I think you may be onto something with stigmatizing it. Unfortunately from a public policy perspective it probably needs to be parent led. At back to school night this year the principal at my kids' school spent an hour pleading with us to keep kids off these things as much as possible, and for everyone to get more comfortable with minimal to no supervision outdoor play. Her take is that everything is downstream of destruction of attention span and the atrophy of faculties very specific to short form video. This was notable since usually her address is a bunch of mundane stuff about funding.
I’ve had so many conversations with my peers about how when we’re parents, we’ll never let iPads anywhere near our kids. To the point where it’s kind of a cliche. But for this current crop of kids it seems to be a huge problem.
What gives? Are we just naive and we’ll pull out the iPad when it comes down to it? Is the next gen of parents going to be more enlightened?
The basic thing that makes it hard (parent of a 9yo and a 4yo here) is that pocket screens and short-form video are so ubiquitous in society, and used so frequently in every part of our adult lives, that keeping kids away from them is really hard. It’s not impossible, but it means swimming against the current constantly.
It’s also true that most parents do things they firmly believed they would never do before they had kids. My kids will sit at the table for every meal and eat the same food as the adults! My kids will always sleep in their own beds! I’ll never give my kids processed snacks! Many parents have been humbled by the reality of day to day parenting…
I'm probably a decade or so out from any real parenting but my thought now is that you have to pick and choose your battles. Maybe they need to occasionally look at the ipad, eat the unhealthy snack, etc. Just don't make a habit out of it.
But of course my take should obviously be read with the tiniest grain of salt due to my complete lack of experience!
But you get good at self-regulation by self-regulating, not by abstaining. It is by eating the one cookie after your meal that you learn to eat a cookie after your meal. Not by never having tasted a cookie in your life.
Dunno why most of the parents here keep getting this wrong…
Look, it’s because the kid sees YOU “playing” with the phone and being addicted to it, and they figure it must be SUPER fun to command your attention like that, so they DEMAND you share your “toy” with them.
And you’ll do it because they whine to HIGH MOTHERFUCKING HEAVEN LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.
The moralizers often forget the sheer amount of panic that any pre-k child can induce in a parent simply by whining and causing a disturbance. These little shits CAN and WILL basically ruin ALL of your plans for the ENTIRE day. And it just becomes a slog.
So when they demand the phone while you’re trying to get them to choke down their chicken fingers so they won’t have a tantrum an hour later in the middle of the zoo, you triage your concerns about smartphones burning a hole in their brain, because that little shit has been burning a hole in YOUR brain for the past 3 years of its entire precious, adorable life.
The teacher described gave the alternative, ‘limited to no supervision outdoor play’ which scares the bejesus out of a lot of people and sometimes has weather issues. And to be clear, at the ages she is talking about it means ‘free range in the neighborhood,’ not backyard. It’s trading a (real but almost certainly exaggerated) fear of physical harm for brain rot.
It’s because many parents don’t want to put forth the work of rearing their child and the IPad requires less time investment in their child. People sometimes do this because they don’t have time and are stressed. Others do it out of sloth and inattentiveness.
There was a video from about a decade ago of a young child who tried to interact with a magazine by scrolling and that should have been a warning sign for a lot of people.
Once he reaches, say, middle school, and can go places by himself, how would you know? You may know that it is not on a device that you give him, but he could use it on a library device, a friend's device, or a secret device that he buys with his own money and uses on wifi. All of these are common among the youth.
Obviously the subject of this article is education policy, but the extent to which this is a problem happening to kids is very overrated versus something happening to all of us and dumbing all of us down.
More acute among developing brains, surely, but as in so many other domains, we can't magically make schools firewalled off from what's happening outside their walls.
No - they literally don’t understand what it means. There’s an epidemic of TikTok videos captioned “POV,” when the video is not from the video maker’s point of view in any way, shape or form.
I agree with your basic position, but I was being snarky. Most of TikTok seems made for a resident of that ship in WALL-E if they were also huffing battery acid.
It’s kind of funny but also sad that any given amateur porn creator understands what “POV” means and the vast majority of people making TikTok videos don’t.
Would I not be mistaken, though, that often these mislabeled “POV” videos are simply using shortform’s 3rd-person-centric visual language to communicate a *mental* perspective?
That seems like much less of a dire violation of the intent of “POV”. Contrast with porn, where the action is the focus, and thus POV is inherently 1st-person.
The economics take here is that the internet is *underpriced* and should be paid for by subscription, not by ad revenue.
It would probably be a net positive for society if you paid Xfinity $0.50 per gigabyte of data you use per month, and then Xfinity distributes revenue (say at $0.47 per gigabyte) to each website you use in proportion to use. Want to use 30 hours of TikTok? Fine, pay $15. Of which $14 can go to ByteDance in exchange for not having any ads.
I suspect this would very rapidly push people away from overconsuming digital media in their leisure time and make the internet a much more work-first activity. It would also *equalize* the cost of consuming high-value, paywalled media (Slow Boring paid, NYT) and low-value, ad-revenue-funded media (porn, TikTok) which would probably be good.
Implementing this would also likely lead to my deportation, on account of suggesting it.
Nope. I don’t watch videos of any kind. Probably one of the few things keeping me relatively sane and well-hinged in the past 20 years was that I fucking DESPISED YouRube out the gate, and the entire “pivot to video” afterwards disgusted me.
Every once in a while I get sucked in by some Reels on FB, but it only takes 1-2 to remember that I’m being intentionally hypnotized by this bullshit. I practice what I preach and treat this stuff like a seriously addictive drug.
Ok, I have to speak up in defense of YouTube. Some of the stuff I find there is informative, creative (like Mark Rober and his squirrel maze) and hilarious (the Pitch Meeting series is TIGHT!). You just need to enjoy in moderation.
She makes 4 hour video essays that are more like podcasts. Like one’s about Disney animatronics or how bad that Star Wars experience was. Like a video every year.
