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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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?
What changed with teachers? As if they were doing same thing as previously you would expect pretty much same result. But clearly something changed somewhere and it might not be the teachers. It might be for example be the tools they have...
Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort? They were fine until then, but then suddenly collectively and globally decided to start sucking?
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.
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.
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 |
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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')
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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
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.
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.
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!
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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.
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There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.
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Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
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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...
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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 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.
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What changed with teachers? As if they were doing same thing as previously you would expect pretty much same result. But clearly something changed somewhere and it might not be the teachers. It might be for example be the tools they have...
> Perhaps teachers are just useless
Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort? They were fine until then, but then suddenly collectively and globally decided to start sucking?
Wow, in just one comment you have demonized:
You seem to be an incarnation of an actor acting in bad faith with a highly ideological agenda. Perhaps give it a rest?
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Black history and gender theory are super useful today.
Understanding them makes you understand Hegseth, Trump and Iran war a lot better.
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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.
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You were downvoted but also right. Memorization is an extremely useful skill to develop.
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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?
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:
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 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?
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.
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?
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.
Idiocracy?
Archive link: https://archive.ph/n8Akh
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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)
Apparently test scores are rising in England....
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?
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.
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.
Better chance it's the reverse, civilized societies end up educating people.
Many, many times through out history knowledge and education have been destroyed to prop up some group that want to rule.
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.
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
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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')
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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.
Fair, maybe finding other ways to measure performance - like actual achievements of kids that you mention - is a better benchmark
> I see kids ... discuss post-modern philosophy
Tell us 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?
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?
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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No serious person in the field agrees with this.
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
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What do you think Orwellian language means?
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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.
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“ 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.
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Something changed and adjusting is slow
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Shit is about to hit the fan.
Yeah that's what I was thinkin, too.