Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
economist.com
economist.com
I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol
“Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD.
And there may be some social-engineering intent there, or at least something approximating it? Like, I don't think the elites are all smoking cigars after their Bohemian grove owl orgy (or whatever Alex Jones coded nonsense) and saying "muah hahahaha, we can really make these kids dumber!" But I definitely think that "it sure would be nice if the workers didn't want raises" certainly comes up. No child left behind has certainly had an effect too... Then there's the shootings, the bullying (which appears much much better than when I was a kid at least), and the jingoism/patriotic nonsense.
My wife and I have actually been considering taking the kids out of "traditional school" and doing something more bespoke. Here in Alaska that's a lot more practical than in say, Washington? We have great home school programs here, and with our family members we have the education and qualifications to teach most of the core subjects (lots of retired teachers in our extended family). But, even with my kids in a fantastic school, it is a weird and almost carceral experience for the kids. They're constantly waiting around for stuff, constantly being tested with tests that don't seem to make a huge difference in what's taught, and they aren't really reading literature or doing much in math beyond simple rote work except for one of my sons who is 2 years ahead in math but is still bored.
I'm not saying it was all roses when I was in school 20-30 years ago, but, it feels qualitatively different? Also... even in the nice school they're in, the environment is just... I don't know, oppressive, crowded, and restrained. I'm sorry, it's messed up to make kids ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. I'm sorry, it's weird how authoritarian most of the classes are - I understand why, shrinking budgets mean bigger classes, but at least personally, I feel that there's a lot of merit to the idea that this thing that used to be about learning has become daycare so the parents can stay grinding away while their kids are safely sequestered. We will see if we can do it, but we're thinking pretty hard about just travelling in the winter while they do home school online or take college classes.
What's better: to have my kids sit in a box for 7 hours a day (but really only work for like 2-3 hours) and respond to bells on command or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties and guide them through projects that really push them all from another country in the winter where they can learn a second language, see a different world, etc? I understand that this is a privileged position for us - like, I work from my laptop and my wife has a commutable job, but each day I pick up the kids from their school it feels a little more like picking up a parolee.
I legit had aircraft sheet metal snips and numerous exacto knives in my locker and a leatherman on my person most of the time and it wasn't a huge deal? Hell, I needed the leatherman to open the hood of my shitbox car. In contrast today, one of my kids brought a toy knife to school a few years ago (because he thought it was cool, great learning opportunity for a young kid about "the man" I suppose) and you'd have thought they caught Bin Laden or something?
Perhaps I was just lucky, but it feels way different now, though there seems to be a lot less bullying.
The system forces schools to increase enrollment by assigning a tuition price based on attaching a loan to it. It's basically for profit. Then, the loans can't be forgiven in bankruptcy when the outcome of the education platform fails to produce an income that supports repayment.
To get an education that doesn't completely screw you over, you need to be a minority with a scholarship or actually have rich parents and attend for fun. But in either case, your only benefit financially is the hope of connecting with other students whose parents are richer than yours.
Exceptions for subjects with artificial barriers of entry (medicine, law, etc., and each of those has its own set of problems, mainly the price of education).
(Speaking about the United States, but probably a lot of this applies to many places.)
I disagree with the sentiment that the rich are dissuading college enrollment. I'm not rich. I don't hire college grads. They are broke, entitled, and lack work ethic. After 5 in a row, I started giving opportunities to smart kids, from good families, who exhibit an appreciation for hard work and good moral character. Those people learn in a month what takes a college grad 6. They appreciate opportunity, instead of expecting it.
As I should have always known, a good person is far, far more valuable than a piece of paper certifying victimhood.
I agree with the idea of giving opportunities to smart kids from good families who work hard and are ethical. But I also think it's pretty damn hard to get good at certain things outside of a classroom? I don't know, I have mixed emotions.
Still, despite my misgivings with traditional education, I think there remains some good that comes from going to a place where your only job is to learn.
But none of the loans and none of the "go work for IBM" mentality that taught me how to be a loser for way too long.
A few years head start on actual business building is way more valuable than a 250 kid lecture hall with a teacher who never built anything in their life.
The future belongs to entrepreneurs, and that's even more true now with LLM built businesses.
Get them a face to face sales job for a bit. It does a lot for one's character to learn how to break the ice and be personable. And it teaches work ethic.
https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/W9MBX7ZGK...
"We estimate the internal rates of return (IRRs) for individuals with college degrees in 10 broad majors compared to high school graduates. Our analysis shows significant differences in the age-earnings trajectories and IRRs across college majors. Specifically, Computer Science and Engineering majors have the highest IRRs, exceeding 13%, whereas Humanities & Arts and Education majors have the lowest IRRs, around 5% for male and 8–9% for female college graduates. Furthermore, the quantile regression analyses show that IRR is generally higher at the high end of the earnings distribution. Finally, we observed a slight decrease in IRR during the study period, which is consistent with the flattening and even decline in college wage premiums following the 2008 Great Recession."
