Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe (economist.com)
147 pointsby vinni27 hours ago279 comments
dumberquestions 6 hours ago
The drop from 2018 to 2022 is as big as the one from 2022 to 2026, so it's not obvious whether AI had a role at all, although it's highly plausible.
I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.
asutekku 6 hours ago
Between 2018 and 2022, we saw the widespread adoption of social media and the rapid digitalization of education. Focusing on these key shifts, it seems clear to me that any kind of electronic learning has had a negative impact on education :p
Avicebron 6 hours ago
You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.
AlienRobot 6 hours ago
Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.
Loquebantur 5 hours ago
"Modern" education isn't modern at all. It's a leftover from industrialization, aiming at producing easily controllable worker drones.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
pixl97 5 hours ago
Playing games as a biological creature optimized to live on plains is great, your body has a lot of the lessons already encoded in DNA.
When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
piloto_ciego 4 hours ago
They're not wrong though, like, it is a creation of the industrial era, and honestly, the "elites vs all of us" isn't exactly crazy. Mcgraw Hill is literally owned by Apollo Global Management, don't just take my word for it, look up the relationship the management there had with Epstein.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago
> It doesn't have to be a conspiracy
“Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD.
piloto_ciego 4 hours ago
You're right, but with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people (who all went to the best schools themselves) the more I think "don't fall for it kids!"
And there may be some social-engineering intent there, or at least something approximating it? Like, I don't think the elites are all smoking cigars after their Bohemian grove owl orgy (or whatever Alex Jones coded nonsense) and saying "muah hahahaha, we can really make these kids dumber!" But I definitely think that "it sure would be nice if the workers didn't want raises" certainly comes up. No child left behind has certainly had an effect too... Then there's the shootings, the bullying (which appears much much better than when I was a kid at least), and the jingoism/patriotic nonsense.
My wife and I have actually been considering taking the kids out of "traditional school" and doing something more bespoke. Here in Alaska that's a lot more practical than in say, Washington? We have great home school programs here, and with our family members we have the education and qualifications to teach most of the core subjects (lots of retired teachers in our extended family). But, even with my kids in a fantastic school, it is a weird and almost carceral experience for the kids. They're constantly waiting around for stuff, constantly being tested with tests that don't seem to make a huge difference in what's taught, and they aren't really reading literature or doing much in math beyond simple rote work except for one of my sons who is 2 years ahead in math but is still bored.
I'm not saying it was all roses when I was in school 20-30 years ago, but, it feels qualitatively different? Also... even in the nice school they're in, the environment is just... I don't know, oppressive, crowded, and restrained. I'm sorry, it's messed up to make kids ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. I'm sorry, it's weird how authoritarian most of the classes are - I understand why, shrinking budgets mean bigger classes, but at least personally, I feel that there's a lot of merit to the idea that this thing that used to be about learning has become daycare so the parents can stay grinding away while their kids are safely sequestered. We will see if we can do it, but we're thinking pretty hard about just travelling in the winter while they do home school online or take college classes.
What's better: to have my kids sit in a box for 7 hours a day (but really only work for like 2-3 hours) and respond to bells on command or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties and guide them through projects that really push them all from another country in the winter where they can learn a second language, see a different world, etc? I understand that this is a privileged position for us - like, I work from my laptop and my wife has a commutable job, but each day I pick up the kids from their school it feels a little more like picking up a parolee.
burnished 3 hours ago
Worry not, school was pretty much as you described even twenty years ago!
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago
I feel like that really depended on where you went? But I suppose my life was different, by the time I was a junior in HS, I was mostly taking shop classes and language classes, had my own car that I had bought with a part time job, and had a color printer that convincingly forged hall passes on demand, so I pretty much did whatever I wanted the last couple years? It worked out fine, I graduated near the top of my class? But the strictures and authoritarian sense seemed to be lower?
I legit had aircraft sheet metal snips and numerous exacto knives in my locker and a leatherman on my person most of the time and it wasn't a huge deal? Hell, I needed the leatherman to open the hood of my shitbox car. In contrast today, one of my kids brought a toy knife to school a few years ago (because he thought it was cool, great learning opportunity for a young kid about "the man" I suppose) and you'd have thought they caught Bin Laden or something?
Perhaps I was just lucky, but it feels way different now, though there seems to be a lot less bullying.
trimethylpurine 2 hours ago
College just doesn't work. They don't know what jobs will be available and they are way too far behind the professional sector to teach about them anyway, with rare exceptions that aren't economically favored for, institutionally.
The system forces schools to increase enrollment by assigning a tuition price based on attaching a loan to it. It's basically for profit. Then, the loans can't be forgiven in bankruptcy when the outcome of the education platform fails to produce an income that supports repayment.
To get an education that doesn't completely screw you over, you need to be a minority with a scholarship or actually have rich parents and attend for fun. But in either case, your only benefit financially is the hope of connecting with other students whose parents are richer than yours.
Exceptions for subjects with artificial barriers of entry (medicine, law, etc., and each of those has its own set of problems, mainly the price of education).
(Speaking about the United States, but probably a lot of this applies to many places.)
I disagree with the sentiment that the rich are dissuading college enrollment. I'm not rich. I don't hire college grads. They are broke, entitled, and lack work ethic. After 5 in a row, I started giving opportunities to smart kids, from good families, who exhibit an appreciation for hard work and good moral character. Those people learn in a month what takes a college grad 6. They appreciate opportunity, instead of expecting it.
