[HN Gopher] America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy
___________________________________________________________________
America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 226 points
Date : 2025-10-14 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| SunshineTheCat wrote:
| https://archive.ph/enwf6
| reactordev wrote:
| Yes yes it's the children's fault. We didn't hold them to high
| standards. We didn't... give me a break.
|
| It's declining because media is shifting. It's declining because
| tools are replacing that need. Smartphones yes but more advanced
| computers as well. Communication has increased in speed and
| people have never had more access to speech platforms to spread
| whatever diatribe they wish. Test scores that test one's general
| knowledge are going to show gaps as we specialize.
| eximius wrote:
| There is (some) truth to this but it fundamentally _does not_
| replace foundational learning.
| reactordev wrote:
| Not saying it does but what I am saying is it's not two
| brackets anymore. It's not Math & Literacy defined by one's
| ability to do long divisional polynomials and identify the
| problematic grammar of some sub paragraph from a book from
| 1880s.
|
| The reality is the testing and scores don't reflect reality
| and everyone's in arms over it instead of looking at the
| testing methodology.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| the problem isn't test scores. if anything, that kind of
| metrification of education is precisely the cause of this
| inability to comprehend and understand.
|
| And that is what is actually happening here; it's not _merely_
| a matter of literally being unable to read and it 's not
| _merely_ limited to the written word. And it 's frankly not
| even a matter of people being stupid or ignorant.
| reactordev wrote:
| Completely agree. The tests aren't up to snuff with
| technology and how the world consumes media - text and
| academia included.
| jf wrote:
| It's weird, and a little unnerving, to have a line from Anathem
| by Neil Stephenson immediately come to mind:
|
| "Can you read? And by that I don't just mean interpreting
| Logotype..." "No one uses that any more," said Quin. "You're
| talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to
| use bleach. That sort of thing."
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I haven't read that book, but the concept is also in his book
| _The Diamond Age_.
| Liquix wrote:
| Mediatronic glyphs on our chopsticks when? Love the way the
| Nell's vocabulary and disposition evolve as the Primer (or
| Miranda) teaches her to spell, read, and eventually
| understand Turing machines via binary and logic gates.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| I don't remember that line in Anathem. It seemd pretty clear
| that the Saecular society at the time of the novel was a
| literate, 21st century tech level. e.g. there were characters
| like Samman who was basically a sysadmin.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| It's in the first chapter. The quote you were replying to was
| in the book, verbatim.
| ashton314 wrote:
| They all use Kinagrams--a moving picture script. Very few are
| literate. Well-off burgers typically can read and write, but
| lots of the workers and virtually all the slines can't read.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Aren't Kinagrams and Logotype Arban forms of logograms,
| like Chinese characters or Kanji? I interpreted that as
| "most extramuros can read and type their daily language,
| but not the alphabet used for technical writing"
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Weren't the ita basically 'half-concents' essentially? Where
| the caste, despite being allowed more of the trappings and
| technological luxuries of the Saecular society, specifically
| were kept away from the other sciences to handicap them
| because they couldn't enforce the same asceticism on one
| whose job it is to maintain the technology.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| Similarly, I thought of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Stephenson
| is right, of course, but I think that Miller more fully
| understands that our fall begins not just with the fading of
| literacy and the rise of ignorance, but also in post modern
| relativism and the reign of cynicism. If one more otherwise
| clever person tries to explain to me how there's no such thing
| as objective truth, I might just scream.
|
| "Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication.
| Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are
| his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich
| themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear,
| for the written word is another channel of communication that
| might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are
| keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the
| battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and
| the violence which follows will last until the structure of
| society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new
| society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it."
| XorNot wrote:
| Everyone who wants to tell me about objective truth is about
| to tell me about which group of humans it's okay to persecute
| in about 2 more sentences.
|
| People making an actual good argument don't front, nor
| bookend it with a thesis on "the nature of truth".
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, ya it seems that the term objective truth has been ate
| by conspiracy theorists and psychos.
|
| I like using the term thermodynamic truth myself. Such as
| what you would find if you ran time backwards. The problem
| we humans have is we attempt to put absolute truth on
| complex statistical systems. They don't realize they
| outcome they saw once was either random or by a set of
| circumstances that can't be replicated.
| jdonaldson wrote:
| I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance
| subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more
| often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a
| movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.
| shagie wrote:
| It's a philosophy text with a _lot_ of ideas masquerading as
| a work of fiction. The closest analogy to it that I can think
| of is the Symposium... which is a philosophy work that uses a
| plot and stories to express the ideas. Incidentally, there 's
| a part of Anathem that feels a _lot_ like the Symposium
| (complete with chatting about philosophy around a table).
| jdonaldson wrote:
| I don't think this quote is in the book.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| It's in the first chapter.
| shagie wrote:
| The larger context... "Can you read? And by
| that I don't just mean interpreting Logotype..." "No
| one uses that any more," said Quin. "You're talking about the
| symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach.
| That sort of thing." "We don't have underwear, or
| bleach--just the bolt, the chord, and the sphere," said Fraa
| Orolo, patting the length of cloth thrown over his head, the
| rope knotted around his waist, and the sphere under his
| bottom. This was a weak joke at our expense to set Quin at
| ease. Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way
| that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man
| but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round
| to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of
| tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo
| of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though
| they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny
| pictures that moved. "Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype."
|
| This was from the part where Fraa Orolo was interviewing
| Artisan Quin about the world outside the Concent.
| user982 wrote:
| When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline
| and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few
| generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to
| witness new parents who not only don't know that they're
| supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how
| to do so.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, the Portland thing.
|
| We have cameras and planes and stuff. How is the idea that
| downtown is a burnt out hole in the ground full of rubble (or
| not) an actual controversy?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Late GenXer here. I went from a place with pretty good
| schools to one with with pretty bad schools and a strong
| religious/honor culture background. I went from a humans
| can accomplish anything to one of we are damned at a pretty
| young age. It seems so many people are fact resistant from
| a young age.
| walkabout wrote:
| The people who need to find out aren't curious and aren't
| looking for proof that counters what they're inclined to
| believe. They won't check what locals are saying and the
| videos of nothing-much-happening they're posting. They
| watch the same handful of shocking crime videos on Facebook
| and are sure the cities are overrun with rampant
| lawlessness (and apparently the residents are just
| persistently too stupid, over decades, to do anything about
| it, voting-wise, and need the Federal Government to step in
| despite their protestations and save them? It's a puzzling
| world view if you think about it for even a second), watch
| Fox News showing b-roll of fire and violence from one city
| block on one night for weeks on end (or from another city
| and year entirely) and claiming that's the whole city all
| the time, see news sites doing the same (one infamously put
| a photo of early '90s LA riots at the top of one of these
| articles recently, JFC)
|
| You can trace right-wing propaganda in the US painting
| cities as worse and more violent (and, specifically,
| overrun over by criminally-inclined immigrants who refuse
| to assimilate...) back to at least the early 20th century.
| The rhetoric from back then is uncannily familiar, as are
| the proposed solutions. But of course nobody who needs to
| realize that the "good old days of the good old days" were
| full of the exact same complaints (and we're all still
| here, everything turned out OK) will be curious &
| interested enough to find that out.
| coliveira wrote:
| Some young people have started to widely use emoji in personal
| communications. We may not be far away from a society that
| partially abolished written language and relies only on images
| and videos to communicate.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| "some young people?" I hardly know anyone who _doesn't_,
| regardless of education level or age.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his
| jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles
| from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used
| his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of
| the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I
| recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler.
| Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. "Kinagrams.
| They obsoleted Logotype."
|
| ...
|
| "Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?" asked Orolo.
|
| "So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market
| share."
|
| Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. "That sounds like
| bulshytt too."
|
| "So that they could make money."
|
| "Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?"
|
| "By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and
| easier to use Kinagrams."
|
| "How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?"
|
| "Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were
| better."
|
| ...
|
| "Where were we?" Quin asked, then answered his own question:
| "You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen
| letters used to write Orth." He nodded at my leaf, which was
| growing dark with just that sort of script.
|
| "Yes."
|
| "I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I
| don't, because I never have to," said Quin. "My son, now, he's
| a different story."
|
| ---------------------------
|
| That section plus Samman's little bit about the "Artificial
| Inanity" systems that made the internet basically unusable are
| hitting way too close to home these days.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from
| ten years ago, though they had made it simpler
|
| 2008. Stephenson is 10 years ahead of the current discourse,
| as usual.
| mallowdram wrote:
| Symbols are archaic, time to replace language with something
| _self-organizing, self-teaching, concatenating and
| concatenated, ruled by verbs, and defanging nouns and agentic
| occlusions._
| Theodores wrote:
| In the 1980s, the BBC did a realistic nuclear war movie called
| Threads. It is a classic and always relevant. The scene I found
| most shocking was in the aftermath, when the children of the
| survivors can't read or even speak properly. There is this
| record player and they have no idea what it is for or what
| music is, because they have never heard of it. One of them
| plays with it, intrigued that the turntable moves, but that is
| about it, nobody is hooking it up to get everyone dancing.
|
| I live in the UK which has been slow compared to the USA when
| it comes to TV. In the 1960s, Americans were watching 4+ hours
| a day of colour TV, with a vast choice of channels. It took is
| about three decades to catch up in the UK. I think the same can
| be said for Europe and elsewhere outside the USA. We have just
| been behind with TV watching and several other American
| conveniences, such as driving everywhere and convenience foods.
|
| At the start of this year I made 'reading part of an actual
| book' my new years' resolution. It was going well for all of
| six weeks (then I had to spend a log time from home, away from
| my books), but why did I need to make it something I was
| committed too with a resolution?
|
| There was a time when I would literally fight over books,
| magazines and newspapers with family and friends. Before then,
| there was a time when, as a child, I would be reading by
| moonlight until the small hours.