Yeah def not my shit. If she’s at all as navel-gazey as Dan Carlin, I don’t want it.
Maybe not her, but Carlin is def a certain kind of Xer commentator who has a wonderful talent for finding a way to gaze at his navel for hours on end and say a whole buncha words he thinks are profound without actually saying anything meaningful… and without even having to get stoned first.
Sometimes it’s fun to go on one of those little journeys while I’m out running… and sometimes it’s just so fucking tedious and self-impressed that I can’t stand it.
The thing about the pivot to video that I find really strange is that it slows down consumption of information.
I can read several times faster than anyone can talk—and for that reason I hate everything from podcasts to videos to NPR to the evening news. It’s just too slow. My default setting on YouTube is 2x speed and I’m annoyed I can’t crank it up to 3x.
I can read a Substack essay in 4 minutes that covers an amount of content that would take a podcaster 30 minutes to get through. It really puzzles me that in our low-attention-span era, people would waste their time listening to people slowly talk about things.
This kind of authoritarian thinking is why I’m not optimistic about Democratic governance after Trump. The best possible situation is a divided government till one party evolves into something better than they are today.
I'm taking an econometrics class right now and all the Taiwanese kids are kicking my ass in it. But they are also very nice and always give me a lot of help. I've also heard from a few that they were interested in studying in the US, but were nervous because of the political situation. Sad!
How much French did you have when you started? Would long-ago high school French, used intermittently on work trips to Brussels, work in this situation? How long is the program? I would love to do something like this!
My husband taught econometrics in a PhD program at a US school. He said that his Chinese students (mostly from mainland China) were not any smarter or even better at math than his US students, but they were much more methodical and would go over every problem slowly, which led to way fewer simple mistakes.
I think maybe, if we are not doing a good job of educating our kids, we should focus on fixing that rather than saying, heck, we don’t have to worry about our own, not a problem. It is a problem.
Keep in mind, many of our kids have parents who were immigrants.
I don’t think any Slow Borer would ever say “Screw education, let’s just import smart immigrants.” It’s a “Porque no los dos?” situation: let’s welcome smart immigrants AND improve education for American children!
Not bad faith. I do think we have used the easy out of immigration to avoid fixing real problems.
Why have we not increased the number of US med school and residency slots? We have a shortage of doctors.
Same exact issue for veterinarians.
It’s now routine for smart US kids to go overseas for medical and veterinary training. Why are we tolerating the supply being artificially constrained?
This is not just a solution to a different problem, it’s a solution that’s absurd in this context. American kids are struggling in high school so let’s make sure more of them go to med school?
Reread the article. Top American kids in high school are, in general, not struggling, but we have failed to keep up with population growth in giving them opportunities here in the US.
Instead we keep complaining about shortages of skilled professionals while literally making it impossible to meet our own needs. It is truly sad to talk to a really smart HS kid who says, I would love to be a vet, but it’s almost impossible to get in. I was specifically thinking of one of my friend’s kids, who eventually did go to vet school. In Europe, not the US. She did really well there, too, and she’s a great vet, but not every family can afford to ship their kid off to professional school in Europe.
Kids should be able to have big dreams if we want them to work hard.
NCLB frequently resulted in an unintended gutting of HS vocational and practical training, with shortages of skilled trades and technical workers, and kids not going to college being measured by standards that don’t necessarily meet their actual needs. Measuring is important, but forcing everyone into one path is not.
We need to teach them better, they need to read whole books, and we need to not be stupid and trendy about teaching them. But we need learning to matter. Kids need goals that result in a good life and a reasonable chance of achieving them.
The fact that the average number of kids who are qualified to go to med school is declining doesn't necessarily mean the number of qualified kids is less than the number of available slots.
Wouldn't want them undercutting the wages of native smart Americans (or smart Native Americans, for that matter). It's just pragmatic class politics! If those Real Smart Guy Jobs were actually any good, no one would need to fill them with H1Bs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste building AI, or batteries for Hyundai, or low-cost transit projects...
A whole cohort was raised on I-Pads, taught on chromebooks, and socialized on TikTok. We have distracted many people to death. It’s odd that so many schools adopted non-zero grading and leniency, but now with school phone bans there seems at least some
“Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been peer reviewed – used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.”
N of 59, not peer reviewed, the kids were wearing electrodes while reading and I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is mentioned.
In any event, most reading is going to be on screens so kids need to get used to it.
Maybe 'getting used to it' is going to include a lot of non screen reading to keep the skill from atrophying. It could also be the case that the way text is formatted on screens is hurting the ability or desire to read. I think it's obviously harder on the eyes in a lot of cases. You're much too dismissive of the downsides.
An oat is an oat regardless of the method by which is it harvested. This does not hold for information retention in which one methodology is inferior to another as a matter of achieving the terminal value.
What’s left out here in terms of the dramatic drop in low performing student scores is the explosion of “school refusal” and chronic absenteeism. In NYC we have 1/3 of students who qualify as such.
I’ve spent 12 years as a frontline home and community-based Social Worker and watched what happens when we defanged child protective services for the sake of “equity” and fighting “white supremacy.” It used to be the case that if a kid was chronically absent eventually the caregiver might have to answer to a court, but would at least have workers in the home, addressing it and taking it seriously. This may have seemed heavy handed, but the removal of any interest or interventions on the part of the child welfare system to address educational neglect certainly corresponds to these trends. Not to mention the fact that usually Ed neglect was an indicator of larger problems in the home, which we then had the ability to address.
Eliminating the authority of CPS is currently a significant activist goal in New York City. There are few policies that would hurt poor, black kids more than removing the ability of the state to intervene when there is a material likelihood of abuse or neglect in the home.
