In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
As the great Douglas Adams once wrote: “This has generally been considered a bad idea.”
2002 though. I sympathize. The internet was different and more human. He must’ve thought they were giving kids freedom to access NatGeo and Wikipedia.
…We were more optimistic about the internet then.
…But they failed to take into account that they were releasing children into an unregulated world of predatory marketer barons making millions hand-over-fist by hijacking attention.
As a society, we chose to only teach ONE FUCKING GENERATION how to use technology and then went “well, young people ‘just understand’ technology, we don’t need to teach it anymore” and then somehow decided to just give all the kids a fucking tablet or laptop and assume they would LEARN THROUGH OSMOSIS I GUESS? Meanwhile we are defunding education across the country to absolutely shameful lows. (yes, I’m focused on the USA - I doubt “Cooney Horvath” is basing this broad generalization meant to scare people into buying his books on a study of ALL CHILDREN ALL OVER THE WORLD) AND THEN we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).
BUT YES, JARED HORNY CORVATH, your astute observations PROVE it was the fault of the LAPTOP that the next generations are “INHERANTLY DUMBER” (feels like a dog whistle, I dunno for what - but it’s trying to justify something, I can feel it in my bones).
and welcome to 'short attention span theater"
Students aren’t being disadvantaged by the availability or even the reliance on technology.
They’re being disadvantaged by not being taught (or in most cases even allowed) to interact with said technology in challenging and enlightening ways.
Would expect nothing better than such jumping to shallow conclusions from the chronically out of touch rag Fortune, though.
LOL what on earth if FORTUNE of all places doing publishing an article on this?
Fortune:
Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior…after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.
Up next: “These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?”
▶️ Fortunate_Son.wav
I have a degree in computer engineering. I have been coding since the 80’s.
I learn better with pencil and paper. Most people do. Schools need to go back to that. Have computer labs but don’t do everything on computers all damn day.
I’m 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.
Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.
I get the writhing because of muscle memory but reading is reading…
We are more distractible when reading on digitsl devices though. Perhaps with the exception of dedicated ebook readers.
In addition to fhat I wonder if eInk and actual paper are more conducive to prolonged reading as well, less eye strain
Agreed! I also have CS degrees and got them before having computers in the classroom was the norm. We had all our exams on pen and paper, you would have to write out a lot of lines of code and make sure it was proper C in the flavor we learnt in that class. Most of our classes were all books, paper and overhead projectors. We did have classes with computers, but they were awful. Our class would be two hours and at about the one hour mark you needed to be sure you were compiling. The compilation could easily take more than 30 mins and if you fucked up or it simply crashed you’d be at the end of the class easily.
I have a masters in Embedded Systems design, so a lot of my studies focused on both the hardware and software. We needed to juggle bits and extract the absolute max out of our very limited hardware. We needed to know about how software could even work on the hardware and why it worked the way it worked. Why hardware shaped the software and vice versa. I feel with the billion abstraction layers these days people are missing a lot of fundamentals about software design.
I also remember half of our classes were various forms of maths. All of those the first year first class started with a variation of: “Forget everything you’ve learned about maths so far, this is something completely different”. And each and every time it was true as well, blew my mind. A lot of those maths I still use very often and I feel like modern programming classes don’t focus enough on those.
On the other hand, I’m an old fart and it feels very “Everything was better when I was young”. So don’t take my opinion too seriously, but it is genuinely how I feel about it.
A core moment of my life was when, late at night, doing homework for assembly class, I finally GOT that “The instruction is the data is the number”. I would be surprised if students today have an opportunity to get to that realization.
I’m just gonna toss this out there…
You old fucks1 are siding with someone non-ironically named “Cooney Horvath” who, btw, is trying to sell books on how best to teach. Hoodwinked I say. Absolutely hoodwinked. “Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!” “They expect to be able to learn spelling and writing without a chalk board tablet? Preposterous!”
1 - Used as a term of endearment.
“Everyone knows you can’t learn math unless you have an abacus!”
I know this is an exaggeration for emphasis… but people who learn the abacus method are faster and more accurate at basic addition.
I don’t think it’s tablets and laptops that caused the decline as much as what they grant access to. The conspiratorial side to me is dying to believe that the massive Gen AI push by the government and businesses is not only about the money, but also about producing a dumber generation.
