- they were addicted to alcohol instead. People levied the same complaints you're making about newspapers and books.

Instead of painting any technology or distraction with a broad brush, it's best to focus on the potential harms and find out who's most impacted. We can help those folks better if we don't just demonize their vice across the board.

Exceptions don't prove the rule, or refute them for that matter.

This zombie apocalypse hits different

I’m reading your comment on a mobile right now.

Replace mobile with television and this sounds quaint. Some people always find a excuse to be dehumanizing even if the "excuse" is a real problem.

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