The two categories of people I know who say this are elite-college graduates and parents of kids who crashed out of their standardized tests.
> or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties
We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
I mostly see business people who are already successful people saying this to be honest.
> We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
Well, the data is that if you can get a private tutor, that's what you should do, it's way more helpful than just going to school for 7 hours a day. That's why were thinking about making a more alternative education style happen. I'm definitely qualified to teach some stuff, and so is my wife, and mother. We just will need to find a way to fill in the gaps of the places where we're not qual'd. Regardless, I think personalized/individualized education is almost always better by the numbers.
That said, it really depends on what you're optimizing for.
These days you can find online courses and tutors. Lots of one to one adult attention helps a lot but kids can teach themselves a lot too. One problem is qualifications. Here in the UK our kids can just do the same exams school kids do. I think its more complicated in the US?
I think a large part of the problem with schools (and this is why its a problem across many countries) is a greater focus on metrics.
Schools have never been efficient with kids time.
> Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
The rest if your point is simply wrong. Focusing is a physical activity that you can train for. Every good chess player that plays classical trains for that. And so do (or rather so did) students in the education system. Taking mock tests before the finals is a way to train your endurance such that you will be better able to keep your focus throughout the test.
There is nothing wrong with me.
Maybe asking teachers is better. Maybe a robust metric across generations and across population simply does not exist, and cannot exist, and we just have to accept that we cannot compare the education of kids in America today with the education of kids in Guatemala a decade ago.
It's not just a good idea. It's the law[0].
[0] https://www.governor.ny.gov/eliminating-distractions-new-yor...
Teaching kids is incredibly challenging -- if they view school as torture or a prison then we have failed them.
I have three kids who've gone through K12 public schools and have been lucky enough to do so in well-funded school districts. Adding to that, we did our best to augment that with a parent organized weekly sessions with a host of different teachers hired to give lessons on things that the school curriculum did not cover.
We also had them participate in Odyssey of the Mind for many years (it's a really cool program worth checking out: https://odysseyofthemind.com/)
Even with all of that, it was clear that while much of their education stuck, other parts were effectively just tolerated.
I think there are really two core factors that lead to educational success:
1. A good teacher who can connect with students and inspire them to learn
2. A curriculum that can be understood by the student as having value and aligns with their life needs.
Teaching anyone is effectively futile unless they are curious or can find value in the subject material. Good teachers are the foundation of that, and outsourcing that to some sort of "educational platform" is doomed to failure.
And obviously a kid that is a disruption in the classroom degrades the experience for all the other students.
In both cases I disagree (to some extent)
Parents are not powerless.
You can’t force love for geography, but you can choose to ignore or give full attention when child asks some geographical question.
Same with setting boundaries and teaching to follow the rules. Kids definitely test boundaries, and thats good, they should learn to negotiate and sometimes win, but still kids that know boundaries at home will know boundaries in the classroom.
Of course engaging with your children is vital, and their curiosity should never be dampened.
Boundaries are about social discipline and that's akin to training a dog. Sure, every parent should do their best to make sure their children grow up to good members of society (including classroom behavior).
But when you say that "parents are not powerless" your implication overstates that power. There's no way to force a child to be curious or to care about a subject. Some kids are just "born that way" and are a challenge even for the most caring and engaged parents.
And once that kid becomes a teenager, that power starts to ebb really quickly as they learn that parents only have so many tools to enforce that discipline.
But I do have quite close relationships to several families and their children.
Some parents actively teach kids to read before going to school (despite certain developmental challenges the kid has), while others see it as a job of teachers to teach meaning of left/right or how to tie a shoe (not joking).
Btw. Most (All?) management techniques could be compared to dog training (positive and negative reinforcements), it does not make it bad or immoral.
> But when you say that "parents are not powerless" your implication overstates that power. There's no way to force a child to be curious or to care about a subject.
By “not powerless” I meant exactly what I said, power is NOT 0%. And yes, as person grows, that power/influence diminishes fast, so I would say early influence is especially crucial.
Btw. If all kids of a same parents have “bad manners” (kick and scream when others silently read), while all kids of other parent are well behaved (to a reasonable extent), then either manners are a genetical trait or maybe nurture part is quite an important thing.
The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.
My point is that we tried to make computers universal and one size fits all, and it doesn’t seem to have helped.
30 years ago, a single computer sat in the corner we could sometimes use it to play "educational" games. Not learn how to use computers or even type, both of which would have been useful life skills. Not how to program or actually educate.
