My Students Can't Read
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness.
90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless
My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off.
Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.
So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.
This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone.
Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10.
This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.
Everyone's very excited to have failure rates or whatever and then mute on the real problem: those people don't just go away.
If anything, it simply increases the pool of people who realize you don't need to try.
Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.
Remedial classes. Or, realistically, unskilled labor.
Like, what do we do with these kids now? The same thing, except after we’ve saddled them with a meaningless diploma and a pile of debt.
Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out.
Source: former F1 visa masters student here
Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and creativity. It’s high time for English teachers to do the same.
Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.
I would argue the last 30 years have had more attention-competition than most of the last 370. These kids are actually different by growing up in a very different world.
Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
However, the value of the Canon° is three-fold:
1) There are stories and ideas that are culturally important. Students need to be made familiar with them, and know where they came from.
2) The themes in the Old Stuff are not unrelateable. Shakespeare wrote about sex and death and jealousy and power, and the tension between individuals and society. Those are all perfectly familiar to anyone. One of my favorite assignments, when I taught a college lit course, was to read Beowulf, and then (during mid-term week, to give them a break) watch Jaws, because they're the exact same story. It's important to recognize common humanity in people who look and dress and talk and believe differently than you do. Using The Old Stuff to expand that skill side-steps many of the reflexive reactions students bring to contemporary literature.
3) Students need to be challenged to read hard texts. You're on HN, so I expect you recognize the value and pleasure of understanding something that was previously beyond you. Yes, there is contemporary writing that also works - I assigned more than some of my colleagues - but reading the classics hits all three of these points, so it's still worth doing.
All that said, there are way too many Humanities teachers who are just awful, and put people off reading rather than the reverse. I suspect that you may have encountered some of them, and that's a damn shame.
°To anyone reading over our shoulders in this conversation: don't @ me over this. I'm well aware of the problems with the notion, but it's still the best layman's term for the idea under discussion. I'm a broad-tent guy, though: whatever you think oughta be included is probably fine with me.
Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
Also, it depends what you see the discussion as. If laws are supposed to do the right thing, then "pass everyone always" is really starting to look like the wrong thing, even where the intentions are seemingly "good" because they avoid "disparate impact" (in the short term on very narrowly-chosen metrics). Then if your argument is "yeah well we can't do the right thing because lawsuits", well, yes, I agree, practically, but then these lawsuits are basically also evil and/or misguided.
If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.
The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).
I want these laws changed, it is the whole reason I brought up the issue, but I also understand how monumentally difficult it would be to do that. I suspect the US would have to degrade far further to even consider this.
1. Takes out six figures of loans for a degree in a field with no hope of commensurate income
2. Pays minimum payments below interest
3. Whines on social media that after X years of not even covering the interest payment they now owe more than ever
Should:
1. Lose both their college and HS degrees. They clearly dont understand HS math.
2. Their college’s accreditation should be investigated
3. Same with their HS
Similarly, the person with the credential that says they can do basic math that cannot do basic math should not have the credential.
Moreover, they said the accreditation of both institutions should be investigated.
I'm not sure if you realize you're basically saying most people with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean should not be pursuing higher education. Currently 40% of young adults are in higher education in the US. (based on a quick google, percent could be wrong, i also saw 60% pursue it at some point)
As a heuristic, let's assume they're the 40% with the highest IQ.
If 90% of them shouldn't be there, then you're effectively saying only the highest 4% IQ individuals should be there.
Two standard deviations cuts out 95% of people. What a very high standard. And I'm not even getting into the mountains of research that higher education makes workers better at their jobs, ceteris paribus.
So you're saying genius-level people don't belong at uni.
That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.
Is it really your assertion that university is a waste of time for the most intelligent decile? Do you think four bucks in late fees at the public library remotely resembles a quality university education? I find people who didn't go to university often say things like this, because they've drunk some kind of far-right kool aid.
The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.
People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.
And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.
Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.
Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)
> IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills.
I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago. Notable, it's been increasing, so someone taking an IQ test in the year 2000 getting an IQ of 100 would have had an IQ of 130 had they taken it in 1950. That's an incredibly important piece of information needed to even do basic comparisons of IQs
> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
> or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
It's also pretty well known and well studied that you can train people to score higher on IQ tests. I'm not talking about years of training either
Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).
Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).
It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:
- IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
- IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
- some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
- IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability
What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.
When I took the California high school exit exam, it was already a joke. Still, the news was filled with people treating every failure as a failure of the test.
I think the growing frustration is real, but it's coming more from employers than the populace in general.
For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating.
I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning.
If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.
Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).
Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.
I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.
Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't
Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.
You're right that it can always be worse but you're wrong to say that we can't do better now
DEI quotas make it hard to bring along a whole team of boot lickers.
Or in the case of this administration, window lickers.
The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it.
What I want ultimately is that we strive to give a better life to everyone. And I don't think that's what meritocracy achieves.
> I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser
But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.
