Which, at least in modern history, has always been fueled by bigotry? I'm not sure that was a super opinionated take considering the subject, and I'm not sure I can think of another motivating factor unless you are scared of knowledge in general. The Church attacking Galileo was bigotry. It is kind of a thing.
Do you feel there are other good-faith reasons that justify these efforts?
Galileo was like an employee who publicly and loudly called the CEO of the most powerful NGO in his country and that his company got rules and procedures from, in the parlance of our times, a fucking idiot. Bigotry wasn’t the issue.
There's a difference between banning things (including books) for use in schools and the federal government declaring certain books illegal. We are dealing mostly with the former here. California doesn't want its schools reading Huck Finn and To Kill a Mocking Bird, Florida doesn't want its schools reading Gender Queer. Anyway, that's all mostly a red herring. There's nothing stopping kids in either state from going to a public library to check them out and read them.
That does seem heavy handed. But think of it this way - how would you feel if your elementary schooler's teacher had a prominent copy of "Mein Kampf" in their classroom and told any kids who enquired about it to read it when they were older because it is one of their favorite books? I personally wouldn't have a problem with it since I know that simply reading a book does not a Nazi make. But some parents might understandably object to that and agitate for laws of the land to ban that. And if you are highly religious as Florida (apparently) is, books like "Gender Queer" teach principles that are diametrically opposed to your religious beliefs (namely that the nuclear family is God's approved way of rearing a family, gender is not a social construct but an immutable piece of identity ingrained into your soul, etc.)
> how would you feel if your elementary schooler's teacher had a prominent copy of "Mein Kampf" in their classroom and told any kids who enquired about it to read it when they were older because it is one of their favorite books? I personally wouldn't have a problem with it since I know that simply reading a book does not a Nazi make.
There's a difference between espousing a principle of "the more you read, the better your education", and "Mein Kampf is my favorite book".
Given how badly it is actually written, and the central theme is "Adolf Hitler: How I Became An Antisemite", I'd wager that the union of people who see it as a favorite book AND are not neonazi antisemites is almost infinitesimally small.
If the books are banned in school, if teachers are forbidden from mentioning them, do you think the number of kids who know of their existence to go up, or down?
That's not to mention that, emboldened by their success in school libraries in some areas, these same people are now going after public libraries, too.
there's probably reasons to ban these books. Banned because of bigotry doesn't really go deep there and it's trying to prime my opinion is what I believe.
People are often surprised to learn one of those famous Nazi book burning photos was of the collection at the era's equivalent of a queer center. That fact is rarely conveyed along with the narratives about censorship that go with it.
It's an example of how even being factual can be misleading. It's a fact that they were Nazis doing censorship, but the facts that are omitted reveal a lot about who's sharing it: either they don't know, or they don't want you to know.
I wonder if they included that pretty much irrelevant book banning bit at the beginning to prove their point about people being unable to concentrate long enough to actually read anything? Nah, probably not.
If you had read further, it was mainly about a bunch of other stuff. I can't really remember what though, so I'm proving their point too.
Reading used to be necessary, since most of media was produced in written form, therefore consuming any sort of media mandated the ability to read it.
In the video-centric world of 21st century, where most media is produced and consumed on television and Internet via visuals and spoken language, why do you even need to be able to read? What's the need that the ability to read would resolve that cannot be resolved in other, simpler and/or more rewarding ways?
> In the video-centric world of 21st century, where most media is produced and consumed on television and Internet via visuals and spoken language, why do you even need to be able to read?
AV presentation is much better at evoking emotion chosen by the presenter and worse at conveying factual information that is retained accurately (visual presentation is obviously useful for conveying spatial relationships relevant for physical/mechanical tasks and skills, though, so AV isn’t uniformly inferior for things other than emotional manipulation.)
At some point there should stop being turtles (questions and justifications) all the way down, and we should agree on some basic shared assumptions/wisdom/reality.
If we have to ask "why is factual information required for living in the contemporary world" something is very wrong with us or with this "contemporary world".
Might as well ask "Why do people need to survive, period? Why not just have them all go and off themselves?".
Taking off my devil's advocate hat for a moment - I disagree here. Many places in the world already redefine "factual information" with their own definitions that are based on e.g. their political or cultural views. Pretending it doesn't happen is not a satisfactory choice for me.
My play on being a devil's advocate is exactly going along this line - if we lose a part of the ability to convey facts because we lose an ability to read, then where exactly does this lead us to?
You can only begin to understand the complexity and nuance of a subject if you are exposed to information in long written form. Tbh I see this with my own kids who don’t even know what questions to ask because they haven’t seen the possibility that there is more depth than what’s available with one click on Google.
Imo it leads to a propaganda driven and conspiracy mindset- if your understanding of the world is limited to a shallow “us vs them” viewpoint, and don’t know how to truly dive deeper into a subject (not just politically charged subjects, just any subject) - then you are imo more willing to accept a “magical” view of the world since you can’t understand what’s going on and you are at the mercy of whomever is more charming at the moment.
>Taking off my devil's advocate hat for a moment - I disagree here. Many places in the world already redefine "factual information" with their own definitions that are based on e.g. their political or cultural views. Pretending it doesn't happen is not a satisfactory choice for me.
Which is neither here, nor there.
