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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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)
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?)
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!
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ...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
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)
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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 |
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
My kid's math curriculum has been a disaster the last couple of years. Teachers started using lesson plans from Desmos (the tech company, which I haven't figured out how exactly they're pumping out curriculum material).
Back in my day, in basic math, you'd learn a couple of concepts a day and then did 20+ problems of homework, with variations of the main themes. But the new homework style is you do 1 or 2 problems for each new concept, and then you "expand your thinking" → trick questions, gotchas, problems that combine (non-obviously) today's lesson with one from last week, things you can't answer without peeking ahead to next lesson, and so on. This style is --I imagine-- good for kids who are already very good at math. I may have enjoyed it myself. But it's shit for most students, if you never spend hardly any time ensuring that the fundamental learning sinks in before moving on.
A very long time ago, in the 90s, we really thought that computers would make people smarter. We thought computers would sharpen people's analytical skills with logic and math, would provide them better tools to write and design things, would provide them information to help them get better answers.
Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity".
Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller.
And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!".
Law of unintended consequences? Or it is the fact that everyone is lazy and do want to remain dumb?
It’s still possible. There’s this sort of guerilla education movement in software with apps like Mathacademy and Mentava to really focus on actual learning, in a scientific way. I can say for my part that my son has been using Mathacademy and the results have been incredible.
The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.
For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.
Does math academy still start at 4th grade? How do you compare it to beast academy or AoPS? What incredible results have you observed?
I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.
Here, let me revise that expression: "computers are ELECTRIC bicycles of the mind". You know this feeling, and we know it's how humans operate: when given a choice, we will ALL take the easy path. School is hard, learning is hard, and it all takes years and years of effort. Give a child a computer, or a smartphone, or AI, and all of a sudden, we don't have to expend any effort, like that electric bike. I shut my brain off and trust the ride, because it is effortless. Forget the part about having UNDERSTANDING of why things are true or false, why things work, how they work, how physics and mechanics and chemistry ALL are needed to create things. As an engineer (retired), I see youth having great KNOWLEDGE at their disposal, but feeble to no UNDERSTANDING of how things work, why they work, underlying mechanics, underlying theories, etc.
Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.
There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population.
Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.
Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.
"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.
The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.
Meh, the writing has been on the wall for a decade at least.
All that stupid ideas on giving passing grades to everybody in the name of equality (lol) removing admission tests to fight racism (double-lol), attention-stealing practices by social media (not lol) are now compounding with AI as a cheap service to offload thinking to.
The writing has been on the wall for years, a lot of people called that out and have been silenced.
Unironically, I would not be surprised if the kids with the best scores turned out to be the homeschooled ones.
My wild (and uneducate, don't get me wrong) guess is that in some years we'll see two groups of people succeeding: homeschooled kids (their parents kept them away from the BS) and the rich people's kids (their parent could afford a no-BS schooling).
> Falling scores will not be fixed in a jiffy
If it will be fixed at all. Chances are, the generation currently in school is to be thrown away, in the sense that given how the US works, nobody's going to seriously help them.
Seems highly plausible AI/robotics will lead a significant decline in public schooling in the near future. Kids honestly might learn better doing a few hours a day one-on-one with 2026 frontier AI than sitting in a classroom of 30 with a teacher. 2027, 2028, 2029?
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
AI improves a student's ability to learn. It does nothing to improve a student's motivation to learn.
Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to pull that off in practice. They have the opportunity, but that matters little if they don't use it.
Math or arithmetic ? Math isn’t arithmetic any more than juggling is theoretical physics.
Mastery of arithmetic involves memorizing lots of heuristic rules that aren’t particularly insightful about, or are outright conflicting with, the structure of math, and learning the structure of math first slows your ability to do arithmetic.
I don’t think any school hands first graders calculators and asks them to never learn arithmetic. But I see no need once you’re doing algebra to be focusing your time on long division or multiplication. These are irrelevant distractions from algebra, time spent and points lost on arithmetic details is a waste of cognition and doesn’t help. This becomes increasingly true through calculus, linear algebra, until you get to real math courses where a calculator is pointless because arithmetic doesn’t even show up.