The body is just as much in charge of the brain as the brain is of the body, it’s certainly a combination of factors including how we are using our bodies while learning, writing is fundamentally human and intellectual, pushing buttons to type, not so much.
That’s a muddied ground to trend. People who can’t draw can still interpret art, but I tend to agree with you. There’s a lot about how the brain works that we still don’t know
I make a comment saying the title here, like a week ago, and its controversial.
I say ‘if you don’t understand this that’s because you’re not familiar with current stats and papers’.
Look.
Everybody is scrambling to actually explain the causal mechanism(s).
… The observed effect though, is so broad and obvious and undeniable, that that’s why everyone is scrambling to try and explain it.
Personally, my inclination is that for-profit, advertisement-oriented social media apps are the ‘cigarettes’ of the digital age… because they are literally precision designed to hijack your attention, cause addiction via hijacking your dopamine/reward neurochemistry, prey on and exploit all your innate/subconscious insecurities, and they reward and amplify convenience, outrage and excess.
But that’s just a hypothesis. Again, what’s undeniable is that… we have, broadly, peaked.
Unless of course we can figure out how to reverse that, and then actually implement whatever needs to be done, to actually reverse it.
Fully back up your theory for the main cause. Screen time has vastly taken over the times of students as their brains are developing and by and large it feeds the least enriching, least challenging content as it has the highest propensity for addiction (under the guise of user retention)
I predict we’ll view this experiment with the same confused disgust as we do when we hear that doctors used to prescribe cocaine for pretty much anything. The software engineers who aided any of this are going to be ashamed of their work.
I do not disagree that social media is having a negative effect but just the over abundance of information, ease of access to it, and a lot being false. It’s exacerbated that we treated iPads and phones like our parents did television as a “shut up kid” distraction.
The dark ages didn’t begin because the library of Alexandria fell, but because it was allowed to fall.
This is fundamentally our fault
I say we’re already in a modern dark age, not because of lack of knowledge to pass around but the omnipresent nature of it now a days with so much being fabrications. We started giving kids access to tech as their mind developed and we’re seeing it has highly negative consequences on unfettered use.
i can’t imagine that forcing kids to go to school during a pandemic where a disease spread whose long-term effects include cognitive impairment had a good impact either
Mostly posting this because holy shit what a jump to blame schools distributing laptops being the cause and not psychologically addictive social media algorithms having a total domination of their attention
Definitely nothing to do with the fact that schools giving out laptops disproportionately benefits less wealthier families
Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.
The issue was not being willing or able to curate their online experiences when given computers.
“Educational” software is terrible.
Someone clearly hasn’t played Typing of the Dead.
It educates kids to use MS Office and ChatGPT.
Many got chromebooks and just had google everything.
You shut your whore mouth about Oregon Trail
Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It’s especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.
I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I’ve been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that’s probably the main factor here.
School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it’s just hard when it’s this bad for this long. We’re talking decades of decline.
It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it’d be a book.
I also think schools are not evolving to the reality. There’s little incentive to memorize facts in a world where they are so easily acceptable. So we shouldn’t teach the memorization of facts.
We should teach people how to use information, how to criticize it, how to synthesize it, how to apply it. If these pursuits are taken seriously students will retain the information.
This issue is that’s much more difficult to test for than the memorization of facts.
I teach immigrants the local language, and students are never grateful to be taught a language. Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it’s not. There are thousands of words that people use in common conversation, tens of thousands that you can find in standard newspapers and normal literature, and even more if you want to read academic or specialized literature. When I teach the meaning of one word, that’s giving the students a fish. When I teach them how to break down prefixes or give them advice for increasing their exposure to language input, that’s teaching them how to fish.
The problem is that it only works for students who care. That’s fine by me, because I teach adults and they can decide whether they want to learn or not.
I don’t know how k-12 teachers navigate that, because it’s not exactly the student’s choice- we’ve decided as a society that kids need to learn certain things, whether they want to or not (basically), and that means that schoolteachers need to be able to teach students who don’t care or actively want not to learn (at least about a given subject). Just teaching them to teach themselves doesn’t work there, so you have to teach them some facts, because otherwise they won’t learn any.
