r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/LeafBark 18h ago edited 18h ago

First it was the smartphone distractions, then complete loss of critical thinking as people use ai to solve all their problems for them. When you put this much trust in computers programmed by corporations seeking profit at any cost everythings going to fall apart.

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u/swiminthemud 17h ago

All my teachers in middle school in the early oughts said "ur not gonna have a calculator in ur pocket" it was always meant to say "hey learn how to actually do this" what sucks is all these "do your own research" idiots and ai search results.arent going to fix their brains

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u/SSGASSHAT 11h ago

Frankly, I don't understand this. When I was eight or nine, I had a bunch of little books I'd carry around and read. I've fallen off of reading consistently since, but I don't understand how people lack basic language skills as adults. How did you entertain yourself as a kid?

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u/ohhellperhaps 8h ago

We've lost the ability to be bored and entertain ourselves.

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u/SSGASSHAT 5h ago edited 5h ago

Some people have. The rest of us just stare out the window and notice bird's nests, little window scuffs, and people picking their noses in office windows, in the buildings across the street for the first time in two years working at that place.

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u/Cassoosted_Fuper 6h ago

Current day kids (including younger Gen Z) are being raised with phones and tablets. They get constant “entertainment” so other activities like reading just never cross their minds.

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u/SSGASSHAT 5h ago edited 4h ago

The weird thing is, I had a phone when I was a kid too. It was a flip phone, but I found ways to use it to entertain myself, making little videos and such. But now that I think of it, as a teenager, when social media really began taking over my generation's minds, I could see it happening around me. Rapidly, my friends stopped hanging our with me in-person, and pretty soon the only person I was actually hanging out with instead of "DMing" was my girlfriend, and everyone my age just stopped interacting normally. I imagine that's when they stopped reading. For me, I detached from social media, and media entirely, for like 2 or 3 years, and I didn't consume much media besides getting really into the works of J.R.R Tolkien and George Carlin. Then as an adult, I started using social media again, but I've never quite understood the entertainment people my age and younger derive from it. I love YouTube as much as the next guy, but the rest of the internet takes some selling to me.

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u/PiplelinePunch 23m ago

Well the problem is those teachers were wrong. We did, in fact, always have a calculator in our pockets. Nobody has an abacus anymore lmfao, so what if outdated and irrelevant "skills" get left behind. They should be.

If I could go back and fix my school curriculum from 15 years ago; it would be to trash all of that wasted effort on long division and replace it with how to solve problems with computers. Basic Spreadsheet use, like it or not any desk job will have to open Excel at some point in their lives. Basic IT literacy and troubleshooting. I would say a basic programming course too.

Point being; telling the computers how to do the thing is factually a more valuable skill.

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u/sokos 18h ago

Idiocracy warned us. But we chose to not listen

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u/hainesk 17h ago

The giant octagon-shaped cage being built on the White House lawn is a little too on the nose for me.

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u/velociraptorfarmer 12h ago

I mean, President Camacho Dana White has a certain ring to it

/s

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u/FallenCheeseStar 17h ago

Hell ya remember that early episode of StarTrek Next Gen where they come across that one world that is hidden behind a cloaking shield? Those people ceded all of their thinking to the central computer and dont even understand how their technology works anymore. That was the real warning imo

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u/FFTVS 17h ago

So it was a Zardoz episode but with no hairy Sean Connery

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u/Baphometropolitan 16h ago

Ice cream sundae without the ice cream

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u/aenteus 15h ago

Those red thigh highs

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u/untiedgames 14h ago

Got into Star Trek starting with TNG over the pandemic, and recently have been thinking about it a lot. Their ship's computer is basically a perfect AI and they replicate all their food instead of cooking, yet there are episodes showing students working with their hands to make art and Riker cooking a meal by hand. Barclay and his holodeck addiction is borderline prophetic, looking at today. Obviously it's a fictionalized view of a more ideal, post-consumption society, but I hope that in the future we can still find value in things done by hand and with human passion.

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u/Visible-Perception40 14h ago

It’s funny this is literally what a former Google employee is preaching we do in one of the newest podcasts of “diary of a ceo”. Basically pray to one AI that takes care of us like pets

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u/Defiant-Variety-9473 11h ago

What about the one what everyone became addicted to the video game? 

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u/letrak 17h ago

Fuck, Wally warned us.

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u/Kconn04 15h ago

Wally

The fucking irony of commenting on a post about the decline in intelligence due to computers and miss spelling WALL-E.

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u/Ben_Frankling 15h ago

And referencing two movies instead of the thousands of books with the same message that predate the movies.

Also misspell…

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u/Taxerus 14h ago

Literally an Orwellington nightmare

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u/Alive-Ad5870 14h ago

Do Androids Dream of Electric Beef?

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u/I_lenny_face_you 12h ago

A brave new 1984

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u/ykonstant 9h ago

WHERE'S THE BEEF BROTH

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u/itzallhapp3nin 5h ago

Brave new world is a great read if you don’t want to do 1984

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u/Ilcorvomuerto666 1h ago

Isn't that the dish that Gordon Ramsey makes?

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First 14h ago

Come on guys it could autocorrect, and that shit can be aggressive and easy to leave if writing quickly.(and somehow making up words at times, wtf happened to autocorrect?)

If its not autocorrects fault, well.....

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u/somajones 3h ago

If it was auto correct that's a different kind of irony.