First, they don't redefine all or even most factual information, just politics/monetary/national/etc-interest charged facts. They still agree that a table is a table and that the Earth is flat, and billions of other things.
Second, even when they refefine some fact, they still present the new information as fact. Because they still understand that facts are important.
Third, whatever this or that party, or ideology, or politician, or corporation, or media outlet, does to distort facts, it is still accepted that facts are good, and facts corresponding to reality is what we should be aiming for.
Fourth, no working scientist, engineer, and so on, can function well without facts or when provided with false facts pertaining to their field. They will still work with imperfect facts or with some wrong facts, but their output is improved the closest to accurate (and real) facts they get.
In any case, usually it's not the bare facts that re contested, but their interpretation/evaluation (ethical, as regards to motive, or as regards to utility, etc). It's expected (and OK) to have different evaluations of a fact, based on your political or cultural views (that's the very definition of a different political and cultural views in the first place), as long as you agree with the objective parts of the fact (the underlying hard reality).
You can say X war was good or bad, but not that it didn't happen when it did, for example.
>My play on being a devil's advocate is exactly going along this line - if we lose a part of the ability to convey facts because we lose an ability to read, then where exactly does this lead us to?
Who is "we"? Is the question is some person who doesn't care about facts, or is fed with bullshit facts they believe, can still be consumer, vote, make a living, be entertained, marry, and generally live their life?
Is the question whether a country and a citizenry can live that way, and maintain their agency, dignity, effectiveness, and so on, the answer is no.
Perhaps a better framing is "What is the relative importance of being able to read and write for transmitting/receiving factual information vs emotional persuasion, these days?" and "What is the relative importance of being able to use those methods to transmit a message, vs media literacy on the receiving side, in understanding how and when something is trying to persuade us, and what tactics are being used?" (and ultimately if you keep digging into that, you ask "What is the ultimate purpose of an education, what specific skills will be needed in the daily life of the recipient?" which is a better to way to ask about how people survive. I don't see that the assumptions or reality are necessarily shared or basic.)
One example is consumption of US Presidential debates of the radio era (1948-1960) vs TV vs social-media (2000s-) (when most people don't watch the full thing, they consume it via clips or soundbites, often distilled or reduxed by third-parties like media outlets, bloggers, highlights reels etc., which is handing over the power of framing and narrative to outlets who mightn't be either neutral or trustworthy). Like how the 2004 Democratic campaign of Howard Dean [0] was reduced (by many media outlets) to a soundbite which had zero to do with healthcare or fiscal policy. (Ok separately, shelve the a wider George-Carlin-type debate about whether political discourse is being dumbed down, by whom and to what ends).
Or a non-political example: if you want to figure out what's a good new-release movie/show to watch, do you read(/watch) individual critic reviews? professional vs amateur critics? or in the old days, just rely on Ebert/Roeper/Siskel? imdb? RottenTomatoes (pre-2016 Comcast-Fandango takeover? or post-2016?) Twitter? or poll five of your friends?
Or: what proportion of people can figure out north/south/east/west or navigate without a smartphone, only a map, signs and recognition points? It could plausibly be argued that navigating in general isn't as important as it used to be (unless you're in remote, unknown or hostile territory or don't have reliable phone charge or radio/satellite reception). Which depends largely on where you live and your occupation.
Is AV presentation worse at presenting facts? I've learned a lot through watching videos on science and history on Youtube. Probably some of it is incorrect, but that's also true of written media.
And is AV presentation better at emotional manipulation than writing? Lots of emotionally charged ideas spread through writing.
Unless those videos have no music at all (doubtful) the mere presence of music influences you emotionally. Present somber, depressing facts with cheery music and you’re intentionally steering the viewer’s feelings in the opposite direction.
Continuity, truth, being able to learn and reason from published facts from verifiable sources.
The ability to operate a machine without understanding its inner workings, and also the ability to crack open a book and repair said inner workings when necessary.
Convince a nation that they don’t need to teach their children to read and you’re on course to be able to undo the progress of centuries (if not millenia) in just a generation or two.
What exactly do you mean by "continuity"? The concept of "truth" has already been discussed widely, to the point of the term "post-truth world" being coined. Why learn, why reason from published facts, how are these necessary?
People can learn from one another without any written instructions, which is how tacit knowledge is often transferred; why would one need to read to learn how something works if they can just get trained by someone else?
Why do we need a global skill to read in order for the progress of centuries to be globally available? As long as some people, let's say a "caste" of those being able to read, retain the skill of doing so, why wouldn't we be fine with the rest of people consuming television and YouTube?
Got a concrete link? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity gives me a disambiguation page with most sublinks being math, science, entertainment; the "other links" section doesn't seem to have anything suitable here.
I know what "continuity" means in the dictionary, I don't know which aspects of the problem at hand should be continuous and why. Continuity of knowledge (and, if yes, theoretical knowledge, tacit knowledge)? Continuity of culture of reading and writing (in general, or when applied to learning and knowledge generally)? Continuity of history (as a specific branch of knowledge)? Continuity of culture? Continuity of whole nations (as carriers of culture and history)?
Text is much more information-dense, and much easier to search, skim, bookmark, summarize, quote, remix… Compare a movie to a novel, or a math video to a math textbook. One is not a substitute for the other.