Now, my son's whole class has laptops (progress!) and what do they use it for? To play Prodigy, a shitty "math" game ("What's 4 + 3? Your attack is successful!") and nothing else. Kids are bored of the shitty game, which pushes kids to pay for microtransactions during class, but they aren't allowed to do anything else on the computer.
My son wants to work on his Scratch game? Nope. Wants to research for his science report? Web access disabled. This has nothing at all to do with computers in classrooms and everything to do with top down educational policy driven by administrative greed.
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
I am saying that if you want to justify saying that a particular statistical anomaly that occurred during the 2020-2023 timeframe is not wholly or nearly wholly caused by the pandemic and its direct and indirect effects, you better have some damn good data to prove it.
> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
I hang out with a lot of teacher. Grade inflation is because if you dare give anything less to an A to a student, their parents complain to administration and administration always gives in and never stands up for the teacher. Same if students aren't turning work in - parents complain, administration says to pass them.
Educators are underwater, overworked, burnt out, and it's getting worse - and none of that is their fault. Every year they're asked to do more with less, which is why many of the best have retired or moved to other work.
If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
For example, made-up numbers, but: 1-2 hours of doom-scrolling daily is okay, as it still leaves time for 1-2 hours of schoolwork at home. 3-4 hours of such doom-scrolling, doom-scrolling between classes or during classes will have a measurable negative effect on your academic knowledge and abilities. (I don't have much information on how US schoolkids live today.)
It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.
Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.
I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
If you’d told me back then that people would actually watch this crap, I would not have believed you.
But not only do they watch it, but they largely prefer it to anything with substance.
Short form video in particular is brain poison, especially when paired with engagement algorithms.
I used to hate history class in high school. The teacher was crap, the subject matter (basically kings and queens of England in the 1200-1700 era. We didn’t even cover ww2 in high school which was amazing to me.
Having access to YouTube, and endless access to whatever angle of history I want, I can’t deep dive to whatever I want.
YouTube, and AI chatbots totally enthrall me and I as an old adult am learning so much more than I was as a child, and its because I want to.
Pre-2016 facebook and insta algos were top posts from your follower net. Tik tok used a gambling algo to feed you the most viral content from around the internet. Randomized shit with no likes mixed in with the good, dopamine driving content. You never knew when you were going to get the good content again, so you just kept scrolling, waiting for the rush of really good content to pop back up.
This dramatically increases retention, and average minutes per user.
Underestimated. Turn off keyboard customizations that let your phone learn you're a literate adult. Then discover how much it really expects you to be swiping: butt, sup, lol, rofl, bruh ... Interspersed with plenty of emojis.
That would have contributed to to the decline.
I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
I think the pandemic had some effect on the current cohort of 15 year olds, but it should not be as large of an effect as the students who were 15 in 2020.
If I missed a week of math class at age ten would it have the same effect on a test given when I was 15 as if I had missed a week of math class just before the test? Your position seems to be that missing math class at any point in your schooling is a permanent unrecoverable setback
A student who is bad at arithmetic will tend to struggle to learn trigonometry. A good teacher can realize this and allocate time to arithmetic practice instead. But this time has to come somewhere. As long as the number of teaching hours remains the same, they have to sacrifice something else. So if the students are all caught up in arithmetic, they will be behind in trigonometry by the same amount.
To fully catch up without sacrifices, students who studied less would need to study correspondingly more to compensate, but there was no concerted effort to make that happen, although the opportunity certainly existed.
- Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.
On the other hand, you have the Mississippi miracle, achieved at a budget increase of $35 per student, and a total budget of around $12k per student-- a far cry from the more recent example of education failure in New York City at $26k/student (elementary) and $32k/student (middle school)
The chief costs for schools are salaries and premises, both of which are highly location dependent.
- there are lots of different long term trends that vary by country
- some seem to have started too long ago to be tick tock or similar
- some countries see a pandemic drop and recovery
- this implies to me that:
(I) the pandemic had a strong temporary effect on average educational attainment (though I have strong priors here), and
(II) other things like long-term trends in teaching approaches, new distractions for students, or availability of AI for ‘cheating’ also have an impact
See coverage of the recent test results in the FT here: https://www.ft.com/content/724f8ecb-1e2b-4c7f-bbb6-14239abd5...
If you actually tied outcomes to test scores all these “causes” would disappear.
Only 12% of American male youth who are qualified for the military are not in college.
Think about that. About 2/3 of American male youth are not good enough for either college or the military. That's a high reject rate.
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/10/10/one-third-you...
[2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
[1] https://nchsdata.cdc.gov/dqs?topic=personal-healthcare-spend...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_federal_bud...