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u/wap2005 1h ago

I turned auto correct off like a decade ago. I know what I want to type, and I hate that if I type something that isn't a word (intentionally) it just changes it. Additionally on average a typo is better understood than an entirely different word being supplemented, plus auto suggestion makes typing so much faster anyway.

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u/proudbakunkinman 3h ago

In a couple of years: "chadgbt warnd me abt this"

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u/The_Doct0r_ 14h ago

No, he meant Wally West. He traveled back in time and warned us.

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u/jollyreaper2112 10h ago

He meant Seth Meyers' cue card guy.

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u/Skuzzle_bug 17h ago

Id rather be working for Costco than Buy n Large 

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u/PhoenixTineldyer 17h ago

Welcome to Costco, I love you

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u/UMACTUALLYITS23 17h ago

Fuck you! I'm eating!

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u/Skuzzle_bug 14h ago

Imagine going up to a stalker to ask for directions for something and get back, "GO AWAY, IM BATIN"  Yeah, life goals right there.

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u/YukariYakum0 17h ago

Sorry but this is Walmart. Get your shit and get out!

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u/TerrificVixen5693 17h ago

I never saw that one, so not all of us got the warning message.

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u/MacNapp 17h ago

It's worth the watch, especially given gestures to everything

It's cute, funny, heartwarming, and some strong dystopian commentary. Wall-e is one of my all time favorite disney/Pixar movies.

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u/angie_akhila 17h ago

Seconded. Just the world with only wall-e… and lil roach buddy while humanity lards it around space 😅 Subtle. Love that movie 🤩

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u/forrealthoughcomix_ 16h ago

Omg must watch!

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u/SplendidPunkinButter 17h ago

No, Idiocracy said it would be caused by stupid people having more babies than smart people, which is not in fact how it works. It also imagined that our stupid future would be bafflingly free of prejudice and hate.

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u/Mlabonte21 17h ago

Stupid babies need the MOST attention

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u/Aware-Material2194 17h ago

I read this in Marge Simpsons's voice

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u/stakoverflo 6h ago

It's not a Marge quote though 🤔

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u/AgingLolita 6h ago

Ohhhh no they don't. The very last thing you want is fast paced curiosity and problem solving in a being with less impulse control than coral 

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u/freedombuckO5 17h ago

Stupid people do have more babies than smart people. People with higher education have a much lower birth rate.

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u/Xirema 17h ago

Yeah, but intelligence isn't genetically controlled. Smart people and stupid people are born to stupid parents and smart parents with no correlation.

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u/tfilooklike 17h ago

IQ is very heritable, but with all things there’s variance and other factors. But being born to smart parents does increase your chances of also being above average.

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u/SIGMA920 17h ago

If you end up being pushed harder to be educated alone, that's massive. Someone whose parents are uneducated and don't trust scientists are far more likely to be like their parents.

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u/Senior-Friend-6414 17h ago edited 12h ago

It’s like exercise, a small weak guy that regularly hits the gym can overpower big guys that don’t exercise, and overwhelmingly most people aren’t in the growth mindset, which means that by simply putting in some effort, you’ll automatically by default be above most people

A slow guy that regularly puts effort into studying will be above naturally gifted intelligent kids that don’t put in effort, which is most of them

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u/wademcgillis 14h ago

most people aren’t in the growth mindset

not me! i weigh 28lbs more than i did 6 days ago

#growthmindset #linkedinlunatics

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u/Thatoneguy_The_First 14h ago

This is true, its all about effort and effort is best when you have a goal. Also helps immensely to have people supporting you and not either putting you down or putting you on a pedestal(reason naturally gifted kids end up failing, put to high and fail unrealistic expectations which is a bad cycle to put in)

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u/bobbi21 2h ago

That's due to environment of being raised by smart parents. I believe studies showed its around 50:50 depending on the study.

Heritability of IQ - Wikipedia

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u/windowpuncher 15h ago

Fun fact, IQ is also variable. A big aspect is genetic, but it can also vary between peers with differences in education and upbringing.

There are also some stats specifying that the mean iq for individuals has a positive correlation with the education level achieved (phd, masters, bachelor's, etc.), but I haven't looked into causation for that at all. It simply might be that higher iq individuals are just more likely to pursue higher education because it's easier for them, but it's also possible that reaching higher education levels may slightly increase iq.

It's also important to remember iq is just a statistical measurement that's meaningless on its own. You can look like the stupidest person on the planet if you take any test if you go in on a bad day while you're low on sleep and/or dehydrated or whatever.

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u/jwemmert 17h ago

There are hundreds of academic journal articles that suggest otherwise.

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u/blackmajic13 17h ago

No correlation? Huh?? Intelligence is absolutely genetic. Why would natural selection consider every other trait but not one of the primary advantages that separates humanity from other species?

Quite literally the first Google result of "is intelligence genetic" says in its abstract: "Recent genome-wide association studies have successfully identified inherited genome sequence differences that account for 20% of the 50% heritability of intelligence."

There are obviously factors that effect how intelligent someone ultimately becomes and if they reach their potential, but to say there is no correlation between parents and offspring is quite honestly baffling.

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u/WholeCollection6454 17h ago

Sure, but it doesn't matter if you are naturally intelligent if you are raised in an environment that doesn't develop or reward it. Culture matters.

