40% of Kids Can't Read and Teachers Are Quitting [video] | Hacker News Reader

40% of Kids Can't Read and Teachers Are Quitting [video]

youtube.com

42 pointssquillion37 comments

From the summary of video:

"40% of fourth graders can't read. Kids are asking their teachers why they need to learn to read when AI can do it for them. Social media has destroyed their attention spans and now teachers aren't teaching, instead they're managing withdrawal symptoms."

Why are fourth graders on social media and using AI already? My fourth grade kid has no social media presence and definitely isn't familiar with AI tools. This sounds like a parent problem.

Not all parents on this planet are investing in their offspring. Some parents also miss the required knowledge. Getting the required knowledge could be a society problem.

This is incredibly true, and has been a growing problem from before LLMs came around. Even wealthy families who presumably have plenty of resources they could use to better their children's fates are failing their kids. My sister is a teacher in a well-off school district and has to buy food out of her own pocket (on a teacher's salary) to give to her students because so many haven't even had anything to eat before they show up.

I mean, these are bare minimum things, people.

The very last clip in the video says that it is kids in affluent families taking that direction.

A lot of people want to have kids but don't want to be parents. There are a lot of kids who spend hours on tablets watching TikTok and so on before they even reached first grade.

Couple of years ago I was taking the tram home, and there was a toddler in a stroller. The toddler was young enough she couldn't speak properly. She got frustrated about something and started crying.

Without hesitation the parent whipped up the iPhone and handed it to her. The kid navigated the menu with ease, launched a game and started playing. After about 15 seconds, she exited the game, navigated a few pages with purpose to another game and ended up playing that instead.

Meanwhile I was standing there gobsmacked...

As part of the "in-between" generation which skipped lead poisoning and the extreme social media/smartphone dependency, I kinda feel worried.

How do they expect to understand what the AI is doing if they can’t read the output? Seems like critical thinking skills are also not entirely there.

No need to read text, AI can talk in a voice of your choosing.

Some kids (parents, really) are beyond helping. They drag everyone in the classroom down and there's nothing a teacher can do about it. The kids are ruined because their parents ruined them. These kids need to be held back, separated, and/or expelled to give the rest of them a chance at a real education. This will require a change to incentives and laws, the first step of which is this growing awareness and dread of the situation.

This is one of the biggest issues. We allow children who do not want to and will not learn to destroy the education of those who do. We used to understand this and expel the disruptive students to allow the good students to actually learn.

Shocked to hear that some children are on social media in grade 4!

Annual escalation of the grade, e.g. eight grade, should be altogether eliminated in favor of one month modules. This avoids wasting a whole year if one fails the grade. Faster feedback is better, up to a point, and it is better here.

How would this work in practice though if a teacher has to teach an entire class? Of course it would have to use computer instruction, with the teacher helping small batches of students who're in the month-long module, but only for a fraction of the time. Whatever you do, please do not call it a sprint - it misuses the concept from running by lasting forever, resulting in inevitable burnout.

Australia's social media ban for young teenagers is probably a good thing but time will tell.

It needs generational time, the current hooked generation can't give up (not their fault since the largest tech bros build a very additive product), but there's hope for the next generation.

Unless something worse comes along, like vaping and we undo all the anti smoking progress of the last two generations.

While, as a parent, i don't like social media in its current form and the effect it has on ALL people, one must not forget that the 'fight' between old and young people has been going for at least 2500 years now. ( https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-a... ). I also recommend watching the movie 'The Boat That Rocked' ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1131729/ )

There is no fight actually and noone is complaining "kids these days" at the moment. KIds are not the ones to blame in current situation. It's 100% work left undone by previous generations.

Per stats in the video results are roughly the same as in 1992, with peak roughly at 2019. I do not know why is 1992 baseline, but for some reason it is.

OK, I found it, peak was 2020. Just in case someone will (again) argue this means we have to go back to pedagogy of 1970.

Why are you letting kids that can't read pass the grade?

"No child left behind"

"Every child college bound"

(Who knew this was the financial aid industry slogan, and "bound" meant "shackled", not "headed to"?)

That would be harmful to their self esteem.

US schools have become one big participation trophy.

The 40% stat is not great, there's a better unpacking of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvCT31BOLDM

Don’t they still need to read what AI writes? Or did they skip to the TTS stage?

You can "talk" to AI, so I assume this is what they'd be referring to. No need to write prompts or read responses.

That's not THE problem. The problem is that they can't encode/decode text. They lack experience, vocabulary, knowledge and all these little small things needed to communicate via (not necessarily written) text. It's not dyslexia.

It takes thousands of hours of reading and writing to get competent at both.

While I appreciate the sentiment of the video, I can‘t get past the sensationalist rhetoric / framing of the problem.

„Skibidi Toilet is rotting brains!! Kids don‘t want cartoons!!“.

I suppose videos like this might get people to think about the problem who hadn‘t considered it before.

(a joke) 100% of kids can't read then 60% learn

This is 100% the fault of parents.

if it's 5% of parents it's the parents problem.

if it's 50% it's a society problem and can not be pushed to the individuals.

These kids will grow up and sadly/likely be a burden on the 60% who can read. Or the even smaller subset who can read, write, count, and be productively employed.

Parents (myself included) have an impossible task of regulating access to technology for their children.

Societal norms are not aligned with what these educators are saying. I and many other parents know this but they are exposed to technology outside of our direct oversight at schools, friends and relatives houses.

Imagine whining about smoking in the first half of the 20th century or even the 60s and 70s. Sure there’s an obvious element to it, but smoking rates used to be higher than 50%. Societal norms were that everyone was exposed to smoke, government was lobbied by tobacco and tobacco got rich.

There has been a generational shift in attitudes to, and prevalence of smoking, but only when the medical consensus was harder to lobby away and politicians were faced with pressure of a critical mass of bereaved relatives. It’s at the this stage that “average” adult has strong enough convictions supported by regulation that society breaks through.

Meanwhile, as an adult I am borderline forced to use a smartphone for banking, shopping and communication and need superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment.

Big tech is 100% thrilled that people still push around the argument that parents are 100% to blame.

No, you don't need "superhuman levels of willpower to avoid social media entrapment". Just block the damn sites. Delete your account before you do. No you don't need to keep up with Timmy from the 8th grade and his third marriage and worsening benzo addiction.

People smoked for the same reason people doomscroll - anxiety.

You can expose your kid to technology and also explain the role of moderation the same way you do with candy and sweets. You will need to model the behavior you want in your kid - that means putting your phone down. Buy a timed lockbox if that is what you need.

Should you delete the HN account?

I don't think I am on social medias at all, but I am on Discord and on HN, so effectively I am.

I am not behind an algorithmic driven feed, but I do use RSS feeds

Where is the line?

Exposure outside the home is a miniscule amount and could not result in this sort of deep rot. It's not an impossible task at all. Don't give the kids a screen, and when it's necessary, use site whitelists. Yes, they will be mildly alienated, but I don't think we should care. They would also be alienated if their peers all smoked, and I would still not consider giving my kid a pack of cigs. They will recover from an unpopular school life, but they may never recover from the effects of addictive technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com