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I suspect the bigger culprit is the optimized monetization of human attention, because pre-algorithmic social media doesn't seem to be as destructive. The fact that science wasn't as affected as math and reading (both of which rely more on attention/practice than rote memorization) somewhat supports this.
- Schools have not gone back to pre-COVID practices. Online courses, use of digital tools, fewer tests, dropping SAT/ACT requirements, and most of all budget cuts in school districts – all are still happening today.
And we can not just change childrens habits, after we forced them to sit at home for 2 years with nothing but youtube! They missed key developmental phase!
I believe that both COVID and LLMs are disrupting educational metrics. But in terms of which one did more short-term scale damage (i.e, within 4 years), I would wager it was COVID.
A continuous decline across both COVID and llms points towards a different causal relationship to me. I would be more likely to believe algorithmic social media or computerized teaching tools are to blame, but that is pure conjecture.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
Between 2018 and 2022, we had a global pandemic hit!
The only reason we were "digitalizing education" is because millions of people were getting sick and dying. Millions more lost their jobs.
Trying to blame any single aspect of what happened during that period, like moving to remote learning, is hopelessly myopic and blinkered.
That would have contributed to to the decline.
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
Having a good memory enables you to think deeper - if you remember certain concepts, you can reason better because you remember more concepts so your thinking is more in depth.
There are things that you just see/know/recognize that are not easily searchable/promptable because the fact that you should be searching/prompting would not occur if you had not seen the pattern before.
One could argue "experience" is just the accumulation of memory such that you can recognize more patterns more rapidly, short circuiting bad decisions before they are made. With LLMs its even more important to have a well tuned "what should be getting built" mental framework if that becomes our primary job.
My history lessons at school were entirely "here's 30 dates of these important events happening, there will be a test at the end of the month where you have to name the event at each of the given dates". I just remember sitting there trying to somehow remember what happened on each of those random dates, what event was it that I knew nothing about with zero context other than the fact that it happened. I can confidently say that after I ended my formal education I remember 0 of any of those dates. That approach to teaching history is just completely wrong, I would have loved to be told WHY certain things happened not just when they happened, but the system wasn't designed for it.
But maths formulas or even chemistry and physics - yes, that makes a lot of sense because you need to remember them and then you can actually use them to solve problems later.
More than half of the USA believes the Earth is less than 10k years old, and this has been true for decades. Being able to read isn’t enough, people have to actually do the reading.
Source?
I thought it was around that magic 20% [1] figure for which you can find support in America for almost any idiocy.
[1] https://ncse.ngo/americans-scientific-knowledge-and-beliefs-...
Over the same period, reading scores actually improved somewhat for each of the 1998 poorly scoring groups (and quite a bit for Asians), but the poorly scoring groups simply make up so much more of the population now that it drags everything else down.
| Group | 1998 NAEP | 2024 NAEP | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *268* | *266* | −2 |
| Black | *242* | *243* | +1 |
| Hispanic | *241* | *245* | +4 |
| Asian/Pacific Islander | *261* | *280* | +19 |
| All public-school students | *261* | *257* | −4 |
| Race/ethnicity | 1999 Grade 8 | 2023 Grade 8 | Change |
|---|---:|---:|---:|
| White | *64.5%* | *44.0%* | −20.5 pp |
| Black | 16.1% | 14.9% | −1.2 pp |
| Hispanic | *14.3%* | *29.4%* | +15.1 pp |
| Asian/Pacific Islander* | 3.9% | 5.9% | +2.0 pp |
| American Indian/Alaska Native | 1.2% | 0.9% | −0.3 pp |
| Two or more races | not separately reported | 4.8% | — |
I’d have been more surprised if there wasn’t any impact on learning.
Especially the part where it states that part of the issue is in 2000 when Finland had higher test scores then everyone it was attributed to play based learning and less testing. Everyone immediately jumped on this, because if you can have more fun and learn more, of course that is the way to go. This opinion still permeates both teachers and parents. I was of this opinion for a long time, as I went to a rigorous school, and would have enjoyed "play based learning".
It turns out this may have been way off and difficult schools such as those in China and Singapore have the best results. In the Finland example they had only recently switched from more rigorous to more play based, so the rigorous schooling was still being shown in testing. I think we were all a bit bamboozled by this. Maybe it seemed too good to be true and we should have been more critical of the findings. But the play based learning opinion is still strong and we as a society need to move back to more rigor will make stronger students.
