Are Many College Students Losing the Ability to Read? (futurism.com)
- Reference: 0183876524
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/06/14/2227254/are-many-college-students-losing-the-ability-to-read
- Source link: https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-losing-ability-read
> in [2]a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.
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> One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone. Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation [3]found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.
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> "What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires...." Jagt cites an MIT study that found users who used ChatGPT during cognitive tasks like writing essays showed [4]lower brain activity in areas associated with creativity compared to students who only used a traditional Google Search or didn't lookup information at all. An astonishing 83 percent of the AI users couldn't quote a single line from the essays they had just written, and capstoning the alarm, the brain activity in the AI users didn't return to normal when they were later asked to write without AI...
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> On our pernicious pocket devices, Jagt touted a 2017 study that found that simply having a smartphone physically nearby — even if it's face down or turned off — [5]reduced available cognitive capacity and impaired cognitive functioning . "So when a student tells me they 'kept losing track' of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition," Jagt wrote. "The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception."
Sunday an " [6]Ask Reddit" question went viral — drawing over 11,000 upvotes — for its question to any teachers reading Reddit. "Is the 'Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math ext)' crisis real? If so how bad is it?" Some responses...
"The run of the mill non-honors kids have gotten really bad," posted one high school teacher. "Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening... It's the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it's probably 40-50% of each graduating class... Then there's of course the bottom 10-20% kids (excluding the special ed/severe/moderate learning disability kids). This is what the viral videos are about and it's not an exaggeration. They can't read, write, or do very basic math like multiplication or division as a 17 year old."
"This is the first year the MAJORITY of my class cheated on their first essays...." posted one high school English teacher. "It was also the first year a kid yelled 'We don't care about your fucking books, Miss!' while I was in front of the class presenting books they might be interested in for their book reviews... Almost all of them cheated on the book review they had to write."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [7]schwit1 for sharing the article.
[1] https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-losing-ability-read
[2] https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read
[3] https://fortune.com/2026/06/08/70-percent-fourth-graders-not-reading-proficienty-education-report/
[4] https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/concern-grows-ai-damaging-think
[5] https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your-smartphone-reduces-brain-power/
[6] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1u5ku71/teachers_of_reddit_is_the_gen_alpha_cant_read/
[7] https://www.slashdot.org/~schwit1
And AI will make this worse (Score:4, Interesting)
As the precis mentioned, use it or lose it. Companies force feeding AI to their employees are cutting their own throats.
And this will come back to bite us all in the ass. These kids grow up and will be unemployable; they will be a constant drain on the U.S. economy.
And this doesn't bother the Silicon Valley techbros, they figure they will determine how the U.S. operates in the future by telling everyone else what to do. And with the uneducated (and uneducatible proles), they'll have and easy time of it until the U.S. goes titsup because it cannot function. The techbros will continue to wallow in their wealth.
Read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever, if you want to know how bad it is.
Re:And AI will make this worse (Score:4, Insightful)
The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.
The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.
By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.
Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.
Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency .
Re: (Score:2)
ED: EEG, not fMRI.
And again, that's not to imply that they have any particular "mastery" in this specific case. Obviously, if they just typed "write the essay for me" into ChatGPT and submitted it without reading it, then they're not going to have learned much of anything from that. The question is, however, what did they do with their time instead? Because their brain was learning that instead.
Re: And AI will make this worse (Score:2)
"correllary"???? WTH
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> The correllary to "use it or lose it" is that the brain isn't just going idle, it's refocusing its efforts on other things that you are "using" instead.
> The average person today could hardly identify all the wild edible plants in their area, change a horseshoe, or build a proper barn, like their ancestors hundreds of years ago could.
> By contrast, their ancestors hundreds of years ago probably couldn't read.
> Brains don't just go idle; they just refocus on different things. A wealthy Victorian often pursued a life of a polymath, seeking varied intellectual pursuits and sometimes making great discoveries, but they could probably scarcely tell you how to mend a shoe or even change a nappy - that was their servants job.
> Also, it's quite the spin to present low MRI activity as "reduced function". It's commonly literally the opposite. If you present a novice with a task they're not used to, and an expert with the same task, the expert will tend to show much less activity than the novice, as the novice has to think harder to accomplish it, whereas it's become rote for the expert. Low activation on a task is commonly a sign of cognitive efficiency .
