Neuroscientist warns Gen Z first generation less cognitively capable than their parents
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
https://fortune.com/article/how-did-us-spending-30-billion-dollars-on-laptops-result-in-first-generation-less-cognitively-capable-than-parents/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
265 replies
The problem isn't "Tech" or "Laptops" or even "Tablets" ; but the addictive nonsense so-called "Tech-companies" spend all their efforts designing instead of trying to solve any actual problems...
IMO, in the US
Not USAian so can't comment on 1 and 5.
And 2. I believe are too recent for this. That's more of a gen alpha thing, gen z already went through most of school before 2020/2022.
Directly causes 6.
I believe 3. Is the root of all evil. And no, 5. Does not cause 3., since I went to a public university. In my case, 3. Was influenced by something similar to 5.: the political party in power encouraging their side of culture instead of focusing on education.
This is not in isolation though. The reason standards started to fall is because higher education became a NEED. As portrayed by the media, if you don't go for higher education, you will end up in a stagnant job that pays minimum wage. So everyone needed to get higher education, so there was a lot of pressure to let all these new students pass.
So you're saying the lockdowns had long term negative effects... Interesting 🤔
Like with most things, there's always a price to an action
Lockdowns are important to curb infection and protect vulnerable people. Did it have long term negative effects? Yes, that's inevitable. Could we have handled both the lockdown and post lockdown better? Sure. But protecting people heavily outweighs the consequences.
As opposed to the massacre of an uncurbed pandemic
(Also, those effects don't exist in a vacuum, and without much in the way of an attempt to mitigate them, the knock-on effects become more severe than they would have to.)
For sure. I love my kids, he's 15. He scores above average in the state/national tests (map ect). He can tell me the date, when the first bomb dropped in fallou 4, but has no fucking idea when the declaration of independence was signed, can't figure out how to cook anything from a box, can't name 10 countries in the world, and had zero idea how to do anything for himself.
The sad thing is I taught for 20 years in elementary level. All the have us teach is tests, ELA, Math, fuck science,art, geography,history. These kids are literally functionally mentally handicapped because they just want higher and higher test scores to jerk off to at the cost of kids who are functional.
first bomb dropped in fallout? what about ww2, japan? i have been hearing some people go through HS not knowing 1945 happened.
The history curriculum must be reworked as a FPS.
Unironically, I do think there is a great opportunity in education for video games.
Unfortunately, the historically inspired games I most prominently see are the likes of Assassin's Creed whose creativity clearly runs just as freely as all the slaves they sweep under the rug and who use the names of historical events and figures as faithfully as a CEO uses those of ethical values.
If these are the games children learn from, no wonder their education is as fucked up as the past these games present should be, but isn't.
whilst I do agree that a game that touts itself as a historical simulator should try to be realistic, I can see how it might kill the enjoyability of the game or conversely lead to more perverse and sadistic actions from the player...
Yeah, but portraying Sparta as these noble heroes while tacitly omitting the fact that 80% of their populace was brutally enslaved is a bit irresponsible. Likewise, the Vikings politely killing guards but sparing civilians, taking only treasure neatly prepared in chests, without so much as an implication that the player character's band is exceptional in that respect, just glosses over the rape, murder and the slave trade that was such a lucrative business for the Vikings.
In the case of AC, they already have mechanisms for discouraging violence against civilians (desynchronization). I'm sure other games could come up with some other solution. If you want to discourage sadistic actions, establish some in-universe reason why the PC diverges from the norm, make that divergence clear, use it as a source of conflict with less progressive fractions to contrast their brutality. Just don't pretend it didn't happen.
I'm down for fantastic stories, I appreciate that the battles in these games are chaotic for the of action gameplay fun, I'm happy to suspend disbelief for entertainment.
But the past can hold valuable lessons; corrupting them enables those who would use it deceptively to push some political agenda.
Oh that's true, I forgot about the desync mechanic. That is a bit odd to just portray this 1 dimensional view of noble heroes. God of War has shown that the male power fantasy can still co-exist with the idea that the hero can do horrible things and still relate to the player, so I'm not sure why Ubisoft would prefer to bury their heads
Honestly, GoW 2018 was a really good commentary on the cycle of violence, processing trauma and self-loathing, emotional vulnerability... This is entirely tangential, but there's one moment where Kratos and Atreus look out at some beautiful view opening up before them. Kratos tentatively reaches out to put his hand on Atreus' shoulder, then hesitates, pulls it back. It broke my heart, breaks it over and over every time I think about it. The game undeniably is a power fantasy, but it hardly pulls punches in digging up Kratos' issues and flaws, including calling out that tough macho persona.
Anyway, on topic: I think the portrayal of Sparta in particular goes back to a circular issue of pop media. When depicting something, the audience usually approaches in with expectations and preconceptions shaped by other works. These works in turn call back to previous ones, partially built on the writings of 19th century historians belonging to their respective elites and accordingly biased to let the Spartan elites look good, drawing on source material written by ancient Greek elites that will also have identified more with the Spartiates than the Helots.
If I make a game or movie about Sparta, most people will involuntarily form some association with 300. If I then (accurately) present their warrior-elite as cruel bastards that largely eschew the arts, don't actually do much combat training, don't value individual prowess so much as coherence in the phalanx, have a very average track record in war; if I show them marching to Athens and back several times because they had no siegecraft to actually take it; if I point out their selling out Greece to the Persians...
I don't think players will enjoy it. That's not a fun Sparta. It doesn't stack up to the glorious expectations. There are no heroics, just disappointment.
Historians will love it, but critics will open with "if you're looking for the heroes of 300, you won't find them here" and players will close the tab.
In that light, a publisher primarily interested in money won't want to take the risk of honesty, if they care at all.
With the Vikings, the causes may differ (and I don't know the historiography here), but the result is similar: we've ended up with an image of big tough heathen warriors, possibly shaped more by the impressions of English monks whose churches they were burning or those Vikings that ended up converting to Christianity, and less by the of slaves that were dragged away or people killed in the raids. Again, Ubisoft won't want to risk kicking up a fuss by smearing that image.
Additionally, the factor you pointed out that you might not want to indulge player cruelty adds complexity to the question of how to frame those issues. Complexity requires more writing work, which costs money, and we're back at "a publisher primarily interested in money".
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the games, despite being aware of those issues. My complaint is rather with a media landscape that has painted an image nobody dares disrupt because it's not profitable. The education to enable such disruption would have to come from the outside, which leads to the initial problem: If games are the best way to convey that information, but the industry has backed itself into a corner where it can't easily do so, we're at a deadlock.
Then history would be the favorite subject by many pupils.
You can't make such a statement about a whole generation without referring to a large cohort study.
...In the pile with the other disappointments.
tosses it on top of X-men after Fall of X
I don't know about that, even with their digital lobotomy, gen z votes a lot smarter than older generations.
the older Gen z , the younger ones are pretty lacking, plus thier aspiration is to be influencers, at least some of them.
Stupid kids! Choose a more realistic career, like astronaut.
I honestly blame the software we use. It's made to be profitable, not to educate. Every fucking article is full of bullshit "click here!" for profit.
Where is the global and universal app to learn fucking everything? That teaches you, lets you read unlimited textbooks (oh piracy!) or science papers, quizzes you, scores you, lets you compete with others, gives you a diploma that is worth something?
Why do we expect an internet that has been captured by capitalism and is algorithmically tuned to maximize profit and brainwashing to be good for intelligence? That is what advertising is brainwashing, and it ru(i)ns everything.
