It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids. "Sold a story" had a huge impact on the educational establishment. My local district reintroduced phonics for the 2023-2024 school year, and reintroduced it in kindergarten. By the end of kindergarten, every single one of my kid's classmates could read. This class is today's 2nd graders; they are avid readers today, I'll usually run into one of them walking with a book in front of their face at aftercare. They're too young to show up in the test scores, though, because these kids won't have their first round of standardized testing for another 2 years.
Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
>>>If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school district based on what their property taxes are already accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per book, including learning to present her findings in a timed manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They advance kids to higher math grades based on the child’s skill level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional ones 6th grade math.
This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier. Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.
Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.
They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
I think that the amount of money spent per pupil is not a critical factor. It does help I’m sure to a certain point, but the issue with the educational system is not about money. For example, Many inner city schools spend far more money per pupil than suburban schools and yet these inner city school systems have terrible results.
The real issue is what you addressed with the introduction of phonics, which addresses the instruction and the material and how it’s taught. These are improvements that would be felt across all socioeconomic levels and schools across geographic areas. Another critical factor is parents and how they support their children and the time that parents have to support their children. Lower socioeconomic level families do not have time and do not have money to support children academically as they are working multiple low income jobs while trying to survive and pay rent and eat.
This isn't only reflected in educational standards. I've seen a ton more restrictions in traffic and speed limits in more affluent areas, and higher/less blatant enforcement in poorer areas, even when the poorer areas are more populated with children.
If you read the article, you'll know that the affluent kids never saw a decrease in performance begin with. The top 10% performed just as well as always.
The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well:
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app restrictions. It's about setting the right example and providing an environment where reading a book is as stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game every once in a while on an iPad.
It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like war and peace.
I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
>It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
Is there proof the affluent ever were suffering? From the article we're discussing:
>Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse.
The low-income story gets most of the airtime because most people are not interested in reading about how rich people are struggling, but there was also a significant decline in affluent districts as well. See eg. this Boston Globe article about how even the top districts in the state (which itself is historically the top in the country) are using poor instructional methods:
I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30 years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent districts can't pass them.
Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax - my kindergartner could read it better than her.
Perhaps the socioeconomic divide won't be as big of an issue as you think. If you haven't heard of the Mississippi Miracle [1], it's worth learning about.
The bigger issue is convincing education departments that phonics are the more successful way to learn reading.
If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
When you look at the conservative attack on public education, the prison industrial complex, et al., it really seems that this is the intention.
It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements. Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this article highlights: they hold students to expectations and prevent them from advancing grades if they don’t meet the bar.
"A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them."
Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it means teachers. Good teachers.
There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get better jobs elsewhere.
There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the resources to change what's possible.
Individually, students have the least agency in the entire system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the disapproval of their peer culture.
The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is inspiration and motivation from educators.
That it's being framed as "raising expectations" at all is very silly to me. "Raising expectations" costs nothing and requires no external support, yet we see no success stories about schools which raised expectations and had big success.
The "Mississippi Miracle" boils down to directing resources toward struggling kids. They hired reading coaches specifically for struggling students, provided teachers with literacy-based professional development resources, and created Individualized Reading Plans for struggling kids and their parents. Yes, they also held back kids who didn't pass a literacy exam (and moved them to teachers who specialized in helping struggling children), but failing more students was not the primary policy improvement here, and on its own it would do nothing.
"Low-expectations theory" (and the accompanying suggestion that progressives are somehow to blame) is an absurd diagnosis for a problem that was not solved by raising expectations, but rather by targeting available resources toward problem areas—a solution which is painfully obvious in hindsight. That doesn't have an ideological valence, though, and this article seems intent on sticking it to progressives somehow.
The proper job of teachers is to provide far more than simple "inspiration and motivation", especially to students who are at significant risk of failure. Teachers must be given the skills they need to provide clear and understandable information and direction to these students in the course of their job duties. They should actively educate, not just act as coaches who simply expect their "inspired" students to learn the school curriculum on their own, as with the now-popular "sink or swim" approach.
Why have grade levels at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through. Then, in order to advance, you can focus the labor effort toward correcting skill deficits in a dynamic way. This is not possible with how educational institutions are traditionally organized, but it doesn't seem intractable to restructure to support this methodology.