As I should have always known, a good person is far, far more valuable than a piece of paper certifying victimhood.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago
I really have found college valuable, but I also self-funded and have no debt. This is pretty much the arrangement I'm trying to set up for my kids too - when I had a blue-ish collar job (bush pilot is a blue collar job no?) I didn't think school had a lot of value, but then again, looking in hindsight, I'd unironically say that the most "valuable" (scare quotes intentional here) course I took was art history. Not because I learned anything that was economically useful, but it gave me a new way to view the world and literally changed some of the decisions I made with my life?
I agree with the idea of giving opportunities to smart kids from good families who work hard and are ethical. But I also think it's pretty damn hard to get good at certain things outside of a classroom? I don't know, I have mixed emotions.
Still, despite my misgivings with traditional education, I think there remains some good that comes from going to a place where your only job is to learn.
JumpCrisscross 43 minutes ago
> with the rhetoric I see espoused about "don't go to college" by most really rich people
The two categories of people I know who say this are elite-college graduates and parents of kids who crashed out of their standardized tests.
> or to do online school for 3 hours a day, have mom, dad, and grandma lecture on our specialties
We’ve tried this for decades. What are the data?
koolba 4 hours ago
> Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
> Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
ThousndBeerMike an hour ago
I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves
(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
runarberg 2 hours ago
Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.”
what an hour ago
Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?
runarberg an hour ago
Not necessarily. Test taking is a skill in its own right. The PISA test is for example 4 hours long, and students might not have the endurance to stay focused reading text that doesn’t matter and answering questions they don‘t care about for 4 whole hours.
what 11 minutes ago
Not being able to focus for 4 hours seems like a bigger problem. But it’s also entirely orthogonal to your distinction of “teaching the test” vs “actually educating”. You can’t teach people to focus for 4 hours.
procaryote 2 hours ago
This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class
falserum an hour ago
How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
thinkybrewster 13 minutes ago
My sons' school makes it a requirement of continued enrolment.
nobody9999 8 minutes ago
>How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
It's not just a good idea. It's the law[0].
[0] https://www.governor.ny.gov/eliminating-distractions-new-yor...
voakbasda 5 hours ago
I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding.
dghlsakjg 5 hours ago
I think that computers in the classroom can have a tremendous positive influence in specific areas when see with correct guidance. I think where we went wrong is replacing the classroom with ChromeOS and iPads.
pstuart 3 hours ago
Those digital devices should be an augmentation of their education, not a replacement for what has already existed.
Teaching kids is incredibly challenging -- if they view school as torture or a prison then we have failed them.
I have three kids who've gone through K12 public schools and have been lucky enough to do so in well-funded school districts. Adding to that, we did our best to augment that with a parent organized weekly sessions with a host of different teachers hired to give lessons on things that the school curriculum did not cover.
We also had them participate in Odyssey of the Mind for many years (it's a really cool program worth checking out: https://odysseyofthemind.com/)
Even with all of that, it was clear that while much of their education stuck, other parts were effectively just tolerated.
I think there are really two core factors that lead to educational success:
1. A good teacher who can connect with students and inspire them to learn
2. A curriculum that can be understood by the student as having value and aligns with their life needs.
Teaching anyone is effectively futile unless they are curious or can find value in the subject material. Good teachers are the foundation of that, and outsourcing that to some sort of "educational platform" is doomed to failure.
falserum an hour ago
0. children that listen to the teacher (depends on factors outside the classroom, like how parents raise the child)
9x39 2 hours ago
Is that a strategy for the 99th percentile or the 50th?
The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.
danaris 5 hours ago
What are you talking about?
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago
We haven’t had a pandemic between 2022 and 2026. The 2018 trend continues. That strongly suggests a common effect across both samples.
EA-3167 an hour ago
It suggests a lot of things, none of which are remotely intelligible with the information we have. The result as always is that people fill those gaps with their pet issues, whatever’s hot today, and tend to ignore anything that doesn’t fit their constructed narrative.
the__alchemist 3 hours ago
If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a broad way, and making an appeal to specific prejudices.
closeparen 3 hours ago
Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.
dataflow 3 hours ago
You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok.
ardacinar 3 hours ago
Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.
closeparen 2 hours ago
The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.
junofan 38 minutes ago
Feels like a hobbyhorse. The article discusses issues between the educator and the child, like:
> An even bigger problem, though, is muddle-headed thinking among educators. Some have fallen for the leftist canard that tests are harmful and grades are racist. Some have allowed reasonable worries about children’s mental health to warp into an excuse for low expectations. Some unhelpful habits acquired during the pandemic have stuck: children are still missing more lessons than before, and many teachers who relaxed their grading standards have failed to tighten up again.
I think we should look there and focus on what’s actually happening between the educator and the child.
Fricken 44 minutes ago
Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.
moron4hire 3 hours ago
If only we knew what could possible have happened right in that time period to really throw a wrench in the works of the education system...
trhway 3 hours ago
we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain.
danielheath an hour ago
Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.
moron4hire 35 minutes ago
And surely one could never predict the impact of sending kids home for two years and expecting them to manage their own education on their own honor. Surely school aged children are better at paying attention to Zoom meetings than I am as an adult. It's in the computer! Kids are good at computer!
williamtell 3 hours ago
I don't know for kids specifically but average user time:
2012 1:30
2016 2:08
2019-now ~2:30
If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
api 3 hours ago
I did tons of electronic learning as far back as the 80s and 90s, and still do.