Worker drones indeed don't need to be able to read beyond a level needed to follow instructions and consume the products needed to be consumed to keep the money flowing.
If you want to advance the state of your civilization and society you need a large pool of people who are able to read and understand long complex passages.
One cannot learn what needs to be learned in order to cure a disease or build a rocket through the consumption of memes, videos, and simplified ad copy.
If I understand your logic correctly, then impairing the ability to read would be a force against advancing the state of a given civilization and society. The article mentions book bans as a conscious political effort and the prevalence of modern mobile media as a side effect of technology evolution; if I understand correctly, then both contribute towards a grim outlook that is mentioned in the comments to my post.
reading is far faster than video, there's no way it goes away.
Instead I suspect the issue is more due to kids being taught not to think too deeply on things. I doubt the professor is saying many kids literally can't read, but that they can't comprehend any sort of nuance.
Reading was necessary because it's a highly evolved and compressed way to convey information, which refines, distills, and focuses thought, and gives access to millenia of civilizational expression, wisdom, and experience.
The video-centric world of 21st century is a Beavis and Butthead vision of culture, where we regress to stream-of-consciousness communication.
We don't gain oral communication (we always had that alongside texts). We lose reading.
> We don't gain oral communication (we always had that alongside texts). We lose reading.
The reason I've heard that we have public schooling in the first place is because the Prussian Army convinced the Prussian State (to the degree these were distinct organisations) that it needed literate soldiers as a prereq for Auftragstaktik; that having been successful, everyone else copied their system.
Yes, but that concerns how schooling for the masses came about.
People that expected to be active citizens, participate in the state, drive society forward, etc., have been educated for millenia, in ancient Greece, Rome, China, Egypt, all the way to today.
So unless we strive to live like peasants and subjects to royalty of the old times, or like the dystopic living-in-a-drugs-and-entertenment-blur degraded population of "Brave New World", we should not lose education.
Society is already structured to handle a population where approximately 50% of adults cannot read beyond the 6th grade level. For all the hemming and hawing and throwing money at education, it might be the best we ever get. I'd venture that our society would continue to operate just fine if that number went up to 75% of the population, considering the pareto rule about the percentage of workers who are actually productive and so on.
Video and audio presentations are a much slower way to ingest information, even when played at 2x speed.
Text on a page allowed the reader to rapidly scan back to previous points to make connections between concepts. Similarly you can scan forwards quickly and then return and read more closely after identifying key words and topics.
Text gives additional structure to the information with clearly delineated paragraphs, sections, chapters and italicized or bolded words and phrases. Citations and footnotes, asides and figures can be referred to more easily than in a video or audio where they must occur linearly.
Text is also more easily modified and marked up by the reader making referring back to important parts simple, being able to do so at a glance of the page rather than scrobbling through the video or audio.
I’m sure others can think of many more but the point is that text is more information dense and less linear than video/audio.
That’s an interesting point. Is long form reading the new cursive?
Is it joining the club of skills that we no longer need to master due to specialization and technological advances, like being able to sow your own wheat fields, field dressing a dear and building a log cabin?
IIUC, they have no issues with reading, they have issues with understanding what they have read. Meaning they likely also have issues with understanding information presented to them in other formats. After all, understanding speech requires constant focus over an extended time.
The information density and the ability to drive deep into a subject is far superior in written form than a video.
I can think of a few reasons to support my assertion. First is simply the fact that you must dedicate much more time to read a book than a short form video. I just read Giles Whittell’s book Bridge of Spies, and it easily took me over 15 hours to read from cover to cover.
The next reason is the depth of understanding that you can gain from the act of reading. The author in that book wove in quotes from primary sources, details and nuance from the private lives to develop a nuanced view of the characters, all of which provides the deep understanding required to fully grasp the events that led up to the 1962 spy swap between two superpowers.
Finally, the fact that it took me 15 hours to read that book over the course of a few weeks meant that I had the ability to start synthesizing higher level understanding of the book rather than just recognizing a few facts. Sleep is important for the brain to organize thoughts during the day, and the fact that I had at least 10 sleep cycles to process the information I had learned in that “chunk” helps me truly remember concepts in the book in a way an hour long video cannot.
I find my ability to make rational arguments is greatly improved after I have the chance to dedicate time reading good books. I find my own kids ability to research subjects have been compromised- I can hardly convince them to do more than pump a literal question into Google and … maybe click on the first link? It’s terrifying.
It took some effort, but I have finally evolved past boring and unrewarding ability to read…
Can anyone please share a hackernews-to-video converter? Tried finding it through TikTok, but without ability to read it is a pain to type something into their search bar.
This hits way too close to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39295526. I am now waiting for someone to start turning HN discussions into videos in the style of "MongoDB is webscale", which is both amusing and terrifying.
On a serious note, I think people in tech underestimate just how much yellow and mass-market race-to-the-bottom content existed out there prior to the Internet.
What we see is just mass crowd getting into the tubes, with content producers and platforms adjusting accordingly.
I was going to reply, but ipython wrote it already, better. However, understanding his reply requires the ability to read it correctly. Notice that we are not having the hackernews discussions as a long list of small video clips.
People who have not learned to read on a professional level, have a hard time grasping the volume, depth and speed with which you can transfer knowledge through text, using that developed skill.