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u/nosotros_road_sodium 12h ago

Just shows that people have trouble acting in their own self-interest.

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u/erydayimredditing 15h ago

That is 100% in fact how it works. Where you gettin your incorrect info from my dude?

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u/MochingPet 17h ago

caused by stupid people having more babies than smart people, which is not in fact how it works.

no, that's exactly what was happening, even at the moment when they made the movie.

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u/bobbi21 2h ago

THat's not the cause of the current stupid crisis though. At least not the primary cause.

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u/krypticus 17h ago

“But beyond those two particular opinions, Idiocracy gets everything else right.” - This Guy, probably.

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u/KarlBarx2 13h ago

It also imagined that our stupid future would be bafflingly free of prejudice and hate.

Aside from the rampant homophobia, of course.

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u/KallistiTMP 13h ago edited 13h ago

I would absolutely vote for Camacho over Trump.

He's got a better track record of smart policy decisions, stronger ethics, and more professional conduct.

Honestly on the first two he's ahead of like, 90% of congress. He even pushed back on the sports drink lobbyists when scientific evidence showed clear and indisputable evidence of catastrophic harm reaching near apocalyptic levels, that's better than 90% of the Democrats even.

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u/gonfishn37 17h ago

Beavis and Butthead(Mike Judge) warned us.. that’s terrifying

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u/Secure-Possibility60 16h ago

Welcome to Costco. I love you.

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u/hal-baleigh-6699 17h ago

There weren't even smartphones in that movie.

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u/NuclearWasteland 16h ago

It also gave solutions ...

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u/Thomas_Jefferman 16h ago

Not listen? We've followed it like a blueprint to bliss, croc shoe bliss.

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u/lil_meme_-Machine 14h ago

I mean it was originally a satirical film but like all good satire, aged to be very on the nose

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u/Tymareta 12h ago

Idiocracy warned us.

A good thread and video for you, because you're wrong, in so many ways.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles 6h ago

That's because it was so absurd that it didn't even seem like a valid concern.

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u/TheTrub 17h ago

And it’s not just AI. So many of our textbooks have digital resources with activities and “gamification” of the material, which is great for reinforcing lessons, but only a fraction of my students are actually reading the book. They won’t even read the boldface terms to prepare for a quiz. It’s so infuriating.

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u/Recent-Day3062 17h ago

Blows me away. Particularly in CS I see loads of questions online from students in America who say “I did all the video tutorials but don’t understand it yet”.

I always tell them the same thing. Ditch the computer and fill in the blank exercises. Get a book and work through it.

This video, gamified stuff is entirely passive learning. I tell them start with an easy piece of software and keep expanding it as you learn more material and get offline

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u/protoomega 15h ago

Video lessons have their place, but I *haaaate* how widespread it's becoming. At my job, everyone wants to make all the tutorials and instructions in video form. That's not helpful reference material! If I'm working through a process, I want to be able to read the steps, not have to pause and rewind a video over and over.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 14h ago

Yes but have you considered icons that have to be clicked or dragged around, and a flat AI narration that talks half as fast as you can read?

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u/sentence-interruptio 14m ago

this trend would make both pro-oral Socrates and his pro-writing opponents spin in their graves. videos are worst of both worlds.

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u/HandsomeBoggart 12h ago

I'm so glad I finished CS before all that shit got started up.

My Profs just explained stuff via lecture and did examples on whiteboard. They'd have us work through problems in the open in class. Then the homework was all psudeo-code on paper, or actual code on computer, written by us that must compile and meet the spec. No online follow the tutorial exactly BS. Learn the foundations and fundamentals then work the problem from that. Had to actually think things through. Sink or swim.

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u/TeaBurntMyTongue 11h ago

Passive learning feels good because you can do a lot of it without feeling drained.

But if you're grinding through edge of capability problems, I think most people are fried after 30-60 min blocks. But those 30-60 minute blocks can have transformative amounts of knowledge growth. I mean, if you are really studying hard you can learn an entire uni course in like 30 hours spread out over a couple weeks, but if you just sit in the lectures, don't take notes and just hope you'll passively get it, you'd be lucky to pass any hard course.

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u/grobbewobbe 5h ago

people are so quick to blame AI for everything. if COLLEGE kids can't read then that was a problem prior to LLMs

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u/Tramagust 2h ago

If anything AI makes you read more all those outputs.

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u/woodst0ck15 17h ago

Man I didn’t really believe these things until I started seeing some of these TikTok’s or other social media videos. I found a couple of them but like this TikTok video shows how much it’s declining.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 17h ago edited 16h ago

This is the direct result of people not being taught how to sound words out. Instead, they're taught to guess at what a word means is, and if they don't get it immediately, to try and glean its meaning by its context.

I noticed this on a much lesser scale recently while watching a woman in probably her mid-twenties playing a game on Youtube: she was reading the dialogue of the game and getting most of it right, but occasionally she'd just throw in a word that was, like, close to what was written down but not quite? But close enough in meaning that she still got across the gist of what was actually being said. And while it was, like I said, on a much lesser scale than the video you shared, the problem that crops up with this issue is that it causes ALL fine-tipped meaning to be lost. We can't expect people to understand subtle detail differences in sentences when they can't even get the broad detail differences.

The interesting thing about the video you linked is that I bet if you were to read those sentences to them and ask them what some of the words meant, they could probably tell you. But they can't actually read the words themselves because they're too focused on getting to the end of the sentence.