That's a very attractive idea. KhanMigo was supposed to embody that potential. Seems like it hasn't.
Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.
There is a 99% probability this will not happen in your lifetime. Half the point of school is so someone has supervision over children for 6 hours and to be part of a small community.
If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.
There is a very high correlation between national IQ and PISA scores. We know that IQ is declining across the world, and it is declining because fertility and IQ are negatively associated. It's likely that declining IQ is a nontrivial factor for why PISA scores are declining. It is unfortunately still taboo to talk about this. Which is bad, because we can't hope to do anything about it if we don't face the truth.
I saw a post where they showed that ethnically native students in Northern Europe are doing just fine, it’s the non natives, which are up to 30% and even higher in som countries, that are doing poorly. Do they actually look at that in these studies or it’s swiped under the rug as something too inconvenient to discuss? If this is fake news, please correct me if you can show the real figures for this.
The really interesting thing was that when looking further, the results of non-native students reflected closely the scores of their native countries (not the countries where they now live), which is not at all surprising to me (as an immigrant, I don't think I am smarter because I now live in a "smarter" country even if I would love to be) but goes completely against everything people in the education sector appears to believe.
How about this, an IQ test developed in the society you have to survive in is a good indicator of outcomes.
If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.
I think there is ample evidence IQ correlates with lots of things like job success, performance in mental work, income etc to the point the military and many organizations require an IQ test for sensitive tasks. To dismiss it as curriculum memorization, which I think is what you are hinting at, is demonstrably incorrect.
Outside of science it seems to be that people measure intelligence as "what I feel I have" and nothing else.
Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.
While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
> The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
One of the weirdest things I noticed when people around me started having kids was how immediately they picked up on their parents obsession with their phones, and would instinctively try to interact with them.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.
According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
Remember that in some liberal schools some of these people will graduate to be your doctors or policy makers, especially if DEI or with a degree studying some perceived social grievance.
Nowhere in No Child Left Behind it says DEI nor it says to promote children who can’t read or pass standardized tests just so certain politicians can be appeased.
This very much echoes the region of critical slowing down present in a dynamical system after its equilibrium states have disappeared due to a change in the system (a bifurcation).
A sentence isn't Orwellian just because you are unfamiliar with its terms. I though dynamical systems theory was quite common knowledge among engineers
The issue is that you're talking in abstraction and it isn't clear what the concrete thing is you're thinking of. Bluntly: you're being obscure rather than illuminating.
For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?
I wanted to relate the result to well known phenomena in Dynamical systems. The value of the comment is in that relationship. But I guess I can try.
After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.
I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.
I can see there a compounding drift from the stable point that is not initially apparent because the compounding values have not yet grown sufficiently to be meaningful. It is still an increase in drift
Slowing down implies a decrease though, what does that represent then?
Society, education and white-collar work in this case. Not saying I believe this does mean the collapse of white-collar work of course. Moreso that if that was the case, the point of no return could have already been passed without us knowing.
For something as abstract as education, is there such a thing as a "point of no return"? It's not obvious to me that's something that degrades in the same way that climate or a physical system does, even if we can draw some parallels. I do think it's still a useful analogy, for example, it would imply that even though we're only starting to notice the ripples of that instability now, it has the implication that fixing it things would mean having to address much more than just what's apparent, we'd also have to fix everything that lead to this mess over the last few decades.
I think there is for a snapshot in time of education or work which is how we commonly think of work right? It isn't true of course. But we sort try to group work into periods of stability between revolutions, industrial, digital or whatever.
We have a chance to adapt, that's for sure. But white-collar work might not exist (or just resemble) as it does today.
But I agree, the category is almost too malleable to analyze.
A bifurcation is a non-continuous change to a system as a result of a continuous parameter changing.
For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.
In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.
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.
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
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.
You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok.
Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.
