American students are getting dumber | Hacker News Reader

American students are getting dumber

slowboring.com

> Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe.

Wrong.

In the article, the nearest link that was supposed to prove that claim points to a blog post that uses the 2019 PISA data. And in that post, there's not just Ireland and Estonia in Europe that do better than USA, but also Finland, Poland and Sweden. US-Americans have a reputation of knowing little of the world geography, maybe that's why these countries were forgotten ;-)

The article also has a link to a blog about 2021 PISA data, but with a very limited sample: e.g. Estonia is missing. And Poland still does better than the USA.

With more to learn than ever, has the US approach to education kept up or prioritized? No, I don't think so.

Students getting "dumber" implies something about the students, when the dumbest things I've encountered or heard of involve the staff and administration of US school systems

> has the US approach to education kept up or prioritized?

"The PISA results are also a reminder of something that I think many Americans don’t know: America’s overall educational performance is above average for a rich country.

Our PISA reading scores were worse than Canada, Ireland, Estonia, and the rich Asian countries, but higher than everyone else in Europe. You used to be able to break out PISA scores by state, which would typically show things like Massachusetts doing better than any European country. But that breakdown is no longer available."

> Students getting "dumber" implies something about the students

A tree stunted by being grown in poor soil is still stunted.

99% of my kid’s education happens outside of the school. in 2025 if a student is “dumb” it is 100% her/his and parent’s fault, not “administration” or “school system”

both could be better but if you rely on any “system” or “administration” for your well-being you are not going to end up well…

What sort of education are they getting out of school? I know I learned a lot browsing the web and playing games as a kid, but maybe you also mean something more directed like tutoring.

As a kid, I learned the most from activities like:

- visiting museums

- going to the zoo

- running a lemonade stand

- volunteering at soup kitchen

- joining a sports team

My parents set me up for all of those, I would have just read books on the couch otherwise.

This is the kind of knowledge you are supposed to have gotten before going to school. We have these institutions called schools, BECAUSE that dense kind of knowledge requires rote memorization at the beginning, which is hard to acquire elsewhere.

If there was any rote memorisation at my school, I don't remember it. I do remember being forced to write until my fingers were raw. So yes, practicing writing gave me a valuable skill I would not have picked up on my own: I can sharpen a mean pencil.

That's the first and maybe second year. You can't tell me you haven't done anything in the other decade you were there.

Biology is famous for being only about memorization, but there is something in every subject. Grammar rules, vocab and poems in the language classes, laws in physics, philosophy has a bunch of concepts. What else are concept names in CS if not simply terms to be learned?

The point is however not only to train you how to learn or to get you to know facts, but most importantly to learn the tools of a subject and to let you be able to see abstractions. You need to do a lot of arithmetic before you can grasp analysis. I can't think of explaining mathematical models to a person who never got to use Numbers. A lot of things can only be learned by doing them.

Do you want to tell me anything you learned past class 6, can be learned by doing the activities you listed? It feels very weird to hear from people on the internet (who I think are adults), that they never moved on from being ~7 years old. (Sorry, that was not intended as an ad hominem, maybe you are a professor in X, but how can you explain, that you think school can be substituted by e.g. selling lemonade, past primary school?)

The alternative is that you are a modern da Vinci and could invent all of modern science yourself. In this case congratulations, but maybe you should have gone to university earlier. You would however realize that most people aren't like that and do learn more then selling lemonade at school.

I'm not disagreeing with you, schools can be great places to learn. I envy your experience.

My school sucked, catering to the slowest students and bullying the self-motivated ones. The general view of the administration was that the whole universe was only a few thousand years old and was unlikely to last much longer.

I got a decent education, in spite of my school, thanks to my parents working hard to fill the gaps. Obviously the list above is not exhaustive, and it adapted as I got older.

So it was true for me then, and probably even more true in 2025, that the parents have full responsibility for the education of the student. Picking a school like yours would be a great first step, if that's an option.

I don't see how this has to do with the quality of the school. This should also apply to a bad school. What have you done in past class 2? I can't imagine a school existing on earth that still teaches 16 year old students how to write.

No writing class at 16 of course, although all assignments were still required to be submitted in cursive until around then, with points quickly docked for spelling and tidiness lapses.

But the curriculum was years behind, so by the time something showed up in the school material, a lot of kids had already learned it. Either outside of school, or just the previous year... the material always seemed recycled from year to year, just with ever increasing page count requirements for assignments. It was a private school, and thereby avoided scrutiny.

Come to think of it, I actually do remember a lot of rote memorisation of religious texts, though. Not sure how I forgot about it, it was a pretty stressful subject. We had to write those from memory in cursive too.

> 99% of my kid’s education happens outside of the school.

If this is true, or even close - your kid desperately needs a new school, an IEP, or some other sort of immediate intervention.

My kid goes to $50k/year private school so school itself is not the issue. the issue is that school isn’t meant for education. if it was you would now be able to solve a differential equation and I can fairly certainly say you can’t even though I am guessing you are highly educated person. you also probably can’t recite periodic table of elements or answer 99.76% of questions you got from “education”

the education begins and ends at home and is highly personal. in this day and age with everything kids have at their disposal, if they get majority of their education at school they are on the wrong track

> My kid goes to $50k/year private school so school itself is not the issue.

You spend $50k a year on a private school that is achieving 1% of the education needs of your child?

That's about $400 per average school day. Does this include food, boarding, and speciality IEP care or something?

The rich kids — 90th and 75th percentiles — are flat, with a inconsequential (1%) drop over the decade.

Yes, but that could in principle be true literally everywhere, and it might well be.

“Idiocracy”, here we come.

More like here we are

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