PS: Of course, I have no idea how good online learning resources of schools actually are. I'm just going to assume they are abyssal. Because why wouldn't they be terrible.
Blame the parents that have abdicated their responsibility to raise their children and outsource that to screens.
My kids have grown up with screens since birth, but our going-into-fourth-grader has a 12th grade reading level and our going-into-second-grader has an 11th grade reading level because we make teaching them at home a priority.
They both score way above grade level in math and science as well. Their teachers constantly say they can tell which parents actually make their kids education a priority and which parents don’t give a shit and expect the teachers to do it all.
Let's apply some critical thinking here. You're saying your 7yr old has the reading comprehension of a 17yr old. I don't buy that. I read voraciously as a child and in 7th grade I had an 11th grade reading level. I have a 7yr old who reads voraciously and they are nowhere near an 11th grade level. They rarely get screen time either. Education is a huge priority for us as well, but 11th grade reading level at 7? That ain't real.
Probably this says more about this specific school district and what they expect of their students than about the reading comprehension a child compared to an adolescent.
I mean believe it or don’t. I don’t give a shit lol. It’s true. I was the same way as a kid, far ahead of all of my peers with a high school reading level in first grade, twice in school scored the highest in the state for standardized testing for my grade. I even got two little trophies from the state for it.
Their mom is an insane reader as well, and clocks 100+ books a year.
They got a great head start with genetics, but we’ve also put a ton of effort into fostering that.
Well done. Did you limit screen time and got them to read physical books and such? And yeah, it's definitely impossible without parenting, but you also need the right "tools" or learning environment and software. I don't think that exists, at least not as open source / non commercial.
Yeah they are limited on their screen time. They have to do an hour of reading before they can do any fun screen time, then they can do whatever until bed as long as homework is done.
At bedtime they have to be in bed, but can use their kindles to read until 10 when they automatically lock on them.
I learned a lot because there was friction in the tools. There’s a point where „accessible“ software (and I don’t mean accessible in the sense of making it usable with screen readers and other disability support) becomes detrimental. Like the complete abstraction that mobile devices have from a filesystem now - many younger people can’t use a hierarchical file explorer as a result.
Yeah that's definitely true, IT systems becoming too easy to use. They should have given the students raspberry PIs and some wire and mechanical switches instead of McBooks, let them build their own laptops lol.
That poor child in the stock photo getting shown for an article on how children are getting dumber...
That being said, the reason why children are getting 'dumber' is probably because a) education is getting less money every year b) social media is destroying their attention span c) intelligence isn't valued enough by society
At no point is getting a notebook part of the problem. Young people need to learn how to use technology.
Problem: we're not spending enough on educators to teach kids
News Articles: we paid apple 10 billion dollars but the laptops made these kids dumber.
Younger gen z are incredibly dumb this really isn't anything new or up for debate.
So is most people, myself included. Millennial btw
Millennial is like the only generation that comfortably says we're all stupid.
You only need to read the headlines in any newspaper to come to this conclusion.
The above is probably why.
I'm willing to bet most of us laughed at E so I'm not saying a damn thing lol
badger badger badger badger mushroom
snaaaaaaaake snaaaaaaake
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went "well, young people 'just understand' technology, we don't need to teach it anymore" and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I'm focused on the USA - I doubt "Cooney Horvath" is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are "INHERANTLY DUMBER" (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it's trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
THIS. PREACH. I couldn't say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.
"Technology" is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. "Technology" didn't cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.
Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.
But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely "technology." They're consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.
In 95% of cases, I'll wager, nobody's getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to "replace" standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.
ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.
So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that's open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research...) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than
"Let's copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase."
My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren't working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.
Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it's not 1-step on her iPhone. It's tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.
We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that's how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer to smoking and gambling .
If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.
Mainstream technology doesn't connect us, it isolates us. It doesn't educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing "friction" to rob our wallets and personal data.
I'm INFURIATED that most people can't even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the "future" is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.
I feel like we need to start "desktop computer clubs" or something. Seeing this crap like they're trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book...
Hey, pardon me if I'm overstepping, but I'm going through the evaluation process with my mom right now and this could be an early sign of dementia (one that we initially dismissed). It could be nothing, but it might be a good idea to get her checked out if you have any other reason to be concerned.
straight facts.
the vacuum of responsible leadership/sane regulations opened the doors for corporations to colonize every corner of online activity. they have run amok with behavior-changing technologies. rather than implementing these new tools thoughtfully in the classroom (and at home), idiotic people wrote enormous checks to Apple and Microsoft, Google and other vendors, assuming that the kids would just, ya know, figure it out. magically, somehow.
a separate but related thought: we need to recognize that:
how kids use personal devices at home shapes their usage patterns at school. if their only reference point for what a "computer" is and does is unlimited brainrot attention baiting consumption, then guess what? they will see these devices purely as entertainment/addiction machines and nothing more.
kids mimic their parents behavior. if parents are zonked out all night mindlessly binging endless short form content and tv shows, they will come to understand that behavior as "normal" and "appropriate" and even "good". society at large (and some parents) think kids must abide by different expectations than the ones they place on adults. kids know that's hypocritical bullshit and will either emulate the bad behavior (with post hoc rationalizations) or resent the behavior (with maladaptations/ internalized guilt or resentment).
moreover, I'm convinced the entire reason my generation (millennials) turned out to be tech-savvy was because adults didn't understand it, were trying to control and curtail our usage, and we were mostly focused on finding ways to circumvent boomer and gen-x meddling in our usage.
Nah that's not it. People who used computers in the 50s, 60s and 70s were tech savvy. But that was just a small percentage of the population.
When mass adoption of computers started in the late eighties, through the nineties and early 00s computers needed a lot of tinkering and care in their usage.
People were forced to use their brains to use the computer and learn tech skills. Then computers started to become a lot more streamlined and people didn't have to put as much thought into using them. It parallels cars and TVs, just in a more complex system.
People who used computers in the 60s were more tech savvy than people who used computers in the 70s who were more savvy than those in the 80s who were better at computers than those in the 90s and so on. Because they had to learn more to use them and take care of them.
New tech (like the web) meant you had to get used to new stuff, which younger people do better than older people.
But if you speak to a boomer who has kept up with the technology you can bet that they are more capable and have more knowledge about tech than us millennials.
With cars, I don't get it we've even collectively given up standard maintenance. When I tell people I did my own oil change or change my brake pads, they look at me like I'm some sort of magician or Tim Taylor. It's like, dudes, you're supposed to be doing it yourself -- it's not hard. And it costs me $40 to diy an oil change compared to $100 for a Quick Lube. Brake pads are a little more difficult, but also are standard maintenance and totally possible. Cost savings of diy vs shop there is hundreds of dollars.
I've not met boomers that have kept up on tech. In fact, all of the boomers I know now use tech like the Gen Z kids.
I was once in a room with a boomer, I'm a Millennial, and a Gen Zer. I said, "your generation invented the tech, my generation perfected it, and your generation takes it all for granted."
ive seen parents give phones to toddlers watching on the phones, ipads just to shut them up. defunding is mostly done by republicans, underfunding is pretty everywhere else, even in pretty decent blue areas. the money goes to admin/bureaucracy and redtaping teachers. the books, i recently saw students at my former hs, from 10+years ago sitll using the same kind of book( the blue book for chemistry edition), but they need to use newer books with updated info.
Nailed it. This is equally true for many countries beyond the US.
Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention
Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families
Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.
"Educational" software is terrible.
It educates kids to use MS Office and ChatGPT.