|
| Then, before my time, before TV, the cinema and radio, was a
| time when people would go out to a hall to listen to someone
| read the latest Dickens installment. That was 'peak book' even
| though literacy wasn't great for everyone.
|
| Nowadays books have been relegated to what people have on show
| in the back of a Zoom call, sometimes contrived, often not so
| contrived. There is a long history of doing this. Middle class
| people used to buy books for the parlour to show they were
| educated, often with out of copyright classics, hardbound.
|
| I suspect that some people read more for the 'bragging rights'
| than for the pleasure of reading. I also suspect that any
| surveys on book reading habits are going to be unreliable since
| it is easy to say 'year I read three books this year' and cite
| the three that you had to read under duress as a schoolchild.
| nicwolff wrote:
| Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis (who wrote The Hustler and The
| Color of Money, and Queen's Gambit, and The Man Who Fell To
| Earth - quite an oeuvre!) has long been one of my favorite
| books and it's been eerie to see how right he was about how
| eager mankind is to hand over all intellectual labor to the
| robots.
|
| (The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the
| Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who
| has learned to read in 400 years - to translate the title cards
| in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind
| of a happy ending.)
| baggy_trough wrote:
| They pretend to learn and we pretend to test them.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Between this, Chinas rise (the lights-out factories etc) and the
| _gestures around_ general atmosphere here in the USA it really
| doesnt seem like we 're in for a good 20-50 years.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I do wonder, and this is probably way too optimistic - but if
| China or another country were to open their economy, I wonder
| if there would be benefit to perhaps some of the wealth leaving
| the US, especially as too many of our modern businesses are too
| extractive.
| davidw wrote:
| What's kind of depressing about this moment in general is
| that there isn't really a 'shining beacon on the hill'. If
| you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US.
| Europe is good in a lot of ways, but kind of muddling along
| in others - and won't even policy democratic backsliders like
| Hungary.
| esafak wrote:
| Canada could benefit.
| nawgz wrote:
| As a Canadian... Canada is weak, poor, and corrupted by
| the same plague that has lead America to where it sits.
|
| The rule of law is holding on a bit tighter, and quality
| of life isn't as bleak as the States, but Canada needs
| some serious reforms to break the hold of the elite
| class.
|
| Seriously, look at how the temporary foreign worker
| program enriched the elites and then is used by their
| centralized media machines to radicalize the population
| against immigrants. It's a bad joke, and this exact
| regulatory capture runs deep and wide.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the
| US
|
| The US only has one additional political party beyond China
| has, and arguably both US parties are simply 'wings' of a
| larger party owned by the actual ruling class, something
| neither party wishes to acknowledge. When viewed through
| this lens the US and China aren't that different
| politically, and at the same time China is far more
| meritocratic and promotes leaders on a much more results-
| oriented basis.
|
| It's like a household where the voters are the kids and the
| leaders are the parents. In China the parents are happily
| married and communicate with each other. Kids can't really
| manipulate the parents, but the parents are reasonable and
| the household is demonstrably a successful one. In the US
| the parents are bitterly divorced, bickering, and are
| easily played against each other by the kids. The household
| is a disaster, in constant disarray and the kids are going
| to end up dropping out of high school. However, at the end
| of the day both of these households are overseen by the
| same leadership system: the parents.
| nxor wrote:
| Yeah, when Trump was in the news for having said in
| another world him and Biden would have been friends, it
| was celebrated, but to me it was just one more indicator
| that they have more in common with each other than with
| the people who put their faith in the one or other. Their
| lifestyles seem similar, the people around them are
| similar ...
| davidw wrote:
| Uh, in the US I can (still) criticize and mock the people
| running things. That's pretty important to me.
| buu700 wrote:
| I think there's an important material difference between
| the two. China's single party is authoritarian and
| uncontested. America's two major parties are mildly
| authoritarian on different axes, but average out to a
| mostly liberal status quo in practice. The relative chaos
| and transparency of America's system are what they are,
| but it isn't an autocracy at this point.
|
| There's also a significant growing political push to
| transition away from FPTP voting in the US, which would
| dismantle the current duopoly.
| tempestn wrote:
| I imagine that analogy won't go over well with some, but
| at the very least I think it's an insightful look at how
| someone who was pro-CCP might look at the contrast.
| tmountain wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Kinda like the
| adult equivalent of learning that Santa isn't real or
| finding out your parents are getting a divorce. I believe
| that we put too much faith in our "bedrock institutions"
| because we were taught to. Now, the facade is gone, and
| we're left to figure things out as best we can. I don't
| have a clue where the future will take us (nobody does).
| But, there's usually some good that comes with the bad, and
| I do have the feeling that we're living through history,
| much more so than I ever thought we'd get to. If we are
| truly witnessing the downfall of the United States, well...
| it's going to be very interesting to say the least.
| davidw wrote:
| It's certainly not like it was perfect here in the past
| or that the mythology reflected reality, but it felt like
| there was a fairly long arc of 'getting better in fits
| and starts' The cold war was over and we stopped
| supporting heinous dictators. Everyone could vote. Gay
| people got the right to marry. Things weren't perfect,
| but we had the means to work hard to make them better.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the
| US.
|
| as a European who frequently travels to both, in recent
| history it was at an American airport, not China that I was
| being asked for my social media profiles and had a 30
| minute discussion because they didn't believe me when I
| told them that I don't actively maintain a social media
| presence.
|
| Of course China has no free discourse as such, but at least
| there is a gentleman's agreement in the sense that if I
| don't stage a protest they'll not bother me, whereas the US
| now increasingly looks like Latin America, where you need
| to be afraid of being harangued by some goon squad of
| people hired off the streets at the behest of some
| kleptocrat
| davidw wrote:
| That sounds like "managing your expectations", as in the
| US is not supposed to be like China, but is becoming more
| like it. There's still a ways to fall though.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >but is becoming more like it
|
| it isn't though, that's the point. It's already more
| disorderly, arbitrary and unpredictable, the point is you
| have no expectation when you go to the US these days.
| You're not getting Prussian/Chinese autocracy in America,
| it lacks the people for it. You're going straight to
| Turkmenistan with the leader building himself golden
| statues of his favorite horses on the taxpayers dime, not
| the shiny trains
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Forget it. As long as China remains a dictatorship, investors
| will not pump in too much money - it's too uncertain what
| happens to your investment.
|
| The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up
| some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital
| controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a
| large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate
| markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just
| sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth
| in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the
| will of a dictator.
| kulahan wrote:
| All billionaires still _in_ China (and some much who 've
| left) exist only at the pleasure of Xi. I don't think Jeff
| or Mark or Warren want to worry about being disappeared. I
| think you're probably right here.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Everyone always complains that if you raise taxes, rich
| people will "leave", with the assumption that only the
| richest can actually run productive companies, which
| obviously isn't the case. On the other hand, there must be
| some fraction of the truly richest that are just relentlessly
| good at accruing wealth, and not much else, no? Wouldn't you
| _want_ those people to leave?
| legitster wrote:
| In the US, the kids are doing poorly. But unlike China, there
| is actually a large number of children being born.
|
| One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as
| America recedes in power, other countries are receding even
| faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way
| of natural resources and favorable demographics and can
| continue to fail forward for a long time.
| nxor wrote:
| What do you mean by fail? Even if we have flaws we still seem
| to have a decent education system
| johnsillings wrote:
| https://www.childtrends.org/publications/fertility-rate-
| unit...
|
| edit: fertility rate in the US is near historic lows. maybe
| you're thinking of something else re: demographic trends, but
| that seems pretty alarming to me.
| coliveira wrote:
| Economic problems create their own demographic problems. The
| current government policies against immigration are a sure
| way to reduce population growth in the US for the next
| decades.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Looking at fertility rates online, the most recent numbers I
| could find is 1.6 in the US and 1.4 in the EU. Both indicate
| population decline.
|
| China is at 1.7, but I am not sure I trust the number if they
| report it themselves.
|
| Either way, I have no idea where you take that there's a
| large number of children being born.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| China's fertility rate, even assuming it does not improve,
| won't cause problems for several decades.
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/can-anything-knock-china-
| off-i...
| 0xEF wrote:
| Sliding? I'd say we're running toward it, what with all the anti-
| intellectualism and attacks on education. After all, can't have
| all those smarty-pants kids turning into bossy-pants adults, now
| can we?
| mandeepj wrote:
| _I love the poorly educated_ - DJT.
|
| Sure, that's what republicans want and it serves them well.
| Dismantling, arms twisting, and attacks on universities - is all
| from their playbook. They've started saying _universities are
| indoctrinating kids_. If you don't speak against these evil
| creatures now, there isn't going to be another chance. They are
| just taliban in a suit!!
| tyleo wrote:
| This take is partisan and not aligned with fact. You may be
| surprised to hear that Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and
| Tennessee are all seeing improvements.
|
| Here's more information on that:
| https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choi...
| gowld wrote:
| Putting a kidin 3rd grade twice, and then saying "more 4th
| graders can read" is just gaming the metrics.
|
| Are MS, LA, AL, TN students reading at a higher level _by
| age_ ?
| tyleo wrote:
| I disagree because learning is cumulative. If you can't
| read or do math at a 3rd grade level and we shove you
| through 4th, 5th, etc, you enter an unrecoverable state.
| consumer451 wrote:
| The reason to fight against university education was laid out
| plainly in the 2012 Texas GOP platform. While not directly
| related to TFA, it clearly shows the reasoning to limit
| aspects of education.
|
| > Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of
| "higher order thinking skills" because it believes the
| purpose is to challenge a student's "fixed beliefs" and
| undermine "parental authority."