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...
Anyways regardless, morality is irrelevant here. The rest of society would be better off if these people lost weight, and I doubt forcing them would go well, but voluntary GLPs would.
We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!
And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.
The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.
Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.
Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.
For me, I lost 50 lbs not exercising and not actively managing my diet. I felt better and all my biomarkers got better (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Later, I started to exercise and cleaned up my diet because I wanted to. Healthy food just tastes better now, and moving my body is satisfying rather than tiring. They are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.
Also, constipation and muscle loss are real issues. Protein and exercise will help with muscle loss (well, I haven't really started weight training yet, just aerobic), but you need to up your water and fiber intake or you could be in for a very hard time. I'm glad that this didn't happen to you, and that you didn't have to take an emergency trip to the drug store to figure out what an enema was (and how to use it, ouch).
The only time you need a dietician is if you want a high enough dose you barely want to eat at all.
Human soldiers are legacy technology that do not fare well against drones, for evidence (obligatory NSFW tag): Check reddit /r/CombatFootage/
Human soldiers are still used extensively on the battlefield - but are in the process of being replaced by machines.
As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo.
Try the US/Iran war for size then.
I'm not sure what you mean by "completely disable their opponents" - there may not be a country on earth with enough munitions to do this against a competent and resilient adversary - the Vietnam war comes to mind where the US still lost after dropping triple the bombs (by tonnage) of what the entire allied forces dropped during WWII across all theaters
At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.
And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.
So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.
(Not shilling for any side, just my honest opinion, plz dont dogpile on this, I don't care about any side's national greatness)
Imagine if they had air superiority. For some reason people ignore this when analyzing the war in Ukraine. Drones are great for denial (defense). So far they are shit at assaults (offense). Also, drones don't do well in environments with military aircraft. We just don't see that in Ukraine because they are very few aircraft in the skies. The Russians haven't flown into Ukrainian airspace in over 3 years now. They launch their missiles and glide bombs from their side of the border.
You still need people to occupy the place, take control of objectives, interact with the population, etc... Otherwise, you are just making craters.
An advanced army with appropriate support can make a soldier 10x more effective, but you still need a soldier to begin with.
The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.
I think perception of American military strength rests somewhat on the image of the square-jawed, rugged soldier, which was very much a staple of combat propaganda, but used to be more like an embellishment of the truth, rather than outright fiction.
Video games of the 2000s-2010s, like the CoD series, have usually cast this WW2-Vietnam era image onto the GWOT era, with the heroic characters fighting in the middle-east this time. It was kind of surreal to see actual authentic footage of awkward gangly teens wearing the same uniforms.
Without reading your citations, your argument threw me for a loop.
66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.
X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.
Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,
leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.
I could be wrong, but it could make sense.
But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)
It's kind of asinine that one can be demonstrably stable over a long term and do all sorts of things operationally in the intelligence community, but could not even become a 92G (culinary specialist) in the Army.
My freshman year cross country course record still stands, 34 years later. I’ve always thought how strange it was that the merest whiff of asthma was disqualifying.
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
The kids? I mean sure, they too - but seriously... It's not just the kids that have been affected.
Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
Ever more extreme positions are being agreed as the norm, and what had previously been the norm is being decried as evil itself.
I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Evil has lost its meaning, and people started randomly selecting other behaviors as "evil", and excusing actual evil deeds like rape, murder etc because "reasons".
This has opened up social media to become a echo chamber of ever increasing insanity.
I'm not seeing things get better through initiatives like that. I suspect things are gonna keep spiralling more and more out of control until we end up in a dystopia in which the populus looses a lot of their rights. And not in the too far future either, I'm almost certain I'll witness it before I grow old.
Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.
Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.
I don’t think I agree with your take around religion or ‘evil’. (Imo two big advantages of religion we are currently or will soon be wanting for society are firstly the social/community component and secondly the idea that one can lead a worthy and fulfilling life through acting virtuously and faithfully, rather than through the worth implied by educational or career achievements, which are often a rough proxy for certain kinds of intelligence, that are neither evenly distributed across the population nor easily changed, and which may become unimportant as machines outcompete us there)
It's probably the combination of both. The smartphone itself is innocuous, but increases the availability of the social media.
However if social media wasn't as ubiquitous it'd likely be less of an issue then it is today.
However, if social media wasn't a thing people just wouldn't constantly pull out their phones, hence id blame it instead of the form factor.
They're actually prime examples of the toxicity it spreads.
Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.
> the populus looses a lot of their rights
People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.
We've recently gone through a very public trial about a women murdering kids and countless people showing support for the confirmed murderer. Claiming she's innocent. When the murderer itself admits the killing.