It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
> Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through
FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress
These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
I'd love to see this tried. If you want to level up in writing, take those classes. If you reach minimum levels in enough subjects, you get a diploma. And you could make it as granular as you wanted.
You might need more carrots and sticks since the penalty for being held back is lessened.
We already run colleges this way, granular down to an academic quarter.
It really comes down to costs and efficiency. Having large enough class size and thus grade level makes things more efficient. As teachers do scale to certain number of pupils. Current schools can teach same material for say 15-40 students at one time. But in more tutoring like system you might be able to do 5. Which means you need 3-8 times more teachers.
I have a suspicion that you'd wind up with a lot of places that would care even less and with people making it to 18 without ever having advanced at all without some sort of stick ("being held back"), probably impacting the most vulnerable even more.
Is there any reason to think they would graduate with useful knowledge otherwise? The kids in my day who did poor may have graduated - but they still lacked knowlege and to the diploma was paper...
also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass - as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the majority already knows
If you don't exclude people who failed to learn the material then the next year's material has to dumb itself down to account for the people who can't understand it. And conversely the students who didn't understand but went forward often still have some missing factor which means they'll spend 12 years not understanding and falling behind.
Obviously you could make a metric for this and if you're holding back say 50% of students there's probably a problem but a small portion isn't obviously a bad thing. Snark is fun but it isn't analysis.
It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should be retained for another year for additional time to meet them. That only becomes a "problem" when we treat it like one, usually because of warped institutional incentives or misplaced shame.
We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for.
What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.
People being held back a grade aren't being excluded from education, though. They're being educated.
Sending kids who haven't learned to read on to higher grades and having no standards for success is not a more "inclusive" policy than having benchmarks that must be passed.
Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does. Their sole purpose is to siphon off as much public funding for their members, not to teach children. In fact failing kids justifies more money spent (guys, this is literally in the article as a point where liberal assumptions are being challenged; please read the article before downvoting me at least).
While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method.
EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based instruction:
> Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does.
Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that is part of the National Education Association, aka the largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the literacy rates.
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents.
Easy. Parents of young children are on their phones more than ever before. That means less reading and more screen time.
One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do with it.
But it’s also a big potential confounder, and I certainly don’t know the literature well enough to say how well they managed to account for that - not that education research has a ton of great studies, but they’re unlikely to all be colossal mistakes.
Lots of books in the home? Great: you have parents who read for enjoyment, have a stable space for living that has lots of room for books (in the pre-eBook/tablet era, my book collection at college was maybe 1/10 of the books in my parents’ house that were specifically mine, not theirs; just their casual reading filled a wall, and they could afford to install built-in shelves as opposed to moving frequently and having to move both books and shelves), and enough money to buy books. Imagination Library (or similar) can fix the last one, but not the first two.
This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit those milestones until a year later. The standards and expectations are extremely high now because it's never been harder to get a spot at a top 20 university—perhaps because a top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your living standards.
I've not seen anything saying all kids are lacking in important skills these days, but rather they all seem (to me) to imply that we're on the way to an even more-stratified society. Smart kids will be just as educated as smart kids used to be - probably even moreso. Dumb kids will fall further and further behind, and the middle range of "kinda smart at a bunch of stuff" will disappear.
With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
Everything is bifurcating now. Haves are having more and more, and have-nots are having less and less. Middle class jobs are disappearing in favor of a mix of 1. low-wage unskilled/service jobs and 2. "elite" jobs for the upper crust. There used to be a place in society for A, B, C, and D students, but now you're either top-college material or you risk being swept into a growing underclass.
> With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
That's one reason that the solution to educational inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.
How are they teaching 4 year olds reading and arithmetic? That wasn’t an option in my affluent area in SoCal. Somehow Chinese and some Russian kids can do it, but mine didn’t. Despite my paying $20k/year per child for preschool.
Same way they used to teach it in 1st grade, but 2 years earlier. There's often more of an emphasis on visuals, manipulatives, and songs too, eg. my kid's kindergarten teacher linked us to this song [1] on the first day, and there's dozens of similar resources on YouTube.
A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest, but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him, go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to me, and say "Read this", though.
For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and I started introducing addition and subtraction just in ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries, and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you get to eat?"
Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100, or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2 * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400" (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is the correct answer.
I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school. This was 25+ years ago.
My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money. I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.