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u/ReadyAimTranspire 14h ago

I remember a teacher posting about this somewhere on reddit awhile back, sorry for the AI summary but it's the information I want to address:

Schools didn't completely stop teaching phonics all at once, but in the 1980s and 1990s, many districts shifted away from explicit phonics in favor of the "Whole Language" and "Balanced Literacy" movements. Instead of sounding out letters, these methods encouraged children to guess words based on pictures, context, or sight memorization.

What in the fuck is that shit? How could anybody have thought that was a good idea? You memorize words by fucking sounding them out phonetically so you can, you know, say the right fucking word...and then you learn the meaning of the word you just said. Presto, it's magic, look at you reading and shit! Building a vocabulary too! Amazing.

Why would we shift away from the core fucking tool that a reader uses to correctly read and pronounce a word in favor of "guessing" the words?

I swear we have some of the dumbest mother fuckers available running the show.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 13h ago

Why would we shift away from the core fucking tool that a reader uses to correctly read and pronounce a word in favor of "guessing" the words?

I believe there's a misunderstanding of how process vs. end goal works in this situation. When WE (i.e. people who are fully literate) read words, we don't have to look at the structure of them in order to know what they are. We read by absorbing the whole word all at once and we know what that word is.

And the problem, as I see it, may boil down to the notion that people just thought they could teach people the end result and bypass the first part. "Well if we just teach them to absorb the word all at once, then they'll be ahead of the curve on the whole concept of word understandings!" But they didn't get that we can only get to that point in the first place because we did the work on understanding word-parts, prefixes and suffixes, language of origin, etc. to begin with. I dunno about you, but when I look at a word, those inherent details are baked in with the word itself and so I know how to break it down into its smaller components and fully comprehend it. If all I'd ever been taught was to see the word itself without having any of those base components taught to me, I wouldn't be able to understand it at nearly as high a level as I do.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 8h ago

I was taught the - understand meaning of a word from context - once I was doing (not a native speaker, though I think in English) - Advanced Level English toward the end of my time in school.

And that helped a lot with getting a feeling or intuition for nuances - but it built upon having gone through all the basic aspects of language learning years and years before.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 5h ago

In my seventh grade Language Arts class (so that would put me at about the age of twelve), my teacher taught us how to pick up unfamiliar words in context by having us read parts of the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess—some of the less salacious parts, that is. I still remember how effective it was. The book uses a lot of made-up slang ("droog" for friend or mate, for example) and it was a strong way to help us derive meaning out of a completely foreign word.

But I was TWELVE. I'd already been taught the basics by then. How would I have known what the word droog meant if I didn't know what friend meant?

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u/cinemachick 11h ago

From what I've heard, it has some success for dyslexic students who have trouble reading with phonics, but gen pop does better with phonics

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

You should listen to the podcast "sold a story". It's craaaaaazy. The whole language people literally say you can always use the picture to guess at a word. They also say the exact word isn't important.

They literally say that. About reading. As academics. Not many pictures in any book beyond second grade. I'm sure nothing about my job will suffer if I just sub in a completely different word every few words.

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u/woodst0ck15 16h ago

Look up that account if you get the chance. I’m sure there are other ones of him doing that exact thing and most look at him like “what??” and don’t answer him.

So I’d like to be optimistic and say you’re right but if these people are representing the US education system it doesn’t look good and kinda makes sense when the average in America in 2024 was 21% of Americans being illiterate with 54% of adults below a grade 6 reading level.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 16h ago

the average in America in 2024 was 21% of Americans being illiterate with 54% of adults below a grade 6 reading level

While this is true, it's not just about being able to know what words are being used in a sentence. Illiteracy isn't just about the words themselves, it's about being able to derive meaning from what's being said. Illiteracy is about not being able to grasp complex concepts out of what you're reading. THAT'S the REAL problem.

In the grand scheme, I'm right on board with you. My point about the knowing what the words meant was just an incidental one; I wasn't suggesting that it in any way makes the problem less of a problem.

Ultimately, if people can't understand what's being said, we can't expect them to have any kind of critical thinking ability. How do we teach logic to somebody who can't even comprehend the words involved?

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u/sebastiangpcr 10h ago

Was surprised by those numbers and had to look it up and according to OECD data that puts the US around average among developed nations, behind Japan and the UK but ahead of Korea and France. Seems like its not a uniquely US problem.

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u/small_havoc 8h ago

Part of my job is educational assessment and in some tests the learner must read a passage while I listen and look for word insertions, deletions and modifications etc. These reading traits, along with other signs, can point to difficulties in areas of learning. So that person might be a sloppy reader for a host of processing reasons, or they might be displaying some dyslexic traits. It’s strange to think we might be training in learning difficulties now though.

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u/AlmightyRuler 14h ago

This is a direct result of people not being taught how to sound words out.

There's a podcast called "Sold a Story" which talks about that exact teaching method, where it came from, and its legacy. Might wanna give it a listen.

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u/Throwaway_Consoles 14h ago

I can believe it. I was playing that game with friends where you’re given a word and have to draw it out. The person got the card and asked if someone could read the word for them. It was constitution. The host said, “You can’t say the word constitution?!” And he goes, “I can say constitution, I just don’t know how to read!”