It sucks, but I don’t know if it can be fixed. It’s reasonable that students don’t care about every subject, and it’s reasonable that there are things we’ve decided they need to learn, regardless of their interest. Teachers can’t always make a subject interesting to everyone, so sometimes you have to teach the base facts.
My seventh grade English teacher got permission from admin (she told us this) to spend her whole semester with us teaching vocabulary. Word roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. That was helpful, and interesting, and the first time I enjoyed learning English. I still struggled in English, but I did better after that.
Students are grateful when you teach them how to learn a language.
I relate to this immensely. I’m taking german classes currently and the professor is driving me insane.
She uses an immersion only method where she speaks German at us and we do exercises from a book.
I am slowly getting an understanding of the past imperfect and various grammatical rules but only barely. There has been no real instruction on how these rules work so when I encounter a new verb or noun it’s a total guess everytime.
From my understanding speaking with some Germans, this is the preffered method for teaching English to school children. Which I must admit does seem to work well the English proficiency of the average person is quite high, even amongst those too afraid to speak it their comprehension is high.
The issue is I do not want to be learning German for the next 8 years as a German student would learn English in school. Also my brain is fundamentally different than a child’s. If they were to explain the rules and grammatical concepts it would be much much easier to understand.
A blended approach where the rules for new grammatical concepts are first explained followed with the immersion based exercises we’ve been doing would be ideal.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I actually teach German, and especially for students who have a good language sense for English (so if “I singed a song” immediately sticks out to you), tenses are mostly (with some obvious exceptions, like present progressive and preterite/perfect) pretty similar.
She’s probably trying to get your brain to recognize an irregular verb so you don’t have to learn each verb anew, but that’s a problem you’re less likely to have as an English speaker (for example, you’d say “Morgen singe ich, gestern sang ich, heute habe ich noch nicht gesungen,” which is pretty intuitive after English).
Fwiw, you do retain it longer if she sets it up so you can draw your own conclusions, but you also learn more slowly. And if you’re highly motivated, you’ll probably remember it well enough either way.
The whole class speaks English at a B2 level since that’s what is required for International students at the university. I do feel like that could be capitalized on given the similarities.
Honestly I truly feel like I paid someone to read the Kurs DaF A1 book to me. Rarely there are other exercises or explanations.
Comparing other language course I’ve had I liked my high school French teacher’s approach. She primed us with explanations of the new concepts and grammatical rules. Then she followed up with immersion and exercises.
My Spanish courses in college and high school were just memorization based. I technically reached a higher level of course in Spanish, but remember next to nothing. My comprehension of French is much better.
Truthfully I need to dedicate more time to my German, but my other studies being all English take up my time. I’m here for a master’s degree. The language is an additional skill I would like.
And if you care for learner’s perspectives, give quizzes. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we took our first test I felt a lot of concepts click into place because I had to perform if that makes sense. It’s like my brain felt the pressure and acted. It made me wish we had regular quizzes on the content in between tests.
Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.
I know you’re joking, but what would result if this actually happened would be after 1 week 99% of the laptops would never be powered on again and simply be handed back in at the end of the term.
I’d be more worried about the 1% that are still being used. You’ve created a group of kids that know more about the computers than most IT departments.
Those aren’t kids to worry about. Those are kids to put into advanced classes because they’ve got some great understanding of complex topics and problem solving skills.
Well that’ll definitely make them resilient in the face of adversity, at the very least.
That is brought up near the end of the article.
While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.
“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”
Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.
“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”
Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable.
It doesn’t have to be. Rote memorization always is for me, but that’s not really learning. And you can focus on just about anything when the alternative is a shitty textbook poorly explaining something that just won’t click with you. Look out the window, doodle, count the ceiling tiles, daydream about not being stuck in school, …
it’s like blaming the obesity epidemic on plates…
when it’s microplastics!
Then it’ll make the wealthy stupider.
I would be willing to bet that is the case, but good luck doing a study to test the hypothesis.
So the interesting line for me, that many comments obviously didn’t read, is:
Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school
So there clearly is something up with computers in school. But this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the kids who are getting their brains fucked by addictive algorithms are then more likely to fuck about on school computers. This line:
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.