The whole influencer industry is - from the perspective of religion - as sinful as you can get and gets more insane with every year. Remember: narcism, vanity, showing off, envy, gloating -> that's 90% or the viral content and it's all based on behavior Christianity considered Sin until the modernity happened.
The other day a gangster publicly murdered another person and hundreds of thousands were raised in response for support
The fact that for almost 10 years variations of onlyfans, patreon before that have been some of the most profitable enterprises. And the way the "models" foster the para social behavior for money extraction
That there are people unironically thinking January 6th riots in the US were patriotic and not hooligans living out their power fantasies. Also patriotism is pretty close to a sin itself, as it gets very close to pride. It most definitely applies to the MAGA people.
greed is one of the primal Sins. If our societies were still deeply religious, we wouldn't even have anything close to the fallout from the unrestricted market exploitation we have today. It would still happen occasionally, but a lot less because currently people don't even consider greed "bad". It's considered the default and obvious MO
I could go on forever, but I think my point is clear and more would not convey this in any better way. One closing remark makes sense however: modern Christianity is a complete bastardization of it's origin. Pastors are humans too, and they're ultimately also grown from our society. And a sinful society mostly produces sinful people. The issue I see is that the idea of Sin has left our mind. In my teenage years I constantly argued that we don't need that, we can be moral without religion. I just think society has proven myself false, as our collective insanity has shown
Over the same period, reading scores actually improved somewhat for each of the 1998 poorly scoring groups (and quite a bit for Asians), but the poorly scoring groups simply make up so much more of the population now that it drags everything else down.
| Group | 1998 NAEP | 2024 NAEP | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *268* | *266* | −2 |
| Black | *242* | *243* | +1 |
| Hispanic | *241* | *245* | +4 |
| Asian/Pacific Islander | *261* | *280* | +19 |
| All public-school students | *261* | *257* | −4 |
| Race/ethnicity | 1999 Grade 8 | 2023 Grade 8 | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *64.5%* | *44.0%* | −20.5 pp |
| Black | 16.1% | 14.9% | −1.2 pp |
| Hispanic | *14.3%* | *29.4%* | +15.1 pp |
| Asian/Pacific Islander* | 3.9% | 5.9% | +2.0 pp |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 1.2% | 0.9% | −0.3 pp |
| Two or more races | not separately reported | 4.8% | — |
1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.
Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?
It is wrong to get overly exact here though. We are talking about a overall score variance of just 10pts in the face of an achievement gap of nearly 30pts, with an absolutely massive 20% decline in white population share over the 26 year period.
I'm in a different field but an arbitrary 27 years (1998-2024) of data and the autocorrelation both would get flagged in a review for me. Not to give statistics homework but you should test and correct the autocorrelation issue you're describing in the model and if the data goes farther back I would go farther back, too (with how you're describing the errors going off pattern then back on it sounds like the inference here would be at least somewhat unstable depending on year chosen).
Edit: these are the assumptions and basics of how to correct for violations, in particular you're describing a violation of assumption 2 but you should test for all of them - https://www.statology.org/linear-regression-assumptions/
There's a channel on YouTube called Statquest that teaches statistics in a pretty accessible way if you're interested in analyzing this sort of data.
To make my point in the original post, I held the group scores fixed and extrapolated combined scores based on changing population sizes. This is straightforward. Simple even.
\(\widehat S=\sum_g p_gS_g,\)
Why did I call this "linear"? (Not a "linear model", your term, because it is not). The model function actually tracks the population function. Over the 25-year period, however, this trend is in fact linear because the White-to-Hispanic population trend is linear on that timescale. Over a longer timescale it would not be.
I don't mean to disparage amateur statistics since often there are interesting things that experts miss that amateurs have insight into but this sort of data with few data points (the data you have doesn't sound independent) and a lot of confounding factors is not trivial to accurately model. Not that everyone needs to learn statistics but this sort of data (and also this topic) probably deserves a bit more of a rigorous approach.
As a very simple example, picking a time range for the model because the model doesn't work when you go farther back adds a lot of potential bias into the model and that along with the non-independence issue (and without looking at the data myself I don't know if there are other issues) are going to lead to overconfidence in conclusions.