You seem to be confusing exceptional people with the average or below average, which is what this article is about. You are also disputing the methodology by bringing up a situation discussed nowhere in the article or paper where it fails rather than saying what they actually did and challeninging that. All of this framing and presupposing seems to be the new rhetoric format and it's not the slightest bot convincing and makes the purveyors of it looks reall, really unintelligent.
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The difference between the tik/tok generation though and those before it is this.
I might not know how to the things described but if I wanted to know, I could sit and read long form document that explores those topics in detail and retain the information long enough to put it into practice. Even if I could not immediately store and recall all the minutia about some detail of post and beam barn framing, I could at least remember there was a discussion of the sub topic and roughly where in the material it pro
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Is only half of women being able to read at all really the counterargument you were trying to make here?
And we're just talking the most basic aspect of an educational system. Kids today learn to read early in grade school .
This is why... (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't buy video games or mobile devices for our middle school aged children. They get to study, read, exercise and participate in athletics. That seems to be working out for them as they are both at the top of their class and in the high 90'th percentile for pretty much every topic in standardized tests. I see other parents using phones/tablets/gaming devices as a mock baby sitter and/or letting their kids doom scroll on youtube for hours at a time. Those kids are not doing very well and and many seem to have the attention span of a goldfish. Seems like a lot of parents are raising a generation of baristas.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for you, but don't be too quick to blame other parents.
In the 1980s, a single parent on typical wage could afford a decent house, nice car, and to raise a family of spouse and 2-3 children. Nowadays two parents working full time can't afford a single child in many places.
It's not just money that is tight, time is too. Both parents working, both tired after work, and increasingly with side hustles.
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> but don't be too quick to blame other parents.
I completely disagree. Once you have children, that is then your life. As a parent your "job" is to raise the kids to be productive, well adjusted, adults and nothing else. This BS of "still having a life" after you decide to have kids is a generational thing and it needs to weeded out of our culture. It started with my generation (late "boomers") and has only gotten worse with each subsequent distracted generation. If you can not afford kids or you do not want to put in the effort, then don't have th
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Expecting having children to mean you cannot have a life means you are deep throating the boot.
This country used to have enough prosperity for that to happen, now it doesn't, and you accept that. That's because you're weak and pathetic.
Demand more, don't be a fucking cuck happy to watch billionaires fuck your country.
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You are a gigantic piece of shit with terrible opinions. This is on par with your typical. I'm trying to determine exactly how detached from reality you are - it appears you have terminally online brain poisoning.
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That explains the falling birth rate.
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> Good for you, but don't be too quick to blame other parents.
> In the 1980s, a single parent on typical wage could afford a decent house, nice car, and to raise a family of spouse and 2-3 children. Nowadays two parents working full time can't afford a single child in many places.
> It's not just money that is tight, time is too. Both parents working, both tired after work, and increasingly with side hustles.
You seem to be saying this is about money when it's actually about priorities. Everyone has financial and time limits. How you work within them is what makes the difference.
Re: This is why... (Score:2)
Don't you need an English Major for that job? I don't think these kids are getting there.
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It depends on the child. Raised in nearly identical environments one of our kids is solidly average student who doesn’t work well in groups, but is intelligent and athletic. They have a twice weekly tutor to make sure he stays on top of his school work. And often needs to be encouraged to engage in tasks. But give him something they are interested in and they eagerly learn everything about it we have to remind them there are in fact other things in the world as well.
The other is top of their class,
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> We let both of them watch tv and play video games. But it is time limited. Neither has a smartphone. The one that likes to watch dumb YouTube shorts is the one who does well in school and is self motivated. Our kid that struggles to care about school hates YouTube and tells his brother he is rotting his brain watching that garbage. So go figure.
One's a midwit, the other is smart. The smart one is bored out of his mind at school because he's stuck in a room with normal kids where 100-IQ teachers think t
Re:This is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know that would work if the 1980s didn't exist and if there weren't a whole bunch of kids who grew up on video games... I mean Jesus Christ dude you grew up on video games or at least around them.
It's not the video games and it's not the cell phone. Your kids are going to be just fine because when they struggle a little you're going to spend a bunch of time with them and if that's not enough you're going to hire a tutor.