Suggests it’s not “tech” but “distractions enabled by tech” which is having the effect, i.e. if school laptops and tablets were locked down you wouldn’t see as much of an effect.
Lots of tech is also badly designed honestly. I know it’s the main reason I’m on Linux. I’m not a programmer, I’m just very easily distracted so I benefit from keyboard-driven applications with no weird attention-grabbing banners or blinking text or obnoxious sounds. I need a consistent design language or I can feel my blood pressure spike. I’m sure the same is true for most people just to a much less noticeable extent.
One of my first forays into computer science was learning how to bypass the various school firewalls in grade school lol
Heh, yeah. When I was at school, security was an afterthought. You could run a .reg file and give yourself any privileges. Bypassing the filters involved going on babelfish and translating from Chinese into English.
Same thing when I was working from home before I had a company laptop. I was using my PC and could easily get distracted by YouTube. Having a separate one if better for privacy and keeping on task.
… commenting from my work laptop, YouTube playing on another screen …
I work with college students and unfortunately regardless of the cause this seems to be true. Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.
I have been reading the “children are getting dumber” article since grade school.
It is the Shepherd’s Tone of news coverage, right up there with “rising crime rates in urban centers” and “migrant caravans are crossing the border”, that reports the same tired set of manufactured concerns paired with a call to ramp up funding for profitable interventions.
Capitalism finally got its perfect consumer.
The consumer with no disposable income? FFS, these toss off lines don’t even make any fucking sense. You could earn more as a blue-collar day laborer 40 years ago than as an entry-level college grade today.
Why do you think so much of corporate industry has pivoted from retail sales to B2B SaaS as a profit center? Consumerism is dying. Six mega-corps passing each other the same dollar in an investor circle jerk is the future of the economy.
I have been reading the “children are getting dumber” article since grade school.
This generation of children are also dealing with some unprecedented events that we know are pretty bad for cognitive development. Both the advent of Covid and the regular use of certain technology in children are relatively new, and we have plenty of studies telling us they are actually delaying cognitive development.
The consumer with no disposable income? FFS, these toss off lines don’t even make any fucking sense.
Consumer spending has increased year over year since the 70s, just since 2020 it’s increased by over 30%.
Consumer spending isn’t just the stuff you want, it’s also the stuff you need. Disposable income is the surplus after your mandatory deductions, like state and federal taxes. So things like groceries, rent, utilities, and your phones are all spent with “disposable income”.
Secondly, more people have more access to acquire debt than ever before. The total household debt in the US is now 18.2 trillion dollars. Consumerism is not dying, it’s just being funded by debt, which in late stage capitalism is the perfect consumer.
This generation of children are also dealing with some unprecedented events that we know are pretty bad for cognitive development.
I don’t want to play the “who had it harder?” game, because that’s always just a war of the sob stories. But COVID is competing with Vietnam enlistment and lead/asbestos poisoning, when it comes to generational intellectual speedbumps. Nevermind the sheer dearth of educational establishments prior to the Boomer-Era buildout of high school and college campuses. I lived through the era when everyone and their kid brother was being diagnosed with a learning disability. And when weed was supposed to obliterated cognition in young people. And when video games were rotting brains. And when Cliff’s Notes was destroying academia. There’s always something.
I see so many “My 16-year-old is a drooling idiot” hysterical denouncements of modern education. And it’s all couched in this insufferable nostolgia for a past that never existed. Long-form Op-Ed articles about how not wearing a bike helmet built character or why Montessori School turned our kids queer. Screaming tirades about the poor quality of STEM and the insidious nature of liberal arts education, combined with jerk-off sessions over Classical Education and the endless need for Teaching The Controversy and in-class debates.
Fucking awful people pushing bullshit lines that get gobbled up by whatever audience is being told “You’re the smart ones, every other generation else is worthless trash”.
more people have more access to acquire debt than ever before
That’s. Not. Actually. True.
Fewer people have access to consumer credit today. A select subset have access to higher debt limits in an inflationary economy. And most of that debt is housing debt, not retail consumer debt, anyway.
The $18.2 trillion isn’t distributed equitably. It’s also overstated, given that a bunch of it is bad medical and housing debt that debt-holders refuse to write down.