Group 1998 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change
----------------------------- ---------- --------- ------
White 268 266 −2
Black 242 243 +1
Hispanic 241 245 +4
Asian/Pacific Islander 261 280 +19
All public-school students 261 257 −4
Race/ethnicity 1999 Grade 8 2023 Grade 8 Change
--------------------------------- ------------ ------------ --------
White 64.5% 44.0% −20.5 pp
Black 16.1% 14.9% −1.2 pp
Hispanic 14.3% 29.4% +15.1 pp
Asian/Pacific Islander 3.9% 5.9% +2.0 pp
American Indian/Alaska Native 1.2% 0.9% −0.3 pp
Two or more races not separately reported 4.8% - Group 1998 NAEP 2013 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change 98–13 Change 98–24 Change 13–24
----------------------------- --------- --------- --------- ------------ ------------ ------------
White 268 275 266 +6 −2 −9
Black 242 250 243 +8 +1 −7
Hispanic 241 255 245 +13 +3 −10
Asian/Pacific Islander 261 279 280 +18 +18 +1
All public-school students 261 266 257 +5 −4 −9Your additional table with the additional columns for 2013 absolutely helps with the shape of the data. The data for years 2013 to 2024 erases all the gains of 1998 to 2013 (and often a bit more) and shows a worrying drop (that the pessimist in me worries is just the start of the slope).
Also if you want to entertain the theory that it is racial/genetic, it'd be important to do that analysis on a continuum since a lot of people who are "minority X" may be more than 50% white or there may be trends in that over time.
You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?
> I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
We have all that data it's just significantly less predictive of outcome then race.
It's sad that there can be no straightforward discussion of issues like this. It doesn't help anyone except people who are paid from ineffectual educational and social programs.
Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
Hispanic != non-native English speaker
There is pretty clearly something going on that causes the results upthread, but there is nowhere near enough data in this thread to figure out what it is.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/01/key-facts...
More data is needed here.
FWIW, until 2024, the US treated the state of being Hispanic differently from race, which seems like it could be a confounding factor. (Not that I believe that it explains any of the educational outcome data, but it’s still bizarre and IMO messy.) Here’s the updated guidance:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
If you want more data on something or other, you should state the hypothesis that you are trying to test. Mine is pretty simple and was easy to test like I did in the first post: in a world of mostly static in-group NAEP 8th-grade reading scores (like the one we live in) large shifts in population shares (like we see) dominate the overall average.
If you don't think that what happened and is happening to black people affects our average performance on tests, you haven't eliminated racist assumptions, you've eliminated the entire black experience in America and any reason for a grudge or complaint.
Grouping a list of test performances by race shouldn't lead to an assumption of natural stupidity any more than grouping a list of incomes or wealth by race should lead to an assumption of natural laziness.
And the fact that you jump to that conclusion, and it makes you nervous, so you think it's bad to talk about the facts that remind you of that conclusion, does not help black people.
You could say the same thing about Hispanic economic migrants. You don't think that economic migrants from countries with good universities and healthy middle classes are going to score lower on tests? The ones that fly in are a different story, they're often elites, but the ones that walk in? They're bottom caste where they come from, and looking for a chance to change things.
Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
(trigger warning: I'm going to use the word "privilege" and hate myself for it...)
The comment above is your math-brain privilege speaking. Not every kid has the required mathematical aptitude for that. You can reach a level of basic competency with repeated drilling and practice, but not everybody's brain is wired to be able to retain the conceptual foundations and then just derive the rest.
This is where math education has gone off the rails, at least in California. It's great to introduce and emphasize the "why", but the curriculum has completely abandoned repetitive drilling. Kids aren't building up any muscle memory.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old, and this has been true for decades. Being able to read isn’t enough, people have to actually do the reading.
Source?
I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.
[1] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...
This gives: 37% of Americans believing "God created humans in their present form", 34% believing that "God guided evolution", and only 24% believing "Humans developed without God".
> Creationist Belief Linked to More Religious, Less Educated, More Conservative Americans
More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor.
It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.
But look at physics: Basically all modern theory was developed by 1930. Math too, with the exception of information theory.
(You could argue that "The Time Machine" was the original example.)
I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.
That means don't just look at test scores by county, it means looking at DELTAs in test scores across time by numerous dimensions (income, poverty, did the kids get breakfast, school, etc) and an open mind to every possibility. Perhaps comparing against the parents' test scores might help elucidate.
Given the rise of so many unexplained mental health phenomena, I personally suspect there are environmental factors, but again, we need hard science and a lot of it.
Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.
Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.
"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.
The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.
one out of every three people is going to be doing last mile delivery of some kind
they don't even need to be able to read english because they all ignore delivery notes, if GPS takes them off a cliff or to the wrong town they will happily follow it because they never learned to read a map
all b&m stores will go "dark warehouse"
how anyone is going to afford delivery I am not sure
but since you won't be able to afford health care or owning a home or even a car at some point, "spare cash" until you die young?
-Everyone has screens.
-Education system broken.
-Covid disruptions
-Biological effects of Covid infections
Bank robbers, gun runners, and chiropractors also need to put food in the table.
I like the idea of a standard to measure against, but in my experience, standardized tests are terrible measures of education.