The same activist instinct - that the state has no right to enforce norms and expectations - is also ruining public education. It's the specific motivation for "social promotion", "grading for equity", and "proficiency based learning", all of which have been spectacular disasters and are major contributors to the phenomena discussed here. It's pretty disappointing that Matt didn't even mention them.
ask your favorite search engine: why is Mississippi at the top of literacy rankings.
The poorest state in the freakin union tops New York and Cali because vibe-teaching was officially declared a bad idea 12 years ago. But what could they possibly know? They're poor.
I mean, snarky tone aside, I think on a newsletter like this where people take empiricism seriously, we’re actually quite interested in what Mississippi is doing right.
"Parental incuriousity about student performance" pulled a deep sigh out of me. Add in "low information voters" and "despite (horrible behavior X), Trump's approval rating hasn't changed," and it just feels like we're living through a time of either massive self-delusion or catastrophic non-interest (or, more likely, both). Is this the hard wood we're boring through? Or is something more modern happening?
This also brings to mind a gag from Father Ted, where a woman on a (British) quiz show is unable to identify the capital of the United Kingdom (that, as the host reminds her, she lives in).
I assume the joke was about the inanity of mid-90s British quiz shows, but it hits uncomfortably close to home as a university lecturer.
This brings to mind the first Jed Bartlett scene from the West Wing. The aides are discussing the Ten Commandments and nobody remembers what the first one was. Bartlett comes in with ‘I am the lord thy god’. Fun stuff.
Although, like, I rewatched it recently and it doesn’t make sense that no one in the room would know trust since three of the people in the room are members of the religious right. It’s not hard to remember, it’s the one you’d expect to kick off the list!
Most of it’s great! In the Pilot Sorkin was just more indulgent of himself than in a lot of later episodes (another pilot moment that makes no sense: Sam telling a random civilian “I slept with a prostitute last night.”
I think and hope that we are near the bottom of smartphone/social media-induced insanity-stupidity and that from now one we will all battle against it, especially when it comes to kids. My son can forget about smartphones and social media until he's 18 (he's 2 now). I feel so lucky that he grows up in a time where we understood that digital heroin is a real menace.
Good note at the end about blue states and education spending. I live in a more blue than red area that spends a TON on education. Over the past few years we’ve passed multiple $100m referendums, most going to new buildings. Our test results have remained lackluster. The district next to us is more red than blue. They spend less per child by about $4k per year and have a top five district (often the top district) every year. If you ask anyone from our district why this is, they have absolutely no logically explanation. More money doesn’t always translate into better test scores or a better quality education, there are more factors involved than just money.
I’m a high school social studies teacher. My wife is a special education teacher coach. She told me a few days ago that Kindergarten teachers in our district are seeing an increasing number of kids coming in who _cannot toilet themselves or speak_. Nothing is identifiably wrong with them. Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon. We can only speculate, but our best guess right now is that parents are so terminally online that they’re not interacting with their kids enough to potty train them or talk to them. Guess they figure schools can do the entire labor of raising their kids for them? 🤷
Jesus. That’s beyond “bad educational outcomes” and suggests either some disability or absolutely massive parental neglect! How else to interpret this?
"Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon". Google also indicates there's no statistics that would show this is truly a national problem, and quite a variety of other speculative theories on why it could be occurring (if it is).
I realize you said you were just speculating, but I think it's worth emphasizing that there's no particular data or evidence to support that particular theory.
My guess, at least if this is a high SES district - it's definitely not lack of parental attention.
1. Toileting: there's a very popular parenting style (part of gentle parenting) that guides parents to wait until kids ask to be potty trained. Many of these parents are upset that day-cares (and less commonly, upset about kindergartens) require potty training. The has resulted in the age of potty-training going way up for some.
2. Speaking: People socialize less and have smaller families than they used to, so kids are just getting less time with other kids. They come to kindergarten and freeze up.
It's a tired hobby to point out the the notable typos in Matt's posts, but I found them (count: 3) a bit funnier than usual in a post about declining reading levels. Is our bloggers learning?
Never sure how seriously to take Discordianism, but the SNAFU Principle of "true communication is only possible between equals" feels like it's hyperstitioning into a genuine aphorism. It really is hard to communicate with someone who can't easily parse text, if that's the medium one is most proficient in...not just *directly* via the written Word, but because the proficient processing of text also shifts how one thinks and speaks. Like I don't buy the strong version of Chomsky, yet it's clear to anyone who encounters regular miscommunications in the workplace that some things just work better with a face-to-face. Or a phone/video call, or a diagram, or a table, or (shudders at the impropriety) a meme. No amount of workshopping an internal memo at Grocery, Inc. will get me better results than just showing someone what I mean directly...
...and that increasingly even applies to supposedly educated coworkers. I guess now I know why: with stagnation and decline even within high-ability bands, "education" just ain't what it used to be. So even though school sucked bigly, in retrospect I'm glad to have gotten out while the getting was still relatively good. It does a real disservice to both the future of society writ large + life outcomes for these individuals to let the academic floor drop out...we're much stronger together with mass basic literacy, rather than an (over)educated cadre of cognoscenti that soy polloi increasingly don't like or trust anyway. Cultivating the cream of the intellectual crop while the rest of the intellectual milk curdles: correct me if I'm wrong, but history in that vein tends not to go so well! (where's THpacis when you need him...)
In defense of your coworkers benefitting from face-to-face communication. It's also hard to _write_ something so it's clearly interpretable. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one". It's very easy to write something and be "sure" of how it will be interpreted because that's what you intended.
I used to spend a lot of time workshopping emails so that they were both concise and clear. Now I'll write a first draft, ask AI to check for clarity, and it'll rewrite it for me.
The result is usually clearer and needs minimal editing, even if the tone feels a bit AI. I either use its version or pull specific sentences because it is more clear and faster.
A part of me feels like I'm losing something relying on AI for this, but it genuinely makes me more effective.
I like to communicate with graphs and diagrams. You'd think digital technology would have made that easier at some point, but no, every tool available is basically indistinguishable from Office 2007.
