I can't read either. I think the paywall might have to do with it.

Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times?

I suspect that has something to do with it.

>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college.

Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade.

>showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests

Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on…

>Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.

Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat.

>districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding

I remember this first hand.

>The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation…

There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.

what was the article?

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.

I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

I can confirm this from community colleges in both California and Oregon over the past two years; every non-science, non-math general education class (n=10+) has at least one students who cannot read or write at more than a couple sentences per minute. They’re perfectly able to keep up verbally but their education passed them through standardized tests without requiring reading and writing at a reasonable velocity.

We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate.

Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness.

90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless

Maybe they can't read because the article is behind a pay wall.

Your readers also cannot read, due to paywall.

https://archive.ph/XvPXE

[delayed]

It's not so much that they can't read, it's just that they have a short attention spam, which is an even bigger issue. And yes, I blame Tiktok and co. Your students couldn't sit through Ben-Hur.