Education outcomes have tanked since we added tech to the classroom. Study after study finds that adding tech to the classroom reduces student performance. Standardized testing to determine funding also mismatches the incentives for educators. Most teachers are forced to teach to the test so students are taught to take tests. They aren’t taught how to apply knowledge or to think critically.
It’s hard to imagine any kid graduating today having been equipped with what they need for college and the world.
This predates the current flood of tech in the classroom. It is due to the low standards of the American education system.
There are loads of reason why US schools are a failure: funding, teachers pay, multiple choice testing, politically driven curriculum, home schooling, anti-science mentality, just to list the biggest problems.
The study was not just the US, they looked at 160,000 students in 38 countries. Their research looked at a period of 10 years to generate its results and students in most of north america and Europe all were down. The US didn’t even see the biggest decline, Israel did.
I’m not saying it’s just tech in the classroom, but it’s a major part.
Guy A: Hot-button opinion.
Guy B: Bunch of facts showing that hot button opinion is wrong.Equal number of upvotes.
Ah, yes, the very scientific reviewers of
RedditLemmy.Upvotes are supposed to be for fostering conversation, not grading accuracy. An equal number of upvotes makes it more likely that the US-centric assumption and the correction are both seen.
“Supposed to” does a lot of heavy lifting there.
They’re both correct, though just saying “tech” is pretty vague when he means the specific technology and usage of it. Plenty of 80s and 90s kids had computers in the classroom and it didn’t fuck us up. I’m guessing without actually looking into it that when he says tech he means education software which probably is garbage and actively harmful.
It’s great that I’m in a place willing to argue minutae of old comments.
So, I think as far as they’re saying that the US Education system sucks, they are correct; but as far as saying it sucks UNIQUELY or that this article/subject is only about the US, they are wrong.
I’m inclined to think in the context of the conversation they are mostly wrong, but there is something to agree with there, and since the vote button is really just the agree button, it makes sense.
Edit: Oh, no, a downvote! I must have said something that did not contribute to the conversation! Please help me, I thought I was sharing my perspective, but I must have done so in a way that did not contribute to the conversation! I AM SO CONFUSED RIGHT NOW
Edit: Oh, I’m sorry. You are correct! You are so very right! You are a light of knowledge that shines in the darkness of my own ignorance! I am forever grateful for this marvelous insight you have into not only this conversation but into human nature in it’s entirety, and perhaps even into the nature of God! My only regret in life is that I have but two orifices to pleasure you with sexually!
Is that more contributory to the conversation?
it tanked during covid, because people were doing it from home. in college reviews , the people tht went through whole college online was very disasstified with thier education, they dint learn anything at all. so this caused a reduced enrollment in state unis all over the west. they got so desperate they were willing to accept hs students automatically if they complete certain courses instead of requiring the USUAL sat, and 3.0GPA, how long this bandaid will last is another thing.
some even said they transferred to a proper university to get a better opportunities for thier careers. not all universities are equal and then saw thier friends stayed in a state school and end up struggling to find a job after graduating. likely the more expensive school offered more volunteering, internship opportunities than a low-prestige schools which basically just pushes people as fast possible through the system, also giving bad advice through thier advisers.
This article is at a level of 10-year-olds. They are talking about The Survey of Adult Skills. OECD does it every year. It’s part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies
Latest results are here: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/12/do-adults-have-the-skills-they-need-to-thrive-in-a-changing-world_4396f1f1/b263dc5d-en.pdf
I think the article is commenting on this part:
You can see a pattern where 55-64 has the lowest scores, then 45-54, then 35-44, than 25-34. Almost all countries are like that: younger generations have better skills than older ones.
And then we see a switch in many countries: 16-24 have lower scores than 25-34. There are some exceptions like Italy, Portugal or Ireland but in majority of countries young people are dumber than previous generation.
BTW, there’s also PISA:
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/pisa-education-and-skills/performance-trends.html
Is the test actually taken by 60 year olds, or are the results from when that generation became adults? Because in the former case, it’s expected that their results would be worse. Your cognitive skills decline as you get older, and many people don’t actually use the skills they’ve learned at their jobs, so there is also skill decay due to lack of usage. My mom would have probably been more literate than me when when we were both 20, but probably is not right now.
My point is, you can only make inter-generational comparisons by normalizing for age, say in the 20-30 peak range.
What are Finland, Japan, and Estonia doing to be at the top of those? The spread is not that wide, but still. The US seems super clustered while most other countries seem to show a generational difference.
Japanese schools absolutely destroy everyone who does not conform. Everyone behaves and studies because kids that stand out are bullied relentlessly with the permission of teachers.
Finland is a small country with a lot of resources that cares about education. They always try new methods, respect teachers and pay them well.
Don’t know about Estonia.