COVID is competing with Vietnam enlistment and lead/asbestos poisoning, when it comes to generational intellectual speedbumps. Nevermind the sheer dearth of educational establishments prior to the Boomer-Era buildout of high school and college campuses.
I mean, Vietnam didn’t happen to children… But I get that’s not your point. However, just because this generation is seeing cognitive development hurdles, does not mean others didn’t face their version as well. The largest difference is things like lead have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. Their reduction marks an improvement to a situation that had been endemic for generations.
Something like COVID or the introduction of screens marks a new impediment that is being laid on top of residual ones that people in the past also dealt with.
I lived through the era when everyone and their kid brother was being diagnosed with a learning disability.
Yes, but children had always had those impairment, diagnosis have just been better at catching disabilities.
And when weed was supposed to obliterated cognition in young people. And when video games were rotting brains. And when Cliff’s Notes was destroying academia. There’s always something.
Yes, based on the hysterics of the news, not scientific consensus.
so many “My 16-year-old is a drooling idiot” hysterical denouncements of modern education. And it’s all couched in this insufferable nostolgia for a past that never existed. Long-form Op-Ed articles about how not wearing a bike helmet built character or why Montessori School turned our kids queer. Screaming tirades about the poor quality of STEM and the insidious nature of liberal arts education, combined with jerk-off sessions over Classical Education and the endless need for Teaching The Controversy and in-class debates.
Again, you are arguing against a straw man of your own making. My examples were based on scientific studies, not news reports.
Fewer people* have access to consumer credit today.
That’s not true according to the latest SCE CREDIT ACCESS SURVEY
Reported application rates for any kind of credit over the past twelve months increased in February to the highest level since October 2022, driven by an increase in credit card applications. The overall rejection rate for any kind of credit over the past twelve months decreased to 15.9 percent, the lowest level since June 2021. Rejection rates fell across all credit types.
most of that debt is housing debt, not retail consumer debt, anyway
That’s always been true? Consumer credit card debt is also near an all time high, especially with how popular buyitnow pay later plans have gotten.
The $18.2 trillion isn’t distributed equitably.
Never said it wasn’t?
It’s also overstated, given that a bunch of it is bad medical and housing debt that debt-holders refuse to write down.
Which still counts as disposable income spending.
I mean, Vietnam didn’t happen to children…
US soldiers killed in Vietnam were as young as 16. The average age was 23, so assume roughly half under that. The human brain isn’t fully developed until 25. FFS, we didn’t let people vote until 21 when the war started. And we only passed the 26th amendment in '71, directly in response to the contradiction between enlistment and elections.
Something like COVID or the introduction of screens marks a new impediment that is being laid on top of residual ones
I’ll spot you COVID, at least for the specific cohort that hit their prime learning years during the shutdown.
But the introduction of screens? We’ve had screens since the 1950s. And, I gotta throw back to XKCD on this one…
The introduction of keyboards has been an enormous boon for education.
Yes, but children had always had those impairment
And in a largely agricultural or early industrial economy, it hasn’t been a serious issue. These only truly become classified as “impairments” when they interfere with a very specific kind of intellectual labor.
Reported application rates for any kind of credit over the past twelve months increased in February to the highest level since October 2022
So we had a four year long dip and we’re finally caught back up?
Which still counts as disposable income spending.
There is no elasticity in these budget items.
US soldiers killed in Vietnam were as young as 16. The average age was 23, so assume roughly half under that. The human brain isn’t fully developed until 25.
Yes, but you aren’t interfering with a child’s ability to learn which is what we were discussing. At that age cognitive function that is typically affected by PTSD and high levels of stress is impulse control and rational control over your emotions.
the introduction of screens? We’ve had screens since the 1950s. And, I gotta throw back to XKCD on this one…
If you cared to read the study you would have learned that they are specifying passive activities. Playing games that actively have the user engage with thought is fine, what is harmful and is a growing problem is passive participation. Where the only thing you do is just swipe to the next piece of entertainment .
If you would have bothered to read the source you would have known that this comic doesn’t have anything to do what we were talking about.
And in a largely agricultural or early industrial economy, it hasn’t been a serious issue. These only truly become classified as “impairments” when they interfere with a very specific kind of intellectual labor.
Again, what does this have to do with your argument… We do not live in an agrarian society.
