Yves here. It’s so common as to be a cliche that older generations bemoan how their successors are lax in self-discipline, or morals, or are somehow pampered. But foisting significant amounts of parenting off on devices by handing young kids iPads and letting them amuse themselves is already producing large-scale harm, in terms of deficiencies in key skills. More and more children are way behind in their reading level. Some cannot read at all. There is also evidence of cognitive harm that may not be reversible, such as inability to concentrate and need for undue stimulation.
A video below gives provides more detail on the damage being done. The new sightings include a collapse in children engaging with stories, which has serious implications for development of empathy and even decision-making. Kids also consume and casually discuss sexual content, and in disgusting ways to boot. And if that has not yet persuaded you, consider this statement from the latest video:
Across every measure we have, the more kids use tech at school, the more their learning goes down. Our children is are the first generation in the last century to be cognitively worse than we are. And that’s just a nice way of saying dumber than we are. On every single cognitive measure, they perform worse than we do. Attention, memory, memory span, creative thinking, divergent thinking, critical thinking, they’re lower across the general IQ. Now, this is fine if generations were always up and down, you’d say, “Cool, things come and go.” But we have been on a steady increase for over a hundred years. Every generation outperforms their parents.
We covered some of this terrain in an earlier article that showed what teachers were seeing in their classrooms and how frustrated and alarmed they were. A major theme was that many students didn’t see the point of learning since AI could do it for them. Some tidbits from “We Are Watching Critical Thinking Disappear in Real Time” Due to AI Addiction: 40% of Kids Can’t Read, Teachers Quitting in Droves:
The narrator in passing wonders what sort of society is coming, since a minority of children, those of the affluent and above all, the progeny of the tech elite, are being brought in a more traditional way, with no or limited device use until their teens, to acquire fashioned cognitive skills. But what of the rest of the dull eaters? What role if any will be allotted to them?
A conservative colleague said the use of AI to create addiction and device dependency was evil. That is an understatement. These kids rely on ChatGPT not just for information but also to make choices, and for many, that seems to extend to every aspect of their lives. Sam Altman makes clear in video clips below that this extreme loss of independence, of personal autonomy, is deliberate..
This widespread abuse is far worse than what the Sacklers and other opioid peddlers did to mainly working class pain victims, or what the British did to China in the Opium Wars. At least with opioid addiction, it is possible for the victims to recover even if the withdrawal process is painful. The evidence is mounting that even for adults, regular use of AI diminishes reasoning skills and attention spans.
And from the top of the video:
Narrator: A fourth grader asked their teacher, “Why do I need to learn how to read if AI can read for me?”
Right now, 40% of fourth graders can’t read. We’re witnessing the collapse of the American education system.
Teacher 1: I teach 8th grade history and I have 110ish students. Two of them are reading on grade level right now. 18 of them are at a kindergarten level. 55 of those students are between a second and fourth grade level.
We were doing guided notes. Supposed to be a real easy day. It was review. They wrote down “Maryland was founded as a safe haven for Catholics.” It was on the board. They wrote it down and before we moved on, I call in a student and I ask, “Hey, where were the Catholics one more time?”
And these students, what they do is they look at me and then they look at their notes and then they look at the board. They look back at their notes and some of them never answered me.
They never figured out the answer. It was wild.
And I kept giving them hints like rephrasing the question and saying like, “It’s in your notes. We just wrote it down. We just wrote it down. Where are the Catholics? It’s on the board.”
And they never got it. They can’t read their own notes. Not and I don’t mean their handwriting. I mean like they can’t they can’t make heads or tails of it on the page.
These kids have a frightening ability for information to go from their eyes to their hands and not pass through the brain at all. What do we do, y’all? That ship is sailing across the ocean and there is no one at the wheel.
Narrator: What she described is terrifying. The information goes through their eyes down through their hands without passing through their brains.
But this isn’t an isolated incident. This is nationwide. I looked up the actual numbers. Only 23% of fourth graders can read at a proficient level. Just 23%.
Then we have the eighth graders. Only 26% are reading proficiently. After all the reforms, adding technology into the classrooms, and debating about funding, we’re now at 40%. We didn’t get better. We made it worse.
The new video below provides more evidence of the decline in reading competence and discusses another impact of childhood device addiction, which is lack of interest in stories. That may not seem like a big deal because like fish not recognizing that they are swimming in water, we so routinely organize our understanding around stories that it is hard for us to appreciate how foundational they are. For instance, juries decide not by scientifically weighing the evidence presented by each side but by putting together a shared account of what they think actually happened and what that means in terms of a verdict. If you encounter unexpected friction with a friend or co-worker, you are likely to try to put together different theories as to why they reacted the way they did
Stories are similarly essential to moral instruction. Think of Greek myths, the Bible (in particular the Parables and the lessons from the sufferings of saints), the key incidents in the life of Mohammed and the Buddha.
The instructors below add to the list of why storytelling is critical to what we regard as normal social functioning: the development of empathy. Stories help children see situations from multiple vantages and put themselves in the shoes of otehrs.
The discussion below describes how hearing stories from parents, whether in routine conversations or bedtime reading, and later reading fiction or watching typical television shows or movie, is rapidly falling by the wayside and what that portends. It also has a section on a school where all teaching is done by AI and how that it working out (not except for profits of the operator).
Originally published by Marissa Van
Teacher 1: I did not realize how bad the iPad kid epidemic was until yesterday.
Teacher 2: Hey, I just subbed a fifth grade class and as someone with a lot of experience in the classroom and a lot of experience in reading. I just want you to know we should be really afraid about the future of our society.
ABC 7 presenter: A heads up for parents. Kids are falling farther behind on test scores and more kids are failing to show up for school according to figures out this morning.
NBC News clip of AI school spokesperson: We have no teachers at our schools. Can you believe that? The educators are a suite of AI powered apps that gify lessons, monitor progress.
Narrator Marissa Van: So, it’s the middle of the school year and we are again seeing a trend in teachers quitting their jobs midyear.
And I can’t blame them. Teachers are some of the most overworked, underpaid, and burnt out professionals out there.
And I definitely know that I’m not the only person that’s genuinely concerned for this next generation of children who are being raised on technology, 10-second Tik Tok videos, iPads, Coco Melon, AI generated slop content. We are just now witnessing the consequences of raising an entire generation on iPads and social media. And it is not looking good.
Today we are going to be talking about a myriad of things. the effect of technology on children’s development. How it’s affecting their performance in the classroom. Why teachers are throwing in the towel and completely leaving a career they once loved. The very real fact that the government is defunding public education and trying to push parents to homeschool their kids. And the fact that we are seeing the concerning trend that test scores in math and reading are dropping across all grade levels.
Clarice Burkett: I did not realize how bad the iPad kid epidemic was until yesterday. We’ve all heard of the issues with these kids that are being raised on iPads and the parents blaming teachers and not being hands-on in their academics. But when I tell you I was absolutely flabbergasted at the interaction that I had with a child yesterday, I just have no words for it.
I’m a bartender at a resort and this family came up to the bar to order their food. One of the kids who’s about 8 or 9 years old asked what flavor of Dip and Dots we had. So, I handed her a menu.
This way, she could read the flavors and I was going to continue helping the rest of the party. When I tell you that I handed her the menu and she looks at me dead in the eyes and goes, “I can’t read.” I was left absolutely speechless for a few seconds. You’re going to tell me around second, third grade, she can’t read. I truthfully did not believe what I was hearing and that’s just frightening.
Narrator: Someone commented, “Teachers are screaming this from the rooftops and nobody is listening.”
[Reading post from a teacher]: Subbed for a class of second graders, majority didn’t know how to read. One little girl said, “I don’t read. I just play YouTube on my iPad,” when I asked if she read at home.
[Reading a second post from a teacher]: Kids can’t tell time either, unless it’s digital.
Teacher 3: Kids are always asking me, “What time is it?” These are middle schoolers and high schoolers, and there’s a clock in the room, but they don’t know how to read it. Like, what?
Narrator: So, just in case you missed that, these middle schoolers and high schoolers don’t know how to read an analog clock. Let that sink in.
Someone commented, “So, teach them?” And someone else responded, “They were supposed to learn this in elementary school.”
[Reading another comment}: They didn’t stop teaching it either. My second grader brought this home today and it’s a worksheet. It’s a picture of a clock showing 7:30 and the student has to write what time it is.
Narrator: So, to reiterate, they’re still teaching it, but these kids aren’t learning it. Or rather, they don’t want to learn it because their iPad will tell them the time instead.
Teacher 4: These brain rot phrases are driving me insane. Skippy ribb toilet, whatever they be talking about, I don’t know.