Many got chromebooks and just had google everything.
Someone clearly hasn't played Typing of the Dead.
You shut your whore mouth about Oregon Trail
It was a different time.
Nah, it's a bad idea, especially with internet connection. They are portals of distraction.
My schools just had a computer lab, and we still mostly figured out how to play games or hack the computers.
I remember one time, on very locked down PCs, I figured out how to use DirectX diagnostic tools to start a group chat on the local network. I didn't even know about that thing, nor was there internet.
I can imagine computers being good only as fully controlled environments with secured connections, no USBs, total control over what software can be opened and used. Anything less is a waste of time.
"These things that I was given access to during my formative years and education? Yea, we absolutely shouldn't let kids today have any access to them at all... for reasons(?)"
Anything can be a portal to distraction for kids that are bored to tears by an awful teacher, better not let them have colored pencils, they might 'waste time' drawing. If they don't interact with computers at all for their education, they will definitely only think about computers as a box for games and/or youtube, and they will struggle with their use for a long time after. We need an environment to explore the systems and the world around us, where there can be boundaries if we get too far out in left field before we are dropped into the real world with real consequences.
I had one at home. The lab was fairly useless and definitely not good for exploration. I learned from breaking and reinstalling the OS and other things; if you do that at school, you get in trouble.
The issue was not being willing or able to curate their online experiences when given computers.
It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it'd be a book.
multiple books, each discussing a different issue.
Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It's especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.
I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I've been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that's probably the main factor here.
School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it's just hard when it's this bad for this long. We're talking decades of decline.
Right, like I've seen parents shove a tablet or a phone in their toddlers hands before they learn how to walk properly, and they keep scrolling mind numbing short form slop on it, and they want to talk about school laptops lol
THANK YOU. As a teacher, this guy made me rage hard. And even harder when older teachers who already hate technology latched on to it as an excuse. Show me evidence for fucks sake when middle school teachers are ALSO now teaching multiple subject areas, have way less prep time, the school has less money, are also responsible for live online grading and access to assignments.
Also, I love fediverse. Rational mind heaven
I’m glad I’m out of middle and high school, both were hell for my ability to learn due to teachers like this. I’ve tried and tested the fact that I objectively learn better on computers than books and writing, but the many teachers who would outright ban laptops in their classes because “you can’t learn on those, you all get distracted” would cripple my ability to learn. Writing is difficult for me as well, and I’ve always had horrible and slow hand writing, but I have abnormally fast typing speed and can type notes while listening fully to the teacher, which is why I breezed through my more tech focused classes for instance.
Of course, I don’t blame those technologically conservative teachers for their views, since monetary interests have crippled the medium enough to make digital education difficult for the vast majority of people, but that doesn’t mean some aren’t the opposite and learn quicker and of higher quality on digital mediums rather than the standard analog mediums.
That is brought up near the end of the article.
It doesn't have to be. Rote memorization always is for me, but that's not really learning. And you can focus on just about anything when the alternative is a shitty textbook poorly explaining something that just won't click with you. Look out the window, doodle, count the ceiling tiles, daydream about not being stuck in school, ...
Be careful not to conflate effortful with boring. Learning can be fun but fun doesn't mean easy or lacking in effort. Fun just makes it easier to remain motivated.
Learning can take effort and be fun, that's true. Same goes for difficult. But if you put those two in with uncomfortable then I hear that it's meant to be painful, essentially. Goddamn kids need to sit still and learn, and they can not do anything else for hours, or else!
The burden of proof is on you for your claim.
Why does learning not need to be effortful or not difficult or not oftentimes uncomfortable?
From the context the combination of these three words sounded to me like they are demanding kids sit still and focus for hours, and that if they fail then that's a lack of effort, determination or intelligence. You can work through a problem slowly and deliberately because it's hard to understand, that can feel very rewarding even if it's hard. But you can also be forced to mentally strain yourself for hours, not because of the subject itself is difficult but because the environment, the provided material, the pressure, ... make learning in and of itself take a lot more effort than it needs to.
Yeah, I have literally never gotten better at anything without effort, difficulty, and sometimes being uncomfortable. These things are ingrained to mastering any skill.
I think if it as no difference than lifting weights.
Do hard things till they get easy, then do harder things.
Your average person should probably not walk into the gym and start by trying to lift the heaviest weight they can. Many people stay active and healthy by doing something much easier, like walking or jogging with minimal or no weight.
Something that we learn to do as children almost instinctively...
Something... Easy.
Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.
I know you're joking, but what would result if this actually happened would be after 1 week 99% of the laptops would never be powered on again and simply be handed back in at the end of the term.
Never underestimate ingenuity. Although the lazy kids would ask the smart kids for shortcuts. Most likely.
I'd be more worried about the 1% that are still being used. You've created a group of kids that know more about the computers than most IT departments.
Those aren't kids to worry about. Those are kids to put into advanced classes because they've got some great understanding of complex topics and problem solving skills.
Well that’ll definitely make them resilient in the face of adversity, at the very least.
I also think schools are not evolving to the reality. There's little incentive to memorize facts in a world where they are so easily acceptable. So we shouldn't teach the memorization of facts.
We should teach people how to use information, how to criticize it, how to synthesize it, how to apply it. If these pursuits are taken seriously students will retain the information.
This issue is that's much more difficult to test for than the memorization of facts.
I couldn't disagree more. We should not be teaching kids to rely their phones. This is literally the same attitude the article talks about.
Rote memorization sucks but it's 100% a necessary skill if you're going to learn literally anything. Do you really want an electrician who lives on his phone because he didn't memorize important aspects of his job? How about a surgeon or a lawyer?
There's no getting around the fact that you need to memorize things if you're doing to develop a deep level of skill in any given field. Your phone or laptop is not always going to be there.
I teach immigrants the local language, and students are never grateful to be taught a language. Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s not. There are thousands of words that people use in common conversation, tens of thousands that you can find in standard newspapers and normal literature, and even more if you want to read academic or specialized literature. When I teach the meaning of one word, that’s giving the students a fish. When I teach them how to break down prefixes or give them advice for increasing their exposure to language input, that’s teaching them how to fish.
The problem is that it only works for students who care. That’s fine by me, because I teach adults and they can decide whether they want to learn or not.
I don’t know how k-12 teachers navigate that, because it’s not exactly the student’s choice- we’ve decided as a society that kids need to learn certain things, whether they want to or not (basically), and that means that schoolteachers need to be able to teach students who don’t care or actively want not to learn (at least about a given subject). Just teaching them to teach themselves doesn’t work there, so you have to teach them some facts, because otherwise they won’t learn any.
It sucks, but I don’t know if it can be fixed. It’s reasonable that students don’t care about every subject, and it’s reasonable that there are things we’ve decided they need to learn, regardless of their interest. Teachers can’t always make a subject interesting to everyone, so sometimes you have to teach the base facts.
I relate to this immensely. I'm taking german classes currently and the professor is driving me insane.
She uses an immersion only method where she speaks German at us and we do exercises from a book.
I am slowly getting an understanding of the past imperfect and various grammatical rules but only barely. There has been no real instruction on how these rules work so when I encounter a new verb or noun it's a total guess everytime.
From my understanding speaking with some Germans, this is the preffered method for teaching English to school children. Which I must admit does seem to work well the English proficiency of the average person is quite high, even amongst those too afraid to speak it their comprehension is high.
The issue is I do not want to be learning German for the next 8 years as a German student would learn English in school. Also my brain is fundamentally different than a child's. If they were to explain the rules and grammatical concepts it would be much much easier to understand.