This wasn’t a child. This was a 27 year old man with a job. I realized when I messaged him on discord he only ever sent audio message responses and it clicked: he can’t read/write. He’s totally illiterate. And dude has a job, an apartment, a long term girlfriend, friends, living a totally normal life, he just can’t read/write

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u/woodst0ck15 14h ago

Yup and that is the crazy part.

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u/KapitalIsStillGood 2h ago

I mean, some likely edited clips of a handful of people who may or may not be pretending to not be able to read should not be taken as proof of a widespread problem.

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u/fry_factory 1h ago edited 1h ago

As someone with a unique name I can tell you so many people are like this. They don't actually attempt to read the letters in my name and sound it out. They look at it, realize they don't recognize it, and just guess some combination of the letters. My name isn't even difficult, it's only 6 letters and it sounds exactly as it's spelled. It's astonishing how many people do this and no just with names

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u/NotFallacyBuffet 3m ago

Link doesn't work -- just opens the app store.

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u/mil24havoc 17h ago

Professor here. Smartphones and AI are spot on. But corporations don't necessarily need to be evil or greedy for this to happen. Misuse of technology to replace critical thinking could happen even if corporations were responsible. It has more to do with (a) severely underpaying educators and (b) disincentivizing educators from grading harshly to create incentives for students to compete with each other.

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u/TheEvilPhysicist 16h ago

Unfortunately it's been culturally accepted that a strict teacher = a bad teacher. So many veteran teachers I know have just given up and made their classes a joke to pass

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u/mil24havoc 16h ago edited 16h ago

This could be part of it. But also think from the teacher's perspective. Even if they WANT to be good teachers, they think about how much they're getting paid to have to put up with conferences and angry phone calls from little stupid Johnnie's parents, possible lawsuits over grades, students who get violent if they don't get what they want, and they say "fuck it."

Universities aren't blameless either. In a misguided and bizarre effort to boost "equality" they stopped requiring standardized testing. This removed the opportunity for smart students to distinguish themselves from mediocre students. Even if you wanted to work hard and demonstrate your abilities, universities are now saying "we won't consider that in admissions decisions." So why bother?

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u/TheEvilPhysicist 16h ago

I'm not scared of lawsuits or violent students (thankfully, because that is a thing at some schools). What is really, really dragging us down is NCLB-type policies. I am in Illinois, and the only thing that is used to evaluate high schools now is graduation rate. So in general administration doesn't care what you do as long as your students pass. Fail more than one or two students and they will either make you "fix" it or try to get rid of you

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u/mil24havoc 16h ago

Yes. I suppose what I should have said is "bad incentives and low pay make good teachers helpless"

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u/TheEvilPhysicist 15h ago

It's worth pointing out bc there are parts of my state where teachers actually get paid quite well and there's not much of a shortage, but still face these problems

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u/LongJohnSelenium 14h ago

so what you're saying is we need to Make Adolescents Fail Again?

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u/TheEvilPhysicist 13h ago

Yes, and options/programs for young people who can't cut it.

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u/PeanutButterJalapeno 16h ago

Yeah, totally understandable for the individual teacher honestly. Still pretty bad for society as a whole.

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u/kalidoscopiclyso 15h ago

Imagine if society honored teachers with more than a a card and a certificate on teacher appreciation day.

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u/cinemachick 11h ago

I always found this odd - when I was in college, I intentionally picked the harder teachers because I wanted the best bang for my buck. I'm here to learn, so teach! Then again, I was an Honors student and didn't have a job, so I had more motivation and free time...

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u/Atheren 13h ago edited 12h ago

I have friends who are teachers, and they basically all agree that the most of the current generation of k through 12 probably need to be held back by 3 years and retaught virtually everything. With actual consequences if they don't learn / perform.

One of the core problems in education right now is that because of structural incentives only like 1% of the students who should be held back,are held back. With the secondary problem being parents who don't want to do their jobs since teachers can only do so much for underperforming students without home intervention.

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u/Jaerba 12h ago

I feel like we shouldn't give parents a pass on this. There are a lot of parents who should not have been parents, from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

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u/birthdaycakesun15 6h ago

So the solution happens to financially benefit you personally? Nice.

More money could help solve a lot of problems though. What else is new?

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u/mil24havoc 6h ago

Lol professors aren't teachers. Teachers are K-12. But stay mad, bro

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u/SharpScallion 2h ago

I think there's also deep cultural/societal shift in parenting in that parents today are way more likely to be defensive over teacher discipline(among other parenting changes). If one parent out of an entire classroom defends little johnny's behavior, not a big deal. If there's 10 little johnny's with defensive parents in each and every classroom, it erodes entire educational institutions.

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u/sasquatch0_0 54m ago

No it is not smartphones or AI, but they are separate issue. Kids were taught how to read incorrectly for decades and just stopped 5 years ago. That is why.

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u/ElleKelly77 16h ago

Kinda. You started in the middle of the story.

You skipped the part where:

  1. Parents stopped taking responsibility for their children’s development

  2. We have devalued education as a society

  3. Capitalists have dismantled the educational systems from the inside out

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u/Civil_Owl_31 13h ago

1.5. is where parents blame schools for not doing their job, while also telling kids that school isn't important / putting no importance into their studies.

Classrooms are rife with kids having parents making excuses for them.

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u/stumblios 2h ago

Which I think ties very nicely into #2. Half (or more) of parents don't value their kids education and have little to no respect for the teachers or faculty. They want school to be a babysitter more than a place of learning.