It’s algorithmic social media. There’s loads of both direct causal and indirect evidence that algorithmic attention hacking has made everything worse: mental health, learning, socialization, motivation, productivity.
Short form content makes it even worse. It’s an endless barrage of short pointless tidbits with no connection, no plot, no larger theme, and often little to no content in the actual shorts. It makes trash TV look like high art from a lost golden age.
m_fayer 43 minutes ago
I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious.
I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
the__alchemist 3 hours ago
I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.
dbalatero an hour ago
If they are used, sure.
add-sub-mul-div 6 hours ago
AI, screen time, short form text/video, normalization of recreational drugs, post-truth, there's no one cause but there's lots of things that are not helping
chairmansteve 6 hours ago
I saw extremely rapid computerisation of my kid's education around 2020. Properly thought out and edited text books were replaced with last minute rushed teachers notes on google docs and buggy apps.
That would have contributed to to the decline.
mcphage 6 hours ago
When I was a freshman in college taking CS courses, they were just rolling out a new Java curriculum. And Java being fairly new, the textbooks that we were assigned were absolutely terrible. Just garbage books.
jimbob45 5 hours ago
WolframAlpha was able to do advanced calculus in 2009 fully for free. LLMs shouldn’t have affected math performance at all because the tools were already readily available for a decade at that point.
xdavidliu 5 hours ago
totally false equivalency. wolfram alpha cannot one shot word problems for one, and there are many many more.
jimbob45 4 hours ago
It got you 90% of the way there once you’d translated the problem. I can’t imagine LLMs ultimately saved more time per problem than WA did.
bdangubic 3 hours ago
I would bet that plot of WA users vs AI users, same age groups etc would look pretty funny as comparison
pixl97 5 hours ago
Wolfram is a tool, and LLM even without a harness is much closer to an agent.
binlog 5 hours ago
Hmm, did anything happen in 2020 to disrupt the entire education system?
chii 5 hours ago
the event in 2020 would've only been the last straw in a series of bad policy in education. It might've brought forward this same outcome a few years in advance, but it isn't a root cause.
filoleg 5 hours ago
Yeah, I am genuinely confused how the grandparent comment just glossed over it.
I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
dghlsakjg 5 hours ago
Wouldn’t there be recovery? Especially for the cohort that started school after the end of restrictions.
A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
yorwba 4 hours ago
The cohort that started school after the end of restrictions is not 15 yet, so no recovery can be expected until the 2029 PISA test or so.
ameminator 5 hours ago
But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system.
throw93038383 5 hours ago
The trauma from lockdowns does not disappear overnight!
It is compounding damage, that gets worse every year!
And we can not just change childrens habits, after we forced them to sit at home for 2 years with nothing but youtube! They missed key developmental phase!
smugma 5 hours ago
Poe’s Law at work
piloto_ciego 4 hours ago
The "trauma" from staying at home? Please. If the parents let them watch youtube for 2 years then the parents were stupid. I have 3 kids in school, all but one of them were in school at the time. Staying at home with Grandma and Papa while they did zoom school didn't break their brains. You know what my kids don't have? My kids don't have a smart phone. You know what my kids don't have? Unlimited access to devices.
Now, I will say that the Pandemic was pretty traumatic here in the US, at least a million people died last time I looked at it. Those people were somebody's neighbors, grandparents, uncles, etc. So maybe the realization that "nobody gives a shit about you except for your productivity" was a lesson they internalized?
Largely, I think it is the parents though. Like I said, I have kids, and when their grades slump, I get on them to fix it. A lot of people are really unwilling to do that.
Izkata 4 hours ago
> I have 3 kids
So they got at least some of what a lot of kids missed out on: socialization.
With homeschooling, parents go out of their way to find other kids for theirs to socialize with, but during lockdowns this wasn't allowed (if the parents even had any idea about it, since it was forced on them and not something they chose to do).
piloto_ciego 3 hours ago
I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way. We didn't really "lock down" here really. Again, the socialization thing? Not a problem from COVID, now, maybe the skinner box I see kids carrying around in their pockets? Yeah, probably not great? But they didn't lose their socialization here despite whatever right-wing grifters say.
I think the only thing that was really curtailed was my sons took a few months off of karate? A lot more traumatic was probably mom having to sleep in a hotel for a few nights because she got inadvertently exposed to COVID as nurse (when we really didn't know how dangerous things were), or me having to camp out in my folks' motorhome for a week because I was at the tip of the spear medevac-ing people out of camps in the arctic. I know that was scary for my kids because they told me it was.
Them not being able to have playdates being some generational trauma is nonsense. What wasn't nonsense was watching aunts and uncles die from a pandemic that we did next to nothing to fix in America until the vax came out. Also, I would not be surprised if there aren't some cognitive effects to COVID. Despite being very careful, we got it too. Everyone had it here. That probably ain't good for kids' development.
But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too. Read this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w35310
If people like doom scrolling more than they like screwing, it's probably not unlikely that they like doom scrolling better than studying.
Izkata 3 hours ago
> I live in Alaska, there were only like 3 months were things were actually curtailed in any meaningful way.
Here in Illinois it was over a year, possibly two in some places. The schools didn't return to in-person right away after the government mandates were lifted.