The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.
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.
Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.
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.
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...
Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.
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!
we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
0. children that listen to the teacher (depends on factors outside the classroom, like how parents raise the child)
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.
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.
I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.
If they are used, sure.
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.
This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class
How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
My sons' school makes it a requirement of continued enrolment.
>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...
"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.
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).
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.
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
> It doesn't have to be a conspiracy
“Versus” implies intent. Apollo owning McGraw Hill doesn’t explain falling scores across the entire OECD.
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.
> 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?
Worry not, school was pretty much as you described even twenty years 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?
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.
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.
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.
We haven’t had a pandemic between 2022 and 2026. The 2018 trend continues. That strongly suggests a common effect across both samples.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm, did anything happen in 2020 to disrupt the entire education system?
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.
- 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.
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)
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?)
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!
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
Poe’s Law at work
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like in South Korea?
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
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.
totally false equivalency. wolfram alpha cannot one shot word problems for one, and there are many many more.
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.
I would bet that plot of WA users vs AI users, same age groups etc would look pretty funny as comparison
Wolfram is a tool, and LLM even without a harness is much closer to an agent.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
> ...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
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)
"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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rkg3wZq0cdo&ra=m
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.
> 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.
The meat robot still has a long way to go
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.
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.)
Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.
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!
> 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.
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.
> We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.
The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.
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.
Medicare is currently something like 14% of the budget and covers 20% of the population.
to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount
The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.
There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.
This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.
Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.
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...
Being fat is a moral failing though? It’s also not portrayed that way, see the entire body positivity/healthy at every size movement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Yes the Chromebooks are pervasive and used in every subject. Probably because they are cheaper than buying overpriced textbooks for every subject.
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% | — |
With pre-formatted table:
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.
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?
Because you grouped intelligence by race and showed that whites outperformed blacks and Mexicans.
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?
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
Does this actually track over time or is it coincidence? I'm a bit confused why 1998 was chosen out of all years
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.
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?
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.
And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You were downvoted but also right. Memorization is an extremely useful skill to develop.
Rote memorization is very ineffective way to memorize things. That is why it was downvoted.
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.
> 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-...
What percentage of people drag us forward kicking and screaming into the future?
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.
>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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial
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?
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).
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.)
Idiocracy?
WALL·E
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.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh
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.
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.
Are you brown?
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.
So many places to point our fingers:
-Everyone has screens.
-Education system broken.
-Covid disruptions
-Biological effects of Covid infections
- Browner
I wouldn't know, the articles talking about the loss of learning are paywalled.
The writers of such articles too need to put food on the table.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Correct. The likely causality is in the reverse direction.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whole word reading has been a disaster.
Not all countries changed to whole world reading at the same time.
Indeed, and some countries have whole word writing.
something something the purpose of a system is what it does
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)
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.
Apparently test scores are rising in England....
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.
Many, many times through out history knowledge and education have been destroyed to prop up some group that want to rule.
Better chance it's the reverse, civilized societies end up educating people.
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.
> was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, and educated countries in the world
It was also an economic disaster. Surely that contributed.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's just basic political math: regulations protect grift and lead to lower scores
Deregulation enables competition to naturally drive up scores
Everything's over-regulated, leading to falling scores
Simple as, all else equal
My kid's math curriculum has been a disaster the last couple of years. Teachers started using lesson plans from Desmos (the tech company, which I haven't figured out how exactly they're pumping out curriculum material).
Back in my day, in basic math, you'd learn a couple of concepts a day and then did 20+ problems of homework, with variations of the main themes. But the new homework style is you do 1 or 2 problems for each new concept, and then you "expand your thinking" → trick questions, gotchas, problems that combine (non-obviously) today's lesson with one from last week, things you can't answer without peeking ahead to next lesson, and so on. This style is --I imagine-- good for kids who are already very good at math. I may have enjoyed it myself. But it's shit for most students, if you never spend hardly any time ensuring that the fundamental learning sinks in before moving on.