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-
| sheet/post/texas...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/07/01/texas-
| go...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| This is a gross distortion. 2012 Texas platform did not
| oppose the concept of higher order thinking skills, it
| opposed a specific pedagogy Higher Order Teaching Skills,
| which was displacing knowledge based learning. Reasonable
| people can disagree on which works better, teaching low
| order skills first, or high order skills first.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Here is the exact passage, so everyone can make up their
| own mind.
|
| > Knowledge-Based Education - We oppose the teaching of
| Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values
| clarification), critical thinking skills and similar
| programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based
| Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on
| behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging
| the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental
| authority.
|
| https://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/201
| 2Pl...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Yes, they are opposing a type of modern educational
| program, not the concept of thinking skills. If you are
| familiar with elementary school curriculums, they are
| opposing Everyday Math or Illustrative Mathematics and
| supporting memorizing multiplication tables.
|
| https://illustrativemathematics.org/math-
| curriculum/k-5-math...
| consumer451 wrote:
| > challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining
| parental authority.
|
| What about that passage?
|
| Can you explain to me what "fixed beliefs" means?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Can you explain to me what "fixed beliefs" means?_
|
| Probably some blend of religious and moral values,
| political and civic beliefs and cultural views towards
| divisive issues.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Religion was my partial read for "fixed beliefs" as well.
| I have been alive for quite some time now, and the major
| battle for the young mind in the US was regarding
| evolution vs. literal biblical interpretation. This is
| the reason for charter schools, destroying the U.S.
| Department of Education, and much more. Those "fixed
| beliefs" are very fragile when exposed to new
| information.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think it is a side note on the charter schools issue.
| The main driver is terrible standards and discipline in
| public schools. There is a reason atheists are putting
| their kids in charter schools too, and even religious
| schools.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I hear you, solid point looking at the current state of
| public education. The next question is: why is our public
| education system so lacking?
|
| My recollection is that ever since science started to
| counter strict religious teachings, a significant portion
| of the country stopped trying to improve the public
| education system, and instead began to undermine it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| IMO it started with no child left behind, and a wave of
| public sentiment and legal precedent that places the
| worst performing and behaving students above the
| majority.
|
| I have a teacher friends who have to deal with students
| attacking them. One had a student break their hand and
| they could not suspend or expell them. Imagine trying to
| teach a class under such conditions.
| thowfaraway wrote:
| This is one the lesson plans that was a trigger at the
| time. It is a typical constructivist pedagogy.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20141023181930/https://api.ni
| ng....
|
| Fixed beliefs are things like America is a good nation.
| You should teach the whole of history, good, bad and
| ugly, but stop trying to make kids reinterpret everything
| through modern political lenses
| mandeepj wrote:
| > This take is partisan and not aligned with fact.
|
| My comment isn't an opinion piece; it's just what's out there
| in the real world.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It's because they still spank children with paddles there,
| and you know that since Trump (and especially Trump 2.0)
| they've been ratcheting it up in magnitude and intensity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_.
| ..
|
| also "They can toss bunks, they can swear, and yes, they can
| put their hands on recruits." from our drunk boi.
|
| I'm mostly being glib (as usual) but consider that the
| general trend in recent times has been for a
| conservatification of reality, especially since covid. Places
| that are violent/authoritarian against the homeless are
| attracting more folks to move to them, hence why red sunbelt
| states are now doing well. Folks want violence on their
| children to be used to make sure they stay conforming.
|
| It's the Singapore strategy.
| squidsoup wrote:
| Purely anecdotal, but most of the kids in my son's cohort, early
| 20s, have received what would be considered by most to be a good
| education, but don't read for pleasure. I find that worrying.
| saulpw wrote:
| I also didn't read for pleasure in my 20s and even much of my
| 30s. Forced reading in high school (of material I didn't enjoy,
| in quantity, and frequently fell behind on, and felt bad about
| failing) ruined it for me for about 15 years. But the trauma
| faded with time and now I read some 10-30 books a year. So
| maybe it's not permanent for your son's cohort either.
| anon291 wrote:
| It's probably not a good education. If your kid is in an
| average public school they were probably not taught to read
| phonetically. Unless you as parents taught that separately, all
| these kids are handicapped.
| nxor wrote:
| Don't we though? My generation is also known for watching hour
| long youtube videos (video essays), and even if that's not all
| of us, that's more than past generations (of course). And we
| are known for listening to hour long podcasts. Even if these
| podcasters are not necessarily as informed or as rigorous (same
| for youtube), I think my generation still in some ways shows a
| curiosity for information
|
| That said I mostly agree with this and think for one, if
| foreign language was appreciated more here, maybe people would
| read more
| nawgz wrote:
| Podcasts are horrible content slop that are appealing more
| because one can enjoy the parasocial relationship it offers
| rather than because the podcasters are insightful or
| informative.
| nxor wrote:
| Some are, just like some books are (not necessarily to the
| same degree)
| JohnMakin wrote:
| The amount of words even an average reader can consume and
| understand in an hour is vastly higher than what one can gain
| from a video essay, even if played at 2x speed. For high
| performing readers, it's not even close to be remotely
| comparable.
| nxor wrote:
| I don't know. Watching x amount of quality videos and
| reading x amount of quality written works is surely better
| than just reading x amount of quality written works. And
| finally, of course the content of those words matters. I
| could read a 200 page academic work and if the work is
| poorly written then I haven't gained much.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Watching x amount of quality videos and reading x
| amount of quality written works is surely better than
| just reading x amount of quality written works_
|
| Why surely?
|
| The reason I'd push back on that simplification is it's
| much easier to simply absorb--without engagement--
| information from video. The struggle that comes with
| reading not only measurably increases retention. It also
| increases the chances that you're going to notice you're
| not dealing with a quality source.
|
| There are far fewer dumbfuck textbooks on almost any
| topic than negatively-informative videos on YouTube, for
| example.
|
| > _I could read a 200 page academic work and if the work
| is poorly written then I haven 't gained much_
|
| Could you give an example? Not of a work that's wrong.
| Just poorly written.
|
| Plenty of classical sources are, by modern standards,
| incredibly poorly written. Yet there isn't a substitute
| for reading the originals.
|
| One _can_ learn from videos as well as from written
| sources. But it 's harder to do right. Easier to do
| wrong. And you'll have put yourself in a silo from
| experts, who tend to communicate via and thus reference
| writing.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To pile on, You can learn a tremendous amount from
| reading difficult sources, specifically due to their
| difficulty. Nobody reads classical fiction for the facts.
|
| It is an exercise in cognitive flexibility and challenge.
| It builds the capability to understand complex ideas and
| challenging contexts. These are important skills in
| navigating a world that is in fact complex and nuanced.
|
| If someone can only understand short sentences and bullet
| lists, they will struggle in the real world and be
| vulnerable to manipulation.
| hiq wrote:
| You're comparing the time spent over 2x with time spent
| over 1x.
| Apreche wrote:
| > School spending did not decline from 2012 to 2022. In fact, it
| increased significantly, even after adjusting for inflation, from
| $14,000 a student to more than $16,000.
|
| Is this average spending per student? If so, then that is just a
| cover for inequality. Spending a vast amount on educating elite
| students, and spending hardly enough on the majority.
|
| Other countries with much better education than the US spend less
| than $16,000 per student, but I imagine they are spending much
| more equitably. They don't have one school that is incredible and
| then another school so broke that teachers and parents have to
| foot the bill for supplies.
| gowld wrote:
| most spending-per-student goes to the poorest or most-disabled
| students, not to the elite students. By definition, elite
| students are a tiny fraction, so evern if they get
| overspending, it won't move the average unless they are getting
| absurd multiples of the median, which they are noy getting.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| The top elite kids aren't in public schools, so they don't even
| factor into the equation. Whether there is inequality in
| spending will depend on the state and whether the funding is
| local, or redistributive. But if you take California as an
| example, they do try to make sure money goes to poor students,
| and it has had no positive effect. California sends mor to
| Black, Latino, and low income students than white or high
| income students.
|
| https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...
| rezonant wrote:
| Actually this isn't the whole picture. Because a lot of
| funding for schools comes from local property taxes, affluent
| areas tend to have more resources for education than poorer
| areas, regardless of how they school their kids. And if a lot
| of higher income students aren't utilizing public school,
| that's less students to spend the increased money _on_ ,
| which would exacerbate the view when looked at as a national
| per-student average.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Still, poor students in california do dramatically worse
| than poor students in mississippi, despite california
| spending much more. I dove into the data a while back and
| adjusted for income and race, California schooling is much
| worse and only looks good because its students are rich
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Mississippi cooks the stats by holding the poorest
| students back. You can probably adjust for this if you
| have the raw data, but it's something you need to adjust
| for.
|
| If you didn't let students into the 4th grade until they
| were 40 inches tall, you'd have taller than average 4th
| graders, but only because of survivorship bias.
| treis wrote:
| Almost every state will spend the most on inner city kids. You
| have a ton of commercial tax base for relatively few kids. For
| example Atlanta Public Schools spends the most per pupil in GA
| outside of a handful of tiny districts.
| nabla9 wrote:
| You must read well to write well.
|
| Writes and Writes not (October 2024)
| https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
|
| >I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but
| I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there
| won't be many people who can write.
|
| >One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how
| many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people
| have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting
| up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many
| people need help writing.
|
| >The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's
| fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly,
| and thinking clearly is hard. ...
| buu700 wrote:
| Anyone who spends any amount of time perusing discussions on
| social media will quickly observe what a rare gift strong
| reading comprehension turns out to be.
| tyleo wrote:
| This was on HN a few weeks ago and provides a similar take:
| https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choi...
|
| It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements.
| Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this
| article highlights: they hold students to expectations and
| prevent them from advancing grades if they don't meet the bar.
| rglover wrote:
| "You'll graduate more competent students with this one simple
| trick." /s
| tyleo wrote:
| There's a few other things they do. The link I shared
| actually provides 3 examples.
|
| I just thought it aligned particularly well with the OP on
| that specific point.
