College-Studenten verlieren schnell ihre Lesefähigkeit – „Es gibt einen messbaren, generationsübergreifenden Zusammenbruch beim dauerhaften Lesen und Schreiben“: Professor
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
36 Kommentare
First it was the smartphone distractions, then complete loss of critical thinking as people use ai to solve all their problems for them. When you put this much trust in computers programmed by corporations seeking profit at any cost everythings going to fall apart.
Also see https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read (paywalled).
Excerpts from article by Frank Landymore:
*[JMU professor] Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992.*
*Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment’s “basic” level in reading, meaning they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” Younger children aren’t better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can’t read at a proficient level.*
*“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”*
*Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can’t understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.*
*More flaglantry detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.*
„Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.“
– The Butlerian Jihad.
This is what the tech billionaires want. An uneducated society.
If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.
Reading Endurance.
There will be ‚mental gyms‘ for this in 15 years.
offload it to the ai, what could possibly go wrong?
Giving the common man unlimited easy access to the internet back when the iphone was first released in the late 2000s was a mistake. It was supposed to enrich the world and give everyone access to unlimited information instead it just gave a voice to idiots and led to the spread of misinformation we see today.
Giving people unlimited access to AI is an even bigger mistake and is actually going to lead us straight to Idiocracy. I called this shit over a decade ago on /r/futurology and got downvoted for ’not being optomistic enough‘
We must declare the Butlerian Jihad now. No thinking machines
We make our kids read at least 20-30 minutes everyday, they have always tested very well in elementary reading and hopefully it continues into middle school.
I know. Lets reduce educational funding some more and then pay the teacher less while we’re at it.
I think that’ll do er
Ya you don’t need to read, just follow orders from now on.
The smartphone revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
This isn’t the way this 46 year old wanted to stay relevant in the AI job market.
I would imagine that a lot of them offload everything to AI and thus learn less, think less, understand less.
We need to get rid of AI access for anything but scientific and medical research or for automating robots to clean and do manual labor for us .
Their parents can barely read and often hated education. They see school as opponents and no longer as allies is raising their students. Education is the opposition to them.
That’s something idk if we can cure in this country. Especially when their TV is reinforcing those views 24/7.
Well there has been a concerted effort to cut back on critical thinking skills because a populace who can reason can tell when their government is screwing them over. Since Reagan a lot of government policies don’t pass the common sense test if you take them out to their logical conclusions. You need people smart enough to do what you need but not smart enough to figure out the end game.
We live in a society of „TLDR;“ people..
You write more than a line or 2 and they blank over and skip things and respond to what ever the first 1-2 lines says..
Drives me nuts being in IT/Security when you send people responses to issues and they ignore 90% of it…
I was born in 1989 and went to public schools in Canada all the way from elementary to university, and I can attest that literacy was already hanging by a thread. All the way through, it felt like maybe only a handful of other people and I actually cared about typos, grammar, and how to form a coherent sentence.
With all the tools people use now to be lazy and shortcut actually learning their only language, I’m not surprised everyone’s literacy is atrophied. You can google and text now without knowing how to spell a single word because the app will autocorrect and save you every time.
This is 100% the parents‘ fault. Previous generations neglected their kids by not having any idea where their kids were or what they were doing. The current generation of parents just continued that neglect by offloading their parental responsibility to screens and YouTube and streamers and smartphones.
When I was growing up, the TV announcement was, „Parents: It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your children are?“ Today it would be, „Parents: It’s 10 pm. Do you know what your children are streaming on YouTube?“
The only difference is that the prior neglect at least forced kids to learn how to fend for themselves. Today’s neglect just makes them idiots.
From K shaped recovery to a K shaped world.
No child left behind. Kids are supposed to get left back for a reason. We are supposed to be able to expel the bad children to force the parents to move them to a different school, and then to a different city or to have them pay for private school if they don’t want to move
It’s probably attention span causing the issue. I didn’t realize how badly my reading abilities had degraded until I started doing college level reading. I could easily clear light novels and fantasy book in a sitting, so I thought it was decent.
Once I started reading authors like Hobbes, Marx and Nietzsche, it was like being hit in the head by a tire iron. The text was so dense and I had to push through over a hundred pages every 1-2 days. The level of sustained thinking and concentration to both understand and digest the material was nothing like the passive reading and imagining a fictional book required. Half the time I didn’t even know what Nietzsche was talking about. And if I was sleep deprived, it was over, no real reading would be done.
College student redditors, what say you.
What’s most frustrating is I don’t hear ANY elected officials or even folks running talking about solutions for our broken education system.
The Democrats seem completely disinterested and the Republicans are actively trying to sabotage public education.
The children yearn to read books all summer for a personal pan pizza.
I really want to see a global study of this. I see a million report of this and videos of people talking about this in the US, but is this just a US phenomena, western countries, or is it worldwide?
The stupidization of the US. It’s planned.
I remember when I was in school, I hated math. I was CONVINCED that I didn’t need it. But the thing is? Your brain needs to exercise, it needs to build connections and develop the ability to focus, retain, comprehend, problem solve, etc etc. when you outsource these tasks ESPECIALLY at the early ages, you are doing yourself a disservice.
AKA the American university system is largely structured like a pill mill that largely supports an athletics system rather that actually educating.
It should be much harder to be accepted into higher education, but instead it has been completely monetized to the tune of hundreds of billions in loan debt to banks. Sounds about right.
Bring back reading for pizza in schools like we had in 1999
It’s ok. We’ll have our first trillionaire soon so it’s a fair trade.
so you telling me the decades of giving my change to the literacy for children project was for fucking nothing?
The elite and overseers of this nation want a dumb, uneducated population.
Easier to make slaves and fill, prisons and jails. Free labor and such. America doesnt want its people educated, otherwise the whole nation would realize how bad we are drained and fraudulently misused and ppl would revolt.
My mom read to me every night for years when I was little. I started writing in 1st grade and never stopped, and now I have a few books of my own.
One of the biggest suggestions I would make to parents: read to your kids. Start early, don’t stop until they start doing it in their own.
Not just that, but we’re also beholden to AI that’s frequently WRONG too. So not only are your cognitive skills shitting the bed, but you can’t differentiate fact or cap. Big AI stands to gain everything while society breaks down around it.