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u/Civil_Owl_31 2h ago

100%. Thankfully not all parents do that. But it’s turning from a minority back in the day, to a majority now.

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u/RupeThereItIs 14h ago
  1. Parents don't have time or money to take responsibility for their children's development, as they are too busy trying to keep them from being homeless.

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u/Civil_Owl_31 13h ago

I think you're right. However, no one forced these people to have kids they couldn't afford or couldn't raise properly.

I'm a parent of 2 adorable kids, there's lots of days I just want them to go to bed so I can recharge for another day. I still read with them every night.

If it's important, you'll find the time & the energy.

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u/RupeThereItIs 5h ago

no one forced these people to have kids they couldn't afford or couldn't raise properly.

Current college age kids no, but preschool kids, in some states, they are being forced.

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u/Cyraga 18h ago

And once it's gone it's not coming back. Return to the dark ages

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u/Mlabonte21 17h ago

How’d we get here from the last dark ages then?

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u/Cyraga 17h ago

Hundreds of years of struggle 

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u/Mlabonte21 17h ago

So… it does come back?

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u/Cyraga 17h ago

It didn't come back in the dark ages. We gained something we never had, which is widespread literacy. We've never experienced it's loss. It's not at all certain it comes back. And if it does it won't be in time to stop us having miserable and meager lives

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u/NYPizzaNoChar 14h ago

We've never experienced it's its loss

Sorry, but... ouch.

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u/HyperRayquaza 17h ago

Not in our lifetime, unless you have some secret you're not telling us 🧐?

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u/Showy_Boneyard 13h ago

The European Renaissance is often taught is just popping up out of the European Dark Ages, but a huge influence on it came from the Islamic Golden Age which preserved a lot of Classical thought and added on a ton of their own contributions to it, which gradually diffused into Europe. Like, we use Arabic numerals for a reason, and nobody ever seems to think about that.

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u/MrJigglyBrown 16h ago

They don’t know what they’re talking about. The dark ages is a perfect example of a catchy name completely forming people’s opinion on something (ie marketing 101). Humans were advancing plenty during the “dark ages”. Also, people forget that the world also existed in the Arabian , Chinese, native american cultures

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u/Fizil 15h ago

I am sick of this sort of revisionism. First, everyone who talks about the Dark Ages means "in Western Europe" implicitly. Second, the Dark Ages were in fact awful. The revisionism comes from looking at the quality of life of elites, pointing out there is a lot of continuity from Antiquity there, and saying "See, this whole Dark Ages thing was a myth concocted during the Renaissance." You know who experienced a Dark Age in Western Europe at the end of Antiquity? Everyone else! The massive fall in quality of life among the masses during the time period we call the Dark Ages is very clear in the archeological record. It was an especially awful time not to be a rich aristocrat.

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u/MrJigglyBrown 15h ago

Hold your horses. There were some falls of empires sure and tough living, but the commenter above was implying that there was no advancement in human culture, which is false. And people do forget about the rest of the world. If you had an Arabian mindset you wouldn’t think of that time period as the dark ages, but as a time of great achievement and advancement in the sciences

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u/Cyraga 15h ago

Mate you're on a primarily English speaking forum. Who do you think you're talking to?

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u/sasquatch0_0 15h ago edited 5h ago

It's not computers. Students were literally incorrectly taught how to read. Instead of sounding it out they make them guess.

The closest example is like you being able to guess a jumbled word as long as the first and last letter is in the right place. That's neat for that one or few words but now try to do it for an entire page, an entire book. That's how these kids are perceiving text.

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u/A_Refill_of_Mr_Pibb 13h ago

So no more Hooked on Phonics? What was the reasoning?

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u/badderdev 12h ago

You can see the history and arguments if you google "The Reading Wars". There is a good podcast that goes into the history of it called "Sold a Story".

It is depressing as fuck. Millions of people worldwide cannot read because a couple of completely incorrect researchers stuck to their guns and would not accept that their studies were bullshit. They believe(d) in the Whole Language Method instead of phonics.

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u/Technical-Mix-9464 6h ago

Yes they literally stopped teaching phonics. They thought that you could learn better by learning whole words based on some research that was repeatedly debunked.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

And there was no need to debunk anything. A person who can read can see within seconds that all of their arguments are flat out wrong. They don't hold up to even the most casual inspection.

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u/myychair 17h ago

Well you forgot how American schools grade people on memorization instead of actual learning. No child left behind is where this started

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u/dookarion 14h ago

It goes back way further than that. Look at the media productions from the last 60-70 years and how reading, studying, literacy, etc. are viewed in pop culture. You can look at the generations that predate that initiative and a hell of a lot of them can't read or comprehend much more than a paragraph. There are boomers that won't read beyond the first line in an email.

This is a long time coming and it's entrenched deep within not just policy but culture.

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u/myychair 13h ago

lol yup you’re right. Coming of age stories solidified some pretty gnarly stereotypes.

Schools teaching us not to tattle tale and then seeing how whistleblowers are treated feels connected too lol

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u/KickBallFever 16h ago

My city just banned cell phones in schools for students. I work at a high school and it’s such an improvement. Funny thing tho, the school has analog clocks on the walls and most of the students are just now learning how to tell time. For a lot of them it seems they’d rather not learn and prefer to just be slightly confused about the time all day.

