I completely reject these policy statements based on the data laid out.
Standardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.
The article makes some interesting points about the correlation between computer usage in schools and test scores. What I would be interested in is the unmetered computer usage outside of schools. Are students with restricted access to so-called "brain-rot" social media outperforming those with it?
Feels like there's a number of these trend shifts that are hard to explain, that make a fantastic canvas for projecting world views onto. The school performance dip is one, global decline in birth rates another.
You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.
You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
Don’t need educated citizens for a dictatorship of the elites where you only need to press buttons with a picture of a burger on them because your economy was outsourced to poorer countries
I wouldn’t relate this directly to cognitive performance.
But my anecdotal experience working with younger employees / interns has been an uptick in situations where they become “paralyzed” by a fear of making a mistake, coupled with the inability to ask questions / seek out help.
They’ll google, or use ai, but if that doesn’t deliver an answer instead of asking a co worker, they will sit on an issue until someone follows up with them.
There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough.
I notice this in organizations I’ve been in leadership roles, but also have had this expressed to me by a half dozen peers in other organizations.
The data cited are international organizations so they are generally pretty trustworthy. However looking at the data tells a very different story from what this professor is claiming. They are averaging all countries regardless of context. Including countries at war, countries who have inconsistent data, etc. Not to mention all the different educational systems. Looking at each country though the results are fairly consistent from 2000 to 2022.
This seems like a testimony from a pop-science professor. Credentials seem to mostly point to self-help books and paid speaking events. The first graph in the written testimony show a direct decline in scores with screen time. However the linked data does not show this.
Using the US alone scores from 2000 to 2022 have not really moved.[1] They have fluctuated but in those 22 years the score is largely unchanged except in Mathematics where the US has declined. Dr. Horvath links to the 2015 PISA results, but screen time is not a part of that data. I got through the paper to this point and if they already faltering this badly then it's not worth my time to keep reading. Plenty of idiots and misinformed people testify before Congress. That doesn't make their statements empirically true and arguments right.
The sad part is the amount of people who will take it as gospel as it already conforms to their biases of children and technology.
This is world wide, look around us, everything is broken.
Early 2000s is when humanity peaked, the technology is making some people dumber.
Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet.
Students cannot study without AI anymore.
Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.
If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!!
It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 34.4 ms ] threadStandardized education is failing and doesn't fit the modern world. We need radically individualized education. By 2050 no student in the school system should speak the same language. There is no "correct" way to learn. We need, now more than ever, diversity of thought.
You see it explained as the result of everything. Be it microplastics, mobile phones, immigrants, long covid, climate change (, stress about), social media, AI, glyphosate, 5G, the elders of zion, the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, something to do with late stage capitalism... everyone seems to have their personal landscape of theories as to why this is happening.
You can probably ask someone to enumerate what they think causes this dip, and use it as a pretty reliable embedding for their entire political worldview.
But my anecdotal experience working with younger employees / interns has been an uptick in situations where they become “paralyzed” by a fear of making a mistake, coupled with the inability to ask questions / seek out help.
They’ll google, or use ai, but if that doesn’t deliver an answer instead of asking a co worker, they will sit on an issue until someone follows up with them.
There also seems to be a huge fear of submitting “something” that’s not good enough where the preference seems to be “nothing” if they’re worried it’s not good enough.
I notice this in organizations I’ve been in leadership roles, but also have had this expressed to me by a half dozen peers in other organizations.
Trump is obviously untrustworthy because he keeps saying the quiet part out loud.
The rest of the government obfuscates untrustworthiness and elders love to drag youth as the source of moral decay in our society.
We are generally more educated these days though so "look at them eating avocado toast!" and straight up fear mongering won't cut it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26328105.amp
So they resort to unfalsifiable data. You all going to put the work in that would be required to refute this?
But if they insist on playing this game, OK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
Using the US alone scores from 2000 to 2022 have not really moved.[1] They have fluctuated but in those 22 years the score is largely unchanged except in Mathematics where the US has declined. Dr. Horvath links to the 2015 PISA results, but screen time is not a part of that data. I got through the paper to this point and if they already faltering this badly then it's not worth my time to keep reading. Plenty of idiots and misinformed people testify before Congress. That doesn't make their statements empirically true and arguments right.
The sad part is the amount of people who will take it as gospel as it already conforms to their biases of children and technology.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet. Students cannot study without AI anymore. Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.
If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!! It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.