A blended approach where the rules for new grammatical concepts are first explained followed with the immersion based exercises we've been doing would be ideal.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I actually teach German, and especially for students who have a good language sense for English (so if “I singed a song” immediately sticks out to you), tenses are mostly (with some obvious exceptions, like present progressive and preterite/perfect) pretty similar.
She’s probably trying to get your brain to recognize an irregular verb so you don’t have to learn each verb anew, but that’s a problem you’re less likely to have as an English speaker (for example, you’d say “Morgen singe ich, gestern sang ich, heute habe ich noch nicht gesungen,” which is pretty intuitive after English).
Fwiw, you do retain it longer if she sets it up so you can draw your own conclusions, but you also learn more slowly. And if you’re highly motivated, you’ll probably remember it well enough either way.
The whole class speaks English at a B2 level since that's what is required for International students at the university. I do feel like that could be capitalized on given the similarities.
Honestly I truly feel like I paid someone to read the Kurs DaF A1 book to me. Rarely there are other exercises or explanations.
Comparing other language course I've had I liked my high school French teacher's approach. She primed us with explanations of the new concepts and grammatical rules. Then she followed up with immersion and exercises.
My Spanish courses in college and high school were just memorization based. I technically reached a higher level of course in Spanish, but remember next to nothing. My comprehension of French is much better.
Truthfully I need to dedicate more time to my German, but my other studies being all English take up my time. I'm here for a master's degree. The language is an additional skill I would like.
And if you care for learner's perspectives, give quizzes. I don't know how to explain it, but when we took our first test I felt a lot of concepts click into place because I had to perform if that makes sense. It's like my brain felt the pressure and acted. It made me wish we had regular quizzes on the content in between tests.
That’s rough. I’m currently teaching at a school where they basically hired me to do that, but they’re not upset that I’m not. The teachers at the school are mainly university students in language related fields, but they mostly don’t have any experience or training in didactics (my autocorrect twigged on that-is it still pedagogy when you’re teaching adults?), so that’s an okay way to get people doing an alright job.
I’m almost done with my masters thesis in German instruction, so I’m not an expert teacher or anything, but I know how to construct an assignment and what didactic principles should guide a lesson plan. And just teaching to the book makes me feel pointless/like I’m cheating.
If you want a pretty good guide to grammar based on comparison with English, then try English Grammar for Students of German
That’s very good advice, thank you. One of my students currently is in his mid 50s and he’s got a lot of experience learning things (not just his age, he’s had a lot of huge life changes that required him to do totally new things), and it’s so incredibly helpful. I gave them a quiz when I started teaching them (their last teacher went on leave partway through) and everyone (good naturedly) groaned a little, but he was 100% down for it and got the class to settle.
It helped show me their gaps, and I was able to anonymize them and have them peer correct, which was even more helpful
Just relying on classes is slow no matter what method they use. You need to study at home as well and something different from what you learn in class so don’t use the textbook from class. I think the best way to learn a language is to focus on vocabulary first. Like learn the 2000 most frequently used words first through rote memorization. Then grammer comes more naturally since you can get a lot of things from context. Also native speakers don’t know the grammar rules by heart, to them forming a correct sentence just comes naturally. Sure it’s good to know the grammar rules and concepts, but to make it come naturally requires a ton of reading and listening and eventually speaking and writing and that requires a large vocabulary.
The most used method for vocabulary is flash cards. Many people use a program called Anki and a German flash card deck has already been made by the community.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/9489615
My seventh grade English teacher got permission from admin (she told us this) to spend her whole semester with us teaching vocabulary. Word roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. That was helpful, and interesting, and the first time I enjoyed learning English. I still struggled in English, but I did better after that.
I was homeschooled. My mom was always avidly against what she called "read and regurgitate." Instead she supported "teach how to learn."
It was a different world back then, but the lessons still serve me well.
Then it'll make the wealthy stupider.
the wealthy know this, they are shielding them from it, placing them in montiserri type schools, aka rich people tutoring, learning grind+ make sure they are in sports, get all extracarricular. with a poorer family its an IPAD/TV/computer doomscrolling , or watching youtube, streamers.
I would be willing to bet that is the case, but good luck doing a study to test the hypothesis.
https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/peter-thiel-bill-gates-steve-jobs-steve-chen-tech-billionaires-publicly-shielding-their-children-from-tech-products-social-media/
it's like blaming the obesity epidemic on plates....
You actually can influence how full a person feels after a set amount of food based on how big or small the plate is on which the food was served.
The addictive qualities of ultra processed foods at the same time as the diminishing nutrition of processed and unprocessed foods alike is obviously so much more of a contributing factor, but isn't it nuts that plates can also have a measurable effect?
when it's microplastics!
You gave a bunch of kids systems they're completely locked out of modifying and garden walled to shit and then act shocked when they learn nothing from them.
Jesus
That's not true, they learned something. It just wasn't beneficial at all.
Nothing in USA rewards intelligence. Not education system, not employers, not government. Why develop a skill that isn't in demand? Would you want to develop medieval brickmaking just because some researcher is measuring for it?
And who designed the software and tools leading to this?
Google.
Which is run by their parents’ generation
It's run by techbros who live in a different reality then the rest of us.
they do, plus they SHIELD thier children from the brainrot they caused with thier SOcial media, propaganda. so they can go through life academically achieving, nepotized jobs, assuming most of them dont become lazy and entitled, probably setting them up for political/celebrity careers to perpetuate the cycle.
I don't think framing it generationally is useful. Your average mum and dad have little to nothing to do with it.
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
I'm 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
I get the writhing because of muscle memory but reading is reading...
Books are tactile and involve more of your perception.
That tracks, although I'd compare them with ereaders instead of screens.
We are more distractible when reading on digitsl devices though. Perhaps with the exception of dedicated ebook readers.
In addition to fhat I wonder if eInk and actual paper are more conducive to prolonged reading as well, less eye strain
Also... keep in mind that when kids read internet articles they are picking up on terrible grammar and all around insane ways to form sentences in general. Look at all the uptalking females from just seeing others do it. Crap catches on easily. Nobody is proof reading anything online.
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you'd be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: "Forget everything you've learned about maths so far, this is something completely different". And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don't focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I'm an old fart and it feels very "Everything was better when I was young". So don't take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
A core moment of my life was when, late at night, doing homework for assembly class, I finally GOT that "The instruction is the data is the number". I would be surprised if students today have an opportunity to get to that realization.
I'm just gonna toss this out there...
You old fucks^1^ are siding with someone non-ironically named "Cooney Horvath" who, btw, is trying to sell books on how best to teach. Hoodwinked I say. Absolutely hoodwinked. "Everyone knows you can't learn math unless you have an abacus!" "They expect to be able to learn spelling and writing without a chalk board tablet? Preposterous!"
^1^ - Used as a term of endearment.
I know this is an exaggeration for emphasis... but people who learn the abacus method are faster and more accurate at basic addition.
That's just not true. People don't learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.
[citation needed]
It's actual on people to cite that pencil is somehow better but somehow all research never yields any results. Hmm I wonder why. Maybe because learning efficiency doesn't revolve around a single tool that is being used, weird I know.
[citation needed]
also: you made a claim that "People don’t learn with pencil or computer better", and that claim needs backing up with facts.
no it's the other way around dummy. The default state is neutrality and if you have a claim that something veers of it then you have to substantiate it.
there's no such thing as a default assumption of "neutrality". straight up not a thing that exists.
what does exist, and what you're mosst likely mixing up here, is the mediocrity principle. that's en entirely different concept and has nothing to do with "neutrality", because no such concept exists in scientific contexts.