So we had a four year long dip and we’re finally caught back up?
No, we’ve been growing in debt and access to debt since the crash in 08, in 20-21 we saw a two year lull due to the pandemic. Since the end of the pandemic we have seen the most aggressive rebound in history, largely spurred by inflation and post pandemic spending.
There is no elasticity in these budget items.
That is not relevant to the current argument.
you aren’t interfering with a child’s ability to learn which is what we were discussing
Drafting a kid out of high school and putting them on a 12-month tour of duty absolutely interfered with their education. Even if they never see a day of combat, they’re still doing some menial work that allows their accrued educational experience to atrophy. Same as what happened during COVID.
they are specifying passive activities
They are specifying interpersonal communications through text.
In this study children 10-12 were asked to compose text messages. The number of textisms was recorded, and a positive correlation was found between use of SMS abbreviations and success at literacy tests. This is then related to David Crystal’s concept of “ludic” language: the playful use of language as a contribution to language development. That notion is developed here: By playing with textual language, one develops writing skills
How is this “passive”? None of it involves “swiping”.
Again, what does this have to do with your argument…
That public reporting on learning difficulties only became interesting when students were educated to the level at which the difficulty was relevant? It goes directly against the notion that the current generation is in a unique situation.
That is not relevant to the current argument.
It is extremely relevant.
Do you often interact with young people?
For there to be no disposable income these corporations are somehow making money hand over fist at every level of commerce.
As a relatively younger guy (26) I do suspect that a lot of that comes from whales and whatnot IE the richer subsect. At least amongst my friends we have all started to approach old man thinks 20 bucks is a lot of money levels of stingy.
What do you spend your money on? I hear this kind of thing from lots of kids and then discover that they’ve normalized spending on things like door dash and subscription services as being essential.
Ignoring essentials like groceries then it’s mostly random shit and games. Going over me buying antique surplus and retrotech from various sources would be kinda pointless. Though I will say I’m the least profligate of my friends since as I get older the Scottish and Autistic frugality increases.
Do you often interact with young people?
I mean, I have a toddler, just for starters. Also, a bunch of nieces and nephews and friends with kids of various ages. Then I do some of the professional onboarding for interns and college new hires at my company.
So, Idk, for some definition of “young people”, yes.
For there to be no disposable income these corporations are somehow making money hand over fist at every level of commerce.
The big winners of the post-COVID economy have been B2B companies - enterprise level software firms, data center firms, government contractors, and corporate supply chain companies. Your grocery store chains and big box retailers have been comparatively flat. Car companies have underperformed. Even real estate has been anemic, at least by comparison.
To call this a consumer economy, you really have to point to the consumer end of the equation and show some kind of growth. Inflation might be rising, but retail consumption certainly hasn’t.
call this a consumer economy, you really have to point to the consumer end of the equation and show some kind of growth. Inflation might be rising, but retail consumption certainly hasn’t.
Yes it has. Where are you pulling this information from? The only times in the last 30 years where real retail consumption hasn’t raised is after 08 and during COVID.
Yes it has.
Virtually flat for five straight years.
Only because that short of a period does not account for the giant spike we had due to post-pandemic spending. If you took out the period of time during and directly after the pandemic the growth curve would look completely normal.
that short of a period does not account for the giant spike we had
Trying to explain to a corpse that, on average, it’s still got a heartbeat.
I’m unsure of what you’re arguing here. Walmart continues to grow, Doordash has healthy growth, McDonald’s is still growing despite price increases, subscriptions are growing, micro transactions, cbd companies… I can literally keep going. The need to scroll and consume has hit gen Z hard and despite no “disposable income” they’re somehow pushing profits up along with any other struggling person. These minor comforts are big business.
Retail consumption isn’t growing? Buddy…
They like to confidently make a lot of bold claims that are very easy to refute by looking at a simple chart.
These are a handful of exceptions to a sweeping 15 year trend.
The following retailers in the United States and Canada have all either closed or announced plans to close large numbers of retail locations, since 2010, deemed a “retail apocalypse” by media, accelerated by both the increase in online shopping and by the COVID-19 pandemic.
deemed a “retail apocalypse” by media, accelerated by both the increase in online shopping and by the COVID-19 pandemic.