The problem is a whole bunch of kids who have learning disabilities who were always there and a whole bunch of kids who are struggling because covid fucked up their education need extra help and they're not getting it or if they are getting some of it it's never enough. In the past we would just send those kids off to the factories but the factories are automated or in China.
before the inevitable (Score:2, Troll)
Before the inevitable "it's because we don't fund the schools enough" let's keep in mind: the city of Minneapolis as an example of a metro area in a high tax, school-supporting state.
Spent $25345 per student
Reading Proficiency
Students perform below the 49.6% statewide proficiency average.
Elementary: Roughly \(38\%\) test at or above proficient.
Middle School: Around \(30\%\) test at or above proficient.
High School: Approximately \(43\%\) test at or above proficient.
Math Proficiency Breakdown - state 45% :Ele
Re: before the inevitable (Score:5, Informative)
Minneapolis is a major city in a higher-taxed state, but note that Minnesota spending is set up in such a way that Minneapolis sees less government funding that it pays in taxes (with rural communities benefiting via getting more in spending than they pay in taxes).
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Lets get it through everyone head, rural communities are not finance centers, they are about turning land that would otherwise be empty into a employment and some wealth creation..... that is universally true. Omaha and Tulsa are economic centers will make millionaires, the rest of the state wealth is concentrated in Ranchers and Farmers who wealth is in land and not taxed to an extent more than the cost of supporting farm roads and drainage. Every time ranching and farming go bust in an area you hav
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bull there are so many rural one horse towns just living off welfare.
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The funding inequities though are a distraction.
The underlying reality of MPLS is that they are compared to most urban education districts well resourced and have consistently seen real spending per student increase while conventionally measured outcomes continued to deteriorate.
The story of American public education for the last half century or longer is that real financial investment in education has consistently increased, and outcomes consistently been flat or deteriorating. Of course there are exceptio
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And there is the problem, you fully expect to asset strip the countryside to fund the cities. It used to be a symbiotic relationship where the countryside supplied food and raw materials and cities produced manufactured goods. But then you exported the manufacturing jobs because they were dirty and you didn't want to look at them and at the same time you went to war on the countryside. How many jobs in mining and logging did Clinton, Gore and Babbitt destroy in the search for cheap vacations for the urban e
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How much funding it gets from the State is not relevant. The point is the result of their per-pupil spending. How much of that spending is provided by the State changes nothing about the outcomes.
A better criticism is that you can't actually make 1:1 comparisons to other educational systems, as Japan and Germany do things differently. Japanese high schools don't take every student like ours do. Germany funnels students into apprenticeships. Both take the lower-performing students out of general educ
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You are comparing Minneapolis, with a population for around 400k, to Japan, with a population of 120 million.
COVID seems to have had a much greater effect on Minneapolis, which is not surprising since Japan mostly kept schools open.
I'm not sure you can directly compare literacy rates between Japan and Minneapolis either. Obviously the Japanese speak a different language, with a completely different writing system, which has different criteria for proficiency. There is also very different history there, and
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Last I checked, English was a required subject in Japanese schools. They don't just have higher literacy rates, they have higher bilingual literacy rates.
If nothing else, our system is demonstrably less cost effective. Even at the lower levels before other systems redirect low-performing students to vocational training (which does break comparisons between older student cohorts).
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That is definitely not true. Most Japanese people's English is not anywhere near the average native speaker's, and the English exam is notorious for being more about rote learning and gaming the system than about actual ability.
I said this on another post (Score:3)
But the problem is not a matter of funding schools, although that is the only real solution, the problem is that we have a shitload of kids who have a wide variety of learning disabilities. It takes a lot of time and effort and money to overcome those learning disabilities. In the past we didn't bother because we could just send them to the farms or the factories. We use immigrant labor for the farms and even if we didn't nobody wants to pay farmers and as for the factories they are stuffed full of robots.
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No. That's not it at all. If it was, we wouldn't see outcomes go down over time across all age groups. Kids working on farms were still going to school. It's why summer vacation exists, and kids who were needed on the farm during the rest of the year still went to school, they just didn't do very well since they missed so much class time. Which means scores should have gone up as they stopped being needed on the farm.