It is trivially true that a person who has not learned to read well, learns faster by watching videos. But this is not an argument for videos being the most capable mechanism, only the more initially accessible.
You may be able to start running before I can saddle my horse, but once it is saddled, my horse will outrun your running start.
There is obviously areas in which video, 3d and computer systems/models surpass what a book can present, but outside those areas, the information in the world belongs to books,or the computer equivalent thereof.
It is not about old books. It is about that written text is our strongest tool yet to present and capture a large connected set of ideas into a consistent argument, and similarly to RECEIVE such an argument. If you think a youtube video will do 'just as well', you probably need to read some more books :-)
At work, I dread whenever I have to develop software for which I cant find written documentation, but must rely on random youtube guides sketchily explaining bits of it like and subscribe.
I have a further, simpler argument. Movies. Ever notice that movie adaptations of books often suck? Well, there are some that don't. When shortstories are made into movies, it often works better. This is because the amount of content that fits in a shortstory, matches with what you can cover in a 90minute movie.
If you try to communicate the contents of a book that takes 8 hours to read,to video, that video will be much longer than 8 hours.
So, yes, possibly, you could turn your 8 hour reading assignment into a 40 hour video watching assignment. However, I don't know how you will manage your note-taking, now that you have given up on reading? Abandoning reading is abandoning our ability to organise and maintain knowledge, which we do with words and letters assembled and grasped with ability.
I agree phones and Covid play a big part in reading ability decline. But the last reason mentioned is a big one too. Curriculums have moved away from proven teaching techniques into psuedo science at the same time public schools focus less and less on teaching, and more on being social institutions. Moving away from phonics, dumbing down math, practically ignoring science.
Coupled with the increasingly common practice of grade inflation, kids are hitting college woefully unprepared.
The best decision my wife and I have made in our lives was to get our kids into private school 18 months ago. The difference is like night and day.
This hasn't been our experience. Our public school kids are learning things we never would have dreamed of at their age. I distinctly remember being surpised at the worksheets on platonic solids that my kindergartener was assigned.
Yes, location is everything. I live in NJ in the United States. Public schools here are all over the place, housing prices in towns with good school districts is remarkably higher than those with poor ones. Sadly we live in a town with a poor one.
This has been my experience too. Educational standards are _not lower_ for math and reading than they were when I attended American public schools a generation ago. (by definition, because my children are in it now.)
This comment definitely sounds like someone yelling at the clouds. The fact it starts with "I agree" is a red flag. These are stats and facts that can be looked up. There is nothing to "agree" or "disagree" with.
We know that reading for kids (an adults) increased by a significant amount during lockdowns. We know that kids write and read a lot more, in the form of social messages to friends using there phone than any previous generation. We know that the world in changed, and these young kids are kinder, and more socially aware than any of us ever were.
Our generation is all about written communication, but for them, video chat is a new normal. That could be in the workplace, but also social media. Short form videos have completely replaced what we used to do on message boards or forums.
That is for the general population though. The top academics are doing just as good or better than the top academics from any other older generations. Even though it seems like the Flynn Effect tells us otherwise, that is not the whole story.
Anyway. I am always skeptical of old people saying anything negative about younger generations. Because it almost always turns out to be untrue.
I don't want to debate your claims about the state of public schools, but wonder if it is worth thinking about what could cause this, and consider the types of investments our country is making in public schools and who is deciding on curriculums.
People who work in public education talk about what appears to be a long-running organized campaign to attack public schools and intentionally degrade them. I'm tangential to the debate so don't have evidence at hand, but I can say that the evidence is strong enough that there is a valid case. Obviously without hearing the other side we cannot draw a conclusion, I'm only claiming that the case is sufficient that it is worth hearing.
In our case, you can track school performance via state standardized test scores. Yea, they are somewhat flawed and biased, but can still give you a very good idea of how good of a job a public school is doing. In our case, our kids (now aged 15 and 12) were getting B’s and high C’a, but were both scoring single digits on standardized tests for math, English and science.
As it turns out our district overall state test were abysmally low.
The net result is general flight from the public system, either via home schooling, “Choice” programs that let you go to other districts if yours is inadequate, or private school. Graphing our school enrollment numbers has gone from about 970 students in district in 2017 to 670 in 2023.
In our case, our kids (now aged 15 and 12) were getting B’s and high C’a, but were both scoring single digits on standardized tests for math, English and science.
Can you expound upon "scoring single digits on standards tests" a little more? I can't figure out how these are related as I have some context for where "B's and C's" fall on the grading scale, I don't have context for where "single digits on standardized tests" fall on a scale.
I think this professor has lot the plot by pinning this most recent decline on COVID and whatnot. This has been a much longer decline.
The pandemic and social media on phones are not the reason long form content is dying, though if one of those is to bear responsibility it would be social media. But it’s the death of individual passion in the teaching professions at the lower grade levels that is the direct result of common core that has a major, ongoing role in the disengagement of students from school.
It’s remarkable to sit and work with my teenagers on their homework these days. Almost all of their assignments are readily referenced online in common flash cards and study guides, and so much of the homework is droll repetition. But what strikes me is that there is no relief like there was in my time. There is no “now read chapters 3-7 of this book” in any of her homework. The passages, when there is reading, is assigned by packet and accompanied by some packaged lesson that requires you to fill in the blanks on the point of the reading, it’s key characters, and it’s learned themes and elements. It is perfect educational material put together by panels of experts and crafted to achieve the highest standardized level of understanding for most students.