But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different
Fuck No.
(Much irony, given the topic of TFA.)
You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't really want more of these.
So, more apprenticeship? That's actually a really good solution, but an entire system needs to change as it shifts the burden of training to employers rather than schools. Whatever the solution is, it would have an impact on every aspect of society, maybe positive, maybe negative, my guess is on an overall negative as even if lowest common denominator education is not ideal, it is still better than no education at all for the masses. But it is debatable, and it is often debated.
Also there is a correlation between countries tertiary education rate and GDP and life expectancy. It does not imply causation, but it supports the idea that it may be a good thing.
Yes. But not as a first-order priority. Fixing the incentives in the schooling system can take priority over figuring out what to do with every single person passing through it. (Also, a market where a third of students fail to graduate high school will find use for that labor.)
Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.
Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt
The debt however is an other problem, a US specific one it seems. Many other countries have a lot of students and no student debt problem. But one way to think about that debt is that it is someone else's asset. Money is debt (maybe that's the kind of useless thing you learn in college ;)) and getting rid of a $100k debt is like removing $100k from the economy, and it will be felt in one way or another. I still think that student debt situation is terrible, but "solving" the student debt problem by removing students is not the way to go IMHO.
I have worked in fortune 500 companies for 15 years, and my observation is that there is an alarming amount of people (engineering) who work in these companies are completely inept in their domain of expertise.
What they seem to get by on is a complete adherence to hierarchy: do not ask questions, do not push back on requests, do not engage in capability mindset, just execute on whatever slop is getting jammed down the throat of middle management.
Now, as someone who is on "the leadership team", I see this as generally widespread across many different orgs.
These folks obviously serve some function: which is to churn out whatever the whims are of the executive leadership team based on the Current Business Strategy.
So what do we do with these folks? Let them keep doing it. We could satisfy these roles with the standard factory style highschool education followed by an associates -like degree, e.g. a two year rule following program that introduces the domain and jargon that you're going to be in.
The problem is that because you can no longer get a non-minimum wage job without a college degree, universities are now basically just a place to get a piece of paper so you can get a job, any job. They're no longer "halls of higher learning". A bachelor's degree is the new high school degree.
If you could earn a living without a college degree, like you used to be able to, those going to uni would be those who want to educate themselves.
Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.
I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
Especially not our politicians.
Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.
Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.
A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.
A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.
This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.
In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.
My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.
I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.
Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.
Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.
I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.
Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.
I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.
Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.
I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).
The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.
Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.
Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.
Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.
I'm not sure it matters anyway.
I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points.
I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points.
I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM.
If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos.
The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.
We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.
The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.
If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are.
But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely.
The next generation are just further along on this curve.
And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing.
It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.
They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
long yes, run-on no.
Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.
Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.
The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!
Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)
I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is.
I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us.
Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit.
Sure, that's why this [0] XKCD was made - getting pulled off on a geeky sidequest, automating something that has (almost) no business being automated, and spending far longer configuring, debugging, and refining your "time saving" scripts than actually doing the damn task are what I expect a dev to get lost in.
Which, sure, is a form of laziness, but it has a different vibe than getting an LLM to do everything for you IMO.
As an aside, a common refrain is that the best computer people are innately curious; they wanted to see how the computer responded if they broke or changed something. LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen; in a way, I'd argue they destroy curiousity itself: a horrifying proposition for anyone that looks to the future of computing, or even humanity in general.
My experience has been the opposite. I get claude to go down those rabbit holes a lot, precisely because the effort of doing that is smaller, and claude usually has some insights that help. Often mistaken insights, but still.
And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.
One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?
politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large
> which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it
You can read while still being illiterate
I recorded some tutorial videos for some kids a while back, to help them prepare for an exam.
The feedback I got was very positive, but I suspected they weren't learning as much as they thought. So I made a practice exam for them, and they failed it.
This was a wake-up call for them. They revisited the material, and got a good score on repeating the practice exam, and a good score on the actual exam.
So, there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use.
(Ditto for if you want to retain a skill or faculty!)
Yes! The brain is optimized to be lazy. A forcing function to actually use/apply knowledge is required.
On Stack Exchange sites, I used to see questions and think “Oh! I know the answer. It’ll only take a few minutes to answer”. Invariably, I discovered that I didn’t have all the knowledge to provide a complete answer. While typing, I’d realise that there were gaps in my knowledge (e.g., is what I’m writing true for BSDs as well as Linux OSs?) or there’d be edge cases that I hadn’t previously considered (differences between program versions, how software behaves in different locales, etc.). A good, comprehensive answer ended up taking around half an hour but I found the effort was worth it: writing Stack Overflow answers was a great way to learn.
Speaking of “forcing functions”, I’m currently learning guitar and my goal for this year is to learn a song in full and record myself to objectively see how well I’m actually playing.
People who got into programming in the 80s generally learned assembly because it was the only way to get the job done (BASIC being too slow for games and graphics).