Look at Mississippi. They've gone back to teaching the way we did when outcomes we
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you look at historical graphs, there's a very strong negative correlation between US school spending and outcomes over the last few decades. The more money spent, the worse the results.
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Maybe it's because we've spent so much money on trying to teach in new ways instead of the ways we know work? Every ill-conceived educational fad has necessitated new textbooks and new teacher training. Why waste time, money, and children on trying to make "Singapore math" work, or make it look like social promotion works, or make it look like prioritizing self-esteem works, when we had a proven and effective approach to begin with? And it was cheaper!
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Quite likely. With less money, schools either scrap the new-fangled fads or face parent revolt when their kids are unable to cope with anything in life.
One contributor: flawed teaching theories. (Score:3)
I read that the theory is called "priming" and it goes like this:
The raw neurological capacity for critical thinking skills don't develop in the human brain until 20 years of age (and don't really complete development until around 25). So, in an effort at making that happen sooner and better, we prevail upon young teenagers to read famous "classics" that were written for adults (books like The Grapes of Wrath or The Great Gatsby or etc.). Further, the teacher leads class discussions about the book by aski
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> Why does it cost 25% more per student to get scores than Germany ?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Today parents don't listen to teachers because their precious baby can do no wrong. That or complete apathy in their child's education. Growing up if my teacher called my mother and said I was doing poorly or acting up then she would do something about it. Today the parents tell the teacher to fuck off. The district looks bad if too many children fail or drop out so there's the incentive to pass everyone.
This is a society dumbing down and failing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
Do what my teachers did (Score:4, Interesting)
Get 2 back-to-back class time slots and make students write their essays in class.
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So who's going to pay for that? You do understand that that extra care and attention is why the per capita spending keeps going up right?
Your teacher can only put in so many hours since they've got to get drive an Uber in order to make rent.
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Uhm, no? Having students write essays in class used to happen all the time. I remember this. My school district was on an austerity budget for most of my time in it, and they could still afford to have us write essays.
If that was why the costs kept going up, outcomes should also go up. If a change increases costs and outcomes go down, the change must be undone. It was a mistake. I think we have made a number of serious mistakes when it comes to education (clearly, since changes have been made, cost
How do they get in to college ? (Score:4, Interesting)
The real question is: How can students who cannot read get past college admission checks ?
And why are they allowed to ?
Re: How do they get in to college ? (Score:1)
Obviously for college level remediation. Must be better since it is college, right?
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Yup, make them take on debt in order to help cover up the failure of the secondary education system. A plan with no flaws!
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Because running a university is a business. Even a public university. They're going to admit x number of students. They'll choose the top x number of applicants, whether those students score well or poorly on the admission exams. If the top x applicants signed their applications with an "x" in crayon, they'd be admitted, because that's the best the pool has to offer. Because there are quotas.
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Because the College doesn't care but the kid. They care about the kid's money.
Most freshman don't get past their freshman year (over 50%) but since there's so many of them, they account for over 1/4 of the typical college budget. Considering that on average each freshman is worth about $40000 all you have to do is recruit 4 freshmen and you pay for an adjunct professor's salary.
My favorite story from my old college work days is how our college recruited a horse. Seriously. There was this freshman who was a
Re:How do they get in to college ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would really like to understand "can't read". Does this mean if I gave them something to read in front of the class that they couldn't read it without stopping / stuttering? Does it mean they can't read for comprehension? I'm assuming it's that they are not functionally illiterate. I assume it means can't read at their education level.
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great question and hard to find the answer. is this becuase it reveals somethign that doesn't help the narrative
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Provisionally. Most colleges have remedial classes and training available for students who are struggling like that. Typically if you're struggling like that it's because you have some form of learning disability or you just been through a global catastrophe unlike anything the human race has ever experienced in the last hundred years. So colleges have programs to try and pick that up and fix it.
If you're wondering why per capita spending on students has gone up that's why. We aren't just abandoning the
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Or, it's because the LA unified school district failed to teach you basic reading and math but graduated you anyway. Then you were accepted into a State college because it means LAUSD can claim they got you into college, and the administrators can get bonuses. 80% of students at California community colleges have to take remedial courses. That means every other level of the system failed, and they're using community colleges to cover it up.
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You are conflating 'being able to read' with 'reading comprehension'.