Edit:
> But mostly, I think it's the phones that are having the biggest impact on social development and probably on learning too.
Please re-read the comment from the other person you originally replied to.
(2nd edit: removed something based on a misread)
throw-the-towel 2 hours ago
Yeah, because everywhere in the world is Alaska and did exactly what Alaska did. Man, somehow you out-US-exceptionalismed the usual US exceptionalism you see around here.
piloto_ciego 2 hours ago
You guys have no idea of just how bad it was here. No idea. A million people died. That did not happen in say, Spain. But the kids missing school for a little bit was not as big of a deal as people are trying to retcon now.
binlog 5 hours ago
- Students who entered the education system in the COVID years are still taking tests today. They didn’t automatically relearn everything.
- Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.
readthenotes1 3 hours ago
You mentioned budget cuts and yet if I remember the data there is almost no correlation between school budget and results.
On the other hand, you have the Mississippi miracle, achieved at a budget increase of $35 per student, and a total budget of around $12k per student-- a far cry from the more recent example of education failure in New York City at $26k/student (elementary) and $32k/student (middle school)
piloto_ciego an hour ago
you are correct, but budget cuts are happening nevertheless and it's being used to justify laying off teachers (while admin staff stay employed... strange?)
nonethewiser 3 hours ago
Let’s also not forget efforts to make test scores less important.
If you actually tied outcomes to test scores all these “causes” would disappear.
chowells 3 hours ago
Tied test scores to what outcomes? Bush the second tried tying test results to one kind of outcomes (school funding), and the result was schools getting worse.
supertrope 2 hours ago
Like in South Korea?
Animats 3 hours ago
Plunging physical fitness test scores are even worse.[1] "Fat people don't make good soldiers … they get themselves or others hurt or killed." The US military says 31% of US youth are too fat to serve. 77% are not qualified for one or more reasons.[2]
Only 12% of American male youth who are qualified for the military are not in college.
Think about that. About 2/3 of American male youth are not good enough for either college or the military. That's a high reject rate.
[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/10/10/one-third-you...
[2] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...
armchairhacker 3 hours ago
Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.
dpkirchner 2 hours ago
Hell, let's just reduce the Medicare eligibility age (alllll the way down) so everyone can afford the care they need or would benefit from.
parineum 2 hours ago
Medicare is currently something like 14% of the budget and covers 20% of the population.
supertrope 2 hours ago
The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.
oklahomasports 23 minutes ago
to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount
kelseyfrog 2 hours ago
Because the political will doesn't exist. Because being fat is portrayed as a moral failing. Because the Protestant work ethic's[1] virtue of self-discipline extended to health and eating. I guess it's kinda strange to carry the mantle of the protestants without being protestant one's self, yet it happens.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...
LadyCailin 2 hours ago
Kind of hard to feel sorry for the richest country in the world when they refuse to spend enough money to take care of their people enough to even meet basic national security standards.
9x39 2 hours ago
Taking care of them was historically about calorie and nutrientmaxxing. Subsidized calories have worked too well, worldwide, and there's no response to it within the current Overton window.
what 28 minutes ago
Being fat is a moral failing though? It’s also not portrayed that way, see the entire body positivity/healthy at every size movement.
V__ 2 hours ago
There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.
neutronicus 2 hours ago
This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.
supertrope 2 hours ago
It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!
armchairhacker 2 hours ago
Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but need more support and take longer than a drug, which admittedly has side effects but seems healthier than waiting.
And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.
overfeed 2 hours ago
> We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.
The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.
tick_tock_tick an hour ago
> It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.
Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.
raz32dust 2 hours ago
Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
armchairhacker 2 hours ago
True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.
pgryko 2 hours ago
The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions.
Human soldiers are legacy technology that do not fare well against drones, for evidence (obligatory NSFW tag): Check reddit /r/CombatFootage/
Human soldiers are still used extensively on the battlefield - but are in the process of being replaced by machines.
torginus 2 hours ago
We have heard this so many times. The future was mechanized warfare, or missiles, or aircraft, or stealth jets. It seems that now in Russia/Ukraine, pretty much all forms of mechanized warfare have been rendered irrelevant and you can't achieve military objectives no matter how many bombing runs you conduct with your planes. And those planes are not safe either. Same goes for Iran. You still need the guys to go in.
boredatoms 2 hours ago
Another way to view those conflicts is that (horrible as it is to say) neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.
As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo.
overfeed 2 hours ago
> ...neither side has anywhere near enough missiles to completely disable their opponents.
Try the US/Iran war for size then.
I'm not sure what you mean by "completely disable their opponents" - there may not be a country on earth with enough munitions to do this against a competent and resilient adversary - the Vietnam war comes to mind where the US still lost after dropping triple the bombs (by tonnage) of what the entire allied forces dropped during WWII across all theaters
torginus 2 hours ago
My understanding is that Russia despite falling far from its USSR days, still had multiple times more capacity to make Iskander-s, than the US can make ATACMS (and Iskanders are way better too). The PrSM, the US based successor is just about to enter volume production, and will be years till they can be made by the hundreds.
At least that was the case before Ukraine started blowing up Russian factories. And for the rest of Europe, their capacities are somehow even worse.
And in any case, Russian missiles were a drop in the bucket compared to drones.
So building high performance missiles in a volume needed for sustained conflict is not something any military has managed to do so far.