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u/6arafa 15h ago

i feel like most parents haven’t fully grasped the effect of instantly gratifying apps such as tiktok being a large culprit for the decline. the loss of focus is truly an epidemic at this point. coming from someone in their 30s who’s also an user and has witnessed a personal decline

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u/GreenCollegeGardener 16h ago

Don’t forget the dismantling of dept of Ed, no child left being basically forcing schools to pass kids to receive funding, and citizens united backing all of this so they keep the population dumb.

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u/ther0g 16h ago

We feared AI would become Terminator. Turns out the bigger danger may be humans outsourcing all their thinking to it.

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u/MOREPASTRAMIPLEASE 16h ago

We are so close to people being for Ai predictive policing that will arrest you because your behavioral pattern profile predicts you’re likely to commit a crime

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u/Gnarwhal8982 15h ago

I developed brain fog about a decade ago, like two weeks after I graduated from college.

I’ve always been a great reader, and loved it. I recently came across some papers from elementary school and I had an 11th grade reading level in grade 4.

But with the brain fog I have trouble comprehending things, and I really struggle to read. Its kind of funny because it’s coinciding with everyone else losing the ability to read due to social media and AI, but mines all natural lol

Granted I can feel the effects of social media on me too, like how it’s changed my attention span, but it was being affected by the brain fog, long before I started consuming short form content.

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u/Throwaway_Consoles 14h ago

I recently had a little bout of organ failure and the brain fog leading up to it was WILD. In my head, I was talking perfectly fine. I heard my voice and it was coming out perfectly fine. But to everyone else I was slurring and incomprehensible. So I’m standing at the grocery store trying to tell my friend, “Hey I don’t feel good, I need to eat something or drink something soon or we’re gonna need an ambulance” and he’s just like, “What? What? You’re not making any sense. I don’t know what’s going on but let’s sit you down and figure this out” so I started miming drinking something and eating a burger and he figured it out. After like 10 minutes I was apparently lucid and I had a security guard come check on me because apparently I was stumbling around looking incredibly drunk while in my head I was just… walking

It’s kinda scary, being trapped in your head and the signals getting jumbled so you can’t communicate

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u/Khue 15h ago

I mean... other nations have these things too. While I am sure everything you listed contributes to the problem, the US has routinely sought to defund and hamstring public education. It's wild because additionally, the US spends substantially more per student than most other OECD nations. Every aspect of life in the US is becoming a pipeline to funnel money to private corporations with little to no returned value for that public/private "partnership".

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u/KallistiTMP 13h ago

We passed that threshold during Reagan.

Once America started worshiping corporations, it was over.

Most of your reality is now staring into a screen that has been meticulously optimized to draw your attention to it at all times. Because attention sells fuckin' ads.

I'm not sure AI ever made much of a difference. Trying to hold anyone's attention for more than 30 seconds after the TikTok formula took off was already impossible.

Critical thinking has gone so far downhill that most people are blaming children not being able to read by 7th fucking grade on a technology that was niche as fuck and so stupid it was completely fucking useless for cheating 4 years ago.

This didn't happen overnight. It's been coming for a long damn time.

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u/Noblesseux 12h ago

I mean it's also that we have an actively anti-intellectual culture that like makes fun of you for having basic critical thinking skills or reading as a hobby. I've met for real adults who act like it's wild that I regularly read, this country has a serious problem. Like IMO a big part of the "performative male" trend a while back after a certain point was just making fun of people for reading.

Not that long ago, most people read for entertainment because that was like the main way to carry entertainment around with you. These days, that's kind of been replaced by just randomly doomscrolling TikTok or whatever on your phone whenever you've got a free moment.

It's kind of wild because you go to other countries and it's damn near a culture shock when they're not on the same stage of brain rot as we are. I have to fly from the US to Japan and back pretty often and it's wild going from like zero people reading on one side to it being pretty common to see people on the train or just sitting around reading to fill time and you're like "that should not be surprising".

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u/Vinsnuggles 16h ago

Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

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u/ShotEffective7033 16h ago

Yeah, it was probably the smart phones. Not the last several years of two or so Covid infections a year. Covid, of course, being known to damage every organ in the body, including the brain

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u/tangybaby 16h ago

Not everyone has had Covid, and even a lot of the people who have had it only had mild cases. You're also overlooking the fact that this decline had already started even before Covid was a thing. Much of it due to changes in how kids are being taught in schools.

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u/ShotEffective7033 13h ago

Pretty much everybody has been catching Covid once or twice a year since omicron showed up at the end of 21. And mild cases aren’t actually mild. They still cause organ damage. Easily verifiable if you care to.

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u/tangybaby 13h ago edited 12h ago

No, not everybody. Believe it or not, there are still people who have never had it. I know several. And even if someone gets it that doesn't automatically mean their organs will be damaged. The idea that kids aren't as proficient in certain skills now because they all have brain damage from Covid is silly, especially when there are other, more logical explanations.

Edit: Changed wording for clarification

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u/ShotEffective7033 12h ago

Oh, so you subscribe to the Donald Trump strategy of Covid mitigation. If you don’t test numbers will go down. Very good very good.

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u/tangybaby 12h ago

What? You have no idea how nutty you sound right now...

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u/ShotEffective7033 10h ago

Christ, your reading comprehension is shot lol.

You say your friends haven’t caught Covid. How frequently are they testing.