A very long time ago, in the 90s, we really thought that computers would make people smarter. We thought computers would sharpen people's analytical skills with logic and math, would provide them better tools to write and design things, would provide them information to help them get better answers.
Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity".
Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller.
And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!".
Law of unintended consequences? Or it is the fact that everyone is lazy and do want to remain dumb?
It’s still possible. There’s this sort of guerilla education movement in software with apps like Mathacademy and Mentava to really focus on actual learning, in a scientific way. I can say for my part that my son has been using Mathacademy and the results have been incredible.
The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.
For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.
Does math academy still start at 4th grade? How do you compare it to beast academy or AoPS? What incredible results have you observed?
I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.
It is a bicycle for the mind, but the mind still sets the direction. Sometimes it's going faster towards a dumpster.
Here, let me revise that expression: "computers are ELECTRIC bicycles of the mind". You know this feeling, and we know it's how humans operate: when given a choice, we will ALL take the easy path. School is hard, learning is hard, and it all takes years and years of effort. Give a child a computer, or a smartphone, or AI, and all of a sudden, we don't have to expend any effort, like that electric bike. I shut my brain off and trust the ride, because it is effortless. Forget the part about having UNDERSTANDING of why things are true or false, why things work, how they work, how physics and mechanics and chemistry ALL are needed to create things. As an engineer (retired), I see youth having great KNOWLEDGE at their disposal, but feeble to no UNDERSTANDING of how things work, why they work, underlying mechanics, underlying theories, etc.
Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.
There's a whopper in the middle of the article declaring an outcome "high test scores" is a cause, not a result, of a lack of a wide variety of social ills. The cause and effect ratio is obviously reversed. Its like claiming that playing the violin leads to wealth via some magical process, whereas the reality is only wealthy parents can afford to hire a classical violin tutor for their kid, so sure, the wealthiest neighborhoods have the kids who are the best violin players but it would be pretty clueless to describe violin playing as a vocational skill. Its a luxury skill for people who've already made it, like math is for about 99.9% of the population.
Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.
Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.
"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.
The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.
Meh, the writing has been on the wall for a decade at least.
All that stupid ideas on giving passing grades to everybody in the name of equality (lol) removing admission tests to fight racism (double-lol), attention-stealing practices by social media (not lol) are now compounding with AI as a cheap service to offload thinking to.
The writing has been on the wall for years, a lot of people called that out and have been silenced.
Unironically, I would not be surprised if the kids with the best scores turned out to be the homeschooled ones.
My wild (and uneducate, don't get me wrong) guess is that in some years we'll see two groups of people succeeding: homeschooled kids (their parents kept them away from the BS) and the rich people's kids (their parent could afford a no-BS schooling).
> Falling scores will not be fixed in a jiffy
If it will be fixed at all. Chances are, the generation currently in school is to be thrown away, in the sense that given how the US works, nobody's going to seriously help them.
Seems highly plausible AI/robotics will lead a significant decline in public schooling in the near future. Kids honestly might learn better doing a few hours a day one-on-one with 2026 frontier AI than sitting in a classroom of 30 with a teacher. 2027, 2028, 2029?
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
AI improves a student's ability to learn. It does nothing to improve a student's motivation to learn.
Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to pull that off in practice. They have the opportunity, but that matters little if they don't use it.
No, they think they learn, then when they need to use that knowledge it turns out they learned nothing.
Exactly. Calculators didn't make the typical person great at math. They obviated mastery of math.
Math or arithmetic ? Math isn’t arithmetic any more than juggling is theoretical physics.
Mastery of arithmetic involves memorizing lots of heuristic rules that aren’t particularly insightful about, or are outright conflicting with, the structure of math, and learning the structure of math first slows your ability to do arithmetic.
I don’t think any school hands first graders calculators and asks them to never learn arithmetic. But I see no need once you’re doing algebra to be focusing your time on long division or multiplication. These are irrelevant distractions from algebra, time spent and points lost on arithmetic details is a waste of cognition and doesn’t help. This becomes increasingly true through calculus, linear algebra, until you get to real math courses where a calculator is pointless because arithmetic doesn’t even show up.
