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

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.

Hmm, did anything happen in 2020 to disrupt the entire education system?

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.

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.

Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.

I really have no idea how we (the US) would stand up a meaningful sized army today if a larger war were to break out. Between obesity and the widespread use of psychological medications a huge swath of the population is ineligible to serve.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

With pre-formatted table:

    Group                           1998 NAEP  2024 NAEP  Change
    -----------------------------  ----------  ---------  ------
    White                                 268        266      −2
    Black                                 242        243      +1
    Hispanic                              241        245      +4
    Asian/Pacific Islander                261        280     +19
    All public-school students            261        257      −4

    Race/ethnicity                     1999 Grade 8  2023 Grade 8    Change
    ---------------------------------  ------------  ------------  --------
    White                                      64.5%         44.0%  −20.5 pp
    Black                                      16.1%         14.9%   −1.2 pp
    Hispanic                                   14.3%         29.4%  +15.1 pp
    Asian/Pacific Islander                      3.9%          5.9%   +2.0 pp
    American Indian/Alaska Native               1.2%          0.9%   −0.3 pp
    Two or more races                not separately reported  4.8%      -

Does this actually track over time or is it coincidence? I'm a bit confused why 1998 was chosen out of all years

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.

And memorizing. Rote learning makes the brain.

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.

I think roughly 1900-1930, before leaded gasoline and also before radio and TV, was the peak. At least for educated elites -- the general population didn't get nearly as much schooling.

But look at physics: Basically all modern theory was developed by 1930. Math too, with the exception of information theory.

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.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. A multigenerational ship's population is losing its ability to maintain the complex mechanisms needed to keep everything functioning.

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.)

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).

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children Of Time", there's a generation ship wandering space that's a marvel of human engineering, whose inhabitants are getting dumber every generation and losing the capacity to maintain or even respect the incredible environment into which they were born. Certainly rings a bell.

Idiocracy?

WALL·E

- Browner

I wouldn't know, the articles talking about the loss of learning are paywalled.

I think the point is that they are good for comparing different cohorts and different countries, though the article makes some claims about how the scores tend to correlate with other desirable outcomes. Naturally one should try to avoid Goodhart’s law here.

Are you brown?

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.

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.

> 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.

I thought the article was pretty good. I think it does a reasonable job of explaining why the issue matters, dismissing some alternative explanations (covid, funding), and describes some evidence supporting their ‘pedagogy’ argument (different results in England vs Scotland/Wales which didn’t make the same reforms. I think Mississippi another positive example). One could write a better justified piece but publications have word limits and this format isn’t the place for lots of evidence to be presented – it’s more of an executive summary / editorial opinion

I’m not sure it is even blaming lefty teachers. The blamed people are in university education departments, where I don’t think it’s controversial to say that their faculty tend to be very left leaning (there are surveys on this sort of thing). Their research often being more focused on social justice than finding evidence for better ways of teaching particular things lines up with my (weak) understanding of education research.

I think more senior members of teachers unions are going to be more left-leaning on average and more likely to prefer approaches more on the ‘social justice’ end than the ‘phonics’ end of the education research spectrum. I would generally expect teachers to be more politically left than the general population, as is the case for many professionals, and a little more leftist than other professionals. I also expect many to be a bit naive about how things work in organisations outside the public sector (especially high-functioning organisations). But mostly I think they care a lot about helping kids learn and not very much about the latest education research (expecting some other school leaders will direct them towards the right way to do things). I think it’s therefore reasonable to care about the relatively low quality of education research(ers) without blaming teachers here.

>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

Regardless of political lean, this is a very low effort article.

Teaching phonics is one thing the English education system got right.

Not all countries changed to whole world reading at the same time.

something something the purpose of a system is what it does

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.

> 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.

Education isn't a zero sum game. It's highly possible for people to do worse on basic skills without that being compensated by new unknown skills.

Hoping they're smarter than the tests show is a bad strategy for fixing the issue

Depends on the subject, but much more ‘similar to pre-pandemic levels’ than the ‘continued decline’ observed in most places.

My mom was an inner city public school teacher. Coming from a poor background herself and being an immigrant, she was excited to help underprivileged kids after spending years in corporate America.

Six years, several rape threats, several attempted assaults, and one vehicle destructure later, she gave up on the whole thing. Now a few decades later, she's an AI proponent.

No one wants to face the cold hard truth of what the average American school is like. The people in charge send their kids to fancy schools in nice areas or shove wax in their ears and put blinders on to not see the reality of their child's education (see the recent article in the New York Times).

A sad situation all around.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the basic reason we homeschool. People probably assume it's because we're crazy religious nuts, because we do attend church regularly, but that alone is not enough... there are plenty of religious schools. The real issue is that American education has been taken over by this bizarre desire to not memorize things.

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.

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.

Yes no child left behind is famously liberal dei. /s This issue is non partisan and not limited to the USA.

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.

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.

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

> 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?

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?

If they have no emotional connection to texts from the 50s, then how are they discussing post-modern philosophy? Or rather, how shallowly?

Holy sentence... George Orwell must be turning in his grave right now.

Jira, is that you? Have you become sentient?

restate in simple language please?

Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.