And it’s incredibly, sincerely uninspiring and frequently boring.
I often spend time with my kids talking to them about subjects like ancient history, philosophy, writing, poetry, math and science in ways that are stimulating and it’s a constant refrain, “I wish school were this interesting.” We pick a theme a few times a week for dinner and have discussions with friends and family on that subject. Recently this has included subjects like demographics, geology, quantum mechanics, deep space research, sustainable energy, etc. Anyone can pick the subject.
School fails to be interesting, and we are in one of the better schools in our area. The kids are bored to tears and the format of school is incredibly unpleasant for kids that actually want to learn. This school won’t even let the kids take college classes and apply them, despite being less than five minutes from a UC and 20 minutes from a junior college. They can’t give me a good explanation as to why: they just say it’s against their policy.
So, we do our best to keep kids interested in reading and learning, but it’s fighting against their mandatory education to do so. And I really think the school, despite their best efforts, is failing these kids.
And I blame common core. More than anything else. When I sit down with teachers the better of them confide sometimes that they are really not happy with how they have to teach, but they have to teach that way and have little flexibility in customizing things in their classrooms.
They have become “presenters” of material developed far away in academic laboratories, and while they are still teaching they are far removed from any innovation in curriculum. And without that control, they really aren’t able to overcome the gigantic bureaucracy of the educational apparatus.
> But what strikes me is that there is no relief like there was in my time. There is no “now read chapters 3-7 of this book” in any of her homework
That is the most bizarre complaint I have ever heard, and it’s certainly not a restriction coming from Common Core. Consider asking the school why they aren’t expected to read books.
Oh they “read books.” They just don’t read books without weighty worksheets with “lessons” and themes discussion. The reading is always purposeful and always leads to some bloated exercise. It’s rarely just reading.
Some schools really focus on teaching to the test. Since the tests the student's take require answering questions based on passages, the school requires teachers to only use similar length passwords with no context during class. Their textbook is a collection of such passages.
This is not just an American problem. The same has happened in the UK, and it seems to be happening in many other places too. The problem is that the west has become addicted to beureaucratic central control and distrustful of the ability of trained professionals to do their jobs without incentives and standards.
> I often spend time with my kids talking to them about subjects like ancient history, philosophy, writing, poetry, math and science in ways that are stimulating and it’s a constant refrain, “I wish school were this interesting.”
This is why I took my kids out of school. Once you get interests started and some basic skills in place kids will largely educate themselves.
One at 8, the other at 9, but it was a bit more complicated with the older one because we wobbled and sent her back to school.
I home educated them. We started with a focus on interesting stuff, when they were ready we started studying for GCSEs (UK exams taken in schools at 16 - roughly the same level as a high school diploma in the US) which we spread out by taking some early rather than all at once as at school. Both my daughters did/are doing very well in these. Lots of time for other interests, hobbies and socialising too.
After that back to a sixth form college (a school for 16+) to do A levels (roughly equivalent level to APs in the US). Younger one has not got to that stage yet, the older one did very well (AAA*A for anyone from the UK) and is now doing a degree apprenticeship (working while studying, gets a salary plus university fees paid) in electrical engineering.
> We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave them kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone.
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall.
Given that that's a Pink Floyd lyric from the 70's written by men whose education would have been WWII era, it does indeed seem like a long-running theme.
Not really sure it is the same theme though. The bullying belittling stifling culture of a postwar British classroom is practically the polar opposite of todays education culture.
> I think this professor has lot the plot by pinning this most recent decline on COVID and whatnot.
> death of individual passion in the teaching professions at the lower grade levels that is the direct result of common core
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
The professor agrees with you, talking about Common Core in their first point, and only touching on the transient COVID decline in their second point, before circling back to phonics, Common Core, again.
Trying to categorize this article as "blaming COVID for falling reading standards" is railing against something that isn't happening: literally only one of the ten paragraphs of the article references the pandemic.
Hardly. The author establishes that reading is a challenge and then attributes it to a multitude of challenges including smartphones, COVID and “broader cultural trends over which educators have little control” and balanced literacy approaches.
I submit its common core primarily that is causing the damage.
I don’t think your criticism is on point. I may not be writing well, but I think what I’m saying is largely different and certainly more single problem oriented.
Academics LOVE to sprinkle in a little of this, and a little of that to explain the problem. But the truth is not as complicated: common core is causing a decline in educational outcomes. It’s a crap way to teach kids and it should be tossed in the bin and power given back to teachers to teach and trust put back into professionals being able to teach better than centrally budgeted bureaucracy.
I could be narrow. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I’m missing the point I’m trying to make.
I am a bit doubtful about phonics. Everyone in my family learned to read before we were taught at school, and we all learned using whole word teaching, not phonics. It can be turned unto a game so it is easier to get kids to enjoy it.
My money is on technology or other global causes. The decline started before the pandemic, and a decline in many countries at once cannot be attributed to Norwegian government policies.