It’s annoying. And they literally do it all day long. If I hear 67 one more time, I’m going to scream. I really want to cuss. Can I cuss? I don’t know what’s with the touching. Like they cannot stop touching each other, hugging and hitting and like just constantly putting their hands on each other and they be digging in their nose. I can’t take it. And this is fourth grade. They’re doing this.
They cannot stand the idea of silence.
They are humming. They are drumming.
They are tapping. They are making noises aloud. They cannot stand silence. That wasn’t me. No, I wasn’t. No, I didn’t.
And I’m looking right at you, ma’am.
Sir, I saw you. I watched you before I told you to stop. The gaslighting is ridiculous. Why do you have out scissors and glue and we’re doing a math lesson that has nothing to do with you cutting or gluing anything down? You would really think that these kids are driven by motor. Like the lack of self-control is at an all-time high. There is no way that my entire class has ADHD. And if that’s the case, somebody need to get together and do some real serious studying because something ain’t right.
But I love my job. I love teaching. I love working with kids. I enjoy what I do. I really and truly do. But like I said, these kids, they don’t make it easy. They making us work for that little check, and I do mean little.
Narrator: So, I felt like a boomer when I looked up a lot of this brain rot content kids are consuming. I don’t have any young kids in my family, so I didn’t know the slang and kind of the things that were popular on social media with them. And I’ve heard about Skiib, and I still don’t really understand what it is, but I did come across some very concerning things that kids are consuming online.
Male speaker on TikTok: I need to show you how Ballerina Cappuccina took me from Bluey to an AI video that depicts the worst thing I can imagine on a kid’s feed. And somehow I’m still shocked despite this being day 10 of these tests. Like always, I wiped this iPad. It’s my third time doing it.
And I created a YouTube account and tried it on kids videos. So, I use the regular YouTube app, not the YouTube Kids app, because regular YouTube is 15 times more popular for kids. And when I would go back and forth between short and long form videos, the shorts were fine. I was getting mainstream arts and crafts videos with no harmful AI videos.
Then I searched for Ballerina Cappuccino and that was all it took. If you don’t know about Italian brain rot, it’s very popular for kids. And after just watching three of those shorts, I went back to the homepage and the first video was fine. But then the second video was a cat video. Like instant I I literally cannot tell you or show you what’s in this video.
I’ll show little snippets that are not the graphic part, but there is a scene depicting the worst type of act towards a woman. Yeah, it’s really bad. And it’s wrapped in this sort of AI cat package.
And from here on out, the next 20 shorts were noticeably worse than before I had searched for anything brain rot related. I try to focus on algorithms and AI videos. I stay away from parenting advice because I don’t have kids. But I could not help but think about those Italian brain rot toys and how cultivating a kid’s interest in this is a Trojan horse for other more harmful AI videos because the YouTube algorithm doesn’t know the difference.
Narrator [reading a written comment on the discussion above]: This is Elsagate all over again, but with the method of content creation with unlimited capacity. Terrifying.
[Reading a second comment]: People saying we millennials and gen Z had our own version of brain rot, but this is just so much worse than those.
[Reading a third comment]: Human development doctor here. DO NOT LET YOUR KIDS ON PHONES/INTERNET.
[Reading a fourth comment]: Unmodderated iPad time for kids is straight up neglect.
[Reading a fifth comment}: The fact that it was AI SA so quickly is chilling.
[Reading a sixth comment]: The internet is not for kids and I will die on that hill.
Narrator: So naturally, I went down a rabbit hole and started looking into this Italian brain rot AI content and it was very concerning what was showing up on the screen. I was seeing violent acts towards women, content that is way too mature for any child, and even weapons featured in these videos. It was disgusting.
What’s even more sinister and makes my stomach drop, is the fact that there are adults out there that are creating this content for kids to consume. And I hesitate to give out parenting advice because I’m not a parent myself, but if you have a child, what is the reason that they need to have a smartphone, especially at such a young age, or an iPad?
And if they do, please make sure you have parental controls and safeguards in place. Even that isn’t foolproof. Kids know how to get around that, too. But monitor them because just like that guy in that clip showed, even with the completely wiped iPad, as soon as he typed in one brain rot phrase, the content got very dark, very mature, not okay for children’s eyes, and all it took was that one search to take him down a dark rabbit hole of content that kids should not be watching.
Teacher 2: Hey, I just subbed a fifth grade class. And as someone with a lot of experience in the classroom and a lot of experience in reading, I just want you to know we should be really afraid about the future of our society. Do you know that every single kid thinks they’re going to be a content creator?
And when you ask them what their hobbies are, it’s all video games and addictive things that they think are hobbies.
Hobbies are not that. Hobbies are not addictive things. Hobbies are the things that brought you joy before you were five or six years old. So maybe it was soccer, maybe it was animals, maybe it was going outside. But these kids don’t know those things about themselves.
Quite frankly, I don’t even think they know when they have to go to the bathroom. I don’t even think they know when they’re hungry. They just want to get back onto their devices ASAP. And I’m not blaming their parents. I mean, as a society,
Narrator [injecting]: And I’m just going to come out and say it, I do blame the parents, at least partially. There are things I do understand that are not within parents’ control, such as technology and how much that’s advanced over the years and public schools getting defunded, right?
There are things that are not in their control, but there are also things that are in their control, such as reading to their kids, teaching them right from wrong. Spending time with them and actually talking to them, not just sitting and staring at your phone while you’re in your child’s presence. There are so many things parents can do to raise healthy, stable kids that will flourish in society.
Teacher 2: As a society, I think we should have had better parameters and better education about this 15 years ago, but we didn’t, and here we are. So, here’s what you need to do. You need to set parameters with your child today. This is life or death. What job do you think they’re going to get if they can’t put their phone down for five minutes? What job do you think they’re going to get if they can’t even write their name legibly?
What job do you think they’re going to get if they can’t spell the word caring and they’re 11 years old?
Not everyone’s going to be a content creator. Not everyone is going to make it and get advertising.
Narrator: Just the fact that they all want to be content creators is already concerning in and of itself. Of course, when all you do is scroll on your phone all day, when the only example of someone who is successful and wealthy is an influencer, that’s who they’re going to want to aspire to be.
And then they have no other marketable skills in the workforce because they didn’t pay attention in school and all they did was scroll on their phones. And for a society to thrive and be successful, we have to have people in all professions. We can’t just have all doctors or all lawyers. We need to have people in varying professions.
Teacher 2: Here’s what your kids need. They need communication skills. They need to be able to listen to their own bodies and know when they need to go to the bathroom. They need to be able to control themselves. They need to be able to go to bed on time, which nobody is doing. This is the most sleepd deprived, emotional intelligence deprived, affection-deprived generation ever.
Wake up and really care, please, because it is not fair to them. Do you know how many board games I own now trying to reconquer my children’s childhood? I’m telling you, the time is now. And honestly, I don’t even feel comfortable saying it on the internet. What types of disgusting smexual things these kids say at 11 years old? Really? You didn’t know that 11 year-olds are now over smexalized more than any other generation? They are.
Okay. I’ve I’ve been offended and grossed out by children more in the last two years than the previous 15 years combined. It’s terrifying. They know too much. They’re exposed to too much. And if you don’t want a government that makes the the government control your children’s phone, then you do it. You should really care because those things on the phones are addictive. All of it’s addictive.
Teacher 5: I am a firstear high school English teacher. This is definitely going to be my first and last year teaching. I was made very quickly aware of the fact that this is not the profession for me.
It is absolutely astonishing and scary how your kids are 14, 15 years old and still do not have the proper reading skills. And I’m not talking about the ESC kids, the 504s, the uh the IEP kids. I’m talking about your everyday regular JoeSchmo from Cococomo kid who does not know how to read and write at the level that they should. And the problem is is that they don’t care to learn how to do those things correctly.
Narrator: And I have a comment here from one of you guys from a previous video that says, “I had a 10-year-old neighbor kid ask me what a yard sale sign said. I was reading Harry Potter when I was 10.”
And I think the fact that a lot of kids can’t read is the most genuinely concerning part of all of this. Obviously, the fact that they have unlimited access to the internet and are on social media at way too early of an age is scary as well.
But if kids can’t read, how are you going to survive in the world as an adult? How are you going to read articles, get employment, understand the worlds around you? It is just absolutely mind-blowing and makes me so nervous for what we are going to see with these kids when they grow up in the next 20, 30 years. I feel like a boomer, but I really don’t know if there’s hope for this next generation.
How do you come back from that? I don’t think there’s a way back if a 10-year-old can’t even read the words “yard sale”.