| mindslight wrote:
| Ugh, 3 simple tricks sounds too hard. I'm not going to read
| something that long. (/s)
| anon291 wrote:
| Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left.
| They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi
| does. Their sole purpose is to siphon off as much public
| funding for their members, not to teach children. In fact
| failing kids justifies more money spent (guys, this is
| literally in the article as a point where liberal assumptions
| are being challenged; please read the article before downvoting
| me at least).
|
| While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on
| in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our
| Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It
| was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public
| school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method.
|
| EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the
| source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself
| highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based
| instruction:
|
| https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
| greenie_beans wrote:
| > Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left.
| They are never going to want to get behind anything
| Mississippi does.
|
| Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that
| is part of the National Education Association, aka the
| largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the
| literacy rates.
| anon291 wrote:
| MAE is a wholly different beast than teacher's unions in
| most states. Mississippi _does not_ require teachers to
| join the union, thus the union needs to compete to attract
| teachers. Thus, it is incentivized to actually do stuff.
| Usually, when people say teacher 's unions (or at least
| when I refer to them), I refer to the set up in the most
| populated states like CA, NY, IL, etc, where it is a
| requirement for teachers to join the union, regardless of
| what they think of the union.
|
| I'm fine with employees banding together. What CA and other
| states do (require teachers to pay dues to the union) is
| criminal.
|
| Basically, the strength of the union correlates with
| educational outcomes:
| https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-
| ar...
|
| As of 2006 (a bit dated), only 36% of MS teachers were in
| the union.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| So basically
|
| Person1> Don't trust Unions.
|
| Person2> But you are using a union as an example.
|
| Person1> No, my union is better than all the other
| unions. Mine makes a difference, thus I'm not a commie.
|
| Person2> What?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| It still refutes your original point:
|
| > Teachers unions are political organizations that lean
| left. They are never going to want to get behind anything
| Mississippi does.
|
| This teacher's union supported improved literacy rates in
| MS. Would be insane for any organization to not support
| that effort.
|
| Also, the most effective left leaning organizations
| prioritize uplifting the South, including MS.
| cheschire wrote:
| What about where MAE[0] got their Republican governor[1] to
| approve the largest teacher salary increase in state
| history[2]?
|
| You're painting with an awfully broad brush there.
|
| 0: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/our-history
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves
|
| 2: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/media-center/press-
| releas...
| anon291 wrote:
| I addressed this in another comment. Unlike many states,
| Mississippi does not require teachers to pay dues to the
| union (California for example, does). Mississippi has a low
| rate of teachers union membership as a result (only ~36%).
| Mississippi has one of the weakest teachers unions in the
| country.
|
| Because of this, the union has to do what teachers want,
| rather than vice versa.
|
| I'm speaking from experience with the California Teacher's
| Association. CA mandates even non-member teachers to pay
| union dues.
|
| EDIT: Here is an article from the CTA highlighting their
| efforts to _fight_ phonics-based reading instruction: https
| ://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
|
| Woohoo! teachers unions!!!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Mississippi does not require teachers to pay dues to
| the union (California for example, does)_
|
| So when you say "teachers unions are political
| organizations that lean left," you're really saying left-
| leaning teachers' unions lean left.
|
| If you'd instead said states that legally enforce
| collective bargaining for teachers have worse outcomes
| than those that don't, we'd have something to play with.
| Except I don't think the evidence swings that way either.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This is a short term fix that may cause long term problems
| though, kids that are held back are more likely to drop out
| before graduating
| Jensson wrote:
| Whats the point of graduating if you can't read?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| jobs, it's pretty much the driving force of the entire US
| economy
| bluGill wrote:
| Is there any reason to think they would graduate with useful
| knowledge otherwise? The kids in my day who did poor may have
| graduated - but they still lacked knowlege and to the diploma
| was paper...
|
| also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass -
| as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the
| majority already knows
| variadix wrote:
| When graduating is essentially just aging out, it isn't
| really graduating
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| what does "really graduating" even mean in 2025? you're
| eligible for a slightly less bad minimum wage job?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It's interesting that you'd prefer that they move upwards
| with their cohort and damage the education of those students
| too.
| coliveira wrote:
| Well, that's a simple way of "solving" the problem: exclude
| everyone who has the problem you're supposed to fix.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should
| be retained for another year for additional time to meet
| them. That only becomes a "problem" when we treat it like
| one, usually because of warped institutional incentives or
| misplaced shame.
|
| We've built a system where the performance of teachers and
| schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student
| who doesn't graduate on time is a failure of instruction.
| That's nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life
| circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed
| learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma,
| poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a
| child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all
| of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not
| accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later
| career situations that they are not prepared properly for.
|
| What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse
| incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every
| kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets
| get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving
| along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now
| proving this fact.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > retained for another year
|
| It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear
| architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A
| student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or
| "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the
| summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors"
| classes becomes available.
|
| Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals
| (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational
| ones.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer?_
|
| This works for middle and high-school students, where
| courses are _somewhat_ independent. It doesn 't for a
| third grader who can't read. They need the time to master
| what they haven't. Rushing that process compromises every
| year of education in front of them.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| The top ranked schools figured out long ago that removed
| students do not count against the scores that make them top
| ranked schools.
| graeme wrote:
| If you don't exclude people who failed to learn the material
| then the next year's material has to dumb itself down to
| account for the people who can't understand it. And
| conversely the students who didn't understand but went
| forward often still have some missing factor which means
| they'll spend 12 years not understanding and falling behind.
|
| Obviously you could make a metric for this and if you're
| holding back say 50% of students there's probably a problem
| but a small portion isn't obviously a bad thing. Snark is fun
| but it isn't analysis.
| ianferrel wrote:
| People being held back a grade aren't being excluded from
| education, though. They're being educated.
|
| Sending kids who haven't learned to read on to higher grades
| and having no standards for success is not a more "inclusive"
| policy than having benchmarks that must be passed.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| It doesn't exclude them, it just defers them for a year. Rich
| kids "red shirt" all the time.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| "A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing
| high standards while also giving schools the resources they
| needed to meet them."
|
| Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it
| means teachers. _Good_ teachers.
|
| There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the
| profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented
| end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get
| better jobs elsewhere.
|
| There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the
| resources to change what's possible.
|
| Individually, students have the least agency in the entire
| system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and
| administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of
| a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are
| trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the
| disapproval of their peer culture.
|
| The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is
| inspiration and motivation from educators.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The proper job of teachers is to provide far more than simple
| "inspiration and motivation", _especially_ to students who
| are at significant risk of failure. Teachers must be given
| the skills they need to provide clear and understandable
| information and direction to these students in the course of
| their job duties. They should actively educate, not just act
| as coaches who simply expect their "inspired" students to
| learn the school curriculum on their own, as with the now-
| popular "sink or swim" approach.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Why have grade levels at all? Instead, have a directed graph of
| skills that you need to advance through. Then, in order to
| advance, you can focus the labor effort toward correcting skill
| deficits in a dynamic way. This is not possible with how
| educational institutions are traditionally organized, but it
| doesn't seem intractable to restructure to support this
| methodology.
|
| It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are
| no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I have a suspicion that you'd wind up with a lot of places
| that would care even less and with people making it to 18
| without ever having advanced at all without some sort of
| stick ("being held back"), probably impacting the most
| vulnerable even more.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| That might be a possibility, but from what I've read,
| retention (the stick) does more harm than good. One of
| those harms is that students get held back by struggling
| with one skill, like math, when they are progressing on
| other skills at a normal pace.
|
| A system like this would address that issue, and could
| prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of
| skills that you need to advance through_
|
| FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is
| supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional
| grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40
| percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there
| are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing
| coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
|
| > _It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there
| are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress_
|
| These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the
| pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a
| necessary component of progress. It seems that if the
| evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Right, the nodes of such a skills graph would require
| standardized evaluation.
|
| To be clear, I am talking about replacing grade levels (K,
| 1, 2, ..., 12), not graded assessments. I updated my
| comment to clarify this.
| cognisent wrote:
| This is exactly how it is at my husband's high school: no
| penalties, no consequences, unlimited turning in of work
| until the end of the quarter. Didn't finish it all and
| ended up with a D or lower? Doesn't matter, because you
| can't be held back anyway.
|
| Let's not even get into how kneecapped teachers are in
| classroom management. A student reported him for pointing
| at them and touching them when he was never fewer than 3
| feet away pointing away from them. The students know they
| have the power now, and they're definitely not going to be
| told what to do.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| There are other ways to introduce motivating factors that
| aren't tied to grade level retention. Sometimes this is
| done in secondary and tertiary education in the US, like
| preventing participation in extracurricular activities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholastic_probation
|
| You could also reward students for outstanding
| accomplishments.
| anon291 wrote:
| It's declined because a generation of students was not taught to
| read because teachers decided that phonics was a conservative dog
| whistle. To not be associated with George w Bush, they failed our
| children.
|
| There's really not much else to it. Laura Bush's push for
| literacy was well intentioned but she did not anticipate the anti
| phonics backlash that would ensue due to her husband's politics.
|
| The is not some kook take, yet no one talks about it in general
| discourse, despite plenty of reporting on it. Teachers unions and
| public schools in general, which typically lean left, have been
| fighting a war on phonics for several decades. My mother, who was
| a teacher herself, noted this. She was not born in the US, so
| didn't understand why it was seen as political to teach children
| sounding out words.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2022/04/12/lets-n...
|
| We have this idea in America that conservatives are dumb and want
| lower standards for education. Of course, figures like Trump
| totally substantiate this idea, but in reality, both sides are
| invested in making America stupider. Yes, Democrats attract more
| educated voters, but often times these voters are exceptional and
| their kids wouldn't suffer the same fate as a typical child.