They don't generally use assembly much anymore, but often still rely on that knowledge (checking the disassembly).
This ability is no longer forced by the environment, nor is it taught. So the last few generations of programmers did not learn how a computer works.
I suspect that has something to do with it.
It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.
The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.
I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.
Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems.
The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.
At work I spend maybe five minutes on something before being asked a question about something else, and it doesn't feel as if I really achieve much at all.
I don't get paid for the first one and do get paid for the second one, but I think for the quality of work (as a direct result of the continuity of attention) it should be the other way round.
This reminds me of a thing my spouse and I argue about sometimes. She'd get mad as a kid when she turned in homework, because she'd get points taken off for now showing her work. My view is that the teacher doesn't give a shit about the answers, the teacher doesn't need to know what the solution to an equation is, the teacher needs to know that the students are learning the correct techniques to solve a problem, and without showing work, there's no way to evaluate that.
Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM (5 days ago, 866 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233
If you can read cursive, the Newberry has a job for you (62 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607255
Kids rarely read books anymore, even in English class (5 months ago, 346 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233
US high school students’ scores fail in reading and math (8 months ago, 1089 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657
Ask HN: How to gain the ability to read with focus and learn? (11 months ago, 39 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346359
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023) (41 days ago, 292 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867755
It sure looks like phones are making students dumber (2.5 years ago, 151 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695500
UK surgery students ‘losing dexterity to stitch patients’ (7.5 years ago, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18339299
Several Baltimore schools have no students proficient in state tests (9 years ago, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385703
Many McGill education students cannot calculate an average (11 years ago, 274 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080665
Note: I could not find posts about US reading / writing educational failures prior to this in the archives, though they may still exist; but there are still many about math education and bad business writing. However, I believe this post was the bellwether warning of what would follow:
A writing career becomes harder to scale (16 years ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109011
Multiple times in my career in tech, I've had people complain that a 2-page write-up is too long. These are well compensated people that went to top universities. I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article.
They'd feed it to a chatbot and glance over whatever summary it came back with and believe it represents the contents of the article.
Does anyone know what’s the importance of sighing in this context? I notice one of my work colleagues sighs a lot when reading but I assume that’s due to the nature of the work he’s doing – or emails he reads.
On a related note, I recently read an article¹ by an Irish fiction writer who teaches her craft to others. While her article focusses on the stages to achieving mastery, the teacher found that even students who want to be writers don’t want to read. I found that to be a bizarre concept and hard to believe; it’d be like wanting to be a musician without listening to music or a film-maker not watching Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Capra, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Lee, Spielberg, etc.
¹ https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/05/04/some...
Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade.
>showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests
Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on…
>Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.
Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat.
>districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding
I remember this first hand.
>The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation…
There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.
When I was in school we joked about it being 13th grade, that was seeing all the kids as freshmen who CLEARLY didn’t belong there, but their guidance counselors told them for 12 years about how they need to go to college.
- abolish teachers unions
- fail / keep back students who don't meet standards, in a completely objective fashion with no regard for racial / ethnic / gender sensitivities
Someone isn’t doing their job. And we can’t fire the parents. Tackling teachers’ unions seems like a necessary difficult step if we want to take this seriously. Alternatively: we keep letting public education deteriorate until so much of the population opts out of it that killing it outright becomes politically possible.
Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."
Respondent: "It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street."
https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...
These are mostly rhetorical because my point is that you will not get the same answers from instructors, teachers, professors, parents …
If you want people, especially children, to read, it needs to be interesting to them. If you want them to learn by reading, they need to have had good experiences reading.
“Here, read some Dickens and we’ll discuss it next week …” without any amount of preparation by the teacher to a) help students understand the times within which it was written, and b) prepare them for the meandering prose is indeed a recipe for disaster.
Examples:
“as here he is” - so he's already doing what he ought? Or is there an alternate reading of this phrase meaning "he's physically here, but the situation is not as it ought to be"?
“… addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers…” - by the time we get here, is he saying the advocate is present, or that the advocate ought to be present but is not?
The sentence ran on, against the education we’ve been so wearily handed over the years. If we are not permitted to craft such things, how can we be expected to ever understand them?
The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class.
Barring that, if students are expected to parse, understand, and discuss prose and topics so many generations removed from their own lives, Education® needs to get off its butt and educate.
No one forced them to read full novels or even full pages.
No one expected them to know what 'Lord Chancellor' was. They could look it up.
"The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class."
The purpose of the study was to test reading comprehension. If you replace the 'reading' part with listening, you're not testing reading comprehension.
Having said that, when I read Thomas Pynchon, and I've only progressed through four of his more beginner-friendly books, in a number of places I feel that reading his work is something that is passively happening to me, as opposed to my actively following along with the action / description.
There's something I enjoy about Pynchon's writing, but I don't think I'm picking up everything that he's putting down.
Similarly with the older language used by Dickens. But damn it sounds good.