Is there no longer time in the school day to teach reading comprehension in high school? Or was it taken up with learning 'on a computer' type of classes.
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There was a study of new students a year or two back which found that the average IQ was the same as the general population. Since smart kids are smart enough to know that paying six figures for a piece of paper is a poor financial decision, this means many of those new students are really dumb.
It simply shouldn't be a surprise that when universities decide to accept anyone who'll pay them the quality of the students collapses.
Remember when... (Score:3)
... we used to be able to get bored? Just sit there and not really do anything. Now we can hardly go for a walk without taking our phones out 100 times. None of this is surprising; I experience it myself. Reading a book *today* is a mental gymnastic I desperately need to sharpen again before it gets even worse.
Re: (Score:2)
I solved this problem by reading books on my phone. Installed Librera Reader from fdroid and downloaded a bunch of epubs... now I can just read a book whenever I'm bored.
Paywalled, here is an article about TFA (Score:3)
[1]https://webs.uab.cat/saramarti... [uab.cat]
While the author raises some good points, there are also problems. AI is apparently a major way to cheat but as a recent innovation it seems to me the lack of a rigorous education with proficiency testing during COVID when these students should have been gaining skills is more likely an issue. I wonder if a lowered attention span learned from addictive social media and a general increase in attention needed to digest more disparate pieces of information these days (whether news, entertainment, or whatever) may be erasons that students lack skills normally required at college level and have a lack of attention span. The above article suggests that rather than not being able to read, students are not willing to put in the effort to digest difficult topics. It might be due to not being native English speakers in this case so I'd say more testing is needed.
[1] https://webs.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/2026/06/09/students-cant-or-wont-read-some-thoughts/
"Sold a Story" (Score:2)
If for whatever reason you're particularly interested in the debate over how American children are taught to read, and changes over the past ~20 years that seem to have been quite damaging, I'd highly recommend giving the "Sold a Story" podcast a listen ( [1]here [apmreports.org], or on the platform of your choosing).
> There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work.
TL;DL: many schools stopped teaching kids to read by sounding out words at that seems to have been a bad idea.
[1] https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Re: (Score:1)
Look up the teaching materials leaked by whistleblowers. They treat basic literacy and things like believing in the existence of right and wrong answers to a math problem as "white supremacy". None of this is an accident. What is happening is exactly the intended result of the policies chosen by schools and teachers' unions.
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Education is Software Development for the human brain. That there is are collections of 10k to 200k K-12 educators under a single regulator per state that need to buy course materials suited to their need is insane. That the spend is hundreds of dollars per student is insane for e-learning, your buying the wrong subscription model. Produce your states own open source course materials, have it up for review for a month before it enters the lesson plan, every other layer of education does this now. An
No (Score:4, Interesting)
Betteridge comes to the rescue.
First off the first round of kids post covid are hitting College and yeah they've got issues. We knew they were going to have problems and we knew we needed to spend money to give them extra tutoring and as usual we didn't want to spend that money because we wanted the first trillionaire for some reason.
Second of all 45 years of non-stop automation for Blue collar Jobs means that there aren't a lot of options if you want a functional life anymore. There are blue collar jobs that pay enough to live. They are either extremely hard on your body like oil rigger or diesel mechanic or they are few and far between like the guys who work on elevators or large HVAC systems. They also require a hell of a lot of training. Everything else is paying about $25 an hour tops and that's after a lot of training which nobody will do anymore so you're going to have to take on 30 or $40,000 in debt to get it.
You could of course also do something like start your own plumbing business but the thing is at that point you're not a plumber you're a small business man who happens to plumb. If you don't have the skill set to run your own business which a lot of people don't and you don't have a territory you can operate in where you're not competing with a thousand other guys trying to do the same thing then that's not an option either. And we stopped building new cities so good luck with that...
I explained this in detail because otherwise people just use blue collar work as a thought terminating cliche.
So what is all this mean? It means we're sending a hell of a lot of people who aren't up for college to college because we don't have anything else to do with them. This is why per capita spending on students has gone way up a bunch of people we used to just kick out of school after 8th grade and send to the factories can't go to the factories because they're either being run by robots or slave labor in China. I guess these days it's slave labor in Vietnam or India but you get the idea.