(Not shilling for any side, just my honest opinion, plz dont dogpile on this, I don't care about any side's national greatness)
hunterpayne 4 minutes ago
"As a thought exercise, imagine if ukraine had 100k missiles ready in a silo."
Imagine if they had air superiority. For some reason people ignore this when analyzing the war in Ukraine. Drones are great for denial (defense). So far they are shit at assaults (offense). Also, drones don't do well in environments with military aircraft. We just don't see that in Ukraine because they are very few aircraft in the skies. The Russians haven't flown into Ukrainian airspace in over 3 years now. They launch their missiles and glide bombs from their side of the border.
onlypassingthru 2 hours ago
Russian autocrats agree. 1.5M Russian casualties in the last 5 years(!) with an unprecedented fatality ratio, but sure, you still need the guys to go in.
nyczomg 2 hours ago
bliteben 2 hours ago
The meat robot still has a long way to go
overfeed 2 hours ago
> The future of warfare is robotic warfare, specifically large volumes of cheap attritionable autonomous munitions
The robots are made to kill people on the other side until you hopefully win, otherwise political disagreements could be settled via best of 3 CoD games - or chess if you're more traditional. Recruitment of humans is still required for fodder.
torginus 2 hours ago
Even before that, I feel like the abolition of conscription has changed the stock of American soldiers (who used to be prime-age males from all walks of life), to a much younger cohort where misfits and lower classes were overrepresented.
I think perception of American military strength rests somewhat on the image of the square-jawed, rugged soldier, which was very much a staple of combat propaganda, but used to be more like an embellishment of the truth, rather than outright fiction.
Video games of the 2000s-2010s, like the CoD series, have usually cast this WW2-Vietnam era image onto the GWOT era, with the heroic characters fighting in the middle-east this time. It was kind of surreal to see actual authentic footage of awkward gangly teens wearing the same uniforms.
le-mark 2 hours ago
The “poverty draft” narrative is old and tired and not true. The stats are 60% are from middle class, about 20% poor and 20% wealthy.
puzzledobserver 2 hours ago
Did you mean:
> Only 12% of American male youth who are __not__ qualified for the military __are__ in college?
Without reading your citations, your argument threw me for a loop.
pessimizer 33 minutes ago
I don't think so. I think what was meant was what was literally said: that 88% of youth qualified for the military are in college.
66% of youth are not qualified for the military or college, leaving a remainder of 34% that are qualified for the military, college, or both.
X% of youth qualified for college but not the military (qualified for college here meaning attending college, I think.), leaving (34-X)%.
Of those, 88% attend college .88(34-X)%,
leaving .12(34-X)% eligible for recruitment. Which ends up a successful recruiting number like 63.5K, which is from one of the references.
I could be wrong, but it could make sense.
But also, 2/3rds of 34% also leaves a remainder of about 12% (which is a bit coincidental), so maybe what was meant to be said was that only 12% of (all American youth) are (qualified) and not (in college), rather than only 12% of (the qualified) are not (in college.)
leodler 2 hours ago
Not to downplay the reality of the situation here, but being not qualified in this case just means not being able to walk into a recruiting office and sign a contract without a waiver. The military processes tens of thousands of waivers every year for past legal infractions, tattoo policy exemptions, medical history stuff, etc. Anyone currently taking something like ADHD medication who isn't willing to stop receiving treatment for the condition is ineligible for instance.
It's kind of asinine that one can be demonstrably stable over a long term and do all sorts of things operationally in the intelligence community, but could not even become a 92G (culinary specialist) in the Army.
bentt 5 hours ago
Where I live in the US there is a movement to A) Prohibit phones from being used in schools B) use textbooks again instead of digital texts C) use handwriting and notebooks instead of Chromebooks for in-class note taking.
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
toilet 3 hours ago
Do some schools really use chromebooks for note taking outside of IT class? I can see the advantages for some types of exercises but using laptops as the default choice seems crazy to me. What is even the problem with textbooks and paper we're trying to solve?
cvwright 3 hours ago
Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.
ffsm8 3 hours ago
> has rewired our kids
The kids? I mean sure, they too - but seriously... It's not just the kids that have been affected.
Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
Ever more extreme positions are being agreed as the norm, and what had previously been the norm is being decried as evil itself.
I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Evil has lost its meaning, and people started randomly selecting other behaviors as "evil", and excusing actual evil deeds like rape, murder etc because "reasons".
This has opened up social media to become a echo chamber of ever increasing insanity.
I'm not seeing things get better through initiatives like that. I suspect things are gonna keep spiralling more and more out of control until we end up in a dystopia in which the populus looses a lot of their rights. And not in the too far future either, I'm almost certain I'll witness it before I grow old.
bentt 3 hours ago
I'm not that doomer about what you are referring to. I think a lot of kids are wising up to the echo chamber.
Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.
tick_tock_tick an hour ago
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.
romaaeterna 5 hours ago
If you take the 1998 NAEP 8th grade reading scores by race, re-weight them by the new 2024 demographic makeup of American 8th graders, you will find a predicted point decline of 4.6, rather close to the actual 4 point fall over the period.