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[ 286 ms ] story [ 3439 ms ] threadWhich, at least in modern history, has always been fueled by bigotry? I'm not sure that was a super opinionated take considering the subject, and I'm not sure I can think of another motivating factor unless you are scared of knowledge in general. The Church attacking Galileo was bigotry. It is kind of a thing.
Do you feel there are other good-faith reasons that justify these efforts?
Are you just frustrated at hearing that word?
Perhaps. But there is a law in Florida making it a felony for the teacher to have that book in the classroom.
There's a difference between espousing a principle of "the more you read, the better your education", and "Mein Kampf is my favorite book".
Given how badly it is actually written, and the central theme is "Adolf Hitler: How I Became An Antisemite", I'd wager that the union of people who see it as a favorite book AND are not neonazi antisemites is almost infinitesimally small.
That's not to mention that, emboldened by their success in school libraries in some areas, these same people are now going after public libraries, too.
They may cloak their bigotry in morality or patriotism or whatever but it's still bigotry.
It's an example of how even being factual can be misleading. It's a fact that they were Nazis doing censorship, but the facts that are omitted reveal a lot about who's sharing it: either they don't know, or they don't want you to know.
If you had read further, it was mainly about a bunch of other stuff. I can't really remember what though, so I'm proving their point too.
Reading used to be necessary, since most of media was produced in written form, therefore consuming any sort of media mandated the ability to read it.
In the video-centric world of 21st century, where most media is produced and consumed on television and Internet via visuals and spoken language, why do you even need to be able to read? What's the need that the ability to read would resolve that cannot be resolved in other, simpler and/or more rewarding ways?
AV presentation is much better at evoking emotion chosen by the presenter and worse at conveying factual information that is retained accurately (visual presentation is obviously useful for conveying spatial relationships relevant for physical/mechanical tasks and skills, though, so AV isn’t uniformly inferior for things other than emotional manipulation.)
If we have to ask "why is factual information required for living in the contemporary world" something is very wrong with us or with this "contemporary world".
Might as well ask "Why do people need to survive, period? Why not just have them all go and off themselves?".
My play on being a devil's advocate is exactly going along this line - if we lose a part of the ability to convey facts because we lose an ability to read, then where exactly does this lead us to?
Imo it leads to a propaganda driven and conspiracy mindset- if your understanding of the world is limited to a shallow “us vs them” viewpoint, and don’t know how to truly dive deeper into a subject (not just politically charged subjects, just any subject) - then you are imo more willing to accept a “magical” view of the world since you can’t understand what’s going on and you are at the mercy of whomever is more charming at the moment.
Which is neither here, nor there.
First, they don't redefine all or even most factual information, just politics/monetary/national/etc-interest charged facts. They still agree that a table is a table and that the Earth is flat, and billions of other things.
Second, even when they refefine some fact, they still present the new information as fact. Because they still understand that facts are important.
Third, whatever this or that party, or ideology, or politician, or corporation, or media outlet, does to distort facts, it is still accepted that facts are good, and facts corresponding to reality is what we should be aiming for.
Fourth, no working scientist, engineer, and so on, can function well without facts or when provided with false facts pertaining to their field. They will still work with imperfect facts or with some wrong facts, but their output is improved the closest to accurate (and real) facts they get.
In any case, usually it's not the bare facts that re contested, but their interpretation/evaluation (ethical, as regards to motive, or as regards to utility, etc). It's expected (and OK) to have different evaluations of a fact, based on your political or cultural views (that's the very definition of a different political and cultural views in the first place), as long as you agree with the objective parts of the fact (the underlying hard reality).
You can say X war was good or bad, but not that it didn't happen when it did, for example.
>My play on being a devil's advocate is exactly going along this line - if we lose a part of the ability to convey facts because we lose an ability to read, then where exactly does this lead us to?
Who is "we"? Is the question is some person who doesn't care about facts, or is fed with bullshit facts they believe, can still be consumer, vote, make a living, be entertained, marry, and generally live their life?
Is the question whether a country and a citizenry can live that way, and maintain their agency, dignity, effectiveness, and so on, the answer is no.
One example is consumption of US Presidential debates of the radio era (1948-1960) vs TV vs social-media (2000s-) (when most people don't watch the full thing, they consume it via clips or soundbites, often distilled or reduxed by third-parties like media outlets, bloggers, highlights reels etc., which is handing over the power of framing and narrative to outlets who mightn't be either neutral or trustworthy). Like how the 2004 Democratic campaign of Howard Dean [0] was reduced (by many media outlets) to a soundbite which had zero to do with healthcare or fiscal policy. (Ok separately, shelve the a wider George-Carlin-type debate about whether political discourse is being dumbed down, by whom and to what ends).
Or a non-political example: if you want to figure out what's a good new-release movie/show to watch, do you read(/watch) individual critic reviews? professional vs amateur critics? or in the old days, just rely on Ebert/Roeper/Siskel? imdb? RottenTomatoes (pre-2016 Comcast-Fandango takeover? or post-2016?) Twitter? or poll five of your friends?
Or: what proportion of people can figure out north/south/east/west or navigate without a smartphone, only a map, signs and recognition points? It could plausibly be argued that navigating in general isn't as important as it used to be (unless you're in remote, unknown or hostile territory or don't have reliable phone charge or radio/satellite reception). Which depends largely on where you live and your occupation.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dean_2004_presidential_...