So what you got are people who actually need to be educated, who aren't just learning on their own, so they're very very expensive to teach. Think about dumb rich kids and how much money gets spent teaching those fuckers. It's like that.
Then they get out of high school there are absolutely no jobs except for Walmart and that's not obviously going to cut it so we send them to college to try and buy a little time while waiting for the economy to collapse because we fundamentally changed the nature of work and we're pretending that didn't happen
Where's the science? (Score:2)
Maybe its just the lazy slashdot blurb choosing per usual, but just recounting a single teachers antidotes? Such bullshit. Don't post that crap. Come back when you show a statistical meaningful test decline in both reading and math.
If I got my info correct (Score:2)
This guy teaches at a pretty mid-grade “online college”. Context matters. The population of students in a class like his are going to be the most marginal university students. Barely qualified for university education. Nearly all of the strong ones go to higher tier colleges, and they attend in person.
Additionally, this article is about a university, instructor complaining that his class cannot keep up with him. Well, duh he’s a university instructor probably a top 1% in his field in t
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> It seems like human intelligence peaked in the late 1900s. Since then, if I have my facts right, there has been a real reduction in human intelligence in the human population, probably because we don’t have to exercise our brain muscle as much as we used to.
Not surprising when all public resources are diverted to the lowest performers. That's 2 generations of dysgenic "inclusion". I guess we should be grateful that female voters have a strong preference for height or humans would have already lost the ability to walk upright.
Intentional (Score:1)
Of course. The goal is to train dumb subjects who can be led by simple slogans. 1. Overload the kids, burn them out. 2. Chase away the good teachers. 2. Make it fashionable to be dumb and create distrust towards intelligent people. At first the elite sent their kids to elite schools, but now I suspect they are content with having access to somewhat better info than the rest, no need to take an effort.
It's covid (Score:2)
These kids all missed two years or more of school. It's going to get worse. The kids that missed the most formative years are just now finishing elementary school. I've heard teachers say ALL kids way behind.
/. has all the data you need (Score:2)
Anyone on /. already knows Americans can't read...
ADHD (Score:1)
As a lifelong active reader I started to struggle in my late 50s,finally being diagnosed with ADHD 4 years ago.
I discovered the concept called Bionic Reading [TM], but its implication was proprietary, so I wrote my own.
[1]https://github.com/badonhill-i... [github.com]
Maybe it will be useful to someone.
[1] https://github.com/badonhill-io/randeli
We have achieved Idiocracy (Score:1)
If you want to understand why we are at this level at this point in time you need to study the disastrous effects of the "reforms" put in place by Lyndon Baines Johnson in the mid-to-late-60's.
Think a little next time you vote for local dog-catcher, schoolboard, and such. Those local elections matter more than you think. And for the past 60 years you've been putting treasonous filth in the school boards.
Treasonous filth that taught the children of treasonous filth, and now here we are, with a generation o
Huh! who would have thought! (Score:2)
Waiting while automation does your homework is not learning!
Never mind read - the can't even articulate (Score:2)
Never mind read - the can't even articulate. There are numerous videos online where college lever students on campus are asked the simplest questions and respond with the vocal level of a ten year old.
what do you expect, look how we do things (Score:1)
Sure is a good thing we don't fail people any more
like it's better to only experience failure when it's too late and nobody gives a shit about you any more
Long-COVID brain fog? (Score:2)
"Population-based studies in 2026 estimate that Long COVID occurs in approximately 10% to 15% of adults who are infected"
Could some of these academic performance changes be the result of, or be exacerbated by, long-COVID?
Donâ(TM)t get the device connection (Score:1)
I first hauled a kindle on trip to Southeast Asia in 2008. Now itâ(TM)s just an app on my iPad. I mean I havenâ(TM)t read war and peace but I do read several books a quarter, usually on the plane. In fact I save some authors just to read on the plane, Tim Dorsey in particular. Though I get where a 20 page slog through some poorly written academic piece could induce fatigue and apathy - oh yes I tracked the article, just wish I hadnâ(TM)t had to.
purpose (Score:1)
From the blurb:
"cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text."
