Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. It’s insane.
While that sounds admittedly ridiculous, there is international data that suggests the problem is widespread and its rise coincides with smartphones.
As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.
Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)
The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
There is another factor nobody will mention, countries in EU that accepted statistically significant number of immigrants from outside of EU are doing way worse on PISA scores. While countries like poland are not really that affected it seems.
Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
Finland also leaned heavily into purely constructivist/inquiry-based teaching methods over the last 20 years. There is significant evidence going back to Project Follow-Through that these are not the best way to teach average and below-average students. The Finnish government announced earlier this year that they are doing a major revamp of the curriculum to reduce the emphasis on these instructional techniques.
For this to be evidence, it requires that there are countries in the dataset where phones did not become widespread? Are the Asian countries better at controlling phone access?
Blaming phones isn't arbitrary. The attention grabbing [/destroying] nuisance UIs that dangle dopamine hits in reach at all times are having an effect on people, adults that grew up w/ no smartphones included.
Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
I’d like to hammer on this point. The problem isn’t phones, but how they are used.
Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free.
People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
>Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended.
I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.
Some people in America are just culture-war Don Quixotes; tilting at windmills 24x7. For every person that's rolling their eyes at a pointed "Merry Christmas" in response to their "Happy Holidays", there's someone feeling they scored a point for the authentic American way of life.
You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
But this phenomenon is happening across the developed world:
> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average
Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. Everyone wants a scapegoat for this problem, whether it be funding, teachers, or administration, but unfortunately the problem is societal.
Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
Based on my own tiny "clinical trials" how much and how quickly children learn is proportional to the time spent working through problems together with their parents.
Yes, let's. PISA scores have been dropping here in Finland too, and we don't have close to the magnitude of the problems I personally saw as a US high school student last decade. I'd be willing to bet a lot of countries have seen a decline since 2010 or so.
> It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.
Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
We don't really have the problems you mentioned in Alberta and we have maintained our standing relative to everybody else in that academic world wide test or slightly improved (pisa??? I forget the name), however our performance over time is terrible. The percentage of people not sufficient in math has slipped from the low teens to low 20% comparing now to 20 years ago, if I recall the numbers correctly. Not to say it's phones, but something is certainly going on over time that is making at least a subset of the kids dumber.
You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
This sort of stuff can be A-B tested, I'm not sure if I can buy into the idea that increased discussion of Peppa Pig would result in increased student intelligence, or the lack of has resulted in lower student intelligence. There was a time where Peppa Pig / Teletubbies / Barney was considered brain rotting TV and ideally avoided for its own sake. Shoehorning it in as a protected human right seems feels like it may be going in the wrong direction.
I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple
lolwut? What's the context on this?
But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education.
That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor?
For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
definitely you got a point. teachers are not valued across the continents - teaching job is not stable not high paying...etc...people who would love to teach are quitting because of the economics. if you can't sustain yourself why get into that job market? obviously this is going to have an effect and this is it.
> I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig
I was born in the 70s.
We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school.
No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons.
A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect.
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended.
Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
I know a lot of teachers, who’ve been teaching for quite a while.
“Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
Sometimes, while using chatting apps like WhatsApp, I get annoyed by people that despite knowing perfectly how to read and write, seem incapable of doing so over the cellphone. They just keep using annoying audio messages. This gets me pondering if cellphones + AI tools like converting text in pictures to audio will eventually cause illiteracy to be fashionable again. Perhaps people will just stop bothering learn how to read and write, if their gadgets can act as the equivalent to personal scribes in antiquity.
We're back to Plato and his dislike of writing. "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written"
There was this thing I read years ago about how teenagers in Japan don't know how to write a lot of kanji by hand, but they'll recognize and be able to use it when typing it in their phone (since the input is phonetic and it autocompletes to possible kanji).
I've had this same thought and even direct comment to friends. The answer I've gotten basically every time has been that they send audios because they're driving while they're responding.
Is this a regional/socioeconomic thing? I very rarely see people record and/or listen to voice recordings in public, and my friends certainly don't do it.
It seems to be younger people where I am. What's funny is they don't hold the phone to their ear like I would, they hold the phone with the screen facing them right in front of their faces. I assume that's because their generation don't really do phone calls anymore.
I've never used voice messages like the ones being talked about in this thread so I don't know if there's a particular reason they hold the phone that way
I know a few older adults who effectively cannot compose text. They can read just fine, they can talk, they just can't express themselves in written words. If they learned to, it was fifty years ago and they've spent their working lives doing things that didn't require it. In the little things where you need to write (a thank you card), they had a spouse cover for them.