And is AV presentation better at emotional manipulation than writing? Lots of emotionally charged ideas spread through writing.
The ability to operate a machine without understanding its inner workings, and also the ability to crack open a book and repair said inner workings when necessary.
Convince a nation that they don’t need to teach their children to read and you’re on course to be able to undo the progress of centuries (if not millenia) in just a generation or two.
People can learn from one another without any written instructions, which is how tacit knowledge is often transferred; why would one need to read to learn how something works if they can just get trained by someone else?
Why do we need a global skill to read in order for the progress of centuries to be globally available? As long as some people, let's say a "caste" of those being able to read, retain the skill of doing so, why wouldn't we be fine with the rest of people consuming television and YouTube?
But you know this, feigned ignorance implies you're a bad actor.
C’mon, dude. Let us keep our books.
Also, “most media” is video? Citation needed.
Worker drones indeed don't need to be able to read beyond a level needed to follow instructions and consume the products needed to be consumed to keep the money flowing.
If you want to advance the state of your civilization and society you need a large pool of people who are able to read and understand long complex passages.
One cannot learn what needs to be learned in order to cure a disease or build a rocket through the consumption of memes, videos, and simplified ad copy.
The deeper the pool is the better.
Instead I suspect the issue is more due to kids being taught not to think too deeply on things. I doubt the professor is saying many kids literally can't read, but that they can't comprehend any sort of nuance.
Of course they can't given the world today.
The video-centric world of 21st century is a Beavis and Butthead vision of culture, where we regress to stream-of-consciousness communication.
We don't gain oral communication (we always had that alongside texts). We lose reading.
The reason I've heard that we have public schooling in the first place is because the Prussian Army convinced the Prussian State (to the degree these were distinct organisations) that it needed literate soldiers as a prereq for Auftragstaktik; that having been successful, everyone else copied their system.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
People that expected to be active citizens, participate in the state, drive society forward, etc., have been educated for millenia, in ancient Greece, Rome, China, Egypt, all the way to today.
So unless we strive to live like peasants and subjects to royalty of the old times, or like the dystopic living-in-a-drugs-and-entertenment-blur degraded population of "Brave New World", we should not lose education.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
Text on a page allowed the reader to rapidly scan back to previous points to make connections between concepts. Similarly you can scan forwards quickly and then return and read more closely after identifying key words and topics.
Text gives additional structure to the information with clearly delineated paragraphs, sections, chapters and italicized or bolded words and phrases. Citations and footnotes, asides and figures can be referred to more easily than in a video or audio where they must occur linearly.
Text is also more easily modified and marked up by the reader making referring back to important parts simple, being able to do so at a glance of the page rather than scrobbling through the video or audio.
I’m sure others can think of many more but the point is that text is more information dense and less linear than video/audio.
Is it joining the club of skills that we no longer need to master due to specialization and technological advances, like being able to sow your own wheat fields, field dressing a dear and building a log cabin?
I can think of a few reasons to support my assertion. First is simply the fact that you must dedicate much more time to read a book than a short form video. I just read Giles Whittell’s book Bridge of Spies, and it easily took me over 15 hours to read from cover to cover.
The next reason is the depth of understanding that you can gain from the act of reading. The author in that book wove in quotes from primary sources, details and nuance from the private lives to develop a nuanced view of the characters, all of which provides the deep understanding required to fully grasp the events that led up to the 1962 spy swap between two superpowers.
Finally, the fact that it took me 15 hours to read that book over the course of a few weeks meant that I had the ability to start synthesizing higher level understanding of the book rather than just recognizing a few facts. Sleep is important for the brain to organize thoughts during the day, and the fact that I had at least 10 sleep cycles to process the information I had learned in that “chunk” helps me truly remember concepts in the book in a way an hour long video cannot.
I find my ability to make rational arguments is greatly improved after I have the chance to dedicate time reading good books. I find my own kids ability to research subjects have been compromised- I can hardly convince them to do more than pump a literal question into Google and … maybe click on the first link? It’s terrifying.
Can anyone please share a hackernews-to-video converter? Tried finding it through TikTok, but without ability to read it is a pain to type something into their search bar.
What we see is just mass crowd getting into the tubes, with content producers and platforms adjusting accordingly.
There is obviously areas in which video, 3d and computer systems/models surpass what a book can present, but outside those areas, the information in the world belongs to books,or the computer equivalent thereof. It is not about old books. It is about that written text is our strongest tool yet to present and capture a large connected set of ideas into a consistent argument, and similarly to RECEIVE such an argument. If you think a youtube video will do 'just as well', you probably need to read some more books :-) At work, I dread whenever I have to develop software for which I cant find written documentation, but must rely on random youtube guides sketchily explaining bits of it like and subscribe.
Like the cognitive/emotional benefits of being able to read and write.
Never would have imagined anyone could question such things.
You don't miss your water. Till your well runs dry.
Coupled with the increasingly common practice of grade inflation, kids are hitting college woefully unprepared.
The best decision my wife and I have made in our lives was to get our kids into private school 18 months ago. The difference is like night and day.