"neutral" is not a concept in nature, so it's not a concept in research either.
there was for a long time a similar concept for U.S. broadcasters, where they were obligated to try and provide balanced reporting, but that also has nothing to do with research.
if you can provide a source for that "neutrality" claim, I'd be thrilled to learn something new! but for now that's yet another [citation needed]
What are you even talking about. So you by default assume position that pencil learning is good and ask someone to disapprove it? Don't you see flaw here? Smh
I feel bad for the girl in the picture. She turns up every time the "technology makes kids dumbfucks" argument surfaces. Feel like ive seen her about 20 times in the last year.
Imagine being the face of that.
I’m guessing from her vacant stare that she probably doesn’t think much of it mate. Jk
Students aren't being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They're being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?
I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it's just not sticking.
Exactly.
As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!
I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.
They're usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else "fell through."
We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.
It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.
It didn't have to be like this. I'm very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it...
YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.
It would've been so great if for at least once say "We don't have microsoft word tasks today, we don't have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead."
It sounds like it's false, but even if it were true, companies like Fortune are working hard to make it true. They want suckers who don't think, who don't remember, who can perform high level labor at almost no cost, so the rich can get richer.
yeah I'm skeptical, but at the same time I'm sure the people showing up for job interviews in the past few years are less capable of basic first year college shit than they used to be. Heck, these days if you ask a basic data structures question at an interview they'll go home and meme about how bullshit it is that they even got asked that because algorithms got nothing to do with real programming
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: "This has generally been considered a bad idea."
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must've thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
...We were more optimistic about the internet then.
...But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
This is what happens when you don't grow up with Math Munchers and Brain Age.
Unrelated but I am pretty annoyed articles can refer to age groups as "gen z" or "millenial."
It's not some universally agreed number. They could just say "kids aged 12-24." It's more empirical.
And these generation cutoffs are basically meaningless. The next one starts just because it would be weird for a parent and child to be in the same "generation" not because the specific birth cutoff indicates anything special. Young X'ers and old millennials have way more in common with each other than those on the other side of their generations.
I work with college students and unfortunately regardless of the cause this seems to be true. Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.
I have been reading the "children are getting dumber" article since grade school.
It is the Shepherd's Tone of news coverage, right up there with "rising crime rates in urban centers" and "migrant caravans are crossing the border", that reports the same tired set of manufactured concerns paired with a call to ramp up funding for profitable interventions.
The consumer with no disposable income? FFS, these toss off lines don't even make any fucking sense. You could earn more as a blue-collar day laborer 40 years ago than as an entry-level college grade today.
Why do you think so much of corporate industry has pivoted from retail sales to B2B SaaS as a profit center? Consumerism is dying. Six mega-corps passing each other the same dollar in an investor circle jerk is the future of the economy.
This generation of children are also dealing with some unprecedented events that we know are pretty bad for cognitive development. Both the advent of Covid and the regular use of certain technology in children are relatively new, and we have plenty of studies telling us they are actually delaying cognitive development.
Consumer spending has increased year over year since the 70s, just since 2020 it's increased by over 30%.
Consumer spending isn't just the stuff you want, it's also the stuff you need. Disposable income is the surplus after your mandatory deductions, like state and federal taxes. So things like groceries, rent, utilities, and your phones are all spent with "disposable income".
Secondly, more people have more access to acquire debt than ever before. The total household debt in the US is now 18.2 trillion dollars. Consumerism is not dying, it's just being funded by debt, which in late stage capitalism is the perfect consumer.
I don't want to play the "who had it harder?" game, because that's always just a war of the sob stories. But COVID is competing with Vietnam enlistment and lead/asbestos poisoning, when it comes to generational intellectual speedbumps. Nevermind the sheer dearth of educational establishments prior to the Boomer-Era buildout of high school and college campuses. I lived through the era when everyone and their kid brother was being diagnosed with a learning disability. And when weed was supposed to obliterated cognition in young people. And when video games were rotting brains. And when Cliff's Notes was destroying academia. There's always something.
I see so many "My 16-year-old is a drooling idiot" hysterical denouncements of modern education. And it's all couched in this insufferable nostolgia for a past that never existed. Long-form Op-Ed articles about how not wearing a bike helmet built character or why Montessori School turned our kids queer. Screaming tirades about the poor quality of STEM and the insidious nature of liberal arts education, combined with jerk-off sessions over Classical Education and the endless need for Teaching The Controversy and in-class debates.
Fucking awful people pushing bullshit lines that get gobbled up by whatever audience is being told "You're the smart ones, every other generation else is worthless trash".
That's. Not. Actually. True.
Fewer people have access to consumer credit today. A select subset have access to higher debt limits in an inflationary economy. And most of that debt is housing debt, not retail consumer debt, anyway.
The $18.2 trillion isn't distributed equitably. It's also overstated, given that a bunch of it is bad medical and housing debt that debt-holders refuse to write down.
I mean, Vietnam didn't happen to children...... But I get that's not your point. However, just because this generation is seeing cognitive development hurdles, does not mean others didn't face their version as well. The largest difference is things like lead have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Their reduction marks an improvement to a situation that had been endemic for generations.
Something like COVID or the introduction of screens marks a new impediment that is being laid on top of residual ones that people in the past also dealt with.
Yes, but children had always had those impairment, diagnosis have just been better at catching disabilities.
Yes, based on the hysterics of the news, not scientific consensus.
Again, you are arguing against a straw man of your own making. My examples were based on scientific studies, not news reports.
That's not true according to the latest SCE CREDIT ACCESS SURVEY
Reported application rates for any kind of credit over the past twelve months increased in February to the highest level since October 2022, driven by an increase in credit card applications. The overall rejection rate for any kind of credit over the past twelve months decreased to 15.9 percent, the lowest level since June 2021. Rejection rates fell across all credit types.
That's always been true? Consumer credit card debt is also near an all time high, especially with how popular buyitnow pay later plans have gotten.
Never said it wasn't?
Which still counts as disposable income spending.
US soldiers killed in Vietnam were as young as 16. The average age was 23, so assume roughly half under that. The human brain isn't fully developed until 25. FFS, we didn't let people vote until 21 when the war started. And we only passed the 26th amendment in '71, directly in response to the contradiction between enlistment and elections.
I'll spot you COVID, at least for the specific cohort that hit their prime learning years during the shutdown.
But the introduction of screens? We've had screens since the 1950s. And, I gotta throw back to XKCD on this one...
The introduction of keyboards has been an enormous boon for education.
And in a largely agricultural or early industrial economy, it hasn't been a serious issue. These only truly become classified as "impairments" when they interfere with a very specific kind of intellectual labor.
So we had a four year long dip and we're finally caught back up?
There is no elasticity in these budget items.
Yes, but you aren't interfering with a child's ability to learn which is what we were discussing. At that age cognitive function that is typically affected by PTSD and high levels of stress is impulse control and rational control over your emotions.
If you cared to read the study you would have learned that they are specifying passive activities. Playing games that actively have the user engage with thought is fine, what is harmful and is a growing problem is passive participation. Where the only thing you do is just swipe to the next piece of entertainment .
If you would have bothered to read the source you would have known that this comic doesn't have anything to do what we were talking about.
Again, what does this have to do with your argument..... We do not live in an agrarian society.
No, we've been growing in debt and access to debt since the crash in 08, in 20-21 we saw a two year lull due to the pandemic. Since the end of the pandemic we have seen the most aggressive rebound in history, largely spurred by inflation and post pandemic spending.
