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| ▲ | closeparen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period. | | |
| ▲ | dataflow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok. | | |
| ▲ | ardacinar 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative. | |
| ▲ | closeparen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video. | | |
| ▲ | junofan an hour ago | parent [-] | | Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like: > 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. |
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| ▲ | Fricken an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined. |
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| ▲ | williamtell 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't know for kids specifically but average user time:
2012 1:30
2016 2:08
2019-now ~2:30 If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018. | |
| ▲ | moron4hire 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If only we knew what could possible have happened right in that time period to really throw a wrench in the works of the education system... | | |
| ▲ | danielheath an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population. | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If you click on the article that has actual data, the trend started in 2013 and has been mostly the same since then. | |
| ▲ | moron4hire an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer! |
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| ▲ | trhway 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain. |
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| ▲ | voakbasda 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think that computers in the classroom can have a tremendous positive influence in specific areas when see with correct guidance. I think where we went wrong is replacing the classroom with ChromeOS and iPads. | | |
| ▲ | 9x39 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is that a strategy for the 99th percentile or the 50th? The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores. | |
| ▲ | pstuart 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those digital devices should be an augmentation of their education, not a replacement for what has already existed. 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. | | |
| ▲ | falserum an hour ago | parent [-] | | 0. children that listen to the teacher (depends on factors outside the classroom, like how parents raise the child) |
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| ▲ | api 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I did tons of electronic learning as far back as the 80s and 90s, and still do. 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. | | |
| ▲ | m_fayer an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious. 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. |
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| ▲ | the__alchemist 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures. | | | |
| ▲ | AlienRobot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it. | | |
| ▲ | procaryote 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class | | |
| ▲ | falserum an hour ago | parent [-] | | How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed) | | |
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| ▲ | Loquebantur 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Modern" education isn't modern at all. It's a leftover from industrialization, aiming at producing easily controllable worker drones. "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. | | |
| ▲ | ThousndBeerMike an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves (they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software). | |
| ▲ | pixl97 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Playing games as a biological creature optimized to live on plains is great, your body has a lot of the lessons already encoded in DNA. 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. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | They're not wrong though, like, it is a creation of the industrial era, and honestly, the "elites vs all of us" isn't exactly crazy. Mcgraw Hill is literally owned by Apollo Global Management, don't just take my word for it, look up the relationship the management there had with Epstein. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It doesn't have to be a conspiracy “Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're right, but with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people (who all went to the best schools themselves) the more I think "don't fall for it kids!" 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. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people 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? | |
| ▲ | burnished 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Worry not, school was pretty much as you described even twenty years ago! | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel like that really depended on where you went? But I suppose my life was different, by the time I was a junior in HS, I was mostly taking shop classes and language classes, had my own car that I had bought with a part time job, and had a color printer that convincingly forged hall passes on demand, so I pretty much did whatever I wanted the last couple years? It worked out fine, I graduated near the top of my class? But the strictures and authoritarian sense seemed to be lower? 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. |
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| ▲ | trimethylpurine 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | College just doesn't work. They don't know what jobs will be available and they are way too far behind the professional sector to teach about them anyway, with rare exceptions that aren't economically favored for, institutionally. 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. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I really have found college valuable, but I also self-funded and have no debt. This is pretty much the arrangement I'm trying to set up for my kids too - when I had a blue-ish collar job (bush pilot is a blue collar job no?) I didn't think school had a lot of value, but then again, looking in hindsight, I'd unironically say that the most "valuable" (scare quotes intentional here) course I took was art history. Not because I learned anything that was economically useful, but it gave me a new way to view the world and literally changed some of the decisions I made with my life? 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. |
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| ▲ | koolba 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. 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. |
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| ▲ | runarberg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.” | | |
| ▲ | what 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test? | | |
| ▲ | runarberg an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not necessarily. Test taking is a skill in its own right. The PISA test is for example 4 hours long, and students might not have the endurance to stay focused reading text that doesn’t matter and answering questions they don‘t care about for 4 whole hours. | | |
| ▲ | what 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Not being able to focus for 4 hours seems like a bigger problem. But it’s also entirely orthogonal to your distinction of “teaching the test” vs “actually educating”. You can’t teach people to focus for 4 hours. |
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| ▲ | danaris 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What are you talking about? 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. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We haven’t had a pandemic between 2022 and 2026. The 2018 trend continues. That strongly suggests a common effect across both samples. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 an hour ago | parent [-] | | It suggests a lot of things, none of which are remotely intelligible with the information we have. The result as always is that people fill those gaps with their pet issues, whatever’s hot today, and tend to ignore anything that doesn’t fit their constructed narrative. |
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| ▲ | the__alchemist 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a broad way, and making an appeal to specific prejudices. |
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| ▲ | Avicebron 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus. |
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| ▲ | ameminator 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system. | | |
| ▲ | binlog 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | - Students who entered the education system in the COVID years are still taking tests today. They didn’t automatically relearn everything. - 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. | | |
| ▲ | readthenotes1 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mentioned budget cuts and yet if I remember the data there is almost no correlation between school budget and results. 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) | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego an hour ago | parent [-] | | you are correct, but budget cuts are happening nevertheless and it's being used to justify laying off teachers (while admin staff stay employed... strange?) |
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| ▲ | throw93038383 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The trauma from lockdowns does not disappear overnight!