I wonder if this task is the main point of reading, rather than a tiny casually addressed subset. Seems to me reading text is more like inputting a "prompt" to a TRUE AGI meat-machine ... that's we humans. As output to this reading "prompt" we generate self-aware non-algorithmically novel events ... whether text or geometric or emotional. So yes, I do (sometimes) follow recip
how did they grow up? (Score:2)
I'll bet that the kids who can't/won't read were not read to by their parents, or anyone else. If you spend quality time reading to a child, that child will grow up to love reading. I've seen it personally and it's been seen in multiple studies.
Was the 20-page article well-written? (Score:2)
If students were forgetting the subject as they read, could it be that the article was poorly written, meandering from one topic to another? I've certainly seen such articles. Sometimes, the length is justified, but often it is not.
As Blaise Pascal quipped in 1657, "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." Many authors today suffer from the same lack of attention to quality and conciseness.
Maybe college students do struggle more with reading than they used to. But
The last analog kids (Score:2)
Dang, I think I'm raising my two boys to be the last analog kids in the world. One just bought a set of encyclopedias from a thrift store this weekend, while the other fixed our leaky kitchen faucet. Neither have a cell phone or any social media accounts.
Obedient factory workers (Score:2)
American education system in the 19th and 20th century was (likely) influenced by goals of philanthropists and industrialists to create a population of compliant workers. This idea is repeated and expanded on in the the book "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto, not that I agree entirely with its conclusions but at least some of the premise is independently verified.
What has changed is that the drive to have factory workers is not there. Coming out of high school with a baseline education to get a job is
Adult Education (Score:1)
Adult Education is an even bigger problem in the US and EU. All these millions of useless immigrants who cannot speak, read or write a local language need mandatory training and if they fail, then they should be deported.
The new Eloi (Score:2)
"cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text"
Wow, that would explain a lot.
But it goes further, the vocabulary of school age kids is shrinking also.
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
"In 2024, the average reading score for the nation at grade 12 was 3 points lower than in 2019. Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was 10 points lower in 2024. NAEP scores are also reported at five selected percentiles to show score trends by lower- (10th and 25th percentiles), middle- (50th percentile), and higher- (75th and 90th percentiles) performing students. Compared to 2019, scores were lower at all selected percentiles except for the 90th percentile."
[1]https://www.nationsreportcard.... [nationsreportcard.gov]
[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't read too much into this. AI is too new for it to have much of an effect here, and it could be measurement error. I've known kids who were supposedly bad at reading, but it turned out they were just bad at reading aloud and got bored with the material the school gave them because they were reading Lord of the Rings at home.
It's also possible that this anecdote is about a really bad article. 20 pages is quite a lot, and if they are losing track of what it is about then it suggests that it doesn't h
Re: (Score:2)
While AI might not be to blame yet for those figures, it is well within the era of TikTok where material that doesn't hit within 30 seconds, the audience is out.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I'd call it the western decline of civilization. We could just have higher requirements to pass in education or ADHD meds.
Re: (Score:2)
But holding them back a grade will hurt their self esteem!
Re: (Score:2)
> I wouldn't read too much into this. AI is too new for it to have much of an effect here, and it could be measurement error. I've known kids who were supposedly bad at reading, but it turned out they were just bad at reading aloud and got bored with the material the school gave them because they were reading Lord of the Rings at home.
> It's also possible that this anecdote is about a really bad article. 20 pages is quite a lot, and if they are losing track of what it is about then it suggests that it doesn't have a very good abstract or introduction that lays out its case before getting into the details.
I'm not even going to try to go into reasons, though I agree the decline appears to be longer than machine learning has been around. It could be how we are measuring rather than an actual decline as I don't always trust how people gather statistics, but I would hope they did a good job. I'm just looking at the numbers which show reading scores have declined since 2015, and maybe even 2013, not just the regular perception of "people were smarter/worked harder (whatever) back in my time.".
Re: (Score:3)
Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays. It's always been a problem - honestly I love reading and read a ton of stuff. But I also remember reading being a chore in school because the stuff you're forced to read generally isn't very interesting.
My school didn't force me to read 1984. So one day out of boredom I read it because it was referenced in a lot of places, and I found it a very interesting read. Maybe not if I was forced to read it, long before anyone really
Re: (Score:2)
I suppose the problem is that different children will find different things interesting. The whole class really needs to do the same book, and in the UK that specific book will be on the exam too so the choice is limited to what the exam company offers.