Multiplication needs to be automatic for doing algebra: FOIL and factoring polynomials immediately come to mind.
Long division, at least conceptually, is also present in algebra and partial fractions.
Similarly, algebra needs to be automatic to do calculus.
Everything builds on everything else.
That's a very attractive idea. KhanMigo was supposed to embody that potential. Seems like it hasn't.
Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.
There is a 99% probability this will not happen in your lifetime. Half the point of school is so someone has supervision over children for 6 hours and to be part of a small community.
If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.
Modern public education is just state subsidized daycare to keep the population at their 9-5.
There is a very high correlation between national IQ and PISA scores. We know that IQ is declining across the world, and it is declining because fertility and IQ are negatively associated. It's likely that declining IQ is a nontrivial factor for why PISA scores are declining. It is unfortunately still taboo to talk about this. Which is bad, because we can't hope to do anything about it if we don't face the truth.
I saw a post where they showed that ethnically native students in Northern Europe are doing just fine, it’s the non natives, which are up to 30% and even higher in som countries, that are doing poorly. Do they actually look at that in these studies or it’s swiped under the rug as something too inconvenient to discuss? If this is fake news, please correct me if you can show the real figures for this.
It's because it's inconvenient to discuss. What you said is the actual truth.
The really interesting thing was that when looking further, the results of non-native students reflected closely the scores of their native countries (not the countries where they now live), which is not at all surprising to me (as an immigrant, I don't think I am smarter because I now live in a "smarter" country even if I would love to be) but goes completely against everything people in the education sector appears to believe.
Mind showing a source for IQ declining across the world?
IQ is not measure of intelligence, it's more like curriculum test if you go into history of test and how it started.
How about this, an IQ test developed in the society you have to survive in is a good indicator of outcomes.
If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.
I think there is ample evidence IQ correlates with lots of things like job success, performance in mental work, income etc to the point the military and many organizations require an IQ test for sensitive tasks. To dismiss it as curriculum memorization, which I think is what you are hinting at, is demonstrably incorrect.
Outside of science it seems to be that people measure intelligence as "what I feel I have" and nothing else.
Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.
No serious person in the field agrees with this.
I M M I G R A T I O N A N D G E N E T I C S
While kids practice the skills of the 21st century, testing got stuck in the 19 hundreds.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
This is a superficial take.
Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.
The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.
Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.
I saw an ad with a guy saying he doesn't write e-mails because he can just speak to the machine, and then the AI does it for him.
Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...
how is "worse at reading" evaluated?
test taking is not a valuable skill. it's mostly pattern matching against the question
people need new skills in a new age. the education system hasn't even kept pace with the existence of the internet, let alone AI
> how is "worse at reading" evaluated?
I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.
> people need new skills in a new age.
If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.
You read a text. Then, you are asked a series of questions to assess your reading comprehension. Rinse and repeat for a school year to get a solid idea of each student's proficiency.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
my point is that evaluating reading comprehension is typically done as a test, and test taking is not a valuable skill
the evidence is that individual workers are more productive than ever, and this trend has continued since long before the 1970s. this is despite any measured decline in reading comprehension
the older generations are obviously not propping up the world economy through their singular reading skills
Find a way to test informally, like taking metrics on the number of times that someone misunderstood written questions, instructions, or requirements at work. If it was possible to measure that cleanly, I bet you’d find a similar trend.
I often find that people simply don’t read anymore beyond a sentence or two, which makes it impossible to communicate complex ideas. If it can’t be expressed as a bullet point, it may as well not exist.
Individual workers is a rather nebulous statement without citing how the measurement was taken. Like if you have 9 people with zero money and 1 person with a trillion dollars, on average everyone is a multi billionaire.
The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools. The concentration of skills to build those things can skew the results in the short term and lead to new and interesting problems long term.
> The vast majority of our production comes from more and more highly automated tools.