I think it's probably relatively common, at least for some generations. Voice memo gets them past a very big source of anxiety.
My wife’s an editor and writer and uses voice to text all the time when messaging on her phone.
I think OP means sending actual voice memos. Yeah, I’d just never listen to most of those. I’m not the sort who has AirPods in my ears all day, so stuff with audio in messaging apps usually gets skipped.
I can swipe with Google gboard faster than I can type on a real keyboard (and I'm a programmer and can type), but I tried that google keyboard ("Gboard") on my iPhone and it was awful - slow to respond, lots of mistakes. (Until fairly recently, Apple didn't allow third-party keyboards at all, and iPhone still doesn't allow third-party keyboards access to all the API's, so they're a bit hamstrung). (Note: on GrapheneOS, I block Gboard from all network access, so it doesn't learn from my mistakes or new words, but it's still light years beyond running it on iPhone.)
So it might be a platform-specific thing. I definitely find typing on an iPhone to be rather painful, but swiping on Android is very, very fast.
Yeah, no, you're just annoyed people aren't texting, it has nothing to do with literacy. Audible user interfaces are great but they don't remove the need for text.
One practical example when I was interviewing a candidate a few years back - I don't need to recall or remember anything, I can just google it up at the moment and learn it.
Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect?
Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
I don't have hard scientific evidence, but memory absolutely plays a role as far as I can tell. Even for simple deductions we rely constantly on toy examples or similar scenarios to that we're currently thinking, which can then guide our thinking further.
For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
There is a lot of cognitive science research confirming the point you're making. Cognitive scientists draw a major distinction between working memory and long-term memory (there's also a third "sensory memory" that appears in the literature but isn't all that germane to learning math). In cognitive load theory, managing working memory is important to getting things into long-term memory, so if you have to do 6+6+...+6, that's going to eat up your working memory and you're less likely to be able to commit the more important thing you're trying to learn to long-term memory. There's a lot of published research on this.
It is appealing to some educators to lean on 6+6+...+6 because it shows conceptual understanding, but counterintuitively students who don't make the jump to memorizing 6x7 or something close like 6*6+6 (cognitive scientists call this "fluency") end up having difficulty learning higher-order concepts because of the working memory bottleneck.
Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks.
Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
For what it's worth, my father is a civil engineering professor and has been complaining that students have been getting dumber for 30ish years at this point. That predates smartphones and laptops weren't a common occurrence in lecture halls yet.
The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
And it has probably been true for 30 years. I’ve been increasingly dismayed at the stark loss of competence from what I already considered the low baseline of my peer group.
In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
I think there is a multi-generational trend. 150 years ago graduating highschool used to really mean something, now it's almost impossible not to. And that's not because everybody got smarter. Even the abject idiots with awful attendance get handed diplomas. There are now school districts in America where none of the students are proficient with basic math and writing, but they're still graduating most if not all of their students.
I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard.
How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.
The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.
So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video.
But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
Personally, I am extremely bad at resisting distraction. Remote working is tough for me because if I'm in a meeting with some interesting and some boring parts, the moment a boring part starts I'll just quickly check my e-mails, and then I won't notice when the meeting gets interesting again.
I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.
I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
On the issue with getting distracted on calls while working from home. I do the same, not because I am easily distracted but because I have a lot of work to do, and you are sitting there in front of your work, so you get back to it. On some calls, I think this is ok.
For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
Technology for sure made me dumber. I used to always know the date, could perform mental mathematics quite nicely, and remember things pretty easily. Ask me what day of the month it is and I'll have to check my phone.
Turns out there are a lot of things we don't need to know the data but it is enough to know how to get it. Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always avaliable when you needed it
Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
Sometimes it's nice knowing how to do something simply for its own sake. I know lots of random little facts and calculation tricks which don't really help me in any major way but I enjoy and take pride in knowing them.
> Take the skill of reading maps in the era of gps as an example, of course it would be beneficial but your brain will not try to remember something that is always available when you needed it
Readit News
As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008.
Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.)
The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free.
People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
> Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average
Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
On one hand, I've heard that a class of 30 kids gets almost half a million dollars of taxpayer money per year.
On the other hand, I've heard that teachers get a salary of about $50k, and have to beg on gofundme to equip their classrooms with basic stationary.
I really have no idea how to get these two facts to line up.
Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
lolwut? What's the context on this?
But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education.
That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
The apps kids are using on phones have the mechanics of slot machines. There is no way that this is good for them.
Unfortunately, they are not using their time online to research 9th century Persian literature.
I was born in the 70s.
We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school.
No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons.
A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect.
It's insane? /s
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
“Each class knows less than the one before, over more than a decade” and “yeah, obviously it’s the phones, they’re a constant problem” are what you’ll hear from all of them if you ask about this stuff.
Things that are much less common over my (long) lifetime:
-memorization of classic poetry and lines from literature
-memorization of tables for simple math operations (+ - * / )
-memorization of telephone numbers
-memorization of how to travel to different locations, even in a city
Is memorization of the alphabet next?
It's a difference of degree.
There was this thing I read years ago about how teenagers in Japan don't know how to write a lot of kanji by hand, but they'll recognize and be able to use it when typing it in their phone (since the input is phonetic and it autocompletes to possible kanji).
So I think there's something more going on. I think maybe it's that text was the "default" communication medium, and speech is becoming the default.
Is this a regional/socioeconomic thing? I very rarely see people record and/or listen to voice recordings in public, and my friends certainly don't do it.
I've never used voice messages like the ones being talked about in this thread so I don't know if there's a particular reason they hold the phone that way
I think it's probably relatively common, at least for some generations. Voice memo gets them past a very big source of anxiety.
I think OP means sending actual voice memos. Yeah, I’d just never listen to most of those. I’m not the sort who has AirPods in my ears all day, so stuff with audio in messaging apps usually gets skipped.
So it might be a platform-specific thing. I definitely find typing on an iPhone to be rather painful, but swiping on Android is very, very fast.
I am faster on a touchscreen than most people are on a keyboard. I have seen teens who are ~50% faster than me.
It's just training.
I know I do (with certain friends, depending on context).
Now this was an extreme behaviour exhibited, but am sure this is the same with everything that we have traditionally been indicators of skill - we still don't understand perfectly the underlying mechanics here of intelligence. Does memory play a role? How does long term memory / encoding affect our ability to have intelligence ? Is our ability to learn something new an indicator of intellect?
Given these unanswered questions - I doubt our current education system really measures intelligence as it has continued to develop over the years because of introduction of devices and an explosion of information.
For example (inspired by my kid's struggles to learn multiplication), if you're calculating 7x6, it helps to remember that 6x6 = 36, and then just add another 6. Much easier than calculating 6+6+...+6.
It is appealing to some educators to lean on 6+6+...+6 because it shows conceptual understanding, but counterintuitively students who don't make the jump to memorizing 6x7 or something close like 6*6+6 (cognitive scientists call this "fluency") end up having difficulty learning higher-order concepts because of the working memory bottleneck.
Wouldn't having a total grasp of adding 6 seven times be considered smarter than using that shortcut?
And wouldn't the logical evolution of that mental shortcut be to simply use the tool in your pocket instead?
I too have similar tricks for math, but there must be plenty I'm not aware of because I just use my phone, and because there is no clear incentive nor reward to learning these tricks.
Is it smarter to memorize math shortcuts that you don't actually need, or is it smarter to circumvent them and employ your attention fruitfully elsewhere?
The gradient of the graphs in the article is pretty worrying though and I'm sure that phones/social media definitely have some effect.
In my view grade inflation, no child left behind, common core, the lack of streamlining and gifted programs, the democratization of university, the increased cost of university and the reluctance to fail people who have paid so much money, rampant cheating by international students, etc all played a roll. Phones just poured fuel on the fire.
How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway.
The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving.
So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.
If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video.
But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.
I grew up before the era of laptops and smartphones, and came up with a bunch of strategies to avoid distraction - revising for an exam? If it's a less interesting subject, it's got to be printed media only, in the library, in silence. Because I knew, no matter how long it took me to find an answer in books, finding it online would take longer with the inevitable distraction taken into account.
I'm glad I never had to attend video lectures, or have a laptop on my desk in school, because I would have failed for sure.
For calls where I really should be listening though, I often do some mindless chore like folding laundry or doing dishes. Very easy then to concentrate on the call while satisfying your need to get things done at the same time.
I hate that about myself - I'm too reliant.
Same goes for a lot of things that we can just quickly lookup nowadays, I don't think its a bad thing but rather the brain doing what it always did and should do - adapting.
Maps themselves are a shortcut tool!