Especially the part where it states that part of the issue is in 2000 when Finland had higher test scores then everyone it was attributed to play based learning and less testing. Everyone immediately jumped on this, because if you can have more fun and learn more, of course that is the way to go. This opinion still permeates both teachers and parents. I was of this opinion for a long time, as I went to a rigorous school, and would have enjoyed "play based learning".
It turns out this may have been way off and difficult schools such as those in China and Singapore have the best results. In the Finland example they had only recently switched from more rigorous to more play based, so the rigorous schooling was still being shown in testing. I think we were all a bit bamboozled by this. Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings. But the play based learning opinion is still strong and we as a society need to move back to more rigor will make stronger students.
It feels to me unlikely that PISA scores should be particularly related to ‘country average IQ’ (except by confounders like malnutrition rates) where my understanding is that much of the research has been limited or of such poor quality that the topic has become so toxic as to discourage most potential further research.
For example, PISA consistently finds substantial differences in math, reading, and science performance between countries.
One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."
Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.
My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.
I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.
This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.
One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.
Anyway, modern schooling was essentially designed to create excellent workers -- it was never about creating excellent individuals. At the time, the robber barons who helped invent this system along with a series of pseudo religious ideologues essentially wanted: standardized, predictable, obedient individuals without a lot of creativity. Credentials became important. Basically they wanted good consumers who don't question their station in life. (It shouldn't shock anyone that this is essentially what our current robber barons also want, although to a more extreme degree. It also shouldn't shock anyone that this is largely what we get out of the system.)
The current system was still helpful, despite it's design, I would argue mostly because of the excellent teachers that really do have kids best interests in heart. However, I really think technology has just completely broken this. I'm not sure it's a system that can be repaired, I think it's going to end up being a new system. My guess (I think it's basically already happening) is the rich will send their children to more experimental schools because they have the money, and the poor... well who cares about the poor anyway? (Sarcasm, but, I think that more or less describes the unspoken attitudes of the elites)
The regional coverage remains excellent, but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.
It's filed under "leaders". It's by definition supposed to be "editorializing", because it's an editorial.
I’m not sure it is even blaming lefty teachers. The blamed people are in university education departments, where I don’t think it’s controversial to say that their faculty tend to be very left leaning (there are surveys on this sort of thing). Their research often being more focused on social justice than finding evidence for better ways of teaching particular things lines up with my (weak) understanding of education research.
I think more senior members of teachers unions are going to be more left-leaning on average and more likely to prefer approaches more on the ‘social justice’ end than the ‘phonics’ end of the education research spectrum. I would generally expect teachers to be more politically left than the general population, as is the case for many professionals, and a little more leftist than other professionals. I also expect many to be a bit naive about how things work in organisations outside the public sector (especially high-functioning organisations). But mostly I think they care a lot about helping kids learn and not very much about the latest education research (expecting some other school leaders will direct them towards the right way to do things). I think it’s therefore reasonable to care about the relatively low quality of education research(ers) without blaming teachers here.
"Hey coach, should I spend the next 30 minutes practicing my free throw?"
"No don't worry about that, you already did 2 free throws today. You got the core idea."
"But my dad says he would spend hours every day just shooting hoops by himself."
"That's the old way. Ineffective. More important to learn what makes a good free throw than to mindlessly just repeat it. Then you can apply it to all kinds of situations."
Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity".
Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller.
And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!".
Law of unintended consequences? Or it is the fact that everyone is lazy and do want to remain dumb?
The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.
For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.
I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.
Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.
Parents are getting worse at being parents, or don't have the time for it. Technology and social media don't help. People have less stable lives. And less support systems. Schools have more complicated trust and financial situations. And more.
Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
Sigh.
Educated people make societies more civilized, and they in turn invest to educate more people.
Unless there's a catastrophe. In that case all bets are off.
It's a lot easier to educate a decent portion of society than create a society that's civilized as a whole. And I think the latter is more important for keeping things running long term which is grim.
In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.
It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.
(Its aftermath was a necessary transition, that happened to be disastrously mismanaged.)
The current proponents of new "realism" who claim that regional empires will co-exist in peace would do well to study the causes of WWI.
Usually due to discomfort of the analysis.
It would be interesting to pull the data and control for demographics and then some kind of educational factor and social media factor
I'm not saying lower test scores are good but they might be a sign that we need to move from "push based" forced complete education in childhood to a more "pull based" system. That would mean the only mandatory part is basic skills as opposed to knowledge, things like reading and arithmetic but also critical thinking, social skills, task organization and manual/mechanical work.
Everything else should be optional, fully up to the student (and their parents until they're 18) and available for their whole lifetime. That's the most important part.