Oh. Right. People in the US can barely read and lack critical thinking skills… Fuck.
What kind of critical thinking skills do you really need to understand the phrase, “The President of the United States is a pedophile?” You don’t even need to read it, either, you can just hear someone say it.
You need critical thinking skills to care more about the president being a pedo than about pwning the other political side.
But it’s not that people lack critical thinking skills, it’s that they blithey bypass them for a whole host of reasons.
The problem on the left is they think rational arguments win fights. They don’t. Emotional arguments, world building, identity, etc, win fights.
The second problem left is that the best emotional argument we have–the rich want to eat us all–endangers the Democratic Party’s funding.
We need to get past the rape, it is murder of small girls not “just” rape. Every one of them who got too bruised to sell or started complaining are not here to be a victim in court.
People in the US can barely read and lack critical thinking skills… Fuck.
that has nothing to do with the epstein files. being able to read does not turn people into good people. and being able to think critically doesn’t do it either.
I beg to differ. Literacy and critical thinking are core to morality. It’s why the capital class is so bent on us not having education beyond the parochial.
Yeah I’ve been saying for years that this is a problem, and people just called me elitist. Like, excuse me? If expecting college students to perform at a college-level is elitist, then what the fuck is an education even for? It’s just a degree-mill at that point.
Might as well send kids to the mines right after middle school at that point instead of making them spend years jumping through hoops and gaining no knowledge or understanding of the world just so they can qualify to be exploited for menial labor in an air-conditioned setting…
your mistake is to assume that there’s a point in any activity at all. “the mines” are not more productive than to just sit at home, and they’re not more fun either. same goes for school.
“the mines” were a deliberate hyperbole to demonstrate the absurdity. “Might as well” implies it’s just as pointless either way.
I wasn’t actually advocating for child labor…
A modest proposal. :)
A major issue with at least the American view of education is that it needs to be profitable, and productive, to be valuable.
Having intelligent well read people is a great boon to society on metrics that may not seem immediately tangible (in spite of having proven beneficial monetary metrics for society), because the nation has been brainwashed into believing that the only qualifier for value is material profit, in spite of that being patently false.
Yes, a commodified education system is the bane of society.
A well-educated populace is a boon to society.
“College level” means more than most people know. Standardized tests have a tendency to be racist. The average going down is bad.
First of all, how would a standardized test be racist if everyone takes the same test?
Maybe the racism is in the zoning laws, the redlining, the education department and how funding is allocated disproportionally. Maybe there are other reasons why students from underserved communities do worse on standardized testing, and it’s not because the tests are racist?
That being said, standardized testing is bullshit and comes with a whole slew of problems that make education outcomes worse for everybody. Schools start tailoring the curriculum to teach for the test, rather than teach for knowledge and understanding. Everything becomes about the metrics, which we can see in many domains has led to serious issues. A lot of important things are qualitative rather than quantitative, and standardized testing misses that entirely.
But yes, the average going down is bad. But it’s a natural consequence of the way things are being run, and not surprising at all.
I’m merely watching the consequences unfold of the things I tried to warn about years ago, and was scorned for it as fringy or edgy or whatever because I was too different for the system to tolerate. The system punishes non-conformity.
I wish I could say I feel pleasure at being corroborated but no, I’m simply sad for society and where it’s going…
As an older millennial I’m terrified about what my end-of-life treatment is going to look like. Some Gen-A is probably going to walk up to my bedside and present me with something like this
and then tell me to put the tube in either my mouth or ass, because they can’t remember which.
That’s why I measure the quality of my end of life care in millimeters. Specifically 9 of them.
All that means is that we’ll have a lot of really uneducated people who think they’re really smart. In this case it’s a game of follow the leader.
across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.
The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.
So just to be clear this happens everywhere in the world, just it’s higher in the US - for reading it’s 14% here vs 8% on average across the oecd and for math 15% here vs 9% average. So we’re bad, but not the worst.
There’s also a major issue: we have a lot of low selectivity colleges, which includes scam diploma mills. Other countries have some low selectivity institutions, but I bet the leaders in this survey have a higher proportion of them. That means there’s inherent selection bias.
Should make sense; entry exams obviously filter out students with poor reading and math skills.
Im Polish and what is this?
i mean that makes sense. why would you invest your life energy into studying, if it’s clear enough that it will with a very high likelihood never pay off later in your life?
That’s why paid tuition is such a scam. You WANT people to study things that interest them regardless what it is.
It teaches you how to think, it teaches you diligence and critical thinking and grows you as a person.
I don’t want to live in a society with a bunch of dumbfucks just because their parents couldn’t afford to put their children through college.
There is so much more to education and learning than potential future profit, it’s about creating a healthy, liveable society.