Matt Y says it’s “understandable” that parents don’t want to be told their children are doing poorly at school, because he too likes it when people say nice things about his son.
/headdesk
I like it when people say nice AND TRUE things about my son. It happens that my son is really smart and good at a lot of things, but he is not good at drawing. He basically does standard 10-year-old style stick figures. Without meaning to sound stuck-up, I can honestly say that my drawing skills at the age of 10 were noticeably better than his skills are now.
So, if someone told me “wow your son is so great at drawing,” I would know they are unserious or lying. I would NOT appreciate it! I would respect someone who told me “here are xyz recommendations if you want your son to get better at drawing” instead.
This just seems like common sense to me. Why wouldn’t loving parents want an accurate assessment of their children’s skills? You’ll still love them unconditionally if they’re bad at something!
Having witnessed the inside of the borg from my teacher wife for the last decade I think if anything this article is underrating the depth of the problem.
My overarching theory of what happened to education is basically as follows....
In general, teacher salaries are too low to attract the best teachers. Many teachers make more than people think, but nonetheless, the top decile of achievers in school are rarely wanting to become teachers in the first place because of how truly miserable the job is relative to the compensation. This means that schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack all the highly remunerative org management skills that the private sector rewards far more handsomely. This problem basically existed before and after NCLB but the existence of federal accountability papered over the deeper cracks.
But now with no federal accountability and a broader "equity based" culture in education circles, the emphasis on grading at all or even the idea that there is a bell curve like distribution of student abilities has become a policy problem to solve for, not an unavoidable reality. And too much is asked of individual teachers who are in no position to make any relevant change rather than policy makers to reinstall the carrots and sticks that avoided such problems beforehand.
This article fails to reckon at all with the question of the purpose of mental fitness in the first place.
There are two standard answers: a) it’s valuable for its own sake; b) it enables you to make money using your mind.
My interpretation of all the data here is that the weaker students, and more importantly their parents, are making a call: they realize their kids are not going to be competitive for careers that have a significant cognitive component; and they themselves don’t value mental fitness for its own sake. So why bother with all that book learning?
Are they wrong? Nationally can we claim they’re wrong? They’re likely correct that, whatever their kids’ virtues or undiscovered talents, they’re not going to be getting a desk job that requires a 4 year degree. Last I checked, only 45% of working adults are in a “white collar” job. And then who are we to tell them that education is valuable for its own sake? I certainly believe it is, but that’s me.
I also take issue with the account of the surveys. “Grade level” is a technical term, but at face value I’m sure most parents are interpreting it as “roughly on par with the other children in his/her grade”. After all, if the school system is setting standards that are so high that 70% of students are failing to meet them, that’s the school system’s fault!
The kids who can’t read at grade level won’t be able to interpret an HVAC manual, read blueprints, or later raise children that can read at grade level.
White collar / blue collar doesn't really cleave "smart job / dumb job" very well. Something like HVAC repair probably does take a lot of smarts, while something [I don't want to insult anyone, in particular, so think of a boring desk job] probably doesn't.
China continues the long-standing practice of communist countries of not being honest about what is happening inside, using all three tools in the toolbox: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
In a sane world, we’d just ban short-form video. Or tax it in inverse proportion to its length!
Short of that, we should stigmatize it. Short-form video should be disdained like a hard drug.
If YouTube is like alcohol, TikTok and Reels are cocaine.
I think you may be onto something with stigmatizing it. Unfortunately from a public policy perspective it probably needs to be parent led. At back to school night this year the principal at my kids' school spent an hour pleading with us to keep kids off these things as much as possible, and for everyone to get more comfortable with minimal to no supervision outdoor play. Her take is that everything is downstream of destruction of attention span and the atrophy of faculties very specific to short form video. This was notable since usually her address is a bunch of mundane stuff about funding.
I’ve had so many conversations with my peers about how when we’re parents, we’ll never let iPads anywhere near our kids. To the point where it’s kind of a cliche. But for this current crop of kids it seems to be a huge problem.
What gives? Are we just naive and we’ll pull out the iPad when it comes down to it? Is the next gen of parents going to be more enlightened?
The basic thing that makes it hard (parent of a 9yo and a 4yo here) is that pocket screens and short-form video are so ubiquitous in society, and used so frequently in every part of our adult lives, that keeping kids away from them is really hard. It’s not impossible, but it means swimming against the current constantly.
It’s also true that most parents do things they firmly believed they would never do before they had kids. My kids will sit at the table for every meal and eat the same food as the adults! My kids will always sleep in their own beds! I’ll never give my kids processed snacks! Many parents have been humbled by the reality of day to day parenting…
I'm probably a decade or so out from any real parenting but my thought now is that you have to pick and choose your battles. Maybe they need to occasionally look at the ipad, eat the unhealthy snack, etc. Just don't make a habit out of it.
But of course my take should obviously be read with the tiniest grain of salt due to my complete lack of experience!
Kids are bad at self-regulation, so this is much harder than it might seem. Once you crack open the door, you're on the slippery slope.
But you get good at self-regulation by self-regulating, not by abstaining. It is by eating the one cookie after your meal that you learn to eat a cookie after your meal. Not by never having tasted a cookie in your life.
How is short form video used so frequently in your adult life? If people didn't show me TikTok on their phones, I would never encounter it.
Dunno why most of the parents here keep getting this wrong…
Look, it’s because the kid sees YOU “playing” with the phone and being addicted to it, and they figure it must be SUPER fun to command your attention like that, so they DEMAND you share your “toy” with them.
And you’ll do it because they whine to HIGH MOTHERFUCKING HEAVEN LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE.
The moralizers often forget the sheer amount of panic that any pre-k child can induce in a parent simply by whining and causing a disturbance. These little shits CAN and WILL basically ruin ALL of your plans for the ENTIRE day. And it just becomes a slog.
