Their early-years and kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants are a bit more likely to be Millennials, and I suspect that is a factor.
If you assume that the slow drift in poor teaching started with Gen X teachers, then what Millennials would have lost first was some of the communication of the the joy of learning and metacognition, which matters when you are the first generation whose attention span is taking a battering.
It is perhaps harder to teach what you had fewer opportunities to learn.
The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.
Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.
I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.
While I agree with you, it's so far and away from anything that could actually happen that I despair over what could be done. It seems like my children's schools change their evaluation criteria every other year to some "new" and "evidence-based" criteria. Do the kids do any different work? No. Do that get evaluated by different standards? Not really. I wouldn't call changing "pass" to "meets expectations" and fail to "not on track for success" to be a substantive change. Forcing equilateral, rectilinear wooden dowels into orifices of constant radius doesn't change the fact that we're playing a stupid game.
Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.
For reference,
they're. contraction. Gen Z and they are parents. Is not what was intended.
there. location. Over there.
"The class tossed their graduation caps in the air" strikes me as less clumsy than its alternatives.
I don't know if you've met people, but most people are terrible! And now these poor role models are spending extra time with young impressionable minds! /s
We, the older generations, have failed them.
Can you give an example of that?
"Kids These Days" don't even know how to operate a perfectly standard smartphone without help.
There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.
Bit of a rant incoming:
This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.
The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.
Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.
I would argue that its a function of raw effort in varying domains.
Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?
Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.
[1] Written Testimony, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, Neuroscientist and Educator Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
P.S. Every generation thinks that next generation is dumber than the previous generation in some area and still we are making progress with every generation.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.
https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...
Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.
andsoitis•46m ago
Eddy_Viscosity2•37m ago
vustagc•30m ago
literalAardvark•25m ago
A few overwhelmingly smart people who had that as a hobby, and the very sad rest.
zobzu•9m ago
the reason it's interesting is that the lack of understanding and skill results in a "bourgeoisie" class in the workforce, and that isn't correlated to skill, amounts of labor or even cognitivity.
This tends to reduce the utilization of 'overwhelmingly' smart people, who are put to crappy tasks just to make money and ends meet.
bushbaba•18m ago