My Students Can’t Read | The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse

Can someone summarize the article? I can’t read

I wonder how a certain 54 year old individual from Pennsylvania might react to learning of this information?

TLDR summary?

>There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

We really don’t need a structural overhaul at the college level to deal with this. Colleges literally just need to enforce standards. They need to require entrance exams or actually care about test scores. Just filter out students who can’t do it.

The problem is massive for K-12 schooling, but it’s not a problem for Universities. Just don’t let in kids who can’t read. It’s not hard.

My kids are prolific readers, one thing I at least got right as a parent 😆

https://preview.redd.it/4jknaj1eah5h1.jpeg?width=1115&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=575059be1572d93b10efc36374481d64bddec6ee

They’re interweaving aspects to this.

Ooh, there is a public school mandate to get as many kids as possible reading above the bare minimum level.. Lack of basic literacy makes life hard. 

At the other end… I think most people don’t realize what an enormous shaping effect reading has on Consiousness. The modern mind, is a literate mind. 

Plato recorded Socrates complaining about the beginning of literacy. The old, oral methods of doing scholarship we’re being abandoned and Socrates felt that loss.  

College students is a specific aspect of this. I think it’s true that “arts and humanities” education is affected here. The way history, philosophy or whatnot are taught is mostly reading stuff. They then grade students on essay writing. 

Reading skills have diminished, as fewer people read fewer books. AI doping has made essay writing. 

I’m an adjunct in humanities who just finished teaching a writing intensive course: it is very, very bad. A pre-req for my class was an English writing course, yet I had to devote time to teach them remedial writing skills, I’m talking how to structure a paragraph, let alone write at an analytical level.

I assigned three in-person handwritten essays and two research papers. My hope was that their in-class essays would incrementally improve as they got my feedback, but instead I just got three equally bad essays. The research papers were rife with ai use, and despite giving zeroes for everyone I caught, I know there were more who did it. The saddest part was seeing some who just naturally write in the vapid style that you see with ai; I think it may be how some of them learned how to “write.”

This year has genuinely tested my passion for teaching. I look back to a few years ago when I also taught a writing intensive course, and the mediocre papers there were on par with the best that I had this semester. It’s really, really bad, and I don’t see it getting any better now that they’re all using ai.

I’m in Alberta and my kids in grade 1. They have reading logs, they have to write and try to sound out words. My son was struggling at the beginning of the year now is where he needs to be for grade 2. Most of his class is on schedule and I don’t think anyone is the most strict with screen time. Now I’d say parents are pretty interactive with there kids education and anyone that was doing worse got extra reading comprehension time.

To me this seems very normal and the kids in his class seem very good at reading comprehension for grade 1. Is this different in the states, has there also just been a straight structural issue in education. I know that lots of places moved away from phonics and it turned out really bad. Are parents less interactive, just so weird seeing these things and seeing my school being very good on this, maybe we are the outlier.

A large portion of the accountability for this lies with parenting. I’m saying this as a Gen X parent of 4 kids (2 Gen Z, 2 Gen Alpha): what the fuck have we done?? Say what you will about the Boomers but we can read.

Being literate is a key component of being able to think for yourself. The anti-humanist movement doesn’t like people thinking for themselves. Technology makes it easy for us to just follow the pass to least resistance. Without parents instilling literacy at home, digital engagement into low form content just becomes the default.

This is quite common in Asia. In many countries, even the classes themselves are ranked. Class 1 will have the highest scoring students in the grade, while say Class 4 will have the lowest.

In these societies, this ranking can determine the direction of your life in more ways than one. Lower ranked students in many countries are not given any opportunity to apply to university. In some countries (see South Korea), it’s common ONLY for top ranked students to attend college.

A classmate of mine was from a middle class family in a wealthy Southeast Asian country. He had graduated near the top of his grade, and as such, when he went in for his mandatory military service, he came in as an officer.

Then they put him through a top local university for free. Then he was granted the ability to get a masters degree at a highly ranked foreign university (in the UK) and they covered 2/3rds of the cost as a grant. After college, he went to work for a global financial institution.

If he had not been in the top rank at his school, he would not have been able to achieve any of these experiences. This is often surprising to US students, but one of the ways European and Asian governments and universities keep costs down is by only admitting the “Best” students to college.

The Germans for instance offer very low to often no cost university education, but they send a significantly lower proportion of each year’s secondary school graduating classes onto college. This is the flip side of low cost, government funded education.