It’s weird, and a little unnerving, to have a line from Anathem by Neil Stephenson immediately come to mind:
“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”
Similarly, I thought of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Stephenson is right, of course, but I think that Miller more fully understands that our fall begins not just with the fading of literacy and the rise of ignorance, but also in post modern relativism and the reign of cynicism. If one more otherwise clever person tries to explain to me how there's no such thing as objective truth, I might just scream.
“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”
…
“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.
“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”
Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”
“So that they could make money.”
“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”
“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”
“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”
“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better.”
…
“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.
“Yes.”
“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”
---------------------------
That section plus Samman's little bit about the "Artificial Inanity" systems that made the internet basically unusable are hitting way too close to home these days.
When I first read Asimov's Foundation, I thought the decline and loss of knowledge in the Galactic Empire within a few generations was unrealistically quick. It's been eye-opening to witness new parents who not only don't know that they're supposed to teach their children to read, but wouldn't know how to do so.
Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis (who wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money, and Queen's Gambit, and The Man Who Fell To Earth – quite an oeuvre!) has long been one of my favorite books and it's been eerie to see how right he was about how eager mankind is to hand over all intellectual labor to the robots.
(The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who has learned to read in 400 years – to translate the title cards in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind of a happy ending.)
I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.
It's a philosophy text with a lot of ideas masquerading as a work of fiction. The closest analogy to it that I can think of is the Symposium... which is a philosophy work that uses a plot and stories to express the ideas. Incidentally, there's a part of Anathem that feels a lot like the Symposium (complete with chatting about philosophy around a table).
Mediatronic glyphs on our chopsticks when? Love the way the Nell's vocabulary and disposition evolve as the Primer (or Miranda) teaches her to spell, read, and eventually understand Turing machines via binary and logic gates.
I don't remember that line in Anathem. It seemd pretty clear that the Saecular society at the time of the novel was a literate, 21st century tech level. e.g. there were characters like Samman who was basically a sysadmin.
Weren't the ita basically 'half-concents' essentially? Where the caste, despite being allowed more of the trappings and technological luxuries of the Saecular society, specifically were kept away from the other sciences to handicap them because they couldn't enforce the same asceticism on one whose job it is to maintain the technology.
They all use Kinagrams—a moving picture script. Very few are literate. Well-off burgers typically can read and write, but lots of the workers and virtually all the slines can't read.
In the 1980s, the BBC did a realistic nuclear war movie called Threads. It is a classic and always relevant. The scene I found most shocking was in the aftermath, when the children of the survivors can't read or even speak properly. There is this record player and they have no idea what it is for or what music is, because they have never heard of it. One of them plays with it, intrigued that the turntable moves, but that is about it, nobody is hooking it up to get everyone dancing.
I live in the UK which has been slow compared to the USA when it comes to TV. In the 1960s, Americans were watching 4+ hours a day of colour TV, with a vast choice of channels. It took is about three decades to catch up in the UK. I think the same can be said for Europe and elsewhere outside the USA. We have just been behind with TV watching and several other American conveniences, such as driving everywhere and convenience foods.
At the start of this year I made 'reading part of an actual book' my new years' resolution. It was going well for all of six weeks (then I had to spend a log time from home, away from my books), but why did I need to make it something I was committed too with a resolution?
There was a time when I would literally fight over books, magazines and newspapers with family and friends. Before then, there was a time when, as a child, I would be reading by moonlight until the small hours.
Then, before my time, before TV, the cinema and radio, was a time when people would go out to a hall to listen to someone read the latest Dickens installment. That was 'peak book' even though literacy wasn't great for everyone.
Nowadays books have been relegated to what people have on show in the back of a Zoom call, sometimes contrived, often not so contrived. There is a long history of doing this. Middle class people used to buy books for the parlour to show they were educated, often with out of copyright classics, hardbound.
I suspect that some people read more for the 'bragging rights' than for the pleasure of reading. I also suspect that any surveys on book reading habits are going to be unreliable since it is easy to say 'year I read three books this year' and cite the three that you had to read under duress as a schoolchild.
Some young people have started to widely use emoji in personal communications. We may not be far away from a society that partially abolished written language and relies only on images and videos to communicate.
Symbols are archaic, time to replace language with something self-organizing, self-teaching, concatenating and concatenated, ruled by verbs, and defanging nouns and agentic occlusions.