Woman speaker: I have a sister that was born in 2012, which by the way, didn’t know that was possible. thought 2012 was for Coney, but she’s a generation after Gen Z.
They’re called generation Alpha.
[laughter] I don’t like the tone of that. But I was I was trying to connect with her. I was like, “So, girl, like, what’s cool on the Disney Channel these days?” She looks me dead in the eye and goes, “I don’t watch plot-based media.”
Narrator: Oh, someone commented, “Plot-based media is literally how children learn empathy.”
[Reading another comment]: Kids are genuinely not engaged with storytelling anymore, which is about as horrifying as it sounds. One of the oldest human creative pursuits, and kids are just not doing it.
[Reading third comment]: I’m scared of Gen Alpha, and not in a good, funny way. I am genuinely worried for whatever comes to and from them for the next couple decades.
[Reading fourth comment]: As if plot-based media was a trend and not a crucial and enduring social tool that we developed tens of thousands of years ago.
[Reading fifth comment]:This is actually the problem. They’re not watching content produced by people who know how to read and write.
Narrator: The little girl literally looks at her and essentially says, “I’m too old and too good to watch all that crap on PBS Kids and Disney Channel. I just scroll on TikTok.”
According to Aspire early education, storytelling plays a vital role by promoting creativity, enhancing language development, and building emotional intelligence in young children. Through stories, children are introduced to new vocabulary, different perspectives, and important life lessons.
Stories, even ones for children, often involve characters facing challenges, making choices, and experiencing different emotions. This offers children the opportunity to empathize with these fictional characters and share another’s perspective. This helps nurture their emotional intelligence, enabling them to navigate their own feelings from a young age.
So, this little girl who apparently doesn’t watch plot-based media is missing out on a very important child development tool, which is storytelling.
So, these kids essentially are going to grow up with very low or no emotional intelligence at all. They’re not putting themselves in the shoes of fictional characters, following them throughout their story, throughout their life.
They’re not seeing how these characters actions affect the people around them.
They’re not seeing these characters go through trials and tribulations and they’re not experiencing these emotions that these characters feel throughout different points in their life when something good or something bad happens to them.
At surface level, programs and books for kids can just look like entertainment, but it’s actually teaching them vitally important life skills. Stories also encourage problem solving. They frequently portray characters facing challenges that requires them to overcome obstacles or solve problems.
By engaging with these stories, children develop critical and creative thinking skills as they navigate how the characters may solve these problems. This process helps develop their own problem solving skills and how different decisions can affect the outcome of the plot.
And we can only predict that this is going to get worse as generative AI is taking over with chatbt and Claude and all the chat bots and encouraging kids to not think for themselves and just have the AI spit out the answer for them.
And surprise surprise, student test scores are also dropping in almost all subjects across the board. And they are absent from school more than they have been in years past. A heads up for parents. Kids are falling farther behind on test scores and more kids are failing to show up for school.
[ABC News]: According to figures out this morning, a new report card is out for American students and it’s not good news. The National Assessment of Education Progress shows fourth and eighth grade students are fairing even worse in math and reading than in recent years.
[National Parents Union Speaker on ABC]: It’s a call to action as parents and families to hold our districts and our school systems accountable for making sure that we get our kids back on track.
[ABC News]: Compared to 2019, average reading scores are down five points. And in math, fourth graders are down 3%, eighth graders sliding 8%.
[Harvard Center for Education Policy & Research speaker]: I don’t think this is a season of us giving up hope. It’s a season of us coming together in community in our learning communities to make sure that our students are making progress.
[ABC News]: Experts say the results show reading is a greater challenge than math. The score declines appear to be driven by lower performing students falling farther behind while top performing students are showing some recovery since the pandemic. The message to parents, get involved.
[National Parents Union Speaker on ABC]: Trust your gut. Ask for more information. And if you need to seek outside help, do it immediately.
[ABC News]: One big issue, students not showing up for class. 12% of eighth graders missed at least 5 days of school per month.
[Male speaker on Tiktok]: Across every measure we have, the more kids use tech at school, the more their learning goes down. Our children is are the first generation in the last century to be cognitively worse than we are. And that’s just a nice way of saying dumber than we are. On every single cognitive measure, they perform worse than we do. Attention, memory, memory span, creative thinking, divergent thinking, critical thinking, they’re lower across the general IQ. Now, this is fine if generations were always up and down, you’d say, “Cool, things come and go.” But we have been on a steady increase for over a hundred years. Every generation outperforms their parents.
And that’s what we want. Every generation wants their kids to be healthier, happier, smarter than they are. We are the first generation in history where trend is now reversed.
Narrator: Someone commented, “Having worked in a technology-free residential alternative education program for nearly 10 years, I 100% agree and will forever advocate for removing cell phones and personal computers and tablets from schools.
“There was an astronomical difference in social skills, emotional regulation, and test scores after being without tech for 6 months. Let’s not get started on how the adjustment period went for these students.
“The first month of no technology was like watching an addict detox. It’s ruined Gen Z and is presently destroying Gen Alpha.”
Narrator: And something else that I found interesting, but not surprising, is the fact that people who work at Google, Meta, and these big tech giants are choosing to send their kids to Waldorf schools, which are schools that have pretty much tech-free environments.
CNBC]:In most public and private schools across the nation, Chromebooks, iPads, or Windows devices are everywhere.
But things look very different at the private Sacramento Waldorf school in California, where technology isn’t used at all through 8th grade and is scarce even in high school.
[Waldorf student 1]: Instead of just turning to my phone to answer a question to ask a teacher for help or to ask a friend.
[Waldorf student 2]: I just never really knew what it was like to play video games as opposed to running around and having fun outside.
[Waldorf student 3]: We don’t have that many screens here, but I can still use a screen really well. You don’t have to be on the screen all the time know how to use it well.
[Waldorf teacher in class]: Here. So, I would whip stitch this on.
[Same Waldorf teacher to camera]:I find that even in my own experience, in my own life, that when I’m using a device, it divides me from those who are around me. So, I find that the community experience of being in a classroom without those devices that comes only from one-on-one human interaction, and the screen tends to divide that.
[Student entering]: Good morning.
[Waldorf teacher]: Morning, Nicole.
[CNBC narrator]: Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the Waldorf teaching philosophy is used at more than a thousand institutions in 91 countries, including 136 schools here in the US.
The screen policy differs at each Waldorf school, but it’s known for its holistic instructional style, which promotes artistic expression, experiential learning, and yes, limited technology use.
For students at the Sacramento Waldorf School, screen time is highly discouraged at home, too. The lower school parent handbook recommends no media at home through fifth grade and limited access accompanied by clearly defined family policies and monitoring for older children, stating none is the optimal condition for young children and less is better than more. In high school, computer use at Sacramento Waldorf School is restricted to just six desktops in one small lab and 20 MacBook Air laptops used in just a few classes.
Mobile devices can be brought by high schoolers who all sign a pledge to limit use to outside the classroom only. Tech in schools is big business expected to hit 43 billion this year with 46% of that growth happening in K through 12.
So, Apple, Google, and Microsoft may not be thrilled to know the Waldorf approach represents a growing trend in Silicon Valley, where low tech education is becoming increasingly popular among parents who are apprehensive of the devices they themselves helped to invent.
The private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, which has campuses in Los Altos and Mountain View, is highly sought after. 3/4 of the students parents there have a strong high-tech connection.
In fact, many big names in tech like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs gained notoriety for the [music] strict bounds they placed on device usage in their homes. Gates reportedly didn’t let his kids get phones until age 14, and Jobs didn’t let his kids use iPads.
The tuition at Waldorf schools varies by grade and location. High school tuition at the Waldorf School of the Peninsula is more than $35,000 and elementary school starts just under $26,000. In Sacramento, high school is over 1$9,000 and elementary starts just under $13,000.
Narrator: And this comment says it all. “Steve Jobs goes by the slogan, “The dealer never consumes.”
Again, I’m not surprised that these people that have created and invented these addictive technologies and apps are sending their kids to a private school that has heavy restrictions on technology use. But the sad thing is the tuition at these schools per year is very expensive. I believe they were in the five digits.
And so only the most affluent families are going to be able to afford to send their kids to these schools. But working families don’t have that luxury of sending their kids to a private school or charter school, which costs 5 figures a year. They send their kids to public school because it’s the only option.
But that option is looking bleaker and bleaker every year with student test scores dropping, teachers quitting at alarming rates, and public school getting defunded as we speak.
That brings me to another comment from one of you guys on a previous video. “Everything is 100% true. I’m a teacher of 20 years and it is rough. It doesn’t help when our country is dismantling the Department of Education. States are oblivious to the real issues and keep pushing nonsense to schools and so forth.
