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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

It’s culture led by phones and other screens. Most teens are addicted to the screens. The need them for school and for socialization with friends and they end up on TikTok or another network and zombie there for most of their best brain years. They lack the ability to focus necessary to learn because the brain is used to constant screen simulation. Letting your child be babysat by a screen is absolutely the worst thing you can do to ever raise an adult.

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From my conversations with 20-year-ago school students, American schools are culture led by sports, and football most of all. No surprise many parents don't see a reason for their kids to excel in STEM.

For this theory to hold up you would need to explain what changed as high schools in the US have loved sports since at least the 40s

I doubt much changed. American STEM education has always been pretty mediocre. I've been hearing about my whole life.

Mediocre by what metric? American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc. Of course there's always room for improvement.

> American STEM education seems to objectively be doing pretty well in terms of Nobel prizes, scholarly journal articles, patents, technology product revenue, etc.

I hate to break it to you, but a lot of our most valuable research is produced by people who did their primary education outside the US. Just go to a STEM research lab at any US university connected to a Nobel prize or Fields medal in the last 10-20 years, and it will be almost completely made up of internationally educated students / professors / etc.

Yes, they are getting visas via academia employment.

If someone is curious about this data, I made a little analysis a while ago - Nobel Prize in numbers: https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/nobel-prize-in-numbers/#sec...

About a half of Nobel Prizes in the US were awarded to immigrants or children of immigrants.

Unfortunately, those metrics are very focused on the 0.1%, if not the 0.01%.

Like a sorting algorithm which is O(n) on nearly-sorted input - the utility is limited.

? That’s a common use case for sorting though.

Changed was the reduction of brain-drain from Germany/Hungary and later USSR to the US.

This is true (and they do take a large amount of things like money and resources), but these cultural influences are also very loud. You will find that the majority of the kids in the cafeteria really don't give a crap about any of that, and that goes for the parents as well.

It really depends on the town, the school, and the social circle of the parents. If you live in a wealthy Boston suburb, academics are emphasized much more than sports, and expectations for students are very high. If you live in rural Appalachia, then football is king.

Something that isn’t obvious to non-Americans or non-parents is just how diverse the US education system is. Even within a medium size city you’ll find multiple schools that might have completely different cultures.

Some schools are sports centric. Others have to work hard to get students interested in sports.

I think the implication that sports are bad is also misleading. Sports programs, when run well, can do a good job of getting kids into routines, out of trouble, and keeping them accountable to their peers for something. The TV and movie style sports culture where the football players aren’t expected to even attempt to pass their classes doesn’t actually exist in most schools.

I hear what you are saying, but I feel like this is related more to both parents working or single parent households. The more time parents work, the harder it is to get ahead, the more screen time kids will get.

Don't expect much when (from what I see) most adults are properly addicted to their screens. If parents are already not up to the bar kids will seldom be, leading by example and all that.

Now show me parents, hell even here on HN, who openly admit that they are addicted to the screens and various 'social' cancers and consider it something profoundly bad and damaging, and that they as parents should really do better and actually try. A rare sight, mostly its brushed off and some even brag how 'digital' and modern their kids are.

But its fine, we all know how these things really are. This is one area where even otherwise disadvantaged parents (ie due to their poor upbringing or ie coming from undeveloped places) can raise their kids to be well above sea of future desperate population with severe social anxieties and addictions (lets not forget addictions ball up since they change personality for the worse).

Think how much lack / minimization of those will give them various advantages in their adult lives, be it professional (focus on work, ability to better socialize and communicate in person) or personal (all kinds of relationships, and finding one's purpose and drive in life). I just mentioned basically whole core of adult existence, no small things by any means.

And its not that hard, we do it with our kids and often see it around us in their peers, just need to put a bit more effort and spend more time with them instead of doom scrolling or binge watching TV. Which are anyway good parenting advices, but one needs to start like that from beginning and lead by example.

I'm pretty sure the same argument was made for television, movies, radio and fiction books.

That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

I remember racing home from school to catch Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z. And then they were over until the next day.

yeah but you get home at 4, watch an hour of anime, it's 5pm, you do homework for half an hour, then you have dinner with family until about 7, then you have about an hour of getting ready for bed/chores and that gets you to 8pm. At most you have one more hour of studying. So 90 minutes of education-related stuff at home a day in your ideal past where kids "only" spent an hour on TV.

Much like extending the workday past 10 hours there must be a point of diminishing/negative returns to expecting multiple hours of study per night. Also, those times you list seem indicative of elementary school kids. Most high schoolers are going to be up way past 9pm. Of course, they also probably aren't getting home before 6pm and don't have the luxury of an hour long family dinner every night either.

I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is that the entertainment was finite, in this case because it was only available for a set duration.

That Dragonball Z came on for a single episode created a dead zone where it made sense to do homework and it wasn't pulling teeth when it came time to sit down for dinner with my family (something we both would be very privileged to have in our youth btw).

That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.

Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?

So why are the drops happening in the US, but not Asia, which is equally smartphone addicted?

> but not Asia

It's happening in many Asian countries too.

Korea: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

HK: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?

Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems

yes, and none of those things are just available to you while you're also learning in the classroom. no school should allow phones in the classroom.

Yes and it was a fair argument then, too. It's likely only a matter of degree of distraction.

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