Over the same period, reading scores actually improved somewhat for each of the 1998 poorly scoring groups (and quite a bit for Asians), but the poorly scoring groups simply make up so much more of the population now that it drags everything else down.
| Group | 1998 NAEP | 2024 NAEP | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *268* | *266* | −2 |
| Black | *242* | *243* | +1 |
| Hispanic | *241* | *245* | +4 |
| Asian/Pacific Islander | *261* | *280* | +19 |
| All public-school students | *261* | *257* | −4 |
| Race/ethnicity | 1999 Grade 8 | 2023 Grade 8 | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *64.5%* | *44.0%* | −20.5 pp |
| Black | 16.1% | 14.9% | −1.2 pp |
| Hispanic | *14.3%* | *29.4%* | +15.1 pp |
| Asian/Pacific Islander* | 3.9% | 5.9% | +2.0 pp |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 1.2% | 0.9% | −0.3 pp |
| Two or more races | not separately reported | 4.8% | — |
tdb7893 3 hours ago
Does this actually track over time or is it coincidence? I'm a bit confused why 1998 was chosen out of all years
romaaeterna 2 hours ago
Coincidence? Of course not.
1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.
kalkin 38 minutes ago
The article says that scores began drifting down around 2012. Gemini is telling me that NAEP peaked in 2013. Elsewhere in this thread there's a claim of an inflection point around 2018 in PISA, which eyeballing Gemini's numbers lines up with NAEP.
Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?
shagie 3 hours ago
With pre-formatted table:
Group 1998 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change
----------------------------- ---------- --------- ------
White 268 266 −2
Black 242 243 +1
Hispanic 241 245 +4
Asian/Pacific Islander 261 280 +19
All public-school students 261 257 −4
Race/ethnicity 1999 Grade 8 2023 Grade 8 Change
--------------------------------- ------------ ------------ --------
White 64.5% 44.0% −20.5 pp
Black 16.1% 14.9% −1.2 pp
Hispanic 14.3% 29.4% +15.1 pp
Asian/Pacific Islander 3.9% 5.9% +2.0 pp
American Indian/Alaska Native 1.2% 0.9% −0.3 pp
Two or more races not separately reported 4.8% -zug_zug 3 hours ago
The challenge here is that you're assuming performance by race should be constant over time. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
Also if you want to entertain the theory that it is racial/genetic, it'd be important to do that analysis on a continuum since a lot of people who are "minority X" may be more than 50% white or there may be trends in that over time.
romaaeterna 2 hours ago
I don't assume that. See the first table, even better in shagie's nicely reformatted version.
You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?
yesitcan an hour ago
Because you grouped intelligence by race and showed that whites outperformed blacks and Mexicans.
tick_tock_tick an hour ago
He just picked the strongest predictive characteristic we have data on. You're the one trying to turn the statement into something it isn't.
> I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
We have all that data it's just significantly less predictive of outcome then race.
kalkin an hour ago
"roma aeterna" is also the sort of alias that's associated with a particular set of political views. (Not conclusive! But a rational thing for someone to notice.)
romaaeterna 18 minutes ago
There is a particular set of political views associated with people who read classical languages? I fail to see what you are calling "rational" here.
romaaeterna 20 minutes ago
Where did you come up with "Mexicans" or "intelligence"?
Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
pessimizer 17 minutes ago
They grouped performance, not intelligence.
If you don't think that what happened and is happening to black people affects our average performance on tests, you haven't eliminated racist assumptions, you've eliminated the entire black experience in America and any reason for a grudge or complaint.
Grouping a list of test performances by race shouldn't lead to an assumption of natural stupidity any more than grouping a list of incomes or wealth by race should lead to an assumption of natural laziness.
And the fact that you jump to that conclusion, and it makes you nervous, so you think it's bad to talk about the facts that remind you of that conclusion, does not help black people.
You could say the same thing about Hispanic economic migrants. You don't think that economic migrants from countries with good universities and healthy middle classes are going to score lower on tests? The ones that fly in are a different story, they're often elites, but the ones that walk in? They're bottom caste where they come from, and looking for a chance to change things.
t0mpr1c3 35 minutes ago
Naturally, The Economist chooses the political stance of "blame lefty teachers and hooray for Baron Gove".
The regional coverage remains excellent, but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.
gruez 30 minutes ago
>but this kind of editorializing is the precise reason I stopped subscribing.
It's filed under "leaders". It's by definition supposed to be "editorializing", because it's an editorial.
mkl95 6 hours ago
It seems there is no working around learning to write and read properly. We've drifted away from this idea, which might lead to a "soft" dark age.
pfortuny 6 hours ago
And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.
yoyohello13 5 hours ago
You were downvoted but also right. Memorization is an extremely useful skill to develop.
watwut 5 hours ago
Rote memorization is very ineffective way to memorize things. That is why it was downvoted.
absoluteunit1 5 hours ago
Not sure why this was downvoted. Memory is one of the most important skills imo
Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
gambiting 5 hours ago
There's memorising and there's memorising.
My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
ArnoVW 5 hours ago
Yep. Even for maths, knowing why is king. Once you understand maths there is a whole bunch that makes sense and you can just derive.
steveBK123 5 hours ago
More things in memory also leads to making more connections / recognizing more types of patterns more easily.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
sneak 5 hours ago
I think most people don’t bother to use the reading and writing skills they did learn, so I doubt this is as big a deal as people think.
More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old, and this has been true for decades. Being able to read isn’t enough, people have to actually do the reading.
pixl97 5 hours ago
What percentage of people drag us forward kicking and screaming into the future?
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago
> More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old
Source?
I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.
[1] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago
Is there a good science fiction story where humanity discovers it’s unalterably getting dumber? As in within a fixed number of generations tool use will cease?