I wanted to ask if you saw the news video about a California school going all AI. The only teachers they have on campus, I believe, are to assist where and when is needed, but students learn from AI teachers.
[NBC Morning News]: This probably isn’t what comes to mind when you think of an [music] average school day. Kids breathing fire. Find a spot for our foot. climbing a rock wall and even learning the art of grilling.
But for students at the Alpha School in Austin, Texas, this is no field day.
Here, K through 12th graders are proudly cutting classes, spending just 2 hours a day learning math, science, reading, and writing. All with the help of an AI tutor, and without a single teacher.
[Woman in NBC video]: Morning launch time.
Narrator: I already don’t like this and I’m skeptical. How can the student possibly learn enough in 2 hours compared to a full day of school? And the fact that they don’t have a teacher and are learning specifically from an AI chatbot. Yeah, does not sound good.
[NBC Morning News]: Mackenzie Price is the co-founder of Alpha School in its 2-hour learning program.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: This is a school without teachers.
[Mackenzie Price]: We have no teachers at our schools. We have no teachers at our schools. Can you believe that?
[NBC Morning News]: The educators are a suite of AI powered apps that gamify lessons, monitor progress, and with the help of eyetracking, keep tabs on students attention span.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: Who’s teaching you?
[Student]: I think the app is teaching me, but I’m also teaching myself.
Narrator: So, they learn on an app, but they also think that they are teaching themselves and they’re only maybe five or 6 years old and don’t know anything about the world yet. Does not sound promising.
[NBC Morning News]: All as adult guides, many of which have never been teachers. look on without interfering with their robot counterparts.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: Are you comfortable having guides in the classroom that don’t necessarily know the core curriculum?
[Mackenzie Price]: It’s okay that our guides aren’t experts in physics or math or whatever they’re doing. They are experts in their students.
Narrator: It’s okay that they’re not experts in science or math, but they are experts in their students.
What the heck does that even mean? Then what is the purpose of teachers having to go to school for years in order to get their teaching credential? I am appalled that any parent would want to send their child to the school that has no teachers. What?
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: It almost sounds like the guides here are told you’re here to lead the kids to AI.
[Mackenzie Price]: Our guides are not allowed to teach.
They are coaching students to become selfdriven learners.
[NBC Morning News]: Price says the AI tutor personalizes lessons for each student, allowing them to learn class material in half the time, and according to data from Alpha, score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests in most grade levels.
[Person at whiteboard in class]: This one’s a little unusual.
[NBC Morning News]: It all comes as students nationwide grapple with AI’s role. While some critics say it’s too soon to know if the text’s having a positive effect in classrooms.
Narrator: That’s not suspicious at all. According to their very own data that is probably biased, the students score in the 90th percentile on standardized tests. I would like to see some independent third-party unbiased sources that are evaluating these students and how they’re doing on their standardized tests.
[NBC Morning News]: One study found generative AI tutors can sometimes inhibit learning if students become too reliant on the tool.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: How do you make sure that the AI that is teaching kids is doing what it’s supposed to be doing?
[Mackenzie Price]: We have a lot of guard rails in place to make sure that kids are not dealing with some of the issues that come with what we hear about with AI.
[NBC Morning News]: Still, at Alpha, where tuition costs $40,000 a year, academics are just the beginning.
[Mackenzie Price]: This is called our check chart.
[NBC Morning News]: Each student must complete a long list of tasks before they can level up, including things like run a mile without stopping, solve a Rubik’s cube, and even independently put together a piece of IKEA furniture. All in an effort to teach life skills and promote passion projects.
[Student]: Welcome to the Alpha School Airbnb.
[NBC Morning News]: Like this group of sixth graders who are running a real Airbnb.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: But how old are you?
[Student 2]: I’m I’m 11.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: You’re 11?
And how much money did you guys make with this Airbnb?
[Student 2]: We have over $10,000 of confirmed bookings
[NBC Morning News]: And over at Alpha High School….
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: You made an app.
[NBC Morning News]: 16-year-olds Ellen Sloan are getting ready to pitch an AI enabled app that gives dating advice.
[Female talking to app]: I want to ask my crush out to prom in front of all of her friends. Is that a good idea?
[App]:It really depends on her personality.
[NBC Morning News interviewer]: So, you’ve been learning from AI and now you’re building your own AI?
[Female student]: Yes.
[NBC Morning News]: A full circle experiment putting these AI [music] academics in a class of their own.
[NBC Morning News interviewer facing camera]: Yeah. A lot to take in there. Uh, and as a parent, I was a little sketched out seeing those little kids locked into their laptops with their headphones on.
We used to have sustained silent reading back in the day. This is way beyond that because these are are gamified interactive apps. So, the kids are given full attention. And Price says they only do that for 2 hours a day. They break those up into these 20-minute intervals.
The rest of the day is spent in those workshops collaborating with others, learning life skills. Actually, on the day we visited, some of the high school students were going through this rejection workshop where they would pitch strangers on the street their passion projects. Uh, AI, not so great at teaching how to get rejected, but something we humans are still pretty good at, I guess.
Narrator: So, they’re learning how to exercise, solve a Rubik’s cube, put together IKEA furniture, and cooking, which are all things that they can just learn at home with their family. We can take a look at the comments.
[Reading comment]: When they said, “Don’t worry. Artificial intelligence won’t take jobs.” They meant their jobs, not yours.
[Reading comment 2]: Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
[Reading comment 3]: Unlimited screen time and babysitters with S40K a year tuition. What could go wrong?
[Reading comment 4]: Smart kids with no social and emotional skills. As a teacher, that scares me.
Narrator: I also found this CNN article interesting about Alpha School. Apparently, they have applied for charter school status, and it’s been rejected by several states, including Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Department of Education, in denying its application, pointed to the lack of teachers and concern about the model being largely untested.
And the story also features a parent who sent two of her daughters to Alpha school.
She said it was a chance for her older daughter, who was autistic, to reach new academic heights. She liked that her students could learn at their own pace and they would have specialized lessons.
But the parent said she almost immediately noticed a change in both her daughters after they started at alpha.
Although on paper they met their academic targets, their attitude shifted from curiosity about knowledge to an extreme focus on metrics. Several parents apparently expressed their concern with how the daily driven metrics seem to supersede learning. Some children were staying up late into the night or logging extra hours on their apps to boost their metrics, sometimes leading to anxiety and tears. And after their second year, the parent decided to withdraw her daughters and enroll them in public school, where she says she discovered that the girls had fallen behind. She said that they were doing what the school wanted them to do, but in the end, it really wasn’t out of joy.
And she said at the end of their time at Alpha, her children had turned zombie-like. This school has got to be absolutely terrible for kids learning.
And here this person comes in who has no knowledge of education and tries to profit off of AI and charge parents $40,000 a year for an AI chatbot to teach their kids reading and math.
I really agree with that comment that this is starting to feel like a Black Mirror episode.
And I feel like I can’t say it enough times. I sound like a broken record, but I am concerned for this next generation and what is to come. But I’m very curious to hear from all of you, especially teachers and parents. Please share your experiences down below in the comments. I would love to know what you are doing to help your kids through this schooling system, to help your kids in this changing landscape of technology, and really what actionable steps can we take to make sure our kids don’t have unfettered access to the internet and to make sure that they’re learning in school and their test scores are going up and they’re able to read at a proficient level.
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Bleeker? More and more bleak? Or is bleerer some new hep cat lingo?
I imagine this comes off as whinging, particularly since I normally appreciate your comments, but nevertheless:
This was a machine-generated transcript that I had to revise and format heavily (as in listen to all the video a second and in some sections more times than that, pausing often while working on it) to make it make sense to a reader. Can you please not be a jerk about this? This was a long piece on an important set of issues yet all you see that is noteworthy is a typo? Can you not see how demotivating this is? I might as well just put up the video and not bother with trying to provide a usable transcript
It was a shit-ton of work to clean it up as much as I did, and that’s before having even more hassles due to the site again being under attack by the scraper and slowing things down further. This is a website and we don’t have the staff to put as much as we do and be perfect.
thank you for your efforts. in a very busy world with many things clamoring for attention, i appreciate a transcribed version. i can read much faster than the run time of even a very clear video.
Thank you, Yves, for your translation and the effort it took to accomplish it. I prefer the written word and am most grateful for all you do, yourself and contributors, to make these available to us. Minor typos are easily remedied by the reader.
This video/article is disturbing; I am trying to find a more definitive word.
Another quick “thank you!” It’s not like I’m offering to help, other than a bit of donation during that time of year.