| Until at least one party takes education seriously, nothing will
| change
| a1pulley wrote:
| This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income
| decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things
| earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my
| kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All
| could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can
| read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom
| pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit
| those milestones until a year later. The standards and
| expectations are _extremely_ high now because it 's never been
| harder to get a spot at a top 20 university--perhaps because a
| top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your
| living standards.
| kulahan wrote:
| I've not seen anything saying _all_ kids are lacking in
| important skills these days, but rather they all seem (to me)
| to imply that we 're on the way to an even more-stratified
| society. Smart kids will be just as educated as smart kids used
| to be - probably even moreso. Dumb kids will fall further and
| further behind, and the middle range of "kinda smart at a bunch
| of stuff" will disappear.
|
| With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the
| stratification of... everything else, really.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the
| stratification of... everything else, really.
|
| That's one reason that the solution to educational
| inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in
| tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve
| education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money
| from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Maybe the most expedient way to improve education
| outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from
| wealthy people and give it to everyone else_
|
| Given the evidence in the article, wouldn't it make sense
| to try simply holding students to standards--the thing that
| caused the last wave of achievement gain--instead of
| another novel and divisive policy treatment?
| ryandrake wrote:
| _Everything_ is bifurcating now. Haves are having more and
| more, and have-nots are having less and less. Middle class
| jobs are disappearing in favor of a mix of 1. low-wage
| unskilled /service jobs and 2. "elite" jobs for the upper
| crust. There used to be a place in society for A, B, C, and D
| students, but now you're either top-college material or you
| risk being swept into a growing underclass.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest
| income decile_
|
| FTA: "High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they
| always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid
| losses."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| This is generally true for all professional (white collar)
| families.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| How are they teaching 4 year olds reading and arithmetic? That
| wasn't an option in my affluent area in SoCal. Somehow Chinese
| and some Russian kids can do it, but mine didn't. Despite my
| paying $20k/year per child for preschool.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I don't know, but I new a guy who had gotten a 5 in AP calc
| BC before entering high school. He was understandably
| depressed
| gtk40 wrote:
| I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I
| could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom
| spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school.
| This was 25+ years ago.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| You touch upon an issue near to my heart but I am loathe to
| utter it: women in workforce is robbing our children and
| country of a future.
|
| Disagree if you will.
| tayo42 wrote:
| You probably get disagreement becasue your focused on one
| gender. No reason why we can't have stay at home dads.
|
| Unless you think that men can't be good caretakers or
| something about it being a women's job, then good luck,
| your on your own lol
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Men are pretty bad at breast feeding or carrying a
| pregnancy.
| tayo42 wrote:
| You can formula feed or feed with pumped milk. Father's
| are capable of feeding children.
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Formula is not as nutritious as human breast milk. Bottle
| feeding leads to long lasting anatomical changes. You can
| look at the research confirming these uncomfortable and
| inconvenient truths.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Same way they used to teach it in 1st grade, but 2 years
| earlier. There's often more of an emphasis on visuals,
| manipulatives, and songs too, eg. my kid's kindergarten
| teacher linked us to this song [1] on the first day, and
| there's dozens of similar resources on YouTube.
|
| A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his
| 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet
| puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest,
| but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him,
| go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He
| will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to
| me, and say "Read this", though.
|
| For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through
| 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and
| I started introducing addition and subtraction just in
| ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries,
| and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you
| get to eat?"
|
| Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random
| numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity
| for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like
| binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100,
| or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back
| on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2
| * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say
| "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now
| subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if
| 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400"
| (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and
| then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is
| the correct answer.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IBDpTRVNE
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Attmu-Toddlers-Alphabet-
| Preschoolers-...
|
| [3] https://www.miniplay.com/game/snake-2048-io
| anarticle wrote:
| My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me
| reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money.
| I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead
| paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My
| mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents
| were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.
|
| Some things you cannot buy for love or money!
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, but what is the proportion of the population reaching
| those standards? High income families are a very small
| percentage of the US demographics.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Depends where you set the bar, but GP's post explicitly said
| "Highest income decile", which means 10% by definition.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| If Mississippi can read, and California can't, the future of
| Silicon Valley might be in red states.
| gowld wrote:
| California is an economic powerhouse because people who could
| read (and more) moved to California for opportunity, not
| because they were educated in California.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps. Growing up though in the 70's, it was well known
| that California public schools ranked best in the country.
| gdulli wrote:
| I know why saying those words makes you feel good in the
| moment, but read them back to yourself and imagine how they
| sound to someone who's not coming from that same place as you.
| hypeatei wrote:
| No, you don't understand, he totally owned the libs with this
| one /s
| Jensson wrote:
| I'm not an American, whats wrong with what he said? If my
| areas reading score was plummeting I'd worry about our future
| viability, what is wrong with that?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Silicon Valley is full of immigrants. Any place that actively
| dislikes them and is hostile to them is probably not going to
| replace it.
|
| And contrary to popular narrative, the Bay Area boast school
| districts in the country. And if you look at top school
| districts in the country by any measurable metric, most of them
| are in blue states. I think Silicon Valley will be fine where
| it is.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| This was an intentional plan to keep the population stupid and
| fearful. It's been happening for the last 40 years or so. We've
| been systematically and intentionally dismantling and rendering
| ineffective, our education system.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > This was an intentional plan to keep the population stupid
| and fearful
|
| A plan by whom and to what end? What does keeping the
| population afraid and stupid do that benefits the planner?
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Who's intentional plan? Where is this plan documented?
| legitster wrote:
| > But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It's not just
| middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is
| declining; it's also kids in elementary school. Phone use has
| certainly increased among young children, but not to the
| ubiquitous proportions of adolescents.
|
| Easy. _Parents_ of young children are on their phones more than
| ever before. That means less reading and more screen time.
|
| One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the
| number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and
| reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It
| starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived
| than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do
| with it.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| > One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is
| the number of books at home.
|
| This "effect" is the textbook example of correlation !=
| causation. By which I mean, it was literally in my AP Psych
| textbook in high school.
| bodiekane wrote:
| Except, programs which give free books to children in
| households without books demonstrably improve reading.
|
| There's a correlation component, but also there absolutely is
| a causal connection of access to books and parents reading to
| children.
| ThrowMeAway1618 wrote:
| TL;DR
|
| Isn't there a video or a podcast of this?
|
| /s
| higgins wrote:
| can someone summarize this with emoji or an animated gif please?
| nostrademons wrote:
| It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids. "Sold a
| story" had a huge impact on the educational establishment. My
| local district reintroduced phonics for the 2023-2024 school
| year, and reintroduced it in kindergarten. By the end of
| kindergarten, every single one of my kid's classmates could read.
| This class is today's 2nd graders; they are avid readers today,
| I'll usually run into one of them walking with a book in front of
| their face at aftercare. They're too young to show up in the test
| scores, though, because these kids won't have their first round
| of standardized testing for another 2 years.
|
| Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down
| on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
|
| The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still
| worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America
| have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class
| has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20%
| and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this
| continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced
| with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry,
| and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
| coliveira wrote:
| The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it
| is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire
| to learn anything that doesn't move.
| sixtyj wrote:
| This. People skim, they don't read.
|
| Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for
| browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app
| (of the brain and attention).
| jihadjihad wrote:
| I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and
| iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my
| experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not
| just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app
| restrictions. It's about setting the right example and
| providing an environment where reading a book is as
| stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game
| every once in a while on an iPad.
|
| It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies
| equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be
| held accountable for poor habits that are largely a
| consequence of their environment.
| coliveira wrote:
| > the second part of your sentence applies equally well to
| adults as children
|
| You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least
| adults already learned how to read, so this is not
| something that will stop their development during their
| critical formative years.
| ocschwar wrote:
| It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I
| can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.
| aeternum wrote:
| The screens thing is a diversion.
|
| The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline
| students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child
| behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to
| socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack
| of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students.
|
| Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with
| it, most cannot.
| alephnerd wrote:
| In the upper income public school my mom teaches at here
| in the Bay, the "problem kids" are overwhelmingly
| classified as low-med severity special ed for that reason
| - it solves the disruption problem while reducing the
| need to deal with Karens
|
| Interestingly, in my mom's experience, kids from
| immigrant backgrounds (working class or undocumented
| Latinos bussed in and Asian Americans from all economic
| strata) never get in trouble. It's only the "American"
| parents that try to overstep on educators toes for
| "disciplining" kids.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I think the drop is an almost worldwide thing and not
| correlated very much to disciplining. Disciplining
| varies, the screens and the slop are universal.
| noosphr wrote:
| I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever
| had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able
| to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like
| war and peace.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean I'm sure you disable most pop-ups and notifications
| on your phone too. The problem is most people don't and
| every type of distraction is vying for their attention
| every moment they are on that screen.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That can't be true because the Mentava and Alpha School kids
| use screens for instruction and they're doing well from
| parental reports.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not
| convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit,
| and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an
| effect as _not knowing how to read_. The article seemed to
| suggest as much as well:
|
| > But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It's not
| just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is
| declining; it's also kids in elementary school. Phone use has
| certainly increased among young children, but not to the
| ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though
| smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have
| not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as
| they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid
| losses.
|
| My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits.
| Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't
| seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited
| to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do
| other stuff.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| > It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading.
|
| A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built
| and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your
| kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as
| you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I
| think that is great, and again, presumably in these
| households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime.
|
| The question is to what degree lower performers both come
| to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household
| doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or
| there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it
| stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid
| losses."
| nostrademons wrote:
| Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good
| at. Reading and academic performance generally has a
| snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it
| more, which makes you even better at it, and so on.
|
| My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause
| for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at
| _the very beginning_ , when kids don't learn the
| fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading.
| Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound
| out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just
| guessing all through the rest of their education. And
| without competence, reading _isn 't_ fun, so why would
| they do it for fun?