So when they demand the phone while you’re trying to get them to choke down their chicken fingers so they won’t have a tantrum an hour later in the middle of the zoo, you triage your concerns about smartphones burning a hole in their brain, because that little shit has been burning a hole in YOUR brain for the past 3 years of its entire precious, adorable life.
Did I mention I really love kids?
this is very accurate! I also love my kids! :)
The teacher described gave the alternative, ‘limited to no supervision outdoor play’ which scares the bejesus out of a lot of people and sometimes has weather issues. And to be clear, at the ages she is talking about it means ‘free range in the neighborhood,’ not backyard. It’s trading a (real but almost certainly exaggerated) fear of physical harm for brain rot.
Never state something you will never do as a parent. It will come back to bite you.
It’s because many parents don’t want to put forth the work of rearing their child and the IPad requires less time investment in their child. People sometimes do this because they don’t have time and are stressed. Others do it out of sloth and inattentiveness.
All in all, it’s a crutch.
There was a video from about a decade ago of a young child who tried to interact with a magazine by scrolling and that should have been a warning sign for a lot of people.
The thing is you are doing it out of knowledge of the risks. I think earlier generations had no choice but to keep up with the technology and trends!
And they'll do what instead needs to be the question. How comfortable will you be with kids out of sight?
What is wrong with parents? Over my dead body that my son would use TikTok.
I think it is probably a combination of ignorance and path of least resistance.
Once he reaches, say, middle school, and can go places by himself, how would you know? You may know that it is not on a device that you give him, but he could use it on a library device, a friend's device, or a secret device that he buys with his own money and uses on wifi. All of these are common among the youth.
Obviously the subject of this article is education policy, but the extent to which this is a problem happening to kids is very overrated versus something happening to all of us and dumbing all of us down.
More acute among developing brains, surely, but as in so many other domains, we can't magically make schools firewalled off from what's happening outside their walls.
Pigouvian taxes on short videos? I like it!
You are a true exemplar of Matthew Yglesias Thought With Boring Characteristics.
I’ll take that as a compliment! 😊
We should have all noticed that this generation doesn't understand the meaning of the phrase "point of view."
Are you trying to imply that somehow the kids started out “woke” and thus were unable to understand that phrase?
No - they literally don’t understand what it means. There’s an epidemic of TikTok videos captioned “POV,” when the video is not from the video maker’s point of view in any way, shape or form.
And why does this matter?
I agree with your basic position, but I was being snarky. Most of TikTok seems made for a resident of that ship in WALL-E if they were also huffing battery acid.
Fair. I generally agree, just didn’t understand the reference.
It’s kind of funny but also sad that any given amateur porn creator understands what “POV” means and the vast majority of people making TikTok videos don’t.
Would I not be mistaken, though, that often these mislabeled “POV” videos are simply using shortform’s 3rd-person-centric visual language to communicate a *mental* perspective?
That seems like much less of a dire violation of the intent of “POV”. Contrast with porn, where the action is the focus, and thus POV is inherently 1st-person.
I guess…? I think that’s being way too generous - Occam’s Razor suggests that they just literally don’t understand the meaning of the words.
The economics take here is that the internet is *underpriced* and should be paid for by subscription, not by ad revenue.
It would probably be a net positive for society if you paid Xfinity $0.50 per gigabyte of data you use per month, and then Xfinity distributes revenue (say at $0.47 per gigabyte) to each website you use in proportion to use. Want to use 30 hours of TikTok? Fine, pay $15. Of which $14 can go to ByteDance in exchange for not having any ads.
I suspect this would very rapidly push people away from overconsuming digital media in their leisure time and make the internet a much more work-first activity. It would also *equalize* the cost of consuming high-value, paywalled media (Slow Boring paid, NYT) and low-value, ad-revenue-funded media (porn, TikTok) which would probably be good.
Implementing this would also likely lead to my deportation, on account of suggesting it.
I dunno if we’re ever going away from “unlimited data” in anything but a dystopian hellscape though.
Sure, this is probably a structural choice that would have needed to be normalized in 1998.
You watch Jenny Nicholson videos don’t you?
Nope. I don’t watch videos of any kind. Probably one of the few things keeping me relatively sane and well-hinged in the past 20 years was that I fucking DESPISED YouRube out the gate, and the entire “pivot to video” afterwards disgusted me.
Every once in a while I get sucked in by some Reels on FB, but it only takes 1-2 to remember that I’m being intentionally hypnotized by this bullshit. I practice what I preach and treat this stuff like a seriously addictive drug.
Ok, I have to speak up in defense of YouTube. Some of the stuff I find there is informative, creative (like Mark Rober and his squirrel maze) and hilarious (the Pitch Meeting series is TIGHT!). You just need to enjoy in moderation.
The TV shows are fine. The DIY ecosystem is AMAZING. Just most of the rest is nonsense.
And if you're trying to figure out how to replace the battery in your damn key fob, it's invaluable.
She makes 4 hour video essays that are more like podcasts. Like one’s about Disney animatronics or how bad that Star Wars experience was. Like a video every year.
Millennial YouTube: Here's a four hour video essay
Zoomer YouTube: let's recap TikTok drama
Yeah def not my shit. If she’s at all as navel-gazey as Dan Carlin, I don’t want it.
Maybe not her, but Carlin is def a certain kind of Xer commentator who has a wonderful talent for finding a way to gaze at his navel for hours on end and say a whole buncha words he thinks are profound without actually saying anything meaningful… and without even having to get stoned first.
Sometimes it’s fun to go on one of those little journeys while I’m out running… and sometimes it’s just so fucking tedious and self-impressed that I can’t stand it.
Na, it’s more of “look at this weird niche thing.” She also had a whole thing about getting the largest stuffed spider ever produced.
It’s mostly nerdy and theme park stuff. Kind of like Defunctland (what happened to that one ride guy.)