It is compounding damage, that gets worse every year! And we can not just change childrens habits, after we forced them to sit at home for 2 years with nothing but youtube! They missed key developmental phase! | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The "trauma" from staying at home? Please. If the parents let them watch youtube for 2 years then the parents were stupid. I have 3 kids in school, all but one of them were in school at the time. Staying at home with Grandma and Papa while they did zoom school didn't break their brains. You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices. Now, I will say that the Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it. Those people were somebody's neighbors, grandparents, uncles, etc. So maybe the realization that "nobody gives a shit about you except for your productivity" was a lesson they internalized? Largely, I think it is the parents though. Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that. | | |
| ▲ | Izkata 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I have 3 kids So they got at least some of what a lot of kids missed out on: socialization. With homeschooling, parents go out of their way to find other kids for theirs to socialize with, but during lockdowns this wasn't allowed (if the parents even had any idea about it, since it was forced on them and not something they chose to do). | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way. We didn't really "lock down" here really. Again, the socialization thing? Not a problem from COVID, now, maybe the skinner box I see kids carrying around in their pockets? Yeah, probably not great? But they didn't lose their socialization here despite whatever right-wing grifters say. I think the only thing that was really curtailed was my sons took a few months off of karate? A lot more traumatic was probably mom having to sleep in a hotel for a few nights because she got inadvertently exposed to COVID as nurse (when we really didn't know how dangerous things were), or me having to camp out in my folks' motorhome for a week because I was at the tip of the spear medevac-ing people out of camps in the arctic. I know that was scary for my kids because they told me it was. Them not being able to have playdates being some generational trauma is nonsense. What wasn't nonsense was watching aunts and uncles die from a pandemic that we did next to nothing to fix in America until the vax came out. Also, I would not be surprised if there aren't some cognitive effects to COVID. Despite being very careful, we got it too. Everyone had it here. That probably ain't good for kids' development. But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too. Read this paper:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310 If people like doom scrolling more than they like screwing, it's probably not unlikely that they like doom scrolling better than studying. | | |
| ▲ | Izkata 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way. Here in Illinois it was over a year, possibly two in some places. The schools didn't return to in-person right away after the government mandates were lifted. Edit: > But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too. Please re-read the comment from the other person you originally replied to. (2nd edit: removed something based on a misread) | |
| ▲ | throw-the-towel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, because everywhere in the world is Alaska and did exactly what Alaska did. Man, somehow you out-US-exceptionalismed the usual US exceptionalism you see around here. | | |
| ▲ | piloto_ciego 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You guys have no idea of just how bad it was here. No idea. A million people died. That did not happen in say, Spain. But the kids missing school for a little bit was not as big of a deal as people are trying to retcon now. |
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| ▲ | smugma 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Poe’s Law at work |
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| ▲ | filoleg 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it. 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. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wouldn’t there be recovery? Especially for the cohort that started school after the end of restrictions. 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. | | |
| ▲ | yorwba 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The cohort that started school after the end of restrictions is not 15 yet, so no recovery can be expected until the 2029 PISA test or so. |
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| ▲ | chii 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause. |
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