Looks like transcripts on YT are machine-generated subtitles with timestamps. It’s very difficult to convert it into a text. I’ve done it in the past a few times and even with a short excerpt it’s a real pain.
It’s possible a custom script might be able to lighten the load a bit but idk how much without trying.
I found one that did not have time stamps but for this one to make sense (with all the changes of speakers, inclusion of news clips, narrator regularly reading written comments) it took a lot of donkey work to clarify who was saying what, like identifying the news show and even then, when it was a news narrator, a news person interviewing and who was responding to the questions.
Fantastic work! Thanks a lot! The same is observed in Germany. Already ten years ago German psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer warned exactly about that in his book “digital dementia”. It is all well known but big tech has corrupted journalism and the school authorities. The further East you go in Europe the better the situation the further West the worse. It is all about the $$$$ and as the East has much less of it they have been spared the worst excesses. Maybe that is as well why Missisippi is doing better if it is true of course.
As a slight aside about machine translation. It appears that when Amazon Prime puts subtitles on a film they are machine generated from scratch each time. I watched the Battle of Britain recently. It’s a film from the 60s that i had seen a few times on tv. When Germans are on screen they speak German. Now in the versions I had seen on tv they had subtitle translations for these scenes.
But there were none on the Amazon version. So I put the subtitles on and at first all good. The German speaking scenes had English subtitles, vut then so did the English speaking scenes whoch was a bit annoying. Then after a while the German subtitles were in German. Subtitles were appearing after the scen they were for or even before the scene. When any sort of English slang was used the susbtitles were completely wrong.
And yet there was no need for this. Perfectly good subtitles had been made for this film when it first appeared in cinema. Which had continued to be used when it appeared on tv. But instead of using that already completed and correct work, it makes up new subtitles from scratch everytime and it is wrong.
This was a very disturbing article. I almost never read Nicholas Kristof, but this recent column has a smidgen of hope…
These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling NYT archive
It seems back to basics in schools and discouraging truancy. Given the inherent poverty of public school in those states students there also are less likely to have much less high end device accessibility.
Those stats are almost certainly bullshit. Every time there’s an education miracle touted by either the neo-liberals, or the right, it turns out there’s fraud, gamed stats, or someone screwed up the analysis.
One of the most stable findings in all educational analysis (and it applies outside the US, just as it does within it) is that socio-economic factors trump almost all educational interventions. So the idea that kids from one of the poorest and most unequal parts of the US are doing better than kids in Massachusetts strikes me as very unlikely.
Nicholas Kristoff is very gullible and has a long history of being fooled by dubious educational interventions.
The best way to fix educational outcomes is reduce inequality, and reduce poverty. Expecting schools to fix the results of inequality and poverty is cruel. But for some strange reason this is the approach that the US has taken.
I am no fan of standardized testing or Kristof, but if the testing instruments are the same or similar, you are contending that the completed tests are falsified at an entire state level. And that school attendance rates are similarly falsified? And these state-wide falsifications have gone on undetected for years now?
How many kids in the upper 80% of family incomes have their own phones versus the bottom quintile? Can it be that kids in Massachusetts are being dumbed down by big tech at higher rates than the Mississippi Delta? After all, here in NYS chromebooks and hotspots are almost universally handed out and personal phones were such a universal school day distraction they were finally banned. Truancy in upstate NY city schools is 60%, FFS.
There’s no doubt socioeconomic factors are key determinants of all sorts of outcomes. But Yves’ article is clear that we’re really at the cusp of creating a mass population uneducated. This is just the beginning. Impoverishment regarding 24/7 big tech access might not lead to poverty of intellect.
> If the testing instruments are the same or similar,
That would be the first question. Are they? Often they are not. The next question is are all the kids being tested, or are some kids being excluded in some fashion (typically they are – often in quite nasty ways). Are teachers, or schools, being punished, or rewarded, for how their kids perform? In which case, there will be cheating.
> you are contending that the completed tests are falsified at an entire state level.
I am saying that there are range of ways in which these test results could be misleading – ranging from state to school level. But given that the incentives for everyone involved are to get these results as high as possible – the likelihood that the test results are a neutral arbiter of performance is unlikely. And there has yet to be a large scale example of this kind of result where it didn’t later transpire that the data was unreliable. Sometimes it’s due to cheating, sometimes statistical incompetence, sometimes due to reclassifications of what a student is.
> And that school attendance rates are similarly falsified?
If the schools are incentivized to have good attendance rates (something they have very little control over), then those statistics are fake.
> And these state-wide falsifications have gone on undetected for years now?
In whose interest would it be to expose a problem? And would they have the skill required to identify the issues.
> How many kids in the upper 80% of family incomes have their own phones versus the bottom quintile?
I live in a city with a high proportion of black kids – and I see far more black kids being parented with iPads, than white kids.
And how many kids in the upper 80% of family incomes are homeless, or don’t have access to the internet they need to do their homework, or have a violent parent? The further up the income scale you are, the more likely you are to read and have parents who read to you.
> Can it be that kids in Massachusetts are being dumbed down by big tech at higher rates than the Mississippi Delta?
I think kids in the delta are being dumbed down by poverty, pollution, poor nutrition, lack of sleep, bad living conditions, parents who are too tired/busy to parent. And I think those probably have a far bigger effect, than the difference between watching TV all the time and being on an iPhone.
> Truancy in upstate NY city schools is 60%, FFS.
This seems unlikely. I think someone is exaggerating, or the state legislature has defined truancy in a dumb way (I speak from experience – my state did this).
> There’s no doubt socioeconomic factors are key determinants of all sorts of outcomes.
No, they are by far the largest. Schools and teachers have a tiny influence in comparison.
> But Yves’ article is clear that we’re really at the cusp of creating a mass population uneducated.
It was mostly TikTok anecdotes – many of which I remember hearing as a kid in the 80s (in a different country with a better school system). And the data we have, for all its many flaws, do not support this.
I think the US education system is pretty mediocre, YouTube/phones are a disaster for kids and AI is godawful. But I would like to see some evidence and data that these things are a problem – rather than attention farming clickbait.
No, you did not read the post or even the intro.
And you are bigly continuing to Make Shit Up with no links.
First, most of the content was from news stories and written comments that the narrator read. TikTok was less important than either of those.
Second, the post CLEARLY described that the performance of kids has declined, in all types of cognitive measures, including IQ, and reading ability has too. And this is contra the trend over the last 100 years, for each new generation to do better. FFS, in the US, literacy used to be well in the 90%s. It’s now below 80%
Syracuse schools have some of the highest rates of absenteeism statewide, report finds syracuse.com
I think literacy and arithmetic and regular school attendance might help to reduce poverty, no? When you figure out how to eliminate poverty in the US, let us know. The war on poverty didn’t eliminate it. And the kids in the Mississippi Delta are as deprived as those in the city of Syracuse, but they lack chromebooks at school.
My elementary teachers would “teach to the test” for Iowa tests (used widely) 60 years ago. My HS teachers would teach to the NYS Regents exams 55 years ago. My kids had the same thing in Arizona 30 years ago. Assuming only poor states do this is false. Surely some fraud occurs, but it is very doubtful at an entire state level for years on end.
There has never been a large scale educational policy which has resulted in the dramatic and sudden increase claimed for Mississippi. Usually when such claims are examined, then you find out that a number of low performing students are being offloaded off the books, or excluded entirely – though there are certainly other ways to improve test scores that are similarly dubious.
Mechanisms of exclusion have included expulsions, wrongly classifying kids as having some kind of learning disability, or just quietly pretending that kids who have dropped out have moved away. Sometimes there will be statistical errors (this was one of the ways that Texas got its ‘dramatic’ improvement in education under Bush).
If Mississippi’s results are real, then that will require data that tracks specific students progress (not cohorts, which can be gamed), independent testing (e.g. tests where the state officials have no involvement) and other data that supports this (rises in SAT and ACT tests). It will also require a careful audit of any other data (did the special education numbers rise dramatically. Was there a surprising drop in student intakes in certain areas, or demographics, that cannot be accounted for).
So far none of this seems to have happened. So I’m skeptical. Every previous US education miracle from this century has been similarly disproved once it’s undergone rigorous analysis. Some of them in fact were underperforming.
The key bit there is once adjusted for demographics. So they are not number 1 until you play with statistics.
Freddie de Boer i find to be one of the most credible experts on educational interventions and empirical analyses and he called BS on the “mississippi miracle” months ago:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-are-no-miracles-in-education
specifically he states:
the article also goes on to detail the BS in all previous educational “miracles”.
i don’t doubt the recent overall cognitive decline caused by apps and AI and screens. i do doubt that Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have all radically bucked the trend.
