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Comment by Proofread0592 | Hacker News Reader

> “It’s like they’ve never seen a block,” says Hornbeck, an instructional coach at Beverly City Public Schools in New Jersey, describing how kids fumble when asked to stack just three blocks. “The things they do with the block when you’ve just shown them what to do is boggling.”

Whenever I see quotes about "kids these days can't do X", I'm always skeptical.

You remember the kids in your class that were just absolutely, indefensibly stupid? These quotes are probably talking about those specific kids. I seriously doubt out of a class of 30 kids, all 30 of them couldn't stack the blocks. It was probably the 5 kids in the class that are just stupid, and every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will.

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For better or worse they did actually cite statistics:

> 77 percent of educators reported young students having greater difficulties handling pencils, pens, and scissors. In comparison, 69 percent noted increased struggles with tying shoes compared to five years ago.

But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years.

That said, I wouldn't doubt the claim, only the methodology.

> But I'm also skeptical of drawing any conclusions from questions phrased this way. In my experience, the fraction of people who think everything is worse than 5 years ago has remained unchanged in the last 30 years.

Oh no, there are for sure more people now who think things are worse vs 5 years ago than there were 5 years ago.

I would also have to wonder how much of that is the supposed general 'manual dexterity' problem, and how much is just greater unfamiliarity with those specific items because they're no longer immediately using them every day. I certainly know that my own ability to hand-write for long periods dropped off hard once I got out of high school and shifted into typing almost everything.

Maybe the proportion of “stupid” kids is increasing due to phone use altering cognitive development?

I don’t know if that’s true or not but it is worth thinking about.

Especially since apparently Big Tech executives and top engineers are very strict regarding technology use in their children. And very strict regarding screen time.

Reminiscent of how tobacco executives would not let their kids smoke while suppressing data regarding lung cancer.

> every class throughout the history of time has had those stupid kids, and always will

Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn. And current technology could make this time longer.

> Maybe they weren't stupid, they just need more time to learn.

Isn't that the definition of stupid, someone who needs more time than average to learn. While smart would be someone who needs less time than average to learn.

That seems a little reductive to me, since "needs more time" could mean many different things, ex:

1. (Overall rate) From the same starting-point, this child will always require 2x the time/effort to learn than expected.

2. (Overall offset) This child's thresholds for becoming able to learn many skills at the normal rate tends to be 6 months later than expected.

3. (Specific rates) For a particular task this child learned slowly no matter how old they were.

4. (Specific offsets) For a particular task this child learned slowly, but when stopped trying and revisited it X months later they had no problems.

Of those, it sounds like you're assuming the harshest, first version.

I'm no child developmental psychologist, but I'd wager that versions 2,3,4 are more frequent than most people would assume, since they take more work to distinguish and the universe tends to be messy.

Well, there's a huge difference between having 5/30 kids being intensely stupid vs. 6/30 in the average kindergarten. That is catastrophically bad.

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