No wonder you get trump voters and vote abstainers when they never were taught how to use their brains and why that is important.
At that point its self fufilling prophecy.
That French literature degree with a minor in Taylor Swift music not working out?
I don’t understand, don’t they have test scores in the USA to go to college? Over here if you don’t test well, and have bad grades, you’re not getting in to college because you’re competing with others who if they have better grades than you do take your spot.
Is it all just money? You just pay and get in?
Is it all just money?
Yes.
I’m here to tell you the U.S. does not care about literally anything else.
I guess I knew that, just checking in sometimes.
Like, “are you really the head of the Kwik-e-Mart? Really? Really?”
Consequences of allowing Ghisline Maxwell’s dad to publish our textbooks and fill our heads with of propaganda
I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think parents also carry a significant part of the responsibility.
I’m kinda 50/50 on that. Parents should be doing better, but most are probably unequipped to fight A.I., short-form video, social media, and other things that harm focus and education. You also cannot just expect parents to do better and hope that they will change. Parenting is not subject to very much government regulation (for obvious practical and ethical reasons) but education systems are, and can be changed systematically through law or policy.
So I agree that parents are responsible, but there’s not really any kind of systematic change that I can imagine would fix that problem.
I agree but also would say they’re powerless to fix it if they want to. Everyone is on the hamster wheel, zero support from government and society for dual income families, run between work and childcare/school, after school activities, caring for aging parents. If you’re a single income family perhaps you trade better parental engagement for the crushing weight of financial woes. Parents are stuck doing the bare minimum and just surviving, not thriving.
How did they graduate high school then?
Teacher: (looking at term paper which consists entirely of em dashes and explanations why it is a large language model) “Well, this student hasn’t paid any attention in class all year, has managed not to be automatically failed through skipping classes, but only just, shows no sign of actually wanting to learn anything, swears at me when I say they should be doing schoolwork in the classroom, lies to their parents that I’m failing them because I’m racist, and is supported in those lies by their friends and family. I could fail them, which will bring them back to this school, and probably my classroom, and probably with a grudge against me, and the admin will say I failed as a teacher by not getting them to learn enough to pass… or I could give them just enough credit to get a D-- and make them some other teacher’s problem so I can concentrate on the students I really feel like I can help next year.
…
Have fun in college, shithead.”In the United States, No Child Left Behind tied school funding to standardized test results, while also increasing the required number of standardized tests. These are already biased to favor white, middle and upper class boys, anyway. Teachers taught rote, that’s basically it, to improve test scores, not learning. Before that, you can look for Lee Atwater’s full interview about the Southern Strategy he did with The Nation. But in introduction to sociology, in college, it discusses how schools were designed to teach kids enough to understand and follow orders, not enough to question those orders. That makes for a hella compliant work force, military, police, FBI/NSA force. Other Western states followed suit, some got the privilege to pay for it, others the privilege of having it deducted from pay, through taxes, which is fine if it were to actually…educate.
I think graded levels are a terrible idea and that all schools should follow the Montessori model.
too many college educated is a problem for low wage, and military recruitment. thats why they worked in cahoots with job industries(employers avoid hiring people who are fresh out college by sourcing already experienced people in the field to avoid paying over the longterm, it is a law of diminishing returns in the end) to limit/make it hard to hire people. so they end up going for these low wage jobs.
its simple, participation grades. they were already doing this int he early 2000s, it began with if you made slightly under a D- , or an F thats close to a D, or C you get a C. nowadays you have to pass people no matter what, because the schools dont get funding. the SIMPSON episode where lisa cheated on a test, and the principal begged her not to report it because it funds the school, since shes pratically the genius students that is raising her schools statistics up, they cant afford a fail/expel.
plus in HS they have all these useless class for struggling students that they shunt them to be babysat so the school doesnt lose funding if they fail the core classes.
when i was in CC, my math prof(terribl prof) said people were graduating HS with only 9th grade math, and this pretty generous to be honest, so many people were in arithemetic classes when i was in CC. and english only 10th grade comprehension, this includes writing.
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The most shocking thing for me is that Israel is doing particularly bad, worse than the US even. I can imagine the systemic reasons are similar, but I would have also thought that being a much smaller country, there would be less kids falling through the cracks. But maybe they’re too busy genociding to care.
There’s religion based homeschooling in both countries, which might have something to do with it
israel likely depends on the US/EU for all its industries, they are completely reliant. many universities are a pipeline to multiple industries in israel hence why so many universities are funded by certain donors , yet not directly working or living in the country. that make sense.
Yes. Yes… Great. More we can distract and not be bothered by while we own the world.
/S
That’s not even a conspiracy theory. There’s sects like Opus Dei with their private schools pushing for defending of public education. Catholic institutional memory still has that medieval control of knowledge baked in.
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