|
| I'd actually go further and say that the causality
| between screen time and lack of reading goes the other
| way. The reason that today's social media industry looks
| the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because
| its primary audience _can 't read_. There were plenty of
| text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials
| in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But
| images and videos started dominating around 2013 because
| _the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn
| 't read_. It's a case of the market pulling the product
| out: text based social media is a niche product today,
| with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over
| Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos,
| because its primary market can't deal with text.
| isodev wrote:
| > it's also kids in elementary school
|
| Maybe it's because their parents are spending more time on
| screens (... and probably working due to the stagnation of
| wage vs. prices) instead of reading to/teaching their kids
| qqtt wrote:
| I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a
| convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to
| point to.
|
| The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make
| ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both
| lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less
| time. Children are given devices to play with because the
| parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully
| engage with young children that are full of energy.
|
| Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially
| teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay
| something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of
| living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply
| left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
|
| So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality
| education time with their parents being funneled into
| underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40
| kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for
| everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty
| training in grade school.
|
| As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the
| home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual
| classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is
| something worth investing in and we need to spend the time,
| money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
|
| Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just
| treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful
| jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education,
| it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to
| educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require
| two people working full time to be able to afford a home
| and have kids, and we need to push against the various
| forces that have driven us to that.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _If this continues for another couple generations, we 're
| potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and
| illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval
| indeed._
|
| When you look at the conservative attack on public education,
| the prison industrial complex, et al., it really seems that
| this is the intention.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Oh yes, the public education that has done such a wonderful
| job. God forbid parents had better options. /s
| ribosometronome wrote:
| The article, and presumably this discussion, is
| specifically about a recent decline, e.g. the largely
| public school system doing a worse job than it used to. It
| should obviously be worth thinking about the reasons,
| including things like the attacks on schools.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
|
| Is there proof the affluent ever were suffering? From the
| article we're discussing:
|
| >Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top
| tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always
| have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The low-income story gets most of the airtime because most
| people are not interested in reading about how rich people
| are struggling, but there was also a significant decline in
| affluent districts as well. See eg. this Boston Globe article
| about how even the top districts in the state (which itself
| is historically the top in the country) are using poor
| instructional methods:
|
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/10/metro/reading-
| skills-...
|
| https://archive.is/epEe5
|
| I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught
| in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores
| have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a
| hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30
| years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent
| districts can't pass them.
|
| Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter
| for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an
| adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise
| great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax -
| my kindergartner could read it better than her.
| tayo42 wrote:
| >middle class has largely stopped having kids,
|
| Anecdotal I guess but I feel like I'm seeing alot of people
| having kids suddenly.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| >>>If this continues for another couple generations, we're
| potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and
| illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval
| indeed.
|
| It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school
| district based on what their property taxes are already
| accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that
| are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas
| with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are
| expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are
| challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at
| least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per
| book, including learning to present her findings in a timed
| manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They
| advance kids to higher math grades based on the child's skill
| level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional
| ones 6th grade math.
|
| This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier.
| Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the
| kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of
| getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.
| bodiekane wrote:
| Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from
| affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas
| throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar
| budgets regardless of income level in the area.
|
| They still have drastically different quality of schools and
| student experiences though, because the kids are coming from
| very different home environments, parental expectations,
| cultural norms, etc.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| I've heard teachers often dislike the term good or bad
| school district. And rightly so. The home environment that
| kids come from can vary. This makes a "great schools" score
| (or something equivalent) not a marker of the level of
| effort the teachers put in but rather a marker for parents
| to find "better peer groups" and "like minded pta". Note
| I'm consciously avoiding the discussion of race here.
| Because in most suburban cases the good/bad doesn't depend
| on race but more on income. This will obviously change if
| you look at urban districts.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think the parents never really claimed or cared whether
| it's the marker of the level of effort the teachers put
| in, but they care whether it's the marker of "better peer
| groups". From the parents perspective, you care about
| outcomes, and the particular experience your kid will
| have.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| Having had direct experience with a system like that, my
| anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has
| more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer
| surrounding school districts were critically underfunded
| (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time,
| etc).
|
| That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the
| mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize
| that variable. Of course the points you bring up are
| important factors in education as well.
| nostrademons wrote:
| California does too. Parents get around it in all sorts of
| ways. Donating (and having your employer donate) to a
| 501(c)3 PTA that then directly funds many of the enrichment
| activities at the school. Parent volunteers for things like
| robotics classes. In-kind donations: my kid's teacher let
| slip that they were running out of paper, my kid shows up
| to class the next day with 2 reams. After-school enrichment
| through things like Kumon or RSM. Home tutoring. Study
| sessions after school.
|
| I'm not sure it'd be desirable (let alone legal) to prevent
| that, though. The point is to raise up the kids that are
| doing poorly, not to make the kids doing well also do
| poorly.
| aswanson wrote:
| This isn't only reflected in educational standards. I've seen
| a ton more restrictions in traffic and speed limits in more
| affluent areas, and higher/less blatant enforcement in poorer
| areas, even when the poorer areas are more populated with
| children.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
|
| America is not solely made up of affluent kids.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| If you read the article, you'll know that the affluent kids
| never saw a decrease in performance begin with. The top 10%
| performed just as well as always.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Most of the article is paywalled for me
| chimpanzee wrote:
| And so it begins...
| ulrashida wrote:
| Ah yes, I am literate but I cannot read.
| constantcrying wrote:
| I think the most important thing for literacy is a nationwide
| _culture of reading_.
|
| That has stopped existing over the last decades. Parents do not
| read and so neither do their children.
|
| Reading is now a niche hobby. If you visit a book store you will
| also find out that most "readers" are a very niche group, who
| mostly read genre fiction or crime slop.
|
| The amount of people actually reading intellectually challenging
| literature is miniscule. Is it any surprise to have an illiteracy
| problem in a country where nobody reads?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| "We should read fewer books that I don't like, and more books
| that I do like."
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/23/science-fictio...
| constantcrying wrote:
| I have read maybe a thousand books of fantasy or science
| fiction, including 10k pages long fantasy series. Some of it
| was good, but most of it was pure slop.
|
| People read for a variety of reasons and I am not saying that
| people should not be reading their genre fiction slop. But to
| a culture of reading belongs the idea that reading
| challenging works is also important and that a deeper meaning
| is to be found in classical works.
|
| If we want a society which reads we need books which are more
| than movies without images. We need to tell _adults_ that
| reading is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when reading
| complex material. Only then literacy can rise again, because
| only then will people believe that it is important to be able
| to read.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Who is it that distinguishes the "slop" (you love that
| word) from the complex? You seem to be focused on the idea
| of genre, which is orthagonal to the quality of the prose,
| the depth of the characters, the complexity of the themes,
| etc. You might as well focus on the size of the font.
| filchermcurr wrote:
| It also doesn't help when we have programs like Accelerated
| Reader. The original goal of the program, from what I
| understand, was to encourage reading by rewarding kids for
| succeeding at reaching goals. Unfortunately, schools decided
| rewarding was bad and punishing was good. So instead of being
| an optional reward-driven approach, it became a mandatory part
| of your grade.
|
| This sort of thing makes kids resent reading. Especially kids,
| like me, who were given extremely unrealistic goals to meet
| because they happen to have a high reading level. Plus you're
| restricted to books that are: 1. Your exact reading level. 2.
| In your school library. 3. Have A.R. tests available. That,
| especially in smaller schools, is an extremely difficult set of
| criteria for meeting a goal. It made me HATE reading because
| there were no books of any interest to me, but I had to read
| the most bizarre (and, frankly, age inappropriate) things to
| meet the goal and get a good grade.
|
| Bring back Pizza Hut and toss A.R. back in hell where it came
| from.
| constantcrying wrote:
| I always hated school assigned reading. I could not really
| tell you why though.
|
| At the same time I was a very avid reader, who spend a lot of
| time reading books.
| skulk wrote:
| Even treating it as a purely optional reward didn't work, at
| least for me. I remember doing AR and treating it like a game
| -- find the most points-dense book possible in the school
| library (for me it was The Hobbit, a whopping 70 points),
| read a summary of it online to get the details and ace the
| test. All without even opening the book. Well, I actually did
| try reading The Hobbit but I couldn't make it past the
| handful of pages without falling asleep.
| bendigedig wrote:
| > America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy
|
| America is Sliding Towards _Autocracy_ - FTFY
| lukewrites wrote:
| The authoritarian creep has certainly been facilitated by
| developing a culture of intellectual apathy.
| programjames wrote:
| I believe the issue is measures of 'achievement' and 'excellence'
| typically use the 20th and 50th percentiles, respectively. For
| example, most education studies focus on what improves graduation
| rates, passing rates, or the bottom 10-20% on standardized
| assessments. Most school districts' financial incentives rely on
| these metrics as well. Occasionally you'll get a study that looks
| at the median (and even more rare, the 90th percentile), but no
| standardized assessment even showcases the bellends of the
| distribution. This is why you get claims like this
|
| > High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always
| have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses
|
| in the article, when they're actually doing _much worse_ as well,
| which can be seen from the median (or top) scores in STEM
| competitions. All the financial incentives are for schools and
| teachers to focus on their bottom 20% of students, and even if
| they cared about their top students (culturally, most education
| departments do not), it 's not even feasible to collect that
| data, short of signing everyone up for the AMC 12. So, naturally,
| the percent of elementary schools offering gifted programs has
| declined by fifteen (twenty?) percent in the last twenty years,
| and the general standards and curricula have been lowered to
| teach to the 20th percentile. This also creates a cultural issue
| where many students recognize they're bored, and that schools are
| not trying to teach _them_ , so they become disaffected and stop
| caring. My friends in high school joked that school was for
| socializing, and frankly, what other purpose does it serve
| anymore for most kids?
| jltsiren wrote:
| > My friends in high school joked that school was for
| socializing, and frankly, what other purpose does it serve
| anymore for most kids?