Chinese students can work like fiends because they are in competition for a shortage of seats at elite universities. Not too surprisingly they burn out or they slack off once the pressure is off.
My personal experience with self-paced learning in middle school tells me that some students are capable of blazing through a curriculum at 3X the normal pace of classroom instruction, under no pressure at all. Technology can enable self paced learning, and it's really the only answer to scale it up. So it's hard to blame technology for screwing up education.
One impact for later time was increased immigration and challenges of integrating increasing amount non-native speakers in same system that used to have nearly exclusively native speakers.
One mom told me: "I like the American school. It's like Singapore, but with fewer beatings."
I mean, I always was. My rule has always been - if something seems too good to be true, it is.
This is my biggest issue with ‘progressive’ types. They always seem to get drawn in by hype and flash, and neglect to consider 2nd order effects. I’ve had an endless number of conversations with friends of this persuasion where I point out very very obvious problems with some hot new idea they are so enamored with, which they inevitably poo-poo as me being a mean old cynical conservative. And a few years later we end up with articles like above.
More specifically I wonder if the birth of social media in the form of short videos is the real culprit. Most other single causes don't line up even if I can believe they are a factor.
It seems like we should be able to adapt, but the dopamine hit of short videos may prove as difficult to manage as healthy eating and exercise in terms of self-discipline.
-Everyone has screens.
-Education system broken.
-Covid disruptions
-Biological effects of Covid infections
I'm not saying lower test scores are good but they might be a sign that we need to move from "push based" forced complete education in childhood to a more "pull based" system. That would mean the only mandatory part is basic skills as opposed to knowledge, things like reading and arithmetic but also critical thinking, social skills, task organization and manual/mechanical work.
Everything else should be optional, fully up to the student (and their parents until they're 18) and available for their whole lifetime. That's the most important part.
If you go to an accounting school and decide to become a plumber after you graduate, then switch to programming at 30 and electrician at 45, you should be able to do that. Low cost, free if you're poor and always without social stigma, the exact same quality and credentials as if you did it in high school.
Sometimes you need to wait and experience life a bit before you understand how important your education is. We should support that instead of making it so you only have one real shot.
I like the idea of a standard to measure against, but in my experience, standardized tests are terrible measures of education.
Is it possible to have a civilization that works well, with institutions that work well, if the population is poorly educated?
Sigh.
Yes, for some definition of "works well" but the population has to be tightly controlled. It's why the oligarchich elite is so enthused to build out the surveillance state at the same time.
Modern public education itself is industrial revolution technology. Why would it be left as-is after the intelligence revolution?
Motivating students to learn is not at all a solved task. And arguably a harder one too. Even the ~2010 "Google and grit" self-teaching is enough to outperform public education - but most students don't have the motivation to pull that off in practice. They have the opportunity, but that matters little if they don't use it.
Mastery of arithmetic involves memorizing lots of heuristic rules that aren’t particularly insightful about, or are outright conflicting with, the structure of math, and learning the structure of math first slows your ability to do arithmetic.
I don’t think any school hands first graders calculators and asks them to never learn arithmetic. But I see no need once you’re doing algebra to be focusing your time on long division or multiplication. These are irrelevant distractions from algebra, time spent and points lost on arithmetic details is a waste of cognition and doesn’t help. This becomes increasingly true through calculus, linear algebra, until you get to real math courses where a calculator is pointless because arithmetic doesn’t even show up.
Some kids really enjoy learning. Never mind merely solving an educational assessments problem, personalized learning seems like it has the potential to unlock a lot of intellect across the population. And yet.
If anything, if someone is looking for an AI proof job while not wanting to do something braindead, teaching might be one of the good jobs that may get more competitive.
Talking to my kid's friends indirectly and casually, as per above the deck is stacked against them resulting in lower scores in stuff that won't result in a job anyway, no amount of study will improve your DEI scores which are all that matter for hiring anyway, and the jobs you can get with high scores are the ones targeted for elimination via AI.
Despite being pretty young they understand the scam that it doesn't matter if it works or not, the powers that be will ruin your career trying to replace you with AI. Much like outsourcing in their parents and grandparents generation, it literally doesn't matter if it works or not, you're still sitting in the same unemployment line if they make a profit or lose their shirts. They lost their shirts and will lose them again for AI, but that provides little sympathy for those sitting in the unemployment lines.