That is not relevant to the current argument.
Drafting a kid out of high school and putting them on a 12-month tour of duty absolutely interfered with their education. Even if they never see a day of combat, they're still doing some menial work that allows their accrued educational experience to atrophy. Same as what happened during COVID.
They are specifying interpersonal communications through text.
How is this "passive"? None of it involves "swiping".
That public reporting on learning difficulties only became interesting when students were educated to the level at which the difficulty was relevant? It goes directly against the notion that the current generation is in a unique situation.
It is extremely relevant.
Do you often interact with young people?
For there to be no disposable income these corporations are somehow making money hand over fist at every level of commerce.
As a relatively younger guy (26) I do suspect that a lot of that comes from whales and whatnot IE the richer subsect. At least amongst my friends we have all started to approach old man thinks 20 bucks is a lot of money levels of stingy.
What do you spend your money on? I hear this kind of thing from lots of kids and then discover that they've normalized spending on things like door dash and subscription services as being essential.
Ignoring essentials like groceries then it's mostly random shit and games. Going over me buying antique surplus and retrotech from various sources would be kinda pointless. Though I will say I'm the least profligate of my friends since as I get older the Scottish and Autistic frugality increases.
I mean, I have a toddler, just for starters. Also, a bunch of nieces and nephews and friends with kids of various ages. Then I do some of the professional onboarding for interns and college new hires at my company.
So, Idk, for some definition of "young people", yes.
The big winners of the post-COVID economy have been B2B companies - enterprise level software firms, data center firms, government contractors, and corporate supply chain companies. Your grocery store chains and big box retailers have been comparatively flat. Car companies have underperformed. Even real estate has been anemic, at least by comparison.
To call this a consumer economy, you really have to point to the consumer end of the equation and show some kind of growth. Inflation might be rising, but retail consumption certainly hasn't.
Yes it has. Where are you pulling this information from? The only times in the last 30 years where real retail consumption hasn't raised is after 08 and during COVID.
Virtually flat for five straight years.
Only because that short of a period does not account for the giant spike we had due to post-pandemic spending. If you took out the period of time during and directly after the pandemic the growth curve would look completely normal.
Trying to explain to a corpse that, on average, it's still got a heartbeat.
I'm unsure of what you're arguing here. Walmart continues to grow, Doordash has healthy growth, McDonald's is still growing despite price increases, subscriptions are growing, micro transactions, cbd companies... I can literally keep going. The need to scroll and consume has hit gen Z hard and despite no "disposable income" they're somehow pushing profits up along with any other struggling person. These minor comforts are big business.
Retail consumption isn't growing? Buddy...
They like to confidently make a lot of bold claims that are very easy to refute by looking at a simple chart.
These are a handful of exceptions to a sweeping 15 year trend.
The following retailers in the United States and Canada have all either closed or announced plans to close large numbers of retail locations, since 2010, deemed a "retail apocalypse" by media, accelerated by both the increase in online shopping and by the COVID-19 pandemic.
So brick and mortar consumer retail is being killed off by online consumer retail......and you are interpreting this as all consumer retail is failing? Are you just not arguing in good faith, or are you that donkey brained?
Online shopping is retail but semantics... I guess the businesses that aren't on your list are showing profits made by ghosts then.
Amazon’s data center revenue — primarily from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business — has grown faster than its retail sales in recent years, reflecting a strategic shift toward high-margin cloud infrastructure.
Some of this is governmental. But a big chunk is functionally a circular network of business spending. Microsoft pays Amazon a dollar. Amazon pays NVIDIA a dollar. NVIDIA pays Microsoft a dollar. Ad Infinium.
Kids these days
I make a comment saying the title here, like a week ago, and its controversial.
I say 'if you don't understand this that's because you're not familiar with current stats and papers'.
Look.
Everybody is scrambling to actually explain the causal mechanism(s).
... The observed effect though, is so broad and obvious and undeniable, that that's why everyone is scrambling to try and explain it.
Personally, my inclination is that for-profit, advertisement-oriented social media apps are the 'cigarettes' of the digital age... because they are literally precision designed to hijack your attention, cause addiction via hijacking your dopamine/reward neurochemistry, prey on and exploit all your innate/subconscious insecurities, and they reward and amplify convenience, outrage and excess.
But that's just a hypothesis. Again, what's undeniable is that... we have, broadly, peaked.
Unless of course we can figure out how to reverse that, and then actually implement whatever needs to be done, to actually reverse it.
Fully back up your theory for the main cause. Screen time has vastly taken over the times of students as their brains are developing and by and large it feeds the least enriching, least challenging content as it has the highest propensity for addiction (under the guise of user retention)
I predict we'll view this experiment with the same confused disgust as we do when we hear that doctors used to prescribe cocaine for pretty much anything. The software engineers who aided any of this are going to be ashamed of their work.
I do not disagree that social media is having a negative effect but just the over abundance of information, ease of access to it, and a lot being false. It's exacerbated that we treated iPads and phones like our parents did television as a "shut up kid" distraction.
LOL what on earth if FORTUNE of all places doing publishing an article on this?
Fortune:
Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior...after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.
Up next: "These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?"
▶️ Fortunate_Son.wav
You get it!
So the interesting line for me, that many comments obviously didn't read, is:
So there clearly is something up with computers in school. But this doesn't exclude the possibility that the kids who are getting their brains fucked by addictive algorithms are then more likely to fuck about on school computers. This line:
Suggests it's not "tech" but "distractions enabled by tech" which is having the effect, i.e. if school laptops and tablets were locked down you wouldn't see as much of an effect.
One of my first forays into computer science was learning how to bypass the various school firewalls in grade school lol
Heh, yeah. When I was at school, security was an afterthought. You could run a .reg file and give yourself any privileges. Bypassing the filters involved going on babelfish and translating from Chinese into English.
Same thing when I was working from home before I had a company laptop. I was using my PC and could easily get distracted by YouTube. Having a separate one if better for privacy and keeping on task.
... commenting from my work laptop, YouTube playing on another screen ...
Lots of tech is also badly designed honestly. I know it's the main reason I'm on Linux. I'm not a programmer, I'm just very easily distracted so I benefit from keyboard-driven applications with no weird attention-grabbing banners or blinking text or obnoxious sounds. I need a consistent design language or I can feel my blood pressure spike. I'm sure the same is true for most people just to a much less noticeable extent.
I don't think it's tablets and laptops that caused the decline as much as what they grant access to. The conspiratorial side to me is dying to believe that the massive Gen AI push by the government and businesses is not only about the money, but also about producing a dumber generation.
its a double edged sword, they become too dumb to even join the military(they are even failing ASVAB) or not even getting a ged, this might be extreme cases, but ive seen posts like these on another forum.
I absolutely agree with you.
Computers used to be multi-purpose tools. They existed to benefit their users and make tasks easier.
Now their mainstream "considered ideal" form is just a constant dope-feed that drains your wallet and sells your every waking moment to anonymous bidders. The less you can rely on your own brain, the more you'll pay to rely on theirs.
Computers and those who understand them run society now, and there's definitely an obvious push toward techno-feudalism. A class of "Those Who Understand", served by a forever disadvantaged class of "Those Who Do Not."
A stark contrast can be seen by using any Linux machine, for instance. It's there for you. It is a tool that expects you to gain understanding and familiarity as you use it, rather than handing you all the answers without challenging you to think about anything.