For example, in Wisconsin, one report finds that teacher pay is lower than it was a decade ago. https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/education/20... Wisconsin has a budget surplus, the money is there,
And in October 2023, the governer gave raises to all state employees -- except UW emploees. https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/lawmakers-approve-raises...
People who work in public education talk about what appears to be a long-running organized campaign to attack public schools and intentionally degrade them. I'm tangential to the debate so don't have evidence at hand, but I can say that the evidence is strong enough that there is a valid case. Obviously without hearing the other side we cannot draw a conclusion, I'm only claiming that the case is sufficient that it is worth hearing.
As it turns out our district overall state test were abysmally low.
The net result is general flight from the public system, either via home schooling, “Choice” programs that let you go to other districts if yours is inadequate, or private school. Graphing our school enrollment numbers has gone from about 970 students in district in 2017 to 670 in 2023.
Can you expound upon "scoring single digits on standards tests" a little more? I can't figure out how these are related as I have some context for where "B's and C's" fall on the grading scale, I don't have context for where "single digits on standardized tests" fall on a scale.
The pandemic and social media on phones are not the reason long form content is dying, though if one of those is to bear responsibility it would be social media. But it’s the death of individual passion in the teaching professions at the lower grade levels that is the direct result of common core that has a major, ongoing role in the disengagement of students from school.
It’s remarkable to sit and work with my teenagers on their homework these days. Almost all of their assignments are readily referenced online in common flash cards and study guides, and so much of the homework is droll repetition. But what strikes me is that there is no relief like there was in my time. There is no “now read chapters 3-7 of this book” in any of her homework. The passages, when there is reading, is assigned by packet and accompanied by some packaged lesson that requires you to fill in the blanks on the point of the reading, it’s key characters, and it’s learned themes and elements. It is perfect educational material put together by panels of experts and crafted to achieve the highest standardized level of understanding for most students.
And it’s incredibly, sincerely uninspiring and frequently boring.
I often spend time with my kids talking to them about subjects like ancient history, philosophy, writing, poetry, math and science in ways that are stimulating and it’s a constant refrain, “I wish school were this interesting.” We pick a theme a few times a week for dinner and have discussions with friends and family on that subject. Recently this has included subjects like demographics, geology, quantum mechanics, deep space research, sustainable energy, etc. Anyone can pick the subject.
School fails to be interesting, and we are in one of the better schools in our area. The kids are bored to tears and the format of school is incredibly unpleasant for kids that actually want to learn. This school won’t even let the kids take college classes and apply them, despite being less than five minutes from a UC and 20 minutes from a junior college. They can’t give me a good explanation as to why: they just say it’s against their policy.
So, we do our best to keep kids interested in reading and learning, but it’s fighting against their mandatory education to do so. And I really think the school, despite their best efforts, is failing these kids.
And I blame common core. More than anything else. When I sit down with teachers the better of them confide sometimes that they are really not happy with how they have to teach, but they have to teach that way and have little flexibility in customizing things in their classrooms.
They have become “presenters” of material developed far away in academic laboratories, and while they are still teaching they are far removed from any innovation in curriculum. And without that control, they really aren’t able to overcome the gigantic bureaucracy of the educational apparatus.
That is the most bizarre complaint I have ever heard, and it’s certainly not a restriction coming from Common Core. Consider asking the school why they aren’t expected to read books.
> I often spend time with my kids talking to them about subjects like ancient history, philosophy, writing, poetry, math and science in ways that are stimulating and it’s a constant refrain, “I wish school were this interesting.”
This is why I took my kids out of school. Once you get interests started and some basic skills in place kids will largely educate themselves.
I home educated them. We started with a focus on interesting stuff, when they were ready we started studying for GCSEs (UK exams taken in schools at 16 - roughly the same level as a high school diploma in the US) which we spread out by taking some early rather than all at once as at school. Both my daughters did/are doing very well in these. Lots of time for other interests, hobbies and socialising too.
After that back to a sixth form college (a school for 16+) to do A levels (roughly equivalent level to APs in the US). Younger one has not got to that stage yet, the older one did very well (AAA*A for anyone from the UK) and is now doing a degree apprenticeship (working while studying, gets a salary plus university fees paid) in electrical engineering.
Given that that's a Pink Floyd lyric from the 70's written by men whose education would have been WWII era, it does indeed seem like a long-running theme.
> death of individual passion in the teaching professions at the lower grade levels that is the direct result of common core
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
The professor agrees with you, talking about Common Core in their first point, and only touching on the transient COVID decline in their second point, before circling back to phonics, Common Core, again.
Trying to categorize this article as "blaming COVID for falling reading standards" is railing against something that isn't happening: literally only one of the ten paragraphs of the article references the pandemic.
I submit its common core primarily that is causing the damage.
I don’t think your criticism is on point. I may not be writing well, but I think what I’m saying is largely different and certainly more single problem oriented.
Academics LOVE to sprinkle in a little of this, and a little of that to explain the problem. But the truth is not as complicated: common core is causing a decline in educational outcomes. It’s a crap way to teach kids and it should be tossed in the bin and power given back to teachers to teach and trust put back into professionals being able to teach better than centrally budgeted bureaucracy.
I could be narrow. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I’m missing the point I’m trying to make.
My money is on technology or other global causes. The decline started before the pandemic, and a decline in many countries at once cannot be attributed to Norwegian government policies.