"Line must go up" meme applies. There exist tests you can make kids take to determine their suitability for labor in the garment industry, fine motor skills, some visuospatial skills, etc. That number is useless because there are few jobs, negative industry growth, and we have a severe supply/demand mismatch already. Increasing "garment industry skill test results" led directly to happy outcomes around the 1850s industrial revolution and flat to negative outcomes in the modern era. So it is with math today. Worship of "line must go up" never made anyone happy or wealthy.
The article somehow avoids all documentation and authorities and instead relies on popular memes and biased "common sense". Its not marked as an editorial, which seems odd.
Nobody wants to admit it though due to capitalism and VC drunkenness.
This will reach critical mass in a few years.
Back then, there was a famous snake-oil salesman that coined the expression "computers are bicycles for the mind". He proposed an analogy: when you compare the effort humans put into personal locomotion on foot with other animals you'll notice that they spend a lot of effort to yield very little movement. But then you put them in a bicycle and things change: humans can move a lot with very little effort. Computers would do the same: increase the mind's "productivity".
Fast forward for today and we live in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets. Ironically this change was pioneered by that very same snake-oil seller.
And when I see the consequences of it, I say to myself: "boy, we were soooo wrong!".
Law of unintended consequences? Or it is the fact that everyone is lazy and do want to remain dumb?
The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.
For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.
I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.
Ask any youth today about the smartphone in their pocket. Do they have any inkling of the decades of research and development for that device and it's capabilities to coalesce into what it is today? I mused once on some public forum about the inverse square law and how it applied to the fantastical ability of a smartphone to connect with a cell tower 5 miles away. The power received by the tower is approximately 3 times 10^-13 Watts or -95.15 dBm. This, to me is almost magical. Yet the forum members did not even know what the inverse square law was. They just ridiculed my comments and literally downvoted my musings to zero. I can't comprehend the ignorance of today's society.
If you want to be a pendant about it then there is no such thing as a comprehensive intelligence test at all as there is no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. But that's not very useful either.
Memorization and recall is a huge building block of intelligence itself. Almost everything we call intelligent has some kind of memory to store and work on problems. The more storage you have the more potential intelligence.
I see kids train edge AI models, built things using coding assistants and discuss post-modern philosophy.
I see the same kids struggle to write structured interpretations of 1950s texts they have no emotional connection to.
Kids are worse in orthography, handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end, but they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago.
Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.
The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.
Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.
Guess we'll live in an illiterate society soon...
test taking is not a valuable skill. it's mostly pattern matching against the question
people need new skills in a new age. the education system hasn't even kept pace with the existence of the internet, let alone AI
I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question.
> people need new skills in a new age.
If it's a skill that is picked up in minutes, it's not really a skill.
This skill has been declining steadily since the 1970s, but the decline has accelerated since the mid 2010s. Eventually the productivity boom should take a hit when newer generations struggle to understand basic tasks and the older generations retire. AI is probably orthogonal to the solution space.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.
The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.
If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.
Tell us more?
The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.
So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?
Such as?
On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.
While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?
For instance, with respect to this article, which is about test scores, how does dynamical systems theory describe what's going on or predict consequences?
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Now you tell me
https://www.fadedpage.com/link.php?file=20180223.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
After a saddle-node bifurcation (for example) a system is left with a region of critical slowing down. It can be thought of as the ghost of the fix point that used to exist in that region. Thus observing local phenomena in the system can make it look like the system is still stable while in reality it isn't.
I guess the most famous example of this is global warning. As our emissions of greenhouse gases increased during the industrial revolution, the environment still seemed stable. But in reality we had already deleted the stable point around with our planets temperature oscillated.
I can see there a compounding drift from the stable point that is not initially apparent because the compounding values have not yet grown sufficiently to be meaningful. It is still an increase in drift
Slowing down implies a decrease though, what does that represent then?
Or are you talking about another system like "society" or "civilization"? Or something else altogether?
So really it is not saying much at all.
For example the disappearance of a stable temperature of the earth due to a continuous increase in green house emissions.
In this case the change in test scores is continuous yet might still lead to the disappearance of a stable point in society like white-collar work. At the start the change might seems slow but the point of no return could have already been passed.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe that (or that I stated it with much clarity) but I thought it was interesting how it "rhymes" with dynamical system theory.