If you go to an accounting school and decide to become a plumber after you graduate, then switch to programming at 30 and electrician at 45, you should be able to do that. Low cost, free if you're poor and always without social stigma, the exact same quality and credentials as if you did it in high school.
Sometimes you need to wait and experience life a bit before you understand how important your education is. We should support that instead of making it so you only have one real shot.
Back in my day, in basic math, you'd learn a couple of concepts a day and then did 20+ problems of homework, with variations of the main themes. But the new homework style is you do 1 or 2 problems for each new concept, and then you "expand your thinking" → trick questions, gotchas, problems that combine (non-obviously) today's lesson with one from last week, things you can't answer without peeking ahead to next lesson, and so on. This style is --I imagine-- good for kids who are already very good at math. I may have enjoyed it myself. But it's shit for most students, if you never spend hardly any time ensuring that the fundamental learning sinks in before moving on.
Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.
If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.
Six years, several rape threats, several attempted assaults, and one vehicle destructure later, she gave up on the whole thing. Now a few decades later, she's an AI proponent.
No one wants to face the cold hard truth of what the average American school is like. The people in charge send their kids to fancy schools in nice areas or shove wax in their ears and put blinders on to not see the reality of their child's education (see the recent article in the New York Times).
A sad situation all around.
All that stupid ideas on giving passing grades to everybody in the name of equality (lol) removing admission tests to fight racism (double-lol), attention-stealing practices by social media (not lol) are now compounding with AI as a cheap service to offload thinking to.
The writing has been on the wall for years, a lot of people called that out and have been silenced.
Unironically, I would not be surprised if the kids with the best scores turned out to be the homeschooled ones.
My wild (and uneducate, don't get me wrong) guess is that in some years we'll see two groups of people succeeding: homeschooled kids (their parents kept them away from the BS) and the rich people's kids (their parent could afford a no-BS schooling).
> Falling scores will not be fixed in a jiffy
If it will be fixed at all. Chances are, the generation currently in school is to be thrown away, in the sense that given how the US works, nobody's going to seriously help them.
I don't believe that kids are really getting stupid. I see no physiological reasons. Nutrition, pollution, substance abuse,... Not perfect but generally fine. Intellectual stimulation is high, maybe too high. Availability of information is an all time high. If anything the new generation should be smarter than we are.
And yet, it is always "kids these days are stupid". To me, it can't be right. Maybe they are indeed not as good at some tasks. But what are they good at instead? Maybe we should focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. We are judging the next generation with criteria of our own, but the world they are going to live in is not the same as ours. Maybe tests should take it into account.
Hoping they're smarter than the tests show is a bad strategy for fixing the issue
Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness.
This will reach critical mass in a few years.
Deregulation enables competition to naturally drive up scores
Everything's over-regulated, leading to falling scores
Simple as, all else equal
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
Mastery of arithmetic involves memorizing lots of heuristic rules that aren’t particularly insightful about, or are outright conflicting with, the structure of math, and learning the structure of math first slows your ability to do arithmetic.
I don’t think any school hands first graders calculators and asks them to never learn arithmetic. But I see no need once you’re doing algebra to be focusing your time on long division or multiplication. These are irrelevant distractions from algebra, time spent and points lost on arithmetic details is a waste of cognition and doesn’t help. This becomes increasingly true through calculus, linear algebra, until you get to real math courses where a calculator is pointless because arithmetic doesn’t even show up.
Long division, at least conceptually, is also present in algebra and partial fractions.
Everything builds on everything else.
If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.
Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to pull that off in practice. They have the opportunity, but that matters little if they don't use it.
Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.
The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.
Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.
Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...
test taking is not a valuable skill. it's mostly pattern matching against the question
people need new skills in a new age. the education system hasn't even kept pace with the existence of the internet, let alone AI
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.
> people need new skills in a new age.
If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
Tell us more?
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
Such as?
The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.
If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.
So really it is not saying much at all.
For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.
In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.
After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.
I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.
Or are you talking about another system like "society" or "civilization"? Or something else altogether?
We have a chance to adapt, that's for sure. But white-collar work might not exist (or just resemble) as it does today.
But I agree, the category is almost too malleable to analyze.
I can see there a compounding drift from the stable point that is not initially apparent because the compounding values have not yet grown sufficiently to be meaningful. It is still an increase in drift
Slowing down implies a decrease though, what does that represent then?
For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?
https://www.fadedpage.com/link.php?file=20180223.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Now you tell me
That's not what is understood when we use the term "Orwellian":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Orwellian
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/orwellian_adj?tl=true
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/orwellia...
If both the wikipedia definitions and all the dictionary definitions differ from your definition, it's probably not the dictionaries and wikipedia getting it wrong.