Footprint0521 4 hours ago
WALL·E
vinni2 2 hours ago
I don’t know in WALL.E they are not so dumb as they are lazy l, infact they are smart enough to do space travel at scale.
mindcrime 3 hours ago
Idiocracy?
progval an hour ago
It's a major plot point in one of the books in the Bobiverse series, though it's a civilisation humanity meets instead of humanity itself (not saying anything more to avoid spoilers).
pretzellogician 35 minutes ago
The classic version is Kornbluth's 1951 story "The Marching Morons", itself pretty clearly the basis for Idiocracy.
(You could argue that "The Time Machine" was the original example.)
ThrowawayR2 6 hours ago
Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh
zug_zug 3 hours ago
I agree it's worth looking into, potentially very emphatically. But that means doing some hard science.
That means don't just look at test scores by county, it means looking at DELTAs in test scores across time by numerous dimensions (income, poverty, did the kids get breakfast, school, etc) and an open mind to every possibility. Perhaps comparing against the parents' test scores might help elucidate.
Given the rise of so many unexplained mental health phenomena, I personally suspect there are environmental factors, but again, we need hard science and a lot of it.
limagnolia 5 hours ago
Are the PISA exams really the ultimate end all, the best goal we have for education?
I like the idea of a standard to measure against, but in my experience, standardized tests are terrible measures of education.
notourproblem an hour ago
Are you brown?
BobbyTables2 5 hours ago
Gee, schools got rid of text books and ask only multiple choice questions on Math tests… They now also use AI to grade short essays.
I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.
ProjectArcturis 6 hours ago
So many places to point our fingers:
-Everyone has screens.
-Education system broken.
-Covid disruptions
-Biological effects of Covid infections
Lerc 6 hours ago
I wouldn't know, the articles talking about the loss of learning are paywalled.
ketanmaheshwari 5 hours ago
The writers of such articles too need to put food on the table.
Lerc 10 minutes ago
They do indeed, but that does not make the method by which they choose to do so free of consequences.
Bank robbers, gun runners, and chiropractors also need to put food in the table.
notourproblem an hour ago
- Browner
frankbreetz 6 hours ago
I find this article to be more interesting:
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/09/08/are-teena...
Especially the part where it states that part of the issue is in 2000 when Finland had higher test scores then everyone it was attributed to play based learning and less testing. Everyone immediately jumped on this, because if you can have more fun and learn more, of course that is the way to go. This opinion still permeates both teachers and parents. I was of this opinion for a long time, as I went to a rigorous school, and would have enjoyed "play based learning".
It turns out this may have been way off and difficult schools such as those in China and Singapore have the best results. In the Finland example they had only recently switched from more rigorous to more play based, so the rigorous schooling was still being shown in testing. I think we were all a bit bamboozled by this. Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings. But the play based learning opinion is still strong and we as a society need to move back to more rigor will make stronger students.
sfblah 5 hours ago
Don't Finland, China and Singapore have the highest IQs of any countries? Why can't that be the answer? To me, what you do exactly in school is likely pretty secondary.
medler 2 hours ago
I don’t think reliable data exists for making these comparisons, but even if it did, how you perform on an IQ test is strongly influenced by your schooling.
analog31 5 hours ago
When my daughter was in kindergarten, it was common to walk your kids to school, then let them play in the playground while chatting with the other parents, until the bell rang.
One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."
Zigurd 5 hours ago
Reductiveness is under the surface of many of these numbers. Finland has high teacher salaries, which is a contributing factor but entirely outside of the way teaching methodologies are evaluated.
Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.
My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.
SubmarineClub 5 hours ago
> Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings.
I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.
This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.
Ekaros 4 hours ago
In somewhere that period of Finland education system I remember there being testing. Just not large scale standardised testing. But everything did have tests. Still teachers did have quite large freedom even if criteria was state level. Also it was very much traditional lessons with only occasional small scale group work.
One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.
overgard 3 hours ago
Intuitively though at 40ish, most of the things I "learned" in school but never used have all fallen out of my head. The knowledge I have is things that I was actually excited to learn: computers, enough math to make computers do what I wanted, writing so I could socialize with other nerds better, history because I like history. Basically, you couldn't stop me from learning those things, but the things I was forced to learn ended up being somewhat of a waste of time for both me and the instructor, I think. I mean, you want to challenge kids a bit because they might resist something at first and then eventually realize they like it quite a bit (math for instance), but there's also a point where the tests mostly just become kayfabe. We say these people are doing "better" because they get a higher test score, but then they get into the real world where there is no test score, and that entire academic framework is kind of useless and maybe even harmful.
zozbot234 3 hours ago
"Play based learning" is a huge misnomer, which is unfortunately common in unscientific academic fields like education. Any successful, intrinsically-motived learning is biologically categorized as "play" behavior; and knowledge-based, teacher-centered, direct instruction approaches (i.e. traditional schooling) are the most effective and most likely to be perceived as enjoyable "play" by a school pupil. So-called "play-based" or "student centered" approaches (i.e. expect the student to know what they're supposed to learn by themselves, while the teacher just slacks off) are merely a source of confusion and frustration for shoolkids.
tancop 5 hours ago
The whole system is built on the idea that kids will learn because we force them to for their own good. But I don't think you can get real understanding from that, you need internal motivation that comes from a true desire to know more.