|
| Schools have always been like that, at least if you ask the
| kids. The difference is whether the parents value education and
| expect their kids to work hard and study, or if they only see
| the school as a daycare center that allows them to work full
| time. And whether the wider society values education.
| mcphage wrote:
| This article is a weird mix of things. Early on we see:
|
| > States were given latitude to spend their funds as they saw
| fit, which, it seems, was a mistake. Instead of funding high-
| quality tutoring programs or other programs that benefited
| students, districts spent money for professional development or
| on capital expenditures such as replacing HVAC systems and
| obtaining electric buses.
|
| And then later, discussing Mississippi:
|
| > it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training
| instructors in how to teach reading better (by, among other
| things, emphasizing phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work
| in the lowest-performing schools.
|
| Leaving aside the idea that capital expenditures on aging school
| buildings and busses is a mistake instead of an absolute
| requirement, the author criticizes states that spent money on
| professional development, and then later praised Mississippi for
| (among other things) training instructors--that's what
| professional development _is_.
| mhink wrote:
| An article posted elsewhere in the comments
| (https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-
| choi...) has a take that might explain a distinction:
|
| > Billions of dollars are spent -- and largely wasted -- every
| year on professional development for teachers that is
| curriculum-agnostic, i.e., aimed at generic, disembodied
| teaching skills without reference to any specific curriculum.
|
| > "A huge industry is invested in these workshops and
| trainings," argued a scathing 2020 article by David Steiner,
| executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education
| Policy. "Given, on average, barely more than a single day of
| professional support to learn about the new materials; knowing
| that their students will face assessments that lack any
| integration with their curriculum; and subject to principals'
| evaluations that don't assess curriculum use, teachers across
| America are barely using these new shiny objects -- old habits
| win out."
|
| > Mississippi improved its training through a 2013 law
| mandating that elementary school teachers receive instruction
| in the science of reading. It also sent coaches directly into
| low-performing classrooms to guide teachers on how to use
| material.
| afpx wrote:
| Does it take into account ESL? I know at least at my daughters
| school, kids with English-speaking parents score very well. The
| others score very low, on average. I notice when I pick up my
| daughter that the ESL kids group together and only speak their
| native language though. So, it's not surprising.
| jMyles wrote:
| > What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the
| pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it.
|
| The NEAP follows cohorts which are four years apart in age -
| where (and how, and why) did The Atlantic rasterize this to "the
| decline"?
|
| ...and yes, the NEAP shows that all three of these cohorts
| suffered terribly from the school closures in parts of the USA,
| just as every serious expert predicted. The differences in the
| NEAP math unit are particularly obvious.
|
| It feels very strange to cast this aside with a single sentence
| and no further analysis.
| lukewrites wrote:
| There's really interesting research about children/people
| learning to read without formal instruction; as John Taylor Gatto
| points out in Dumbing Us Down, back when Thomas Paine was
| writing, there were ~600,000 copies of Common Sense printed for a
| population of three million. People learned to read on their own
| or with very little instruction because they were interested in
| reading.
|
| There's a convincing body of evidence that the way you get kids
| to read books is pretty simple: read them books that interest
| them and then give them access to more interesting books as well
| as time to read to self. Unfortunately, the lethal combo of
| Common Core and No Child Left Behind has left teachers at best
| too time-strapped (or, at worst, uninterested) in doing so
| because of mandatory curriculum and testing.
|
| I read to my kids, make sure they see me reading, and talk to
| them about both what I'm reading and what they're reading.
| They've done fine despite awful reading instruction at school.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Crazy not one mention of whole word learning and the disaster it
| has been since it's been rolled out across the country:
|
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
|
| It's largely discredited, yet it still persists.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a new and bad definition of illiteracy. America is more
| literate than it has ever been; it started with Harry Potter, and
| grew with the internet. Everybody can read, and that was not true
| when I was a kid, because English is hard to read. You mostly
| have to read to participate on the internet. The lack of basic
| communication ability of the people on the early internet was
| shocking, and that's all gone. I rarely run into people who
| capitalize Every Single Word any more, and I never thought that
| would happen.
|
| The problem is that kids are stupid, because their parents are
| teaching them (and demanding they repeat) a number of bizarre
| views of the world, and all of the media they consume is
| propagandistic and dumb. That's what's showing up on reading
| _comprehension_ tests. Not that they don 't understand the words,
| but that they lack the ability to put together a complex thought
| because they have been encouraged not to have them; that complex
| thoughts are suspicious, weird, and try-hard and make them feel
| like they're about to look stupid; and that having a thought by
| yourself is the surest way to be ostracized and to deserve to be.
|
| They're scared to think, they've been crippled. They just want
| you to tell them what to say, so they can get back to their video
| game, or to TikTok.
| pavon wrote:
| > From 2000 to 2007, the bottom tenth of fourth graders in
| reading ability showed substantial improvement, before
| stagnating. But by 2024, those gains had been erased.
|
| Your interactions with people online include the cohort whose
| reading scores improved while they were in school, and is
| unlikely to include many current young school children whose
| scores are falling.
| recallingmemory wrote:
| "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or
| grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and
| information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries
| have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological
| powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
| the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people
| have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably
| question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and
| nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in
| decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's
| true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
| and darkness.
|
| The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of
| substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30
| second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest
| common denominator programming, credulous presentations on
| pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of
| celebration of ignorance."
|
| - Carl Sagan, 1995
| kouru225 wrote:
| What I'm most surprised by is how visually illiterate the older
| generations seem to be.
|
| As a video editor, I've encountered multiple moments where an
| older person is incapable of even noticing that we've cut from
| one angle to another, and the amount of times I've had to
| convince them that "yes the audience will absolutely notice that
| incredibly obvious mistake and we need to fix it" is
| astronomical.
|
| I've seen video after video of old people seemingly incapable of
| identifying even the most basic CGI or AI videos. And all you
| techies know how clearly this issue extends into the basic usage
| of a computer interface. How many times do I need to remind my
| dad how to turn on the subtitles?
|
| We can sit here and lambast the younger generations all we want,
| but I refuse to do it without accurately comparing them to the
| previous generations, which IMO were clearly less capable than we
| previously thought.
| criddell wrote:
| Back when high def TVs were relatively new and cable TV and
| separate channels for SD and HD feeds, it used to drive me
| crazy that my parents would watch the SD channel with the image
| stretched to fit the screen. I'd show them where the HD channel
| was (it was something like SD channel # + 200) but they just
| didn't care. The stretched SD image was good enough.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I'm almost certain that if we were to do a test, less than
| 10% of 60+ year olds would be able to identify a messed up
| aspect ratio.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Tech illiteracy at some age groups is insane to me. I
| understand that my 93 year old grandma wasn't great at this
| sort of thing. But I encounter people who are in their 20s who
| don't know how to print a document, or people in their 50s
| falling for obvious AI scams. Didn't Jurassic Park come out in
| 93? Did they just think people were getting eaten by dinosaurs?
| walkabout wrote:
| Media literacy seems to be one of those things it's easy to
| forget you ever had to learn. I'm routinely amazed at how
| little of it most other people are capable of, when a lot of it
| is now so automatic for me that I can't turn it off, it's just
| a permanent part of how I experience things--but at some point
| I'm sure I was about that limited, and I'm better at it now
| only because I found improving my literacy to be interesting
| and fun, so I effortlessly put a lot of time into it.
|
| Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much
| music, et c., as most people do and _not_ putting a little
| thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems
| like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even
| wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that
| choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but _how_ does it do
| that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do,
| and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or
| mysteries in the rest of the work? " side of things seems
| totally alien to me.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I think some people simply have a bad visual cortex. Countless
| times I've tried to show people how to turn off motion
| interpolation on their TV to prevent the soap opera effect, and
| they just didn't see any difference.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| As an "older" person, watching video critically wasn't a
| literacy skill that mattered throughout my education. I was
| taught how to use a (physical) card catalog, how to distinguish
| primary and secondary sources, how to use printed indexes to
| discover relevant news articles, how to find and read material
| on microfiche, ...
|
| I'm often impressed by the multi-media literacy and production
| capabilties of younger colleagues. But to be honest, I will
| likely always prefer to think and to communicate by writing and
| not by making videos.
|
| I think your criticism is fair - assessing the quality and
| reliability of information is different today than it was 40
| years ago. And getting harder as more of it becomes un-bylined,
| remixed, bot-driven propaganda pushed by platforms without
| reputational skin the game for truthfulness.
|
| But I'm not sure I can be convinced that reading and writing
| aren't critical thinking skills, regardless of what other
| mediums exist. Maybe that's just generational myopia on my
| part. Certainly, these seem like more critical skills than
| mastering the remote control.
| sgustard wrote:
| The performance of kids in school reflects adult behaviors.
|
| Number of books Americans read per year is "a smaller number than
| Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990"
|
| per https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-
| fewer-...
| lexarflash8g wrote:
| I notice the trend that people are reading much less in public
| and on public transporation -- before if you went on a long-haul
| flight you would bring a couple of books or magazines, now people
| much prefer to consuming video content. On a flight every row I
| saw passengers either watching a movie on their phone/laptop/ or
| screen seat.
|
| If you walk into a cafe it would be odd to see someone reading a
| book. And its almost impossible to buy physical newspapers even
| the Sunday edition for the NY Times as most grocery stores or
| convenience stores don't carry them.
|
| Personally I'm also guilty of listening to more podcasts and
| background play -- but I only watch YT visual content when its
| interesting there is just too much stuff out there. I consume
| most of my news online -- so my reading comes from mostly
| articles. Its just more convenient and practical now -- though
| requires much less effort than say reading longer form content of
| a book or long essay.