As a retired public school teacher who spent years resisting corporate education reform, which forced the tech infestation of the public schools, rest assured that the overwhelming likelihood is that those numbers are being juiced by never-ending test prep and other games that admins play, under intense pressure from higher-ups and politicians. These “miracles” are almost always later exposed as bogus, starting with intense pressure on teachers to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else.
The so-called reforms introduced during the Obama era, which were particularly vicious in their contempt for teachers, were part of the decline in literacy we’re seeing, which may now be approaching emergency level, but has been in the works for years. Case in point: instruction mandates promulgated by the Gates Foundation, which had an especially pernicious effect on the public schools, called for “close reading” – aridly and tediously so, in fact – of book and article excerpts, to the exclusion of complete texts or books. This led directly to steady erosion of students’ reading stamina, which was already declining. This is now worsened by tech “advances” that have led, as the article shows, to the crisis point we seem to be approaching.
As for the blessing of Nicolas Kristof, a notorious dupe of the education fraudsters, it should transact at a 100% discount.
Puritans never could resist looking at other people’s kids as raw material for their own deranged fertility cult…
not defending Kristoff or Mass. or La….I got no dog in the fight, my anecdote:
this may be a death by 1000 multi-variate cuts…in addition to screens, their is a secular curriculum shift.
My niece is the oldest of the kids’ generation. She lives in (theoretically) the best public school districts in a 600-mile radius, in an area with zero financial resources or parental education issues (at the macro-level).
She was never taught spelling or the times tables in elementary school, lmao. My sister-in-law was flabbergasted too and brought it up during parent-teacher conferences. The gist of the teachers’ responses were: those methods are rote and the curriculum has moved beyond that. (as if kanji or knowing the quadratic equation by memory isn’t rote?)
IMO, yes screens are bad—-and that deficit probably is compounded in many places by pedagogical decisions and a shift to (drumroll) education by screen, shaking my head, lmao!
another bizzaro-world anecdote.
have a friend who lives 1 mile away but on the other side of the school district boundary. Her kids were assigned Chromebooks in (full-day) **kindergarten**! [cuz the future is digital, or something] And those kids were required to take their Chromebooks home every night, and bring it back the next morning.
She had the same WTF?! response that I did, lmao. Whereas at the same time, in K/1st grade, my kids were using chalk and a black slate board.
It is extremely frustrating being a parent trying to limit your kid’s use of technology in an effort to develop good habits, only to have the schools hand them ipads to use all day long at age 7, all oh so generously provided at an extremely fair price by the Apple corporation.
The best scores in UK national curriculum testing are being achieved by non-selective schools in London with some of the least promising sociodemographic scores for their pupils.
Going further back, grammar schools in Wales produced glittering alumni like R S Thomas, Dylan Thomas and Howard Marks :-) from communities that have been some of the most deprived and/or remote in the UK for their entire history. Now grammar schools are admittedly selective but the Celtic cultural commitment to education in the UK is famous and transcends class. Irish monks saved Roman literary civilisation for Europe. Scotland had five Universities when much larger England had two. Botwnnog, a tiny village on the Llyn Peninsula, with nothing but cows and sea for miles in all directions, had a grammar school from 1600-odd.
Family and locality are not destiny.
Speaking from Scotland that cultural commitment is alas, now largely dead
having gone through this….
at first, it was “i’ll never be like people with the kid in the cart glued to the tablet..”
then reality set it, lmao.
screen exposure is unavoidable, it’s more about triage-ing the damage.
i was fortunately in that the kids had plenty of exposure to analog things and place (defacto infinite time at the pool, park, etc) …because someone was able to watch them
time to watch kids is a luxury that few families have.
even a nanny doesn’t necessarily fix it, as I’ve seen plenty of detached, indifferent nannies at the playground.
so every time i see a kid having a meltdown or zombie-fied at a screen….there but for the grace of God (luck, spaghetti monster), go I.
I feel your pain.
I think there’s a real problem with the US education, and since Covid I’ve witnessed a collapse at least in the regional schools. I also think that YouTube, phones and AI are a huge problem.
But this video is also just another manifestation of the problem. It’s not thoughtful, and it’s trying to make its viewers feel outraged and worried, because that’s good for clicks/engagement. Anecdata is bad enough – but when the anecdotes are sourced from TikTok…
To pick one example. Why the hell would we expect kids to remember how to read an analog clock? Where are they going to practice this. I remember when digital watches arived in the 80s, I knew kids who forgot how to read an analog clock (they had a watch on their arm – why would they practice that skill). That’s a really arbitrary and silly thing to pick (one might ask why that is still being taught).
To pick another. Read stuff written by teachers 100 years ago and you will see many of the same complaints. It takes work to get kids to sit still, and not be gross. It’s not natural behavior, and for most of human history it was not a thing for most kids. It became a thing in the C20th, partly due to schools, and partly because that was what was expected of middle class kids (and so many working class parents mimicked it). At some point that changed in the US, and at the same time schools (which were never terribly formal by global standards) became increasingly informal. But even in the fairly traditional British school I went to in the 80s (which by most standards was very good), you would see all of these behaviors sometimes. Whether it was due to kids picking on a weak teacher, kids being bored, or just hormones. Traditionally teachers managed through terror (I was just young enough to miss that), laterally good teachers just learned to roll with and manage it. Teaching is really hard, and is a deeply undervalued skill in this stupid country.
And none of this is helped by a country that can never really decide what education should be for, and which skids from one stupid fad to another every 5-10 years.
They should remember how to read an analogue clock because, as the video shows, they were taught how to do so and there are still many many many analogue clocks out in public spaces.
Not to mention the additional benefit of illustrating fractions, proportions, modular arithmetic (before that actually gets introduced). It’s even the first place you start seeing rates of change. Or comparing times on a stopwatch and having a feel for how far apart times are. Teaching time on an analog clock is a math lesson, not a lesson in how to tell what time it is.
Indeed. Reading an analog clock is a sneaky way to also learn geometry, among other branches of math, whether one realizes it or not.
Which reminds me, I need to go rewind and reset my analog clock which is behind by a couple minutes according to the little digital clock at bottom right. Digital timekeeping isn’t going anywhere but I’d like to think we can still use both.
Perhaps they are emulating Sherlock Holmes and his discussion with Dr. Watson after Watson informed him about the heliocentric nature of the solar system.
To paraphrase a bit….
“Don’t need it, gonna forget it, it makes no difference to my screen time where the hands are on the numbers.”
If you don’t use a skill then you will lose it pretty rapidly. There may be analogue clocks in public spaces, but very few kids have any need to use them. So what they’re describing is exactly what I’d expect. A lot of kids don’t know how to tie laces these days for similar reasons.
Fortunately these are both skills that can be learned trivially if you ever you need them.
In tests they’re doing to detect signs of dementia, you have to draw an analog clock with the numbers and arrows. Looks like they’ll have to abandon that part of the test pretty soon.
Learning to read an analog clock at 5 y.o. is not something you forget at 9 years old. There are analog clocks everywhere that remind you that the second hand has a base of sixty to the minute and the minute hand a base of 60 to the hour; broken into 5 minute intervals that mark the 12 hours of the AM and 12 hours of PM.
It is if you never have any need to read an analogue clock in that time. The brain will lose any skill that it doesn’t use. Which is a good thing.
You demand a documentary? Do you spend any time watching podcasts? Supposed experts mouth off, a combo of interesting insights, some info (too often wrong or incomplete), too often opining on topics where they should refuse the question because it’s outside their knowledge base. This is WAY better than the typical YouTube presentation of similar length.
And I am sorry, I took an entire course in college on the politics of popular education in France and England in the 1800s. You are Making Shit Up about children’s behavior then and as recently as 50 years ago. Adults had no problem imposing their will. Children were beaten or made to stand on a stool or otherwise forced to submit. In my day, nuns were famous for hitting students hard across the knuckles with rulers. One of my women teachers in a public school would beat misbehaving boys across the butt with a clipboard.
And the tests then demonstrate the high level of attainment requires. This is from the US but makes the point:
https://newrepublic.com/article/79470/1895-8th-grade-final-exam-i-couldnt-pass-it-could-you
> You demand a documentary? Do you spend any time watching podcasts? Supposed experts mouth off, a combo of interesting insights, some info (too often wrong or incomplete), too often opining on topics where they should refuse the question because it’s outside their knowledge base.