So brick and mortar consumer retail is being killed off by online consumer retail…and you are interpreting this as all consumer retail is failing? Are you just not arguing in good faith, or are you that donkey brained?
Online shopping is retail but semantics… I guess the businesses that aren’t on your list are showing profits made by ghosts then.
Amazon’s data center revenue — primarily from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business — has grown faster than its retail sales in recent years, reflecting a strategic shift toward high-margin cloud infrastructure.
Some of this is governmental. But a big chunk is functionally a circular network of business spending. Microsoft pays Amazon a dollar. Amazon pays NVIDIA a dollar. NVIDIA pays Microsoft a dollar. Ad Infinium.
Man I hate such and such generation is such. if technology is dumbing the kids its also dumbing the adults. which it is. ironically its not making a bunch of high paying jobs for people who get elementary logic.
ironically its not making a bunch of high paying jobs for people who get elementary logic.
I don’t know. The folks over at Kalshi and Polymarket seem to be doing okay. I’m fairly certain they have a good grasp on logic and math. Better than most of their customers.
well some people have further levels of logic that realize where unfair systems eventually get you to.
Putting generations at scope is honestly stupid and doesnt focus on the real issue. The generational concept should stay as a gimmick - otherwise it is used haphazardly.
They say things like this about every generation. Boomer kids had their brains rotted by TV and rock’n’roll. GenX couldn’t do long division because of calculators. Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting. In the bronze age, writing totally destroyed the youth’s ability to memorise epic poetry. And so on.
Standardised testing results plummeting for the first time ever is quite a bit different to the anecdotal generational gripes you’re describing.
Really highlights the problems with standardised testing.
Standardised testing results plummeting for the first time ever
The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?
Consider what would happen if every single student in the testing pool gained superintelligence overnight and they all aced the tests uniformly. What would testing companies do next? They can’t just hand out perfect scores to everyone all the time. There’s no value in that as a metric.
In the same vein, imagine if everyone was hit in the head with a hammer before test day and they all failed. Testing companies would be lambasted for flunking an entire graduating class, as the default assumption would be that the tests were the problem, not the students.
Standardized testing must be a rigged game which seeks to produce a particular set of outcomes to satisfy the state education boards, not to accurately measure the cognitive capacity of test-takers. Exam difficulty can change radically year to year simply because students are doing too well (or too poorly) for the purposes of sorting the “smart” students from the “dumb” ones.
That’s before you get into the economic incentives of privatized exam-prep courses and supplemental material sales. Or the incentives offered by schools looking to goose scores by a certain degree per year in exchange for some kind of bonus.
The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents.
Scientists: This is the first time this has actually happened based on measurable data.
You: Old people have been saying the same thing forever.
What are we testing them on? Some “basic skills” become irrelevant over time and the testing should reflect that.
We dont test kids on how to use a slide rule any more.
The advent of the calculator has likely made us all dumber at mental math, but that doesnt mean we havent gained skills elsewhere.
Yeah… But there’s actually quite a bit of research to back it in this case. Standardized testing and literacy rates have been falling sharply since 2017, but accelerated even faster after COVID.
I don’t think laptops in schools really have anything to do with it, it’s likely a reflection of systemic failures in education and the economy. However, we do know that too much screen time for children is harmful for their cognitive development, and there are more and more kids being raised by tablets every day.
I work in healthcare in a pediatric hospital, in the last couple years we’ve had to put in strict rules for our clinic about the use of phones and tablets during the appointments. We often have to tell both the patient and their parents to put their phones away, just so they will somewhat pay attention during the appointment. Often both the parents and their children will throw tantrums when we do this.
Technology isn’t inherently dangerous, but the social media we collectively engage with is designed to keep people engaged with it. It’s almost like we all have little casino slots machines in our pockets, and there’s plenty of research about the harm it’s doing.
Standardized testing and literacy rates have been falling sharply since 2017, but accelerated even faster after COVID.
Are you saying that letting an anti public education grifter take over the Dept of Education was a mistake?!?
I mean that definitely doesn’t help, but COVID in general was just a large disruption for most family’s routines and children thrive with stability in their lives.
Millennials lost the ability to communicate in complete sentences because of mobile phone texting.