Re: (Score:2)
Parents need to read to their children at a young age and get their children to read it back to them. Not just memorizing the lines either :)
If parents don't enjoy reading for the sake of reading, they are not very likely to pass this down to their children. Learning to read and comprehend what one has read is a huge advantage is the education process since so much of the information will come at you via the written word and not verbally.
Much the school reading was so so, with some being better then others.
Re: (Score:2)
> 20 pages is quite a lot, and if they are losing track of what it is about then it suggests that it doesn't have a very good abstract or introduction that lays out its case before getting into the details.
Or, 20 pages is something we were all able to do. 20 pages is not, "quite a lot". A 300 page novel should be able to be understood. The Gulag Archipelago is around 2000 pages and deals with complex, interconnected, interdependent situations and we SHOULD be able to process it and gain something from it.
This is bad for society. Period. No excuses.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently, you've never read Ayn Rand. There are worse authors but, she had such a distinct way of demonstrating that 20 pages of leaden prose can be an unrelenting horror. She was, at least, understandable, though you knew that her 20 pages could be summed up completely and concisely in a haiku.
Re: (Score:2)
20 magazine size or A4 size pages is a fair bit of information. It probably isn't like a novel with a narrative to follow either, it's likely to be technical.
Re: (Score:2)
300 page novel....that's just setting the scene, introducing the characters and setting them on their quest.
Re: (Score:2)
nah its part one of the 7 book series that seem to be popular now.
Re: Yes (Score:1)
Luckily, we now have Drag Queen Story Time to make reading fun again!
The problem is that HS seniors are too old, they missed out on the thrilling inspiration to pick up a book that a second grade Drag Queen Story Time event gives to the children.
You get what you measured (Score:3)
High School dropout rates continue to decline because there isn't anything else for you in this world if you're a high school dropout. Meanwhile go back to 1992 and a high school dropout could at least make a living hanging drywall.
What you are seeing is a bunch of students who used to get abandoned because at least we could find some work for them are being kept in the system longer. You are also seeing the tail end of the damage done by covid. Something teachers warned about and said that they needed
Re: (Score:1)
> High School dropout rates continue to decline because there isn't anything else for you in this world if you're a high school dropout. Meanwhile go back to 1992 and a high school dropout could at least make a living hanging drywall. What you are seeing is a bunch of students who used to get abandoned because at least we could find some work for them are being kept in the system longer. You are also seeing the tail end of the damage done by covid. Something teachers warned about and said that they needed more money to hire more tutors to overcome but hey, first trillionaire am I right? To long, didn't read we abandoned fewer children and we're dealing with the damage from a major worldwide catastrophe. Or you know it could just be woke or cell phones or something I don't know. What about woke cell phones?
Students didn't used to get abandoned. They used to fail to graduate, which forced them to either stay in a grade until they passed, or eventually decide to leave school when they were an adult and could choose to do so. Failing students was *good* for the students. They got the extra education they needed to progress toward graduation. Abandonment is what happens now. Children are matriculated through every grade despite their level of understanding of the material. Universities have started courses
Re: (Score:2)
no a drop out can change 50 bucks an hour doing drywall, have you tried hiring a contractor lately?
Re: Yes (Score:1)
The role of the school is to form the future workforce and future citizens. This holds true for 80% of people. Do these future people need to read and interpret from static text? Or they need to interact with written media in a form that is suitable to the final objective that is enabled by reading? Unless done for leasure, reading was never the objective. Reading is how we transfer concepts from one brain to another. If the input medium can now be cheaply and consistently altered by the receiving person to
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree. Reading is like exercise for the brain. Saying that we don't have to read because we have tools to do it for us is like saying we don't have to walk around because we have cars. Sure it's true on a surface level, but the deeper consequences will get severe.
not college material was an thing but now college (Score:2)
not college material was an thing but now college material is can you get an loan.
also sports is an issue as well (football and basketball)
Re: (Score:2)
A few years ago I read a report that student loans were the largest generator of new credit keeping the US economy afloat. I presume it's now AI Data Centres.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking Steve Urkel. Man .. that guy's character is really creepy in retrospect. He kept obsessing over, and was even rewarded for obsessing over, a girl who was not remotely interested in him.