Comment by asutekku
7 hours ago
Between 2018 and 2022, we saw the widespread adoption of social media and the rapid digitalization of education. Focusing on these key shifts, it seems clear to me that any kind of electronic learning has had a negative impact on education :p
Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.
You say this as if 2010 Facebook was comparable to 2022 Instagram/TikTok.
Parent comment was talking about "widespread adoption of social media", not anything qualitative.
The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.
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Most people were still accessing Facebook via desktop in 2010, and the term "engagement algorithm" had yet to be coined.
I'd say the main difference is that you couldn't take a device with good media capabilities, good and cheap-ish networking and lasting battery everywhere. Laptops, netbooks, tablets were a tad too bulky, lasted only a few hours unplugged and mainly wifi, and mobile internet was not all that great.
I don't know for kids specifically but average user time: 2012 1:30 2016 2:08 2019-now ~2:30
If child patterns match the average, an average 8th grader from now has accumulated something like 30% more than one in 2018.
If only we knew what could possible have happened right in that time period to really throw a wrench in the works of the education system...
Right? Imagine how badly it could go if a disease known to cause brain damage became widespread and was circulating in the population.
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we're trying hard to forgot that shameful event of the total failure of our collective brain.
I worked for an education tech company in the 90s. Seemed to clear to me even then that computers in the classroom were not going to be a positive influence. The way things have gone since then, it is no wonder that kids’ brains have turned into pudding.
I think that computers in the classroom can have a tremendous positive influence in specific areas when see with correct guidance. I think where we went wrong is replacing the classroom with ChromeOS and iPads.
Is that a strategy for the 99th percentile or the 50th?
The winner of classroom tech is classroom tech vendors, not students, not collective test scores.
Those digital devices should be an augmentation of their education, not a replacement for what has already existed.
Teaching kids is incredibly challenging -- if they view school as torture or a prison then we have failed them.
I have three kids who've gone through K12 public schools and have been lucky enough to do so in well-funded school districts. Adding to that, we did our best to augment that with a parent organized weekly sessions with a host of different teachers hired to give lessons on things that the school curriculum did not cover.
We also had them participate in Odyssey of the Mind for many years (it's a really cool program worth checking out: https://odysseyofthemind.com/)
Even with all of that, it was clear that while much of their education stuck, other parts were effectively just tolerated.
I think there are really two core factors that lead to educational success:
1. A good teacher who can connect with students and inspire them to learn
2. A curriculum that can be understood by the student as having value and aligns with their life needs.
Teaching anyone is effectively futile unless they are curious or can find value in the subject material. Good teachers are the foundation of that, and outsourcing that to some sort of "educational platform" is doomed to failure.
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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.
I don't know why this is even a tiny bit controversial. The idea that the media you consume in formative years has a huge effect on mental development seems extremely obvious.
I grew up in the 90s. Its not like all our media was Tolstoy. But for my cohort it was very normal to read young adult literature - which meant books with 100s of pages, or video games that were elaborate, challenging, and demanded imagination and focus. The shortest media we consumed was 30 minute sitcoms. We got aesthetics, narrative structure, problem solving, focus - and maybe even some semblance of values.
Today, and I can hardly believe it, it really seems to be the case that the average teenager has read zero books cover to cover, or even fully watched a movie as difficult as ET. What she has done, is consumed hundreds of hours of twitchy bizarre quasi-algorithmic video content through a blaring handheld terminal thats held more intimately than any friend or pet. Far from being content made with artistic integrity or true dedication to the fostering of the young, this stuff is more akin to direct neural stimulation.
What I don't understand, is why anyone would think that such a shift would result in anything other than marked mental deterioration.
It’s controversial because this is a forum with a lot of tobacco growers on it, and they don’t want to hear that smoking causes cancer.
If you’d told me back then that people would actually watch this crap, I would not have believed you.
But not only do they watch it, but they largely prefer it to anything with substance.
Short form video in particular is brain poison, especially when paired with engagement algorithms.
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.
"Modern" education isn't modern at all. It's a leftover from industrialization, aiming at producing easily controllable worker drones.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves
(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
Playing games as a biological creature optimized to live on plains is great, your body has a lot of the lessons already encoded in DNA.
When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
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> Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
> Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class
But you may be still trying to teach kids that are going through a form of withdrawal for several hours because it's not managed outside school.
How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
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Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.”
Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?
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I do not think this is right; Kahn Academy, MitX, opencourseware etc are treasures.
If they are used, sure.
What are you talking about?
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
We haven’t had a pandemic between 2022 and 2026. The 2018 trend continues. That strongly suggests a common effect across both samples.
It suggests a lot of things, none of which are remotely intelligible with the information we have. The result as always is that people fill those gaps with their pet issues, whatever’s hot today, and tend to ignore anything that doesn’t fit their constructed narrative.
If I understand you correctly, you are using Covid-19 as a means to justify any position (or broad classes of them) which is convenient to you. I say this because you're using it in a broad way, and making an appeal to specific prejudices.
You make it sounds like you're being sarcastic. But I would argue that ubiquitous digital interfaces demanding our attention is wreaking havoc on people's focus.