I'm not saying lower test scores are good but they might be a sign that we need to move from "push based" forced complete education in childhood to a more "pull based" system. That would mean the only mandatory part is basic skills as opposed to knowledge, things like reading and arithmetic but also critical thinking, social skills, task organization and manual/mechanical work.
Everything else should be optional, fully up to the student (and their parents until they're 18) and available for their whole lifetime. That's the most important part.
If you go to an accounting school and decide to become a plumber after you graduate, then switch to programming at 30 and electrician at 45, you should be able to do that. Low cost, free if you're poor and always without social stigma, the exact same quality and credentials as if you did it in high school.
Sometimes you need to wait and experience life a bit before you understand how important your education is. We should support that instead of making it so you only have one real shot.
srj 5 hours ago
The period after leaded gasoline was eliminated and before modern tech may go down as the peak of human intellect.
More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor.
It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.
Henchman21 4 hours ago
Just forget being able to adapt if you’re male, the videos have attractive women in various stages of undress, that auto-play one after another. You may find yourself in a daze drooling out of one corner of your mouth.
TFNA 28 minutes ago
Taking an intercity bus ride in Europe may disabuse you of the idea that short-form video is a threat to males specifically: you're likely to see from your seat several young women consuming short-form videos (often from beauty influencers) for the entire journey.
JohnMakin 6 hours ago
Whole word reading has been a disaster.
functionmouse 6 hours ago
something something the purpose of a system is what it does
boelboel 6 hours ago
Not all countries changed to whole world reading at the same time.
analog31 5 hours ago
Indeed, and some countries have whole word writing.
overgard 3 hours ago
One thing that tends to get lost when we talk about the education system we have is how it was invented and what it was designed for. I mention this, because if you want to educate kids better, it's useful to consider what they system was designed for so we can design a better one. Unfortunately, the history here is somewhat more cynical and bleak than you might expect. There's an excellent book called "The Underground History Of American Education: A Schoolteacher's Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling"
Anyway, modern schooling was essentially designed to create excellent workers -- it was never about creating excellent individuals. At the time, the robber barons who helped invent this system along with a series of pseudo religious ideologues essentially wanted: standardized, predictable, obedient individuals without a lot of creativity. Credentials became important. Basically they wanted good consumers who don't question their station in life. (It shouldn't shock anyone that this is essentially what our current robber barons also want, although to a more extreme degree. It also shouldn't shock anyone that this is largely what we get out of the system.)
The current system was still helpful, despite it's design, I would argue mostly because of the excellent teachers that really do have kids best interests in heart. However, I really think technology has just completely broken this. I'm not sure it's a system that can be repaired, I think it's going to end up being a new system. My guess (I think it's basically already happening) is the rich will send their children to more experimental schools because they have the money, and the poor... well who cares about the poor anyway? (Sarcasm, but, I think that more or less describes the unspoken attitudes of the elites)
chairmansteve 3 hours ago
Apparently test scores are rising in England....
zkmon 5 hours ago
It's a cycle. Affluence of food, goods and tech removes natural survival instincts due to lack of struggle and need. That would cause the affluence to go away, rekindling the survival instincts through struggle. The cycle repeats. Different geographies have different phase delays in this cycle. Sometimes the cycle is affected by artificial forces such as dominance of a nation and it's control over the global matters. But the cycle just pushes forward.
cs702 5 hours ago
Isn't education the best antidote we have against misinformation, against ignorance, against hateful ideologies, against our least civilized impulses?
Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
Sigh.
maomao5 5 hours ago
> Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
Yes, for some definition of "works well" but the population has to be tightly controlled. It's why the oligarchich elite is so enthused to build out the surveillance state at the same time.
frogperson 5 hours ago
Many, many times through out history knowledge and education have been destroyed to prop up some group that want to rule.
boelboel 4 hours ago
Better chance it's the reverse, civilized societies end up educating people.
cvwright 3 hours ago
The counterpoint to this is that early 20th century Germany was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world.
In fact the genocide only stopped when a bunch of unsophisticated American (and Russian) farmboys rolled in.
cs702 19 minutes ago
> was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world
It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.
ck2 3 hours ago
America's future is delivery drivers
one out of every three people is going to be doing last mile delivery of some kind
they don't even need to be able to read english because they all ignore delivery notes, if GPS takes them off a cliff or to the wrong town they will happily follow it because they never learned to read a map
all b&m stores will go "dark warehouse"
how anyone is going to afford delivery I am not sure
but since you won't be able to afford health care or owning a home or even a car at some point, "spare cash" until you die young?
K33P4D 6 hours ago
Doesn't this just shift the average and calibrate a new set of expectations for the coming youth to placate themselves in an age of all or nothing AI?
VCFundedGenYer 5 hours ago
Been saying this for a while. AI is melting away people's mental and cognitive abilities.
Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness.
This will reach critical mass in a few years.
tonymet 2 hours ago
do we really need to blame AI ? 14+ years of reducing standards in schools, reducing discipline, allowing underperforming students to proceed and graduate, plus 30 years of changing demographics. AI isn't the primary driver here.
proee 5 hours ago
My electromagnetics professor started our class with a massive ambition that we would truly understand maxwells equations at a fundamental level by end of semester. Well our class started failing all his exams leading up to this pinnacle and he told us we were all a bunch of morons, basically the dumbest class he’s ever taught. I raised my hand and asked if we were still going to get to maxwells equations by end of semester and he stared back with eyes of pure distain. This was the year 2000.