Ahh okay, is it like Just The Zoo Of Us on Maximum Fun? That’s about the most “Tumblr Millennial” that I can tolerate.
Reels as a medium just reeks of desperation.
The thing about the pivot to video that I find really strange is that it slows down consumption of information.
I can read several times faster than anyone can talk—and for that reason I hate everything from podcasts to videos to NPR to the evening news. It’s just too slow. My default setting on YouTube is 2x speed and I’m annoyed I can’t crank it up to 3x.
I can read a Substack essay in 4 minutes that covers an amount of content that would take a podcaster 30 minutes to get through. It really puzzles me that in our low-attention-span era, people would waste their time listening to people slowly talk about things.
Seconded; I speed through most everything except for fiction.
This kind of authoritarian thinking is why I’m not optimistic about Democratic governance after Trump. The best possible situation is a divided government till one party evolves into something better than they are today.
The perfect moment to start redoubling our efforts to drive away smart foreigners who one day might become smart Americans!
I'm taking an econometrics class right now and all the Taiwanese kids are kicking my ass in it. But they are also very nice and always give me a lot of help. I've also heard from a few that they were interested in studying in the US, but were nervous because of the political situation. Sad!
Hey, I've gone back to school overseas, too! In France. To study French. I'm writing this comment from Toulouse.
And you're right. It is sad, and so unnecessary, and so counterproductive.
How much French did you have when you started? Would long-ago high school French, used intermittently on work trips to Brussels, work in this situation? How long is the program? I would love to do something like this!
My husband taught econometrics in a PhD program at a US school. He said that his Chinese students (mostly from mainland China) were not any smarter or even better at math than his US students, but they were much more methodical and would go over every problem slowly, which led to way fewer simple mistakes.
Indeed. Let’s not forget that the smart foreign students have had most if not all their schooling paid for by someone else.
I think maybe, if we are not doing a good job of educating our kids, we should focus on fixing that rather than saying, heck, we don’t have to worry about our own, not a problem. It is a problem.
Keep in mind, many of our kids have parents who were immigrants.
I don’t think any Slow Borer would ever say “Screw education, let’s just import smart immigrants.” It’s a “Porque no los dos?” situation: let’s welcome smart immigrants AND improve education for American children!
It wouldn't be an SB thread without a dollop of bad faith comment interpretation. Lol.
Not bad faith. I do think we have used the easy out of immigration to avoid fixing real problems.
Why have we not increased the number of US med school and residency slots? We have a shortage of doctors.
Same exact issue for veterinarians.
It’s now routine for smart US kids to go overseas for medical and veterinary training. Why are we tolerating the supply being artificially constrained?
This is not just a solution to a different problem, it’s a solution that’s absurd in this context. American kids are struggling in high school so let’s make sure more of them go to med school?
Reread the article. Top American kids in high school are, in general, not struggling, but we have failed to keep up with population growth in giving them opportunities here in the US.
Instead we keep complaining about shortages of skilled professionals while literally making it impossible to meet our own needs. It is truly sad to talk to a really smart HS kid who says, I would love to be a vet, but it’s almost impossible to get in. I was specifically thinking of one of my friend’s kids, who eventually did go to vet school. In Europe, not the US. She did really well there, too, and she’s a great vet, but not every family can afford to ship their kid off to professional school in Europe.
Kids should be able to have big dreams if we want them to work hard.
NCLB frequently resulted in an unintended gutting of HS vocational and practical training, with shortages of skilled trades and technical workers, and kids not going to college being measured by standards that don’t necessarily meet their actual needs. Measuring is important, but forcing everyone into one path is not.
We need to teach them better, they need to read whole books, and we need to not be stupid and trendy about teaching them. But we need learning to matter. Kids need goals that result in a good life and a reasonable chance of achieving them.
The fact that the average number of kids who are qualified to go to med school is declining doesn't necessarily mean the number of qualified kids is less than the number of available slots.
I don't think there's any "maybe" about it. We definitely should and must do a better job educating our children!
The Trump administration is bad on education *and* bad on immigration.
He loves the poorly educated!
Very true.
Wouldn't want them undercutting the wages of native smart Americans (or smart Native Americans, for that matter). It's just pragmatic class politics! If those Real Smart Guy Jobs were actually any good, no one would need to fill them with H1Bs. A mind is a terrible thing to waste building AI, or batteries for Hyundai, or low-cost transit projects...
A whole cohort was raised on I-Pads, taught on chromebooks, and socialized on TikTok. We have distracted many people to death. It’s odd that so many schools adopted non-zero grading and leniency, but now with school phone bans there seems at least some
acknowledgment that schools train habits.
Reading whole books rather than short excerpts would help immediately.
I was appalled that my daughter’s 6th grade class read no books. Recent years have been better, thank god.
Ban the chromebooks too. Back to paper for everything education-related.
Shall we only eat grain that has been hand scythed and hauled in ox carts?
Not a valid objection.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/17/kids-reading-better-paper-vs-screen
“Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been peer reviewed – used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.”
N of 59, not peer reviewed, the kids were wearing electrodes while reading and I don’t think the magnitude of the effect is mentioned.
In any event, most reading is going to be on screens so kids need to get used to it.
Maybe 'getting used to it' is going to include a lot of non screen reading to keep the skill from atrophying. It could also be the case that the way text is formatted on screens is hurting the ability or desire to read. I think it's obviously harder on the eyes in a lot of cases. You're much too dismissive of the downsides.
This is just the top-hit. It appears that a 49-atudy metaanalysis reaches the same conclusion regarding screen inferiority on information retention. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-screens-paper-effective-absorb-retain.html#google_vignette
An oat is an oat regardless of the method by which is it harvested. This does not hold for information retention in which one methodology is inferior to another as a matter of achieving the terminal value.
The NAEP tests are administered on tablets/Chromebooks :)
Seems like they could go back to paper fairly easily.