As you gain familiarity, simply using the computer itself feels educating, it gets fun. You are rewarded for trying things by getting smarter.
Compare to any "normie OS."
"No." It says. "You're too stupid for any of this. Pay your subscription and ask Ai maybe."
The body is just as much in charge of the brain as the brain is of the body, it’s certainly a combination of factors including how we are using our bodies while learning, writing is fundamentally human and intellectual, pushing buttons to type, not so much.
That's a muddied ground to tread. People who can't draw can still interpret art, but I tend to agree with you. There's a lot about how the brain works that we still don't know
The dark ages didn't begin because the library of Alexandria fell, but because it was allowed to fall.
This is fundamentally our fault
The dark ages are dark only because things weren't being written down, so historians don't know what happened. It's not because people were dumber or something.
...yeah? That's what I'm saying? The dark ages began because literacy wasn't important and was allowed to decay, like what's happening now.
What makes you think literacy wasn't important and that it decayed?
What are you getting at? Am I arguing with a really badly programmed bot or something?
I don't understand what your point is here? The dark ages exist because literacy wasn't important to daily life. That's why they're dark
The same thing looks to be happening again as literacy and reading comprehension are on the decline. I think I made my points pretty clear. What exactly is yours? Or are you proving my point about the decline of reading comprehension through demonstration as live art or something?
I say we're already in a modern dark age, not because of lack of knowledge to pass around but the omnipresent nature of it now a days with so much being fabrications. We started giving kids access to tech as their mind developed and we're seeing it has highly negative consequences on unfettered use.
i can’t imagine that forcing kids to go to school during a pandemic where a disease spread whose long-term effects include cognitive impairment had a good impact either
They say things like this about every generation. Boomer kids had their brains rotted by TV and rock’n’roll. GenX couldn’t do long division because of calculators. Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting. In the bronze age, writing totally destroyed the youth’s ability to memorise epic poetry. And so on.
Standardised testing results plummeting for the first time ever is quite a bit different to the anecdotal generational gripes you’re describing.
Really highlights the problems with standardised testing.
The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?
Consider what would happen if every single student in the testing pool gained superintelligence overnight and they all aced the tests uniformly. What would testing companies do next? They can't just hand out perfect scores to everyone all the time. There's no value in that as a metric.
In the same vein, imagine if everyone was hit in the head with a hammer before test day and they all failed. Testing companies would be lambasted for flunking an entire graduating class, as the default assumption would be that the tests were the problem, not the students.
Standardized testing must be a rigged game which seeks to produce a particular set of outcomes to satisfy the state education boards, not to accurately measure the cognitive capacity of test-takers. Exam difficulty can change radically year to year simply because students are doing too well (or too poorly) for the purposes of sorting the "smart" students from the "dumb" ones.
That's before you get into the economic incentives of privatized exam-prep courses and supplemental material sales. Or the incentives offered by schools looking to goose scores by a certain degree per year in exchange for some kind of bonus.
Scientists: This is the first time this has actually happened based on measurable data.
You: Old people have been saying the same thing forever.
lmao that's simply not true. If you know anything about academia you'd know that you can find measuring for anything if you want to. In fact 100$ say that this is not the first time even with existing material.
While you are right about academia, if you are going to say "that's simply not true" then you need to simply have the information to prove it. If you don't easily find the information, then it is not simply not true. You are so confident in this that you are willing to bet real money. So go find that information.
Yeah.... But there's actually quite a bit of research to back it in this case. Standardized testing and literacy rates have been falling sharply since 2017, but accelerated even faster after COVID.
I don't think laptops in schools really have anything to do with it, it's likely a reflection of systemic failures in education and the economy. However, we do know that too much screen time for children is harmful for their cognitive development, and there are more and more kids being raised by tablets every day.
I work in healthcare in a pediatric hospital, in the last couple years we've had to put in strict rules for our clinic about the use of phones and tablets during the appointments. We often have to tell both the patient and their parents to put their phones away, just so they will somewhat pay attention during the appointment. Often both the parents and their children will throw tantrums when we do this.
Technology isn't inherently dangerous, but the social media we collectively engage with is designed to keep people engaged with it. It's almost like we all have little casino slots machines in our pockets, and there's plenty of research about the harm it's doing.
Are you saying that letting an anti public education grifter take over the Dept of Education was a mistake?!?
I mean that definitely doesn't help, but COVID in general was just a large disruption for most family's routines and children thrive with stability in their lives.
I agree, but the sharp decline started 3 years before the shutdown.
Writing Skills
gregg
You sent me down a super fun shorthand rabbit hole. Thanks!
As a multilingual, I use Gregg precisely because it coverages the languages I most use phonetically.
But as to what I prefer, phonographics be damned.
What are we testing them on? Some "basic skills" become irrelevant over time and the testing should reflect that.
We dont test kids on how to use a slide rule any more.
The advent of the calculator has likely made us all dumber at mental math, but that doesnt mean we havent gained skills elsewhere.
and welcome to 'short attention span theater"
There's no scientific proof of "shortened attention spans".
pay attention... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11236742/
Maybe it is you who should be paying attention:
This is quack science. Absolute rubbish to grift of rage bait and y'all are falling for this.
Reality is this is incredibly hard to study and we don't even have a thing as "attention span" properly defined to even perform effective studies.
Again, there's no credible evidence that short form videos are impacting our "attention spans" whatever the fuck that even means. What are you a vacuum robot hunting for dust balls? For what the attention is spanning for? That's not how humans work.
Man I hate such and such generation is such. if technology is dumbing the kids its also dumbing the adults. which it is. ironically its not making a bunch of high paying jobs for people who get elementary logic.
Putting generations at scope is honestly stupid and doesnt focus on the real issue. The generational concept should stay as a gimmick - otherwise it is used haphazardly.
I don't know. The folks over at Kalshi and Polymarket seem to be doing okay. I'm fairly certain they have a good grasp on logic and math. Better than most of their customers.
well some people have further levels of logic that realize where unfair systems eventually get you to.
My partner went back to school. The young person sitting next to him was snapping pictures of slides with her phone during lecture.
That feels like highlighting the entire chapter of assigned reading in pink.
Snapping pictures can be useful, but only if it's something secondary.
For example, the prof with a heavy accent is talking about the Avogadro constant. You try to write down what he's saying phonetically, and take some notes about what he's saying -- what that constant is, why it matters, etc. Later on, if you try to look it up and can't find it, you can look back at the snapshot you took to see how it's really spelled.
Or, sometimes a prof might write down where to find something in the textbook as a footnote. It's nice to be able to pull up a slide and find out where to look.
Too often though, people use things like screenshots or recordings as a primary source. They don't realize that the process of taking notes helps you understand and remember.
What's wrong with archiving slides so you can revisit them later?
When I was in college I did similar stuff because I benefited more from actually listening to the lectures instead of trying to keep up with taking notes.
Also, taking pictures is a good hack if you're nearsighted.
But the worst thing I ever witnessed was a Gen Z girl searching Google for Yahoo, then searching Yahoo for Yahoo mail.
Reminds me of my wife's cousin who would always search google for facebook then click the facebook.com link. Every time she wanted to go to facebook this is what she did. (This was on a desktop computer in pre-smartphone days.)
My friend is lecturing second year engineering students and they were all allowed one sheet at A4 paper for a cheat sheet (which they had to submit with their exam). One sheet was full of photos of the whiteboard taken from her phone. Suffice to say, the entire class failed the exam. Not because of the photos but because they didn't know how to learn.
The average Gen Z are truly going to get smashed when they enter the workforce. The tech industry has stunted their psychological growth by a decade.