|
| Lately I've been going on TikTok just out of curiosity for
| entertainmentto watch amusing or funny videos. Its basically like
| digital crack -- before you know it you spent an hour just
| watching mindless content and its designed to get you hooked. It
| really is low-effort instant gratification at its worst (probably
| worse than porn -- because you stop after a while once
| satisfied.)
|
| And you see kids as old as 1-2 years old with personal devices
| watching videos -- so it seems to be a disturbing trend And I
| heard that professors don't even assign books since they know
| their students won't read them and will just ChatGPT for
| summaries.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Not surprising considering the DoE has been failing the American
| people for decades. Now that we're slowly giving education back
| to the states, where it belongs, the trend will start to reverse
| if it hasn't already.
| btown wrote:
| Reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-
| wrong-ho... (2019) was eye-opening for me. It's a must-read
| companion piece if you want to take this Atlantic article
| seriously, particularly with some of the politicization the
| Atlantic article tries to inject.
|
| From the Atlantic article:
|
| > An explanation that deserves equal consideration is what one
| might call the low-expectations theory. In short, schools have
| demanded less and less from students--who have responded,
| predictably, by giving less and less.
|
| The APM Reports article I linked above, in this context, would
| likely suggest that "low-expectations theory" might actually be
| an effect of a specific and well-intentioned methodology change:
| one that replaces phonics-based approaches with an effort to get
| pupils _through_ books rather than being _able_ to read every
| word. From APM Reports:
|
| > For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been
| rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that
| was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains
| deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials.
| As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by
| -- memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words
| they don't know -- are the strategies that many beginning readers
| are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn
| how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in
| reading find it difficult to ever master the process.
|
| It goes on to describe the origins of the different
| methodologies, historical reactions, plenty of context on
| adoption, visual examples. There's an ongoing debate here, but it
| provides real food for thought.
|
| The Atlantic article could have done something similar, focusing
| on the methodologies at hand. Instead, it tries to conclude by
| assigning blame based on political affiliation:
|
| > But for Democrats, who pride themselves on belonging to the
| party of education, these results may be awkward to process. Not
| only are the southern states that are registering the greatest
| improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their
| teachers are among the least unionized in the country. And these
| red states are leaning into phonics-based, "science of reading"
| approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such
| as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to
| adopt them, in some cases hanging on to other pedagogical
| approaches with little evidentiary basis.
|
| The article provides no quantitative backing for these
| statements, much less evidence of causality. (The research they
| do cite has Massachusetts in 4th place, and New York in 10th
| place, for adjusted reading scores:
| https://www.urban.org/research/publication/states-demographi...)
|
| It's a good reminder to read articles critically, and seek
| external sources, when blame is being ascribed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Atlantic article could have done something similar, focusing
| on the methodologies at hand_
|
| _The Atlantic_ isn 't delving into the details of these
| theories because, as you say, "there's an ongoing debate."
| Meanwhile, there is a clear connection between holding students
| to standards versus the equity-based approaches that turn
| graduation into aging out. Getting distracted by the
| methodology debate would have muddied the clear signal in the
| measurement discussion that isn't happening.
|
| > _seek external sources, when blame is being ascribed_
|
| I didn't see blame being ascribed, but hurdles highlighted.
|
| Democrat-run states have higher educational attainment than
| Republican-run states. That doesn't mean, however, that the
| former have a monopoly on good education ideas. There are good
| ideas coming up in the South when it comes to reading. The
| author is pointing out--correctly, in my opinion--the hurdles
| policymakers in Democrat-run states and cities may need to
| contend with to implement those ideas.
| Animats wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _" One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning
| that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a
| substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40
| percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are
| no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing
| coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."_
|
| That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of
| success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.
| panny wrote:
| My favorite paragraph in the article:
|
| The experience of a few outlier states gives reason for optimism.
| Matthew Chingos and Kristin Blagg, two scholars at the Urban
| Institute, computed "demographically adjusted NAEP scores,"
| examining how effective states are at educating kids after
| accounting for significant differences in socioeconomic status.
| Their analysis of the 2024 NAEP results found that Mississippi
| was best at educating kids in fourth-grade math, fourth-grade
| reading, and eighth-grade math. (In 2013, Mississippi was at the
| bottom of the unadjusted league table.) When I computed the
| correlation between these demographically adjusted scores and
| state spending, I found that there was none. If you're an
| underprivileged kid in America, you will, on average, get the
| best education not in rich Massachusetts but in poor Mississippi,
| where per-pupil spending is half as high.
| IT4MD wrote:
| Sliding? You mean racing.
|
| A simple example. We recently blocked chatgpt in our org. A large
| number of people sent in tickets with justifications like, "I use
| it to write reports", "I use it to write email" and more.
|
| My partner teaches at a major university (top 200 in the US). You
| know how they spend about 30 mins on test days? Making sure the
| students mark their scantrons correctly, so it matches the
| version of the test they took! The test are color coded, so if
| you took the "blue" test, then it's pretty obvious you need to
| mark the answer card with the Blue Test, not the yellow test,
| you've never took.
|
| Bridge too far.
|
| I won't go into how many have their fucking parents call the
| teacher to beg for grades, extensions, etc.
|
| Talk about disheartening.
|
| The Last Question book seems more prescient every single day.
| susiecambria wrote:
| My concern for illiteracy, dropping participation in summer
| reading programs, and the like has informed some of my gift
| giving and material donations. All the grands get books. And
| holiday giving to Angel Trees or Toys for Tots includes books
| and/or comic books. I know this annoys the latter and it
| frustrates and annoys the hell out of me.
| gregwebs wrote:
| The recent move away from phonics has been disastrous, and states
| that are using phonics now are seeing better results.
|
| > Some have called it the "Mississippi miracle" ...
|
| > A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing
| high standards while also giving schools the resources they
| needed to meet them. In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring
| that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the
| next grade. It didn't just issue a mandate, though; it began
| screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors in
| how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing
| phonics), and hiring literacy coaches to work in the lowest-
| performing schools. Louisiana's improvements came about after a
| similar policy cocktail was administered, starting in 2021.
|
| I would be interested to know more about the approach with
| literacy coaches. I donate to a charity that does 1 on 1 reading
| tutoring: https://readingpowerinc.org/
|
| If we cannot as a society teach our children how to read,
| something is very wrong and we need to invest heavily in fixing
| it.
| joemi wrote:
| I don't even understand how one could learn to read without
| phonics.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I know from my earliest memories that reading is possible
| from whole words if you are read to enough without being
| formally taught. Granted at that point my attention span was
| too lacking to really read books by myself, compared to being
| read to.
|
| But that basically amounts to probably just learning phonics
| indirectly through examples and drawing patterns, and
| specifically is an exception and not the norm. And children's
| books even if they don't use the phonetic alphabet teach
| through example when read properly.
|
| I don't know enough about whole language learning theory and
| its development aside from the fact that it has been
| discredited. Perhaps it was based off of the outliers and
| wrongly assuming that the higher end of the early literacy
| bell curve's techniques would be generally applicable?
| rayiner wrote:
| > Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to
| backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline
| began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone
| cannot explain it.
|
| There is actually no change in reading scores before covid if you
| adjust for demographic change in the student population:
| https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/reading/student-group-....
| Scores for white, black, and hispanic students went up
| consistently from 2000-2012 then stayed flat until 2020. The drop
| came only after covid.
| trentnix wrote:
| If you could quantify the benefits of literacy, I think you'd
| find a similar decline. The incentives for literacy, especially
| among kids, are less compelling than they used to be.
| anarticle wrote:
| I was a product of DoDDS system:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...
|
| Somehow I ended up with a really high end education system, and
| went to public school my last few years. As I get on in age, I
| realize that school systems vary so wildly it is shocking.
|
| I thought that English was taught in a specific way letters ->
| phonics -> words -> sentences, but it appears that was abandoned
| for "Whole Language" approach which upon reading sounds insane to
| me!
|
| Some of my younger friends (young millennial, early Z) have real
| issues "sounding out words", and I guess that is the effect of no
| phonics.
|
| As much as it is socioeconomic divide, a nice part of DoDD
| schools is that the corporal's kids and the general's kids all go
| to the same school. To be fair, they are usually well funded and
| have career teachers, along with what is shaped like a national
| curriculum. The reason for this is if you move, and you will in
| the military, you can continue grades easily without having to
| interrupt your path.
|
| Ex: in DoDD school, 9th grade had "world history", which didn't
| coincide with my 10th grade move to public school which required
| "American history" in 9th grade, so I was held back(!) in history
| to take American with 9th graders when I was in 10th grade.
|
| Education, for the basics, in my mind should not deviate too hard
| from what we have learned over the years. It is fun and exciting
| to experiment with "new methods" but pretty much everyone I know
| that had common core or new math or xyz new 21st century teaching
| method is abysmally behind both in speed and skill from people
| that were taught in more traditional methods.
|
| It's very bad in the ~20yo segment from HS no college. My mom
| works at a deli shop and people don't understand fractions. Let
| alone fraction<->decimal conversions on the scales. She is in
| complete disbelief this is real. (She is 68, retired, and still
| works because she wants to be useful!)
| carefulfungi wrote:
| As another DoDDS graduate, I'd add that (a) the military makes
| parents responsible for their children; (b) the worst kids gets
| deported back to the US; (c) the military can compel parental
| behavior (like family therapy); (d) DoDDS teachers are a self-
| selection for people with curiosity and an interest to travel
| and live abroad; (e) unit rotations mean a 1/3rd or more of the
| school population changes year to year - naturally breaking
| cliques.
| torginus wrote:
| What I find slightly amusing is I strictly remember education
| people writing scathing articles about the 'No Child Left Behind'
| policies and how mechanistic and cruel was it towards children,
| and how could these evil fascists controlling education reduce
| children to simple numbers.
|
| Now it's getting praised in retrospect.
|
| I'd wager this article is written if not necessarily by the same
| people, but most definitely by the same kind of people writing
| those previous critiques.
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