Blue Books for the Book God.
Scantrons for the Pencil Throne.
They sure can.
What’s left out here in terms of the dramatic drop in low performing student scores is the explosion of “school refusal” and chronic absenteeism. In NYC we have 1/3 of students who qualify as such.
I’ve spent 12 years as a frontline home and community-based Social Worker and watched what happens when we defanged child protective services for the sake of “equity” and fighting “white supremacy.” It used to be the case that if a kid was chronically absent eventually the caregiver might have to answer to a court, but would at least have workers in the home, addressing it and taking it seriously. This may have seemed heavy handed, but the removal of any interest or interventions on the part of the child welfare system to address educational neglect certainly corresponds to these trends. Not to mention the fact that usually Ed neglect was an indicator of larger problems in the home, which we then had the ability to address.
Eliminating the authority of CPS is currently a significant activist goal in New York City. There are few policies that would hurt poor, black kids more than removing the ability of the state to intervene when there is a material likelihood of abuse or neglect in the home.
The same activist instinct - that the state has no right to enforce norms and expectations - is also ruining public education. It's the specific motivation for "social promotion", "grading for equity", and "proficiency based learning", all of which have been spectacular disasters and are major contributors to the phenomena discussed here. It's pretty disappointing that Matt didn't even mention them.
In Kamala Harris’s primary campaign, she was attacked from the left over getting the state involved in truancy cases!
ask your favorite search engine: why is Mississippi at the top of literacy rankings.
The poorest state in the freakin union tops New York and Cali because vibe-teaching was officially declared a bad idea 12 years ago. But what could they possibly know? They're poor.
I mean, snarky tone aside, I think on a newsletter like this where people take empiricism seriously, we’re actually quite interested in what Mississippi is doing right.
"Parental incuriousity about student performance" pulled a deep sigh out of me. Add in "low information voters" and "despite (horrible behavior X), Trump's approval rating hasn't changed," and it just feels like we're living through a time of either massive self-delusion or catastrophic non-interest (or, more likely, both). Is this the hard wood we're boring through? Or is something more modern happening?
As a society, we don't seem prepared to admit that the dominant political movement right now is steeped in loser culture.
Honestly, movements plural! A lot of the left is dead set against anyone being improved or held to account.
We're becoming sloppy across the board.
I think it’s important that we combat this by putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms /s
As long as they teach the kids to read it using phonics.
If students can’t identify the speaker in the first commandment, we know that literacy is doomed.
Why do I feel like this would be genuinely difficult even for a first-year university student…?
Because standards have dropped to the level of “dead fish that can co-sign loans.”
This also brings to mind a gag from Father Ted, where a woman on a (British) quiz show is unable to identify the capital of the United Kingdom (that, as the host reminds her, she lives in).
I assume the joke was about the inanity of mid-90s British quiz shows, but it hits uncomfortably close to home as a university lecturer.
This brings to mind the first Jed Bartlett scene from the West Wing. The aides are discussing the Ten Commandments and nobody remembers what the first one was. Bartlett comes in with ‘I am the lord thy god’. Fun stuff.
Although, like, I rewatched it recently and it doesn’t make sense that no one in the room would know trust since three of the people in the room are members of the religious right. It’s not hard to remember, it’s the one you’d expect to kick off the list!
In fairness, West Wing was one of the better fantasy series of the early 2000s.
Most of it’s great! In the Pilot Sorkin was just more indulgent of himself than in a lot of later episodes (another pilot moment that makes no sense: Sam telling a random civilian “I slept with a prostitute last night.”
It WOULD be a challenging reading assignment! [ only 1/2 :)] But nothing like passages from the Koran.
My older relatives told me that in Haiti, they would take oral exams. If you got something wrong, the professors could spank you. Just saying.
Haiti isn't the societal example we should be shooting for.
Oral exams are definitely one solution to AI though
The original comment was completely insane.
I mean, in France 20 years ago when I was teaching English, there was no spanking, but it was very much a “here we punish ignorance” kind of vibe.
fear reduces effective intelligence
Oral exams minus the spanking are not bad.
I think and hope that we are near the bottom of smartphone/social media-induced insanity-stupidity and that from now one we will all battle against it, especially when it comes to kids. My son can forget about smartphones and social media until he's 18 (he's 2 now). I feel so lucky that he grows up in a time where we understood that digital heroin is a real menace.
Great piece Matt!
Good note at the end about blue states and education spending. I live in a more blue than red area that spends a TON on education. Over the past few years we’ve passed multiple $100m referendums, most going to new buildings. Our test results have remained lackluster. The district next to us is more red than blue. They spend less per child by about $4k per year and have a top five district (often the top district) every year. If you ask anyone from our district why this is, they have absolutely no logically explanation. More money doesn’t always translate into better test scores or a better quality education, there are more factors involved than just money.
You should keep asking that question!
I’m a high school social studies teacher. My wife is a special education teacher coach. She told me a few days ago that Kindergarten teachers in our district are seeing an increasing number of kids coming in who _cannot toilet themselves or speak_. Nothing is identifiably wrong with them. Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon. We can only speculate, but our best guess right now is that parents are so terminally online that they’re not interacting with their kids enough to potty train them or talk to them. Guess they figure schools can do the entire labor of raising their kids for them? 🤷
Jesus. That’s beyond “bad educational outcomes” and suggests either some disability or absolutely massive parental neglect! How else to interpret this?
"Google indicates it’s a nationwide phenomenon". Google also indicates there's no statistics that would show this is truly a national problem, and quite a variety of other speculative theories on why it could be occurring (if it is).
I realize you said you were just speculating, but I think it's worth emphasizing that there's no particular data or evidence to support that particular theory.
My guess, at least if this is a high SES district - it's definitely not lack of parental attention.