I’m seeing an incredible level of anxiety in young workers. Literal head in both hands “I just can’t with…”
I work in a multitasking environment. Everyone present has a constant todo list in constant flux with varying movement of items in that last that move up and down in priority strength.
There are now workers who freak the fuck out when a second task is presented for their list of one. Again, literal head in hands, “I just can’t”.
Someone’s going to die if they don’t start firing these low resilience, incapable fucks. “I just can’t” with their incompetence in organized thinking and emotional regulation.
I see this, "I just can't deal" a lot in younger generations. I do wonder if they have been conditioned to respond like this due to social media overreaction videos and memes.
Prioritisation is a learned skill. So is communication, that way you can talk to others to determine a task's priority if you can't figure it out yourself.
Education systems really need a few classes on stuff like this, not just letting everyone experience the disaster of a "group project" for themselves.
I think it's literally because they don't have the mental stamina to deal with it. If they want to know anything, they just look it up and follow the steps. There's no resilience or practice in retaining lots of information.
For example, I had to memorise a lot of phone numbers and addresses just in case I left my address book at home. I had to remember where things were so I wouldn't get lost because I didn't have access to a digital map.
I also went back to university and encountered all of this. I was floored when my classmate went to a YouTube video of someone reading the GitHub manual page rather than reading it themselves.
My friend who works with two Gen Z colleagues are absolutely addicted to their phones and get massive anxiety when talking to someone on the phone (which is a core part of their job). They also get huge anxiety with admitting that they've made a mistake.
We've failed an entire generation as a society.
Time spent with zero access to “the answer” is key I think.
Or photocopying pages from a text book to review at home later…
Reminds me of an old Elvis Costello lyric..."Now you can't afford to fake all the drugs your parents used to take, because of their mistakes you'd better be wide awake".
Fuck, I know too many stupid adults already...
not useful for k-12, but very useful for college students.
Wow, a generation of kids dumber than their parents. Kids of MAGAt parents must be a sight to behold.
the aspirations of some gen-z was being an influencers, pretty much doomed from the start. hate to see what alpha will become, i think will be even worst once they come of age.
Nice one, Millennials.
Aren't gen-z the kids of gen-x? I'm a millennial and my parents are boomers, 2 gens before
I mean children are ideally raised by their grandparents but no, generations are successive, they don't "skip a generation". Greatest generation fought WW2, came home, and caused the Baby Boom. They raised Boomers who raised GenX who raised Millenials who raised GenZ who are presently raising Alpha. Of course there are millenials who raise millenials and genx who raised genz but that's not the usual case.
So you literally show where it skipped a generation, because you completely left out the Silent Generation between the Greatest Generation and the Boomers.
Greatest Gen are generally the parents of Boomers. Silent Generation are the parents of GenX. Boomers are the parents of Millennials. Gen X are the parents of Gen Z. Millennials are the parents of Gen Alpha.
There was the silent generation between the greatest and boomers.
And in general, it depends on the individual families and how old they were when they had kids. A generation, though poorly defined, spans less than 20 years of birthdates. So some teenage parents, if they were born in the early part of their generation, could have kids that fall in the same generation, late teens or 20s for the next gen, and 30s or 40s to skip a generation (or two). And adjust the ages if the parents are born later in the generation.
Like a boomer born in 1960 who didn't have a child until they were 40 would have skipped both gen x and millenials if the millennial cutoff is remembering 9/11.
Yeah thats click bait.
None of tbe cognitive assessment tools we have are reliable in any scientific way. It's all IQ test level of fundamental misunderstanding of human intelligence.
That being said there is 1 truth in the article - we do need to address learning to ways of human actually learn. Laptops or books or whatever it's mostly irrelevant. Grades and exams and class of 20 people is not how humans learn. The entire education industry needs to be fundamentally reshaped.
Unpopular opinion: AI is the right tool for education revolution and many people are already taking advantage of this tool while education institutions close their eyes and push paper tests. LLMs are never going away.
Are you basing this assumption on the idea that they're free to use? Because that's not sustainable.
The every single time an AI company has tried to actually require compensation for the tokens burned for AI queries, even amounts that would hardly cover a fraction of the operational cost for that 'work', contracts have mass-canceled immediately.
You don't have any control over token churn, either:
First of all, no matter how simple the prompt, LLMs can get stuck in thought loops that can chew through thousands of tokens before an answer can come out.
And second, every prompt you make not only eats a bunch of tokens incorporating the system prompt that can be billions of parameters long, but also includes every PRIOR prompt you put in, AND all their responses for "Context", therefore token use increases geometrically for every next prompt.
The only thing holding its usage aloft is that nobody has had to pay up front. But the bill is racking up more and more every day for the power and cooling and facility upkeep, presently "paid for" by massive debts. When these firms that took out those debts file for bankruptcy, you do realize what's owed doesn't just magically poof into smoke, right? Even if a court literally ordered an injunction that those debts be stricken from the books as if they never happened, there is no financial firm on earth that wouldn't find some backhanded way to balance the loss by shifting the burden to its other clients.
Maybe if any one of these companies posts a net profit, EVER, I might change my tune... but so far, this has been the emperor's new clothes all over again.
Nah you guys are delusioned by blind hate.
Compute will never become more expensive so prices will always decrease and you dont need top most expensive model to do work. Even for education you can spend like 100$/mo on tokens on open source models and get very similar output to top models. In 5 years that'll be 5$. Thats nothing.
It's an unpopular opinion because we can prove that using them gives you fucking brain damage, lol. Just look at this guy!
Prove where?
Everywhere
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12255134/
many conflating subjects here that are not even related to OP. Did you read the papers?
https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12255134/
Are you medically stupid?
where's the brain damage in the paper though? Luddite.
It's in your fuckin head, have you never heard of hyperbole before?
It's making you stupider and we can all tell.
Closed systems are tough to grasp and swallow, huh?
I don't need a neuroscientist to tell me Gen Z are a bunch of dumbasses.
You can either look at instagram and tictok or look at who votes for the DSA.
Lol "who votes for the DSA"
Your Democratic party just blocked a move to stop giving more money to Israel. Had years after first trump presidency to release Epstein files. Didn't.
It is the controlled opposition party. It answers to suits just like republicans do. They just dangle the carrot a little closer.
Its either, Democratic party, Republican party, or DSA which is the ONLY other party that has a shot right now and its only if it gets enough momentum.
I already know what Republicans and Democrats are about from years of seeing them get things to where they are right now
I am nowhere close to Gen Z by the way.
So, any comments on the followers of morons like Fuentes and Tate who are in their teens and 20s? Oh, guess they're totally not a bunch of dumbasses. Super smart rational people just doing some looksmaxxing.
Your sentence structure doesn't really give you much room to talk there, bud.
As you can see, we also have dumbfuck adults, as shown here.
you might need a neuroscientist for something else, though.
This isn't news and if I end up having to block this community over this generational bigotry posting, I guess I will.
This is not an airport, you do not need to announce your departure
Hey it's one of them!! Say something stupid!
Honestly, it does look like a case of bigotry. Its unneeded and literally does no one favours. It is valid to state the concerns.
It's not bigotry to point out that due to things beyond GenZ's control, their IQ is lower than previous generations.
Its the fact that "generations" are used here. It brings in a harmful concept, thats all.
That's seeing for forest and missing the trees, partner.
The fact that GenZ is not as intelligent as the trend of 'being smarter than your parents' is not a dig on GenZ it means that our education system failed them.
That's literally it.