https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.
https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...
Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.
Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.
Also, from the article, it seems to directly contradict your comment:
> This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
No it doesn't. My comment was based on his findings.
This link shows the longitudinal drop in 2022 for the US - almost assuredly pandemic related https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38. Otherwise the scores are higher than ever.
But even in your link, you can see the plateau and subsequent decline prior to COVID.
The pandemic just exacerbated an already existing problem.
Edit: His testimony concludes:
> This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.
> Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.
> Federal policy can restore balance by demanding evidence, protecting children’s developmental needs, and ensuring that innovation serves learning rather than attention capture.
> Our responsibility is not to maximize screen exposure, but to maximize the cognitive capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation.
[1] Written Testimony, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, Neuroscientist and Educator Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
That being said there appears to be a difference in attention spans that I find unnerving, especially as a parent of a Gen Alpha. I could also be suffering the same inability to see my youth through the eyes I have now, but I definitely do not recall the lack of attention that they experience.
Talking about this in generational terms ("people who were born between years X and Y") and not causal terms ("people who were exposed to this and that type of education") is inflammatory and pins the declining test scores on all young people in general, as if it's their existence that's wrong. The generational divide isn't that good anyway, because one chunk of Gen Z has been exposed to studying in a post-COVID, post-AI world, while another chunk did basically the same thing as the Millennials, just with the internet being widespread.
P.S. Every generation thinks that next generation is dumber than the previous generation in some area and still we are making progress with every generation.
We, the older generations, have failed them.
Edit for clarity: some states were fully remote for over a year, and I’m including partial remote weeks here.
A few overwhelmingly smart people who had that as a hobby, and the very sad rest.
the reason it's interesting is that the lack of understanding and skill results in a "bourgeoisie" class in the workforce, and that isn't correlated to skill, amounts of labor or even cognitivity.
This tends to reduce the utilization of 'overwhelmingly' smart people, who are put to crappy tasks just to make money and ends meet.
Tests that legitimately are attempting to measure the thinking skills of individuals aren’t going to see improvements, I predict.
Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?
Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.
I tend to believe the argument made in the article because when I see someone young try to fact-find, the effort usually begins and ends with a Google AI overview. They then accept that unilaterally and are incapable of independently analyzing or verifying what it claims. Hell, they don’t even click its meager “citations”!
Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
All of this points to critical thinking weakness and learned laziness. A belief that everything should be easy and simple. I think it even explains some of their common political beliefs in both parties: absolutist opinions are more popular than ever, rejecting nuance.
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424
There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.
But I’m not really sure how much is education and how much is everything else. We don’t have a control group of kids who have EdTech educations but don’t have brains addled by TikTok (etc) into having no attention span and manipulated by algorithms into having whatever beliefs best optimize “engagement.”
Everyone can see that GenZ isn’t all right, everyone knows that children shouldn’t be raised by makeup tutorials, Jake and Logan Paul, and now ChatGPT, but we as a society are doing little to stop it. And what little we do (social media bans for example) are incomplete and have to be questioned on whether they have bad consequences for adult freedom and privacy.
Their early-years and kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants are a bit more likely to be Millennials, and I suspect that is a factor.
If you assume that the slow drift in poor teaching started with Gen X teachers, then what Millennials would have lost first was some of the communication of the the joy of learning and metacognition, which matters when you are the first generation whose attention span is taking a battering.
It is perhaps harder to teach what you had fewer opportunities to learn.
I don't know if you've met people, but most people are terrible! And now these poor role models are spending extra time with young impressionable minds! /s
actual decline started last century (that's for a hundred).
Older people aren't actually "boomers with everything handed to them", it's just you in 30y - more experience, more depth, and slight drop in cognitivity.
for computer science, I find it interesting that almost every Gen z can use and talk about concepts but does not understand how a computer works (be it transistors, kernel, or memory allocation for example).
With AI we all know this will get worse, and it already does. it's not just the prompting - AIs can and will return information with the upmost confidence, even if wrong. A lot of critical thinking is needed, which cannot be found by re-querying or using a search engine (that does the same thing) - information isn't cognitivity.
Can you give an example of that?
"Kids These Days" don't even know how to operate a perfectly standard smartphone without help.
I would argue that its a function of raw effort in varying domains.
Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.
For reference,
they're. contraction. Gen Z and they are parents. Is not what was intended.
there. location. Over there.
Bit of a rant incoming:
This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.
The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.
Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.
That's what I was referring to. Not the Gen Z stare.
I am also a parent of a kid who participated with a soccer club team for many years. She is a multi-sport athlete who loved several sports and we found the club experience in soccer actually quite good for her emotional and physical health. I will say that family experience with club sports varies based on the quality of the organization. She also played with her club in falls and her other sport in the spring at high school, so she got to do both. This was fun for her and us.
Assume a kid just wants to get better at some sport. I'm a player development nerd and believe most kids would be better served with 1-1 training with a much lower time investment that just joining a club or travel team. I do 1-1 sessions with players for 30 minutes 2x/week for 6-8 weeks in the fall. Players, of all natural athletic levels, will make about two years of progress compared to just participating on the spring team. That's with one whole hour per week of time invested. I love working with players this way because I am measurable-metric driven, so a kid can see their progress. I'm also a little bit qualitative about it too, because sometimes, the goal is just to build confidence and comfort.
The approach I'm describing looks like lots of hobbies. Imagine a kid wants to learn piano or guitar or drums. It's basically the same abstract approach. Work with an experienced teacher, commit to a regular+reasonable practice schedule, repeat for 6-8 weeks, and see if it fits and feels good.
The social aspect of being a good club or travel team is nuanced, but I will just say that my kid was incredibly well-served by having a good group of friends not connected to her school. And she had a great group of friends in school.
The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.
Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.
I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.
While I agree with you, it's so far and away from anything that could actually happen that I despair over what could be done. It seems like my children's schools change their evaluation criteria every other year to some "new" and "evidence-based" criteria. Do the kids do any different work? No. Do that get evaluated by different standards? Not really. I wouldn't call changing "pass" to "meets expectations" and fail to "not on track for success" to be a substantive change. Forcing equilateral, rectilinear wooden dowels into orifices of constant radius doesn't change the fact that we're playing a stupid game.
"The class tossed their graduation caps in the air" strikes me as less clumsy than its alternatives.
With NCLB test scores became very important. With Every Child Succeeds they became less so. The difference could simply be how much incentive is there to game the scores.
So once again, the pandemic was only an amplifier of problems that already existed.