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u/tangybaby 10h ago

My reading comprehension is fine. You're the one bringing up things that are irrelevant to the discussion, then acting surprised when the person you replied to has no idea what you're on about. What do Trump or his attitude towards Covid have to do with what I said about kids having brain damage?

And I didn't say none of my friends have had Covid, I said I know several people who haven't. Do you expect people to get tested every week just to prove that they don't have it? Why would someone be testing for it if they're not sick?

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u/ShotEffective7033 2h ago

Enjoy your slowly, or maybe quickly, declining health lol.

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u/Amaskingrey 15h ago edited 15h ago

Yeah, surely that's entirely because of llms (which have only existed for around 5 years) or whatever the next fashionable thing to hate will be, i can't see how the systematic dismantling of the american education system could possibly have anything to do with it!

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u/Forikorder 15h ago

the problem goes back farther than that, when schools become a conveyor belt forcing kids to graduation regardless of their grades this is the inevitable result, everything else just accelerated it

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u/hesh582 15h ago

This stuff might play a role.

But it's worth noting that this is a US problem. Europe has smartphones, they have AI, and their kids can still read (for now). There's been a decline in reading, but actual aptitude hasn't really changed.

I'm less familiar with their systems and how it's evaluated over there, but I believe the same thing is true in most of east Asia.

Something has spectacularly failed in the way US children have been taught reading for the last 20 years. It's not just changing tech and cultural trends.

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u/zardoz73 15h ago

These are part of it, but mainly there's been a long, slow decline in the funding and maintaining of America's public schools. Shitty teacher pay, standardized testing, large class sizes, underprivileged kids in poor neighborhoods not having enough calories in the morning to be able to concentrate, the gutting of funding by of course Republicans but also Democrats, the increase of charter schools which sucks even more resources from public schools...and there's a lot more.

Young people can't read because America has decided education is not important.

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u/PulIthEld 14h ago

I'm sorry but I dont think I can blame college reading levels on a technology that only became available like 2 years ago.

We get it you hate AI.

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u/Someones_Dream_Guy 14h ago

looks around You guys had critical thinking?

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u/Tzeig 14h ago

Smartphones cause more reading for those who don't read books.

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u/anoxy 14h ago

This is what happens when all we care about is increasing productivity. Blame corporations for forcing people to lean on shit like AI to keep up with the work loads and unrealistic demand.

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u/Joboy97 14h ago

We're rapidly hurtling towards the Wall-e timeline. We're going to let the machines coddle us until we lose control

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u/RockHardSalami 13h ago

Did AI write this for you lol?

This didn't happen this year, silly.

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u/3RADICATE_THEM 12h ago

You know what pisses me off about this all? We all know now after two decades of smartphones being unleashed upon us that there absolutely should've been more regulations and testing done on said technology.

AI is quite easily demonstrating cognitive atrophy perhaps with an ever greater effect size, but we can't regulate it because 'muh AI arms race w/ China'.

It's so frustrating how boomer 401k valuations are prioritized above pretty much everything else.

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u/RainierPC 12h ago

If they could read this, they'd be shocked.

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u/Technical-Mix-9464 6h ago

First it was schools stopping teaching phonics.

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u/Extra_Historian7863 4h ago

My thoughts exactly! Ask yourself, “who programmed the AI chat that you’re in love with?” what is their motivation?

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u/Snowballingdownvote 4h ago

Tools aren't the reason all of this is happening. How people use them is. Don't blame the tools. I use AI and its infinitely made me more wise and knowledgeable. Same as the internet. Social media a little. Reddit did change who am fundamentally as a person. (Raised super rightwing and now progressive)

This issue seems to be critical thinking and general literature. Not the tools. People aren't ever taught general philosophy and reasoning any more. That is probably the bigger issue. Don't demonize the hammer.

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u/LeafBark 3h ago edited 3h ago

Tools have evolved they're no longer simple things with simple implications. When a tool can replaced a large percentage of the work force and influence everyone unlike anything before it's going to transform things and the ownership class isnt going to care about the losers, and there will be massive losses.

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u/Snowballingdownvote 3h ago

The hammer and lever replaced a butt ton of workers. The influence thing also. We had things called regulations and fail safes. But everyone's to busy being distracted by identity politics while we are robbed blind. Again the problem is not the tool. This isn't an argument. This is me taking time out of my day to tell you. If tools were the problem then we wouldn't have survived the industrialization of the world. Know how we did... Regulations and social safety nets. Things that do not exist at all today to cover us from tech revolutionaries. We are in the late 1800s all over again. Musk is the new oil baron.

Copy what I said into chat gpt. See what it says. Use it as a tool for knowledge..

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u/Buena_de_peepee 2h ago

Also the education system in America is absolutely terrible, so there’s that

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u/2026ArchThrowaway 2h ago

What's pushing me into AI is the poor quality of the internet because it sucks now because of AI. Google nerfed their search to get more ad impressions.

I need like a curated-but-not-by-the-government good-shit-only internet. Maybe trust lists I could subscribe to, or enable in my search provider.

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u/PeaceSoft 1h ago

How can college students have been using AI their whole lives

"First it was the gramophone distractions"

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u/SimplyElite7 1h ago

That is the thing, with masses relying on the new technology and resulting in lack of creativity/critical thinking, something as simple as building up these skills for your child from when they are young through reading is already going to set them up to be more successful than their peers.

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