“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…”
“No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”
“We don’t have underwear, or bleach—just the bolt, the chord, and the sphere,” said Fraa Orolo, patting the length of cloth thrown over his head, the rope knotted around his waist, and the sphere under his bottom. This was a weak joke at our expense to set Quin at ease.
Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”
This was from the part where Fraa Orolo was interviewing Artisan Quin about the world outside the Concent.
What I’m most surprised by is how visually illiterate the older generations seem to be.
As a video editor, I’ve encountered multiple moments where an older person is incapable of even noticing that we’ve cut from one angle to another, and the amount of times I’ve had to convince them that “yes the audience will absolutely notice that incredibly obvious mistake and we need to fix it” is astronomical.
I’ve seen video after video of old people seemingly incapable of identifying even the most basic CGI or AI videos. And all you techies know how clearly this issue extends into the basic usage of a computer interface. How many times do I need to remind my dad how to turn on the subtitles?
We can sit here and lambast the younger generations all we want, but I refuse to do it without accurately comparing them to the previous generations, which IMO were clearly less capable than we previously thought.
Back when high def TVs were relatively new and cable TV and separate channels for SD and HD feeds, it used to drive me crazy that my parents would watch the SD channel with the image stretched to fit the screen. I’d show them where the HD channel was (it was something like SD channel # + 200) but they just didn’t care. The stretched SD image was good enough.
Media literacy seems to be one of those things it's easy to forget you ever had to learn. I'm routinely amazed at how little of it most other people are capable of, when a lot of it is now so automatic for me that I can't turn it off, it's just a permanent part of how I experience things—but at some point I'm sure I was about that limited, and I'm better at it now only because I found improving my literacy to be interesting and fun, so I effortlessly put a lot of time into it.
Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much music, et c., as most people do and not putting a little thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but how does it do that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do, and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or mysteries in the rest of the work?" side of things seems totally alien to me.
As an "older" person, watching video critically wasn't a literacy skill that mattered throughout my education. I was taught how to use a (physical) card catalog, how to distinguish primary and secondary sources, how to use printed indexes to discover relevant news articles, how to find and read material on microfiche, ...
I'm often impressed by the multi-media literacy and production capabilties of younger colleagues. But to be honest, I will likely always prefer to think and to communicate by writing and not by making videos.
I think your criticism is fair - assessing the quality and reliability of information is different today than it was 40 years ago. And getting harder as more of it becomes un-bylined, remixed, bot-driven propaganda pushed by platforms without reputational skin the game for truthfulness.
But I'm not sure I can be convinced that reading and writing aren't critical thinking skills, regardless of what other mediums exist. Maybe that's just generational myopia on my part. Certainly, these seem like more critical skills than mastering the remote control.
Tech illiteracy at some age groups is insane to me. I understand that my 93 year old grandma wasn't great at this sort of thing. But I encounter people who are in their 20s who don't know how to print a document, or people in their 50s falling for obvious AI scams. Didn't Jurassic Park come out in 93? Did they just think people were getting eaten by dinosaurs?
I think some people simply have a bad visual cortex. Countless times I've tried to show people how to turn off motion interpolation on their TV to prevent the soap opera effect, and they just didn't see any difference.
Maybe they just have a different set of values. These older generations you're talking about may have grown up watching ultra grainy, ultra low def, low production quality(relative to modern), black and white TV. Maybe they just learned to look past visual blips and focus on the story.
If I point out to my dad that the actors are in a slightly different position before and after a cut, I can imagine my dad saying "Okay. Who cares?"
Between this, Chinas rise (the lights-out factories etc) and the gestures around general atmosphere here in the USA it really doesnt seem like we're in for a good 20-50 years.
In the US, the kids are doing poorly. But unlike China, there is actually a large number of children being born.
One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as America recedes in power, other countries are receding even faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way of natural resources and favorable demographics and can continue to fail forward for a long time.
edit: fertility rate in the US is near historic lows. maybe you're thinking of something else re: demographic trends, but that seems pretty alarming to me.
Economic problems create their own demographic problems. The current government policies against immigration are a sure way to reduce population growth in the US for the next decades.
I do wonder, and this is probably way too optimistic - but if China or another country were to open their economy, I wonder if there would be benefit to perhaps some of the wealth leaving the US, especially as too many of our modern businesses are too extractive.