That fewer and fewer people operate. Hence the people are more productive. Additionally, instead of everyone being unemployed, we just raise the standard of living and demand more stuff that employs just about everyone.
Your comment reads like satire.
None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
One of the weirdest things I noticed when people around me started having kids was how immediately they picked up on their parents obsession with their phones, and would instinctively try to interact with them.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.
According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
> 1950s texts
The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.
If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.
Kids are not training LoRas without a big budget. I fought for $5 from my parents, I could write C for free.
> I see kids ... discuss post-modern philosophy
Tell us more?
Fair, maybe finding other ways to measure performance - like actual achievements of kids that you mention - is a better benchmark
Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
Education isn't broken, it's gotten too conservative and not able to keep up as a result.
> they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago
Such as?
I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
If they have no emotional connection to texts from the 50s, then how are they discussing post-modern philosophy? Or rather, how shallowly?
Remember that in some liberal schools some of these people will graduate to be your doctors or policy makers, especially if DEI or with a degree studying some perceived social grievance.
Yes no child left behind is famously liberal dei. /s This issue is non partisan and not limited to the USA.
Nowhere in No Child Left Behind it says DEI nor it says to promote children who can’t read or pass standardized tests just so certain politicians can be appeased.
This very much echoes the region of critical slowing down present in a dynamical system after its equilibrium states have disappeared due to a change in the system (a bifurcation).
Holy sentence... George Orwell must be turning in his grave right now.
A sentence isn't Orwellian just because you are unfamiliar with its terms. I though dynamical systems theory was quite common knowledge among engineers
The issue is that you're talking in abstraction and it isn't clear what the concrete thing is you're thinking of. Bluntly: you're being obscure rather than illuminating.
For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?
What do you think Orwellian language means?
Orwell's 6 rules for good writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Now you tell me
I think GP's was a reference to Politics and the English Language (1946)—not "1984". An essay against convoluted writing styles.
https://www.fadedpage.com/link.php?file=20180223.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Jira, is that you? Have you become sentient?
restate in simple language please?
I wanted to relate the result to well known phenomena in Dynamical systems. The value of the comment is in that relationship. But I guess I can try.
After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.
I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.
Where is the slowing down? What causes it?
I can see there a compounding drift from the stable point that is not initially apparent because the compounding values have not yet grown sufficiently to be meaningful. It is still an increase in drift
Slowing down implies a decrease though, what does that represent then?
I think we see the slowing down primarily in hiring right?
Is your point that earth is not at a "stable point" or "stable range" but it used to be?
Or are you talking about another system like "society" or "civilization"? Or something else altogether?
Society, education and white-collar work in this case. Not saying I believe this does mean the collapse of white-collar work of course. Moreso that if that was the case, the point of no return could have already been passed without us knowing.
For something as abstract as education, is there such a thing as a "point of no return"? It's not obvious to me that's something that degrades in the same way that climate or a physical system does, even if we can draw some parallels. I do think it's still a useful analogy, for example, it would imply that even though we're only starting to notice the ripples of that instability now, it has the implication that fixing it things would mean having to address much more than just what's apparent, we'd also have to fix everything that lead to this mess over the last few decades.
I think there is for a snapshot in time of education or work which is how we commonly think of work right? It isn't true of course. But we sort try to group work into periods of stability between revolutions, industrial, digital or whatever.
We have a chance to adapt, that's for sure. But white-collar work might not exist (or just resemble) as it does today.
But I agree, the category is almost too malleable to analyze.
Everything is a wave and there are always oscillations.
“ a system can deteriorate slowly even after something fundamental has changed.”: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab7e7ca-7d54-83ed-931b-55300fa1f4...
So really it is not saying much at all.
A bifurcation is a non-continuous change to a system as a result of a continuous parameter changing.
For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.
In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.
Something changed and adjusting is slow
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The good news is the ocean is vast. You don't need to be on a Titanic.
Shit is about to hit the fan.
Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.