1. Toileting: there's a very popular parenting style (part of gentle parenting) that guides parents to wait until kids ask to be potty trained. Many of these parents are upset that day-cares (and less commonly, upset about kindergartens) require potty training. The has resulted in the age of potty-training going way up for some.
2. Speaking: People socialize less and have smaller families than they used to, so kids are just getting less time with other kids. They come to kindergarten and freeze up.
It's a tired hobby to point out the the notable typos in Matt's posts, but I found them (count: 3) a bit funnier than usual in a post about declining reading levels. Is our bloggers learning?
Never sure how seriously to take Discordianism, but the SNAFU Principle of "true communication is only possible between equals" feels like it's hyperstitioning into a genuine aphorism. It really is hard to communicate with someone who can't easily parse text, if that's the medium one is most proficient in...not just *directly* via the written Word, but because the proficient processing of text also shifts how one thinks and speaks. Like I don't buy the strong version of Chomsky, yet it's clear to anyone who encounters regular miscommunications in the workplace that some things just work better with a face-to-face. Or a phone/video call, or a diagram, or a table, or (shudders at the impropriety) a meme. No amount of workshopping an internal memo at Grocery, Inc. will get me better results than just showing someone what I mean directly...
...and that increasingly even applies to supposedly educated coworkers. I guess now I know why: with stagnation and decline even within high-ability bands, "education" just ain't what it used to be. So even though school sucked bigly, in retrospect I'm glad to have gotten out while the getting was still relatively good. It does a real disservice to both the future of society writ large + life outcomes for these individuals to let the academic floor drop out...we're much stronger together with mass basic literacy, rather than an (over)educated cadre of cognoscenti that soy polloi increasingly don't like or trust anyway. Cultivating the cream of the intellectual crop while the rest of the intellectual milk curdles: correct me if I'm wrong, but history in that vein tends not to go so well! (where's THpacis when you need him...)
In defense of your coworkers benefitting from face-to-face communication. It's also hard to _write_ something so it's clearly interpretable. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one". It's very easy to write something and be "sure" of how it will be interpreted because that's what you intended.
I used to spend a lot of time workshopping emails so that they were both concise and clear. Now I'll write a first draft, ask AI to check for clarity, and it'll rewrite it for me.
The result is usually clearer and needs minimal editing, even if the tone feels a bit AI. I either use its version or pull specific sentences because it is more clear and faster.
A part of me feels like I'm losing something relying on AI for this, but it genuinely makes me more effective.
I like to communicate with graphs and diagrams. You'd think digital technology would have made that easier at some point, but no, every tool available is basically indistinguishable from Office 2007.
Matt Y says it’s “understandable” that parents don’t want to be told their children are doing poorly at school, because he too likes it when people say nice things about his son.
/headdesk
I like it when people say nice AND TRUE things about my son. It happens that my son is really smart and good at a lot of things, but he is not good at drawing. He basically does standard 10-year-old style stick figures. Without meaning to sound stuck-up, I can honestly say that my drawing skills at the age of 10 were noticeably better than his skills are now.
So, if someone told me “wow your son is so great at drawing,” I would know they are unserious or lying. I would NOT appreciate it! I would respect someone who told me “here are xyz recommendations if you want your son to get better at drawing” instead.
This just seems like common sense to me. Why wouldn’t loving parents want an accurate assessment of their children’s skills? You’ll still love them unconditionally if they’re bad at something!
Having witnessed the inside of the borg from my teacher wife for the last decade I think if anything this article is underrating the depth of the problem.
(appropriate qualification of Matt's good and sage piece on Lumping from a few days ago https://www.slowboring.com/p/theres-too-many-lumpers-out-there) BUT....
My overarching theory of what happened to education is basically as follows....
In general, teacher salaries are too low to attract the best teachers. Many teachers make more than people think, but nonetheless, the top decile of achievers in school are rarely wanting to become teachers in the first place because of how truly miserable the job is relative to the compensation. This means that schools are largely staffed by B students, and crucially, overseen by school administrations that lack all the highly remunerative org management skills that the private sector rewards far more handsomely. This problem basically existed before and after NCLB but the existence of federal accountability papered over the deeper cracks.
But now with no federal accountability and a broader "equity based" culture in education circles, the emphasis on grading at all or even the idea that there is a bell curve like distribution of student abilities has become a policy problem to solve for, not an unavoidable reality. And too much is asked of individual teachers who are in no position to make any relevant change rather than policy makers to reinstall the carrots and sticks that avoided such problems beforehand.
This article fails to reckon at all with the question of the purpose of mental fitness in the first place.
There are two standard answers: a) it’s valuable for its own sake; b) it enables you to make money using your mind.
My interpretation of all the data here is that the weaker students, and more importantly their parents, are making a call: they realize their kids are not going to be competitive for careers that have a significant cognitive component; and they themselves don’t value mental fitness for its own sake. So why bother with all that book learning?
Are they wrong? Nationally can we claim they’re wrong? They’re likely correct that, whatever their kids’ virtues or undiscovered talents, they’re not going to be getting a desk job that requires a 4 year degree. Last I checked, only 45% of working adults are in a “white collar” job. And then who are we to tell them that education is valuable for its own sake? I certainly believe it is, but that’s me.
I also take issue with the account of the surveys. “Grade level” is a technical term, but at face value I’m sure most parents are interpreting it as “roughly on par with the other children in his/her grade”. After all, if the school system is setting standards that are so high that 70% of students are failing to meet them, that’s the school system’s fault!
The kids who can’t read at grade level won’t be able to interpret an HVAC manual, read blueprints, or later raise children that can read at grade level.
White collar / blue collar doesn't really cleave "smart job / dumb job" very well. Something like HVAC repair probably does take a lot of smarts, while something [I don't want to insult anyone, in particular, so think of a boring desk job] probably doesn't.
China continues the long-standing practice of communist countries of not being honest about what is happening inside, using all three tools in the toolbox: lies, damned lies, and statistics.