What's kind of depressing about this moment in general is that there isn't really a 'shining beacon on the hill'. If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US. Europe is good in a lot of ways, but kind of muddling along in others - and won't even policy democratic backsliders like Hungary.
Forget it. As long as China remains a dictatorship, investors will not pump in too much money - it's too uncertain what happens to your investment.
The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the will of a dictator.
Everyone always complains that if you raise taxes, rich people will "leave", with the assumption that only the richest can actually run productive companies, which obviously isn't the case. On the other hand, there must be some fraction of the truly richest that are just relentlessly good at accruing wealth, and not much else, no? Wouldn't you _want_ those people to leave?
"One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.
Readit News
Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school district based on what their property taxes are already accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per book, including learning to present her findings in a timed manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They advance kids to higher math grades based on the child’s skill level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional ones 6th grade math.
This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier. Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.
They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
The real issue is what you addressed with the introduction of phonics, which addresses the instruction and the material and how it’s taught. These are improvements that would be felt across all socioeconomic levels and schools across geographic areas. Another critical factor is parents and how they support their children and the time that parents have to support their children. Lower socioeconomic level families do not have time and do not have money to support children academically as they are working multiple low income jobs while trying to survive and pay rent and eat.
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app (of the brain and attention).
Is there proof the affluent ever were suffering? From the article we're discussing:
>Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/10/metro/reading-skills-...
https://archive.is/epEe5
I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30 years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent districts can't pass them.
Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax - my kindergartner could read it better than her.
The bigger issue is convincing education departments that phonics are the more successful way to learn reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle
America is not solely made up of affluent kids.
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Anecdotal I guess but I feel like I'm seeing alot of people having kids suddenly.
When you look at the conservative attack on public education, the prison industrial complex, et al., it really seems that this is the intention.
It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements. Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this article highlights: they hold students to expectations and prevent them from advancing grades if they don’t meet the bar.
Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it means teachers. Good teachers.
There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get better jobs elsewhere.
There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the resources to change what's possible.
Individually, students have the least agency in the entire system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the disapproval of their peer culture.
The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is inspiration and motivation from educators.
The "Mississippi Miracle" boils down to directing resources toward struggling kids. They hired reading coaches specifically for struggling students, provided teachers with literacy-based professional development resources, and created Individualized Reading Plans for struggling kids and their parents. Yes, they also held back kids who didn't pass a literacy exam (and moved them to teachers who specialized in helping struggling children), but failing more students was not the primary policy improvement here, and on its own it would do nothing.
"Low-expectations theory" (and the accompanying suggestion that progressives are somehow to blame) is an absurd diagnosis for a problem that was not solved by raising expectations, but rather by targeting available resources toward problem areas—a solution which is painfully obvious in hindsight. That doesn't have an ideological valence, though, and this article seems intent on sticking it to progressives somehow.
It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress
These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
You might need more carrots and sticks since the penalty for being held back is lessened.
We already run colleges this way, granular down to an academic quarter.
also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass - as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the majority already knows
Dead Comment
Obviously you could make a metric for this and if you're holding back say 50% of students there's probably a problem but a small portion isn't obviously a bad thing. Snark is fun but it isn't analysis.
We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for.
What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.
Sending kids who haven't learned to read on to higher grades and having no standards for success is not a more "inclusive" policy than having benchmarks that must be passed.
I just thought it aligned particularly well with the OP on that specific point.
Dead Comment
While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method.
EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based instruction:
https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that is part of the National Education Association, aka the largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the literacy rates.
You're painting with an awfully broad brush there.
0: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/our-history
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves
2: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/media-center/press-releas...
Easy. Parents of young children are on their phones more than ever before. That means less reading and more screen time.
One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do with it.
This "effect" is the textbook example of correlation != causation. By which I mean, it was literally in my AP Psych textbook in high school.
Lots of books in the home? Great: you have parents who read for enjoyment, have a stable space for living that has lots of room for books (in the pre-eBook/tablet era, my book collection at college was maybe 1/10 of the books in my parents’ house that were specifically mine, not theirs; just their casual reading filled a wall, and they could afford to install built-in shelves as opposed to moving frequently and having to move both books and shelves), and enough money to buy books. Imagination Library (or similar) can fix the last one, but not the first two.
There's a correlation component, but also there absolutely is a causal connection of access to books and parents reading to children.
With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
That's one reason that the solution to educational inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.