I thought this video was sensationalistic and designed to get clicks. You see similar things on the evening TV news – which is why I don’t watch that. I think as a source of anecdotal evidence it’s fine with the appropriate caveats (TikTokers trying to game the algorithm are not the most reliable of sources), but one certainly can’t take it at face value. And the data that we have does not support the claims being made here. I am very skeptical when people attribute complex, multi-causal, social problems to a single cause.
> And I am sorry, I took an entire course in college on the politics of popular education in France and England in the 1800s. You are Making Shit Up about children’s behavior then and as recently as 50 years ago. Adults had no problem imposing their will. Children were beaten or made to stand on a stool or otherwise forced to submit. In my day, nuns were famous for hitting students hard across the knuckles with rulers. One of my women teachers in a public school would beat misbehaving boys across the butt with a clipboard.
If kids were so well behaved and attentive naturally, then why did they have to beat and humiliate them?
Kids are not naturally attentive and well behaved in the way that schools expect (and require). Yes you can enforce this behaviors (fortunately not just through the kinds of violence you see described in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), but it’s not a natural thing. It requires training. Whether that was at school, or at home. Middle class, and aspiring working class parents, used to enforce these behaviors. Now for a mixture of reasons (2 working parents, the 60s, permissiveness) they do not. Schools have also relaxed their own disciplinary standards (partly due to middle class parental pressure and shifting educational theories).
I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing, but I think this is more due to social changes than due to the phones/Youtube (though I’m sure they, just like TV before them, have not helped). And that liberals are probably going to be uncomfortable admitting some of the problems that have led to this.
Your argument is ad homimen. You don’t like how the presenter assembled and conveyed her information, even though she includes TV reports, a CNN article, and many many many direct accounts from teachers and parents, and dispositively, both data and sightings on falling academic persormance. The onus is on YOU to debunk the information, and not whinge that you deem it to be click-bait-y.
And the substance of the case you do make is bullshit. Kids will test boundaries to see what they can get away with and will persist in misconduct if rules are not enforced.
I was spanked with a belt by my father over my non-compliance in school first grade. He made it clear this was “administer punishment” mode and not out of anger. He set a time and administered a specific number of whacks to my buttocks. This was the only time my father ever used a belt or implement on me. I don’t recall being spanked otherwise; physical discipline was rare in our household. I refused to cry and had to have this happen at least a second night before I fell in line. I hate to defend this action but it worked. I did what I was told by teachers after that. The vast majority of kids do. They need to respect authority.
We now have pervasive over-indulgent parenting which among other things has produced a population-wide increase in narcissism. This is not “kids will be kids” which is basically your argument. This is dereliction of duty by parents in setting boundaries and demanding responsible behavior. How many parents now regularly whinge to principals if a teacher dares say their kid is disruptive? Or even worse, try to get bad grades reversed? In my youth, what the teacher said was backed by parents. Now teachers know they are not much in charge of their classrooms and a row with a parent might be a career-limiting move.
That does not mean that kids need to be spanked again. But they need to be disciplined firmly for misbehavior, like being sent to their rooms with no devices (and maybe the circuit breaker cut too), having allowances suspended, having other privileges revoked.
Go look again at the 1895 test and get back to me. That plus the Silicon Valley parents making sure their kids make only very limited use of devices disproves your thesis.
> And the substance of the case you do make is bullshit. Kids will test boundaries to see what they can get away with and will persist in misconduct if rules are not enforced.
I’ve stated twice that the reason kids are acting the way they do today is because the US no longer enforces rules of behavior on kids. So I’m not sure what you’re arguing with here.
> Go look again at the 1895 test and get back to me.
I did.
This has been a bewildering exchange. I obviously touched a nerve. I apologize, as I really didn’t mean to.
You attacked the post on rhetorically/logically invalid grounds, via depicting it as sensationalistic, click-bait, etc. Even if true, and many commenters felt otherwise, that does not invalidate the content. You barely engaged with that. And you DID try to depict continuity in kid’s behavior with your argument about behavior 100 years ago, as if kids were unmanaged and unmanageable then.
You did concede that discipline is a problem but you don’t advocate for it.
And I am not sure how they achieve it, but the kids of parents (the sort that go to elite schools even in kindergarten) overwhelmingly do behave, as did the kids at the Waldorf School. So I don’t see kids as natively hopeless and unmanageable as you do. I was deemed as a toddler as the “baddest” girl any of the boys had met, and was expelled from kindergarten. Yet I got shaped up in first grade. I reject that this is as hard as you suggest. It’s crap parenting much more than crap kids.
I think the framing of the linked exam is a little silly, in that the difficulty is more due to the obscurity of the subjects in the modern day than requiring more critical thinking and knowledge than a grade 8 student is expected to know today (after modernizing the subject of the questions).
For example, the mathematics section uses obscure terminology like “Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic” and “bank discount”, and obscure units like “rods” and “bushels”. The important part, setting up the equations to solve the problems, is actually pretty easy. Also note the general absence of geometry other than rectangular shapes – when I was in grade 8 not all that long ago (shut up), the math tests involved a lot more circles, triangles, parallel lines, and angles in general.
Another interesting thing about the exam is that some of the questions only seem to be complex because the times have changed. For example, the question about finding the interest for 8 month and 18 days would be an absolute stinker without calculators (which they didn’t have) if the interest was compounded continuously or monthly, but that’s not what they did back then (because again, they didn’t have calculators). The interest would have been compounded annually, and since no compounding has happened the answer can be found with a straightforward fraction multiplication. The question about republics and their capitals in Europe is even more trivial: at that time there was (1) France, capital Paris; (2) the microstate of San Marino, capital San Marino City; and if you want to stretch the definition of republics, there was (3) Switzerland (arguably more of a direct democracy), with no capital (Bern, if you want to stretch definitions even further).
A modern day (but pre-“AI”) test would have more math problems that require a great breadth and depth of knowledge. The grammar section would involve more hands-on correction of mistakes and conjugations and less recitation of rules. There would be an extensive reading section, where the student is required to read large chunks of unfamiliar text and answer questions based on that reading. And there would be many questions about the natural sciences, which would require the student to assess the compatibility of specific hypotheses with a list of observations, not mere rote recitation of facts.
This 8th grade math exam is less taxing that the one from 1895. So I differ:
https://mastermath.info/images/stories/pdf/Exams/8th%20grade%20final%20key.pdf
And this 8th grade social sciences test from Texas chinches the argument. Multiple choice, FFS:
https://vsat11003.cambiumtds.com/student_core/V499/Pages/TestShell.aspx
I strongly disagree that the test in the first link is easier than the 1895 test. If one shears off the unfamiliar context, half of the questions are conversions with or without some type of simple prep work like finding area (e.g. Q9), volume (Q2), or a step of subtraction (Q3).
Of the remainder, Q6 and Q8 are straightforward fractional multiplication without prep work. Q4 is a division problem where the quotient needs to be calculated first by a round each of multiplication and addition. The oddballs are Q1, recitation of rules, and Q10, home economics (admittedly important, but not usually grouped with math nowadays).
The first link has some questions that parallel those in technique (e.g. L1Q13 vs 1895Q4, L2Q15 vs 1985Q5), but also so much more than that. There is symbolic arithmetic (e.g. Q5), which was a relatively common thing for developmental math students to get stuck on when I worked as a tutor; relating graphic and algebraic representations of linear equations (Q3, Q10); solving systems of linear equations (Q1); geometry (Q9).
In addition to greater breadth (and I would argue depth, for example in the case of Q29) of material, the exam in link 1 also demands a much more punishing pace than the 1985 exam. Whereas the older exam only contains 10 questions for a 60 minute exam (6 minutes/question), the exam in link 1 has 44 questions over 90 minutes (2.05 minutes/question).
As an aside, the answers provided in the key are sometimes incorrect, perhaps as a way to detect students who try to crib off of it.
—
I was neither able to access the second link directly, nor to navigate to a practice social science test for the grade from the main page, so I cannot comment on it.
One of my favorite bits was pointing out to elementary school kids that it was kind of sad that they were in 3/4/5 grade and still counting with blocks like a kindergartner.
The replies were always consistent: “It’s not ‘counting with blocks.’ It’s ‘modeling.'” Then the 6th graders who cannot add two single digit numbers without counting on their fingers. And don’t even get me started on “inability to multiply without using a chart or calculator.”
I am 100% on board with Teacher #4 up there in the first third or so of the article. No discipline, no focus, no interest in anything other than skibbidy rizz or whatever.
I believe there was an article here not long ago about … Finnland? … going back to paper and pencil, and all for the better.
While I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a conspiracy, nevertheless it says something when affluent/educated groups refuse to let their children use tech until later in life.
As one fictional character put it, “Them’s gentry doin’s. Well yeah – how do you think the gentry got on top in the first place?” Cognitive thought vs. bread and circuses….
In the before times, my daughter spent a spring break in Finland on a exchange program that was part of her elementary education teaching program. She said the focus of the lower grades is play. How to share, how to compromise, how to get along with others, how to enjoy the outdoors… all learned through playing – both organized and freestyle. Academics are gradually added as the kids get older. Makes perfect sense.
My nieces attend a Waldorf school which has some similar ideas (they learned to knit, and write personal letters, etc.) – also one was a slow reader, but the teachers said “nothing to worry about, she’ll read when she is ready”. And around 3rd grade she took off and just graduated high school with no problems with the English language.
The net result of the trip to Finland is that it was a wonderful, yet demoralizing experience. Wonderful, because it seemed the kids were thriving. Demoralizing because she knows it is next to impossible for the US to ever do this.
She’s working on getting out of teaching which is sad because she is really good at it. Has so many Wtf stories about her students that she rarely mentions them. It is what it is.
A propos, just today (12 Feb) comes a report that Finnish students may not be best served by that system after all:
> Helsingin Sanomat [the most serious newspaper in Finland] hears from psychologists
> and consultants about young Finnish adults who don’t know how to follow basic rules
> or norms when they enter the workforce.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20209803
Some excerpts from the article:
“Young people in Finland have completely unrealistic expectations of working life, according to the headline of this article in Helsingin Sanomat.
“HS hears from psychologists, consultants and employers, who tell the paper that many young adults … constantly expect special privileges at work.
“‘This is where we have ended up when the world is presented to a child as a supermarket from which you can choose nice experiences and adventures,’ professor of psychology Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen notes.
“Mika Sallinen of consulting firm Universum meanwhile tells HS that he works closely with Finnish companies, and he has heard many tales of youthful apathy — such as refusing to do an important task because the young person in question would prefer to do something else.”
[heh heh: Bartleby the Scrivener]
“‘If you have always gotten everything you want, working life can come as quite a harsh surprise,’ Sallinen says.
“But could all this explain Finland’s dire unemployment rate, especially among young people?”
In any event, the glory days (2004) of those ‘best in the world’ FISA ratings are way in the past.
I believe age restrictions should be imposed on not only social media but also smartphones and tablets. Sometimes, a paternalistic approach is necessary.
At a moment when America is shamed abroad (Gaza, Iran), and at home (Minnesota, any American city) by our own heartlessness, the inability to understand stories portrayed in this post strikes hard. There is surely some affinity between the way overuse of devices erodes the child’s interest and comprehension of stories, and the way that so-called “Artificial Intelligence” conceived as something that can be created by an LLM, erodes our connection to language. These things are disconnecting the heart from realities. Having destroyed narrative understanding, and denigrated language, we will become illiterate, then incompetent and finally, nihilistic.
I thought the video was quite good. As in the video, I’m inclined to a common-sense approach with this kind of thing. Some systems are very complex and difficult to assess objectively with properly scientific methods. Not that we shouldn’t try to gain objectivity but parents and teachers need to act now before causes and effects can be reliably measured.
But assuming the pointers given in the video are correct, I wonder who might implement them. I know two teachers, one quit last year and the other is going to quit this year. The combination of low pay, bad work conditions, workload, bad management, disinterested students, and low status just doesn’t work for them.
On the parents side, how many are too busy doom scrolling themselves to engage?
I walk dogs a lot in busy Boston neighborhoods, my own two plus I walk dogs for the rescue league. It requires good situational awareness and keen attention to avoid sidewalk incidents. So I have to watch people carefully so I can try to anticipate their movements. What’s this to do with the kids in the video. Well, half the people on Boston sidewalks, whether they are walking, jogging, alone, with a dog or other people are staring at their phone and navigating on peripheral vision and audiopilot. If this is what people are like walking on the sidewalk, I wonder what they are doing at home? If they can’t take their eyes off their phone outdoors while in motion I wouldn’t assume they are less distracted at home.
If my guess is about right then even among the parents worried about the issues raised in the video and armed with some tactics to remediate the situation, about half will be too distracted by their phones to do much about it.
There is no doubt AI is diminishing skills across age demographics in the ways mentioned here and elsewhere on this site. Most work in adult life requires the discipline to sit through unexciting, uneventful moments on the way to discovery. AI and technology obviously diminish this capacity and use in classrooms and in homes should be curtailed significantly. Though I also read this story as an indictment of education under capitalism, specifically the fetishization of standardized testing and metrics-based education.
Take college kids using AI for papers and homework assignments. Most correctly identify the purpose of school and education as now to secure employment and prepare them for work; moral edification and the love of knowledge, if they occur, seem like incidental byproducts. The potential for material losses and hardships that can result from failure to play the game well (right school, right major, good grades, right internships, etc) are anxiety provoking for most, so their calculation is why not use the cheating machine to allay these fears and do the stupid shit on this curriculum that is obviously not created with me in mind?
Imagine if students weren’t burdened by debt and frightened by material loss, if they were assured “look even if you won’t be a millionaire, at least you can own a home, have a family, and live a decent life. Here on college is the time for you to pursue knowledge”. Read this op-ed in the NYT by the former philosophy prof teaching great books (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html). She said her students craved the liberal arts and an education which respected their intelligence and pushed them to learn challenging material. Maybe a selection effect but lack of demand for real education is not the issue. I don’t see why this logic shouldn’t be extended all the way down to the lowest levels.
I appreciate how my child’s school uses technology to supplement learning so far. My 2nd grader uses an iPad in the classroom for math differentiation and for reading stories. The teacher has math lessons for the entire class, but each student also uses an app (Dreambox) to learn math at their own pace. Personally I think it would be too much effort for the teacher to differentiate otherwise. The students have paper book reading time, but sometimes there are entire class lessons for topics like MLK Jr. and the book used in on an app.
Unfortunately it looks like the school district is considering exposing elementary school kids to AI tools and I have serious problems with this.
I was a double major in psychology and early childhood ed in the late 2000s with the intention of becoming a child therapist with a focus on Black boys. My planned dissertation was going to be about the negative effects of social media and too much screen time on children because the effects were already starting to present themselves. During my classroom observations I witnessed children under 6 stealing teacher’s phones because they couldnt go 5 minutes without a device in their hands. IMO many of the issues that older generations have with Gen Zers stem directly from too much screen time and social media use, it destroys one’s ability to comprehend reality and on children that effect is disasterous and long lasting
Re: social skills, emotional intelligence, behavior control
This increases justifications for the surveillance tech.
It’s always “just need more tech” to deal with the other problems created by some tech.
Boots on the ground; I left a teaching position mid year. Nope; my battery drained and thus could not be replenished. I also left my nursing career mid contract. Repeat; battery drained. I did what I did; feeling for those still in the profession(s). I noticed a distinct shift in students era 2016. Nursing, era 2019. Forty years of watching the Big Blue spin. Today, as most days, I checked my grocery receipt carefully; errors about 80% of the time. As for medical care, I self direct my provider. Of course I have little to no concerns. Yet, I do see what is going … down, eyes wide open. Thank you for this post❤️🐈⬛
I have watched most of the videos referred to in this article. What strikes me is that teachers feel frustrated and sometimes helpless to counteract the effects of the device addiction. The damage has already been done by the parents. Most kids are sent to day care from early ages, even in infancy. Are day care providers using devices as babysitters? Then the kids come home and use devices. This is conditioning. Extreme psychological and behavioral conditioning.
The solution is parent intervention at the day care, in school and at home. My adult children who are parents limit the time their kids spend on ipads. My 11 year old granddaughter does not have a phone. But this intervention is not enough to counteract the effects of phones & ipads. Hands on parent – child interactions, conversations, activities are vital. Parents must spend time with their children. My adult children take their kids camping, bike riding, hiking. They encourage art creation, reading, making things, learning how to use tools. All this is old school, the way we were brought up before computers.
The solution is simple, but also subversive. Parents need to directly confront the conditioning, interfere, and take charge. They can do this at home but at school? Would they even be allowed to change the direction of digital conditioning?
What is happening now is so alarming, so dangerous for these children. What purpose will our future AI driven society have for them? Will they become slaves? Will they even be allowed to live?
I’m sorry to say, I don’t think the damage is limited to the kids. I deal with middle aged adults every day who are like this.
And while the video calls attention to the damage being done, it is itself in the same format as the very thing doing the damage. The iphone is only an expensive video player, information is now consumed audiovisually and, unlike text, jumps all over the place – leading to minds which do the same. And now even text jumps all over – websites don’t place text in a neat block anymore, intersperses with ads and videos, anything and everything to distract.