FTA: “High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.”
A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest, but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him, go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to me, and say "Read this", though.
For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and I started introducing addition and subtraction just in ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries, and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you get to eat?"
Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100, or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2 * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400" (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is the correct answer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IBDpTRVNE
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Attmu-Toddlers-Alphabet-Preschoolers-...
[3] https://www.miniplay.com/game/snake-2048-io
Some things you cannot buy for love or money!
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“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”
“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
People making an actual good argument don't front, nor bookend it with a thesis on "the nature of truth".
…
“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.
“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”
Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”
“So that they could make money.”
“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”
“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”
“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”
“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better.”
…
“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.
“Yes.”
“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”
---------------------------
That section plus Samman's little bit about the "Artificial Inanity" systems that made the internet basically unusable are hitting way too close to home these days.
2008. Stephenson is 10 years ahead of the current discourse, as usual.
We have cameras and planes and stuff. How is the idea that downtown is a burnt out hole in the ground full of rubble (or not) an actual controversy?
(The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who has learned to read in 400 years – to translate the title cards in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind of a happy ending.)
I live in the UK which has been slow compared to the USA when it comes to TV. In the 1960s, Americans were watching 4+ hours a day of colour TV, with a vast choice of channels. It took is about three decades to catch up in the UK. I think the same can be said for Europe and elsewhere outside the USA. We have just been behind with TV watching and several other American conveniences, such as driving everywhere and convenience foods.
At the start of this year I made 'reading part of an actual book' my new years' resolution. It was going well for all of six weeks (then I had to spend a log time from home, away from my books), but why did I need to make it something I was committed too with a resolution?
There was a time when I would literally fight over books, magazines and newspapers with family and friends. Before then, there was a time when, as a child, I would be reading by moonlight until the small hours.
Then, before my time, before TV, the cinema and radio, was a time when people would go out to a hall to listen to someone read the latest Dickens installment. That was 'peak book' even though literacy wasn't great for everyone.
Nowadays books have been relegated to what people have on show in the back of a Zoom call, sometimes contrived, often not so contrived. There is a long history of doing this. Middle class people used to buy books for the parlour to show they were educated, often with out of copyright classics, hardbound.
I suspect that some people read more for the 'bragging rights' than for the pleasure of reading. I also suspect that any surveys on book reading habits are going to be unreliable since it is easy to say 'year I read three books this year' and cite the three that you had to read under duress as a schoolchild.
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As a video editor, I’ve encountered multiple moments where an older person is incapable of even noticing that we’ve cut from one angle to another, and the amount of times I’ve had to convince them that “yes the audience will absolutely notice that incredibly obvious mistake and we need to fix it” is astronomical.
I’ve seen video after video of old people seemingly incapable of identifying even the most basic CGI or AI videos. And all you techies know how clearly this issue extends into the basic usage of a computer interface. How many times do I need to remind my dad how to turn on the subtitles?
We can sit here and lambast the younger generations all we want, but I refuse to do it without accurately comparing them to the previous generations, which IMO were clearly less capable than we previously thought.
Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much music, et c., as most people do and not putting a little thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but how does it do that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do, and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or mysteries in the rest of the work?" side of things seems totally alien to me.
I'm often impressed by the multi-media literacy and production capabilties of younger colleagues. But to be honest, I will likely always prefer to think and to communicate by writing and not by making videos.
I think your criticism is fair - assessing the quality and reliability of information is different today than it was 40 years ago. And getting harder as more of it becomes un-bylined, remixed, bot-driven propaganda pushed by platforms without reputational skin the game for truthfulness.
But I'm not sure I can be convinced that reading and writing aren't critical thinking skills, regardless of what other mediums exist. Maybe that's just generational myopia on my part. Certainly, these seem like more critical skills than mastering the remote control.
If I point out to my dad that the actors are in a slightly different position before and after a cut, I can imagine my dad saying "Okay. Who cares?"
One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as America recedes in power, other countries are receding even faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way of natural resources and favorable demographics and can continue to fail forward for a long time.
edit: fertility rate in the US is near historic lows. maybe you're thinking of something else re: demographic trends, but that seems pretty alarming to me.
China is at 1.7, but I am not sure I trust the number if they report it themselves.
Either way, I have no idea where you take that there's a large number of children being born.
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The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the will of a dictator.
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"One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.