10 ms·

Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born i

Sure, let’s blame the phones rather than decades worth of misappropriation of school funds, budget cuts, and teachers caught in a myriad of politics. I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. It’s insane.

arp242 3y ago
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple lolwut? What's the context on this? But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education. That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.
jjulius 3y ago
>Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.
- tfandango 3y ago
  Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.
antiframe 3y ago
I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor? For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Yes, let's. PISA scores have been dropping here in Finland too, and we don't have close to the magnitude of the problems I personally saw as a US high school student last decade. I'd be willing to bet a lot of countries have seen a decline since 2010 or so.
pavlov 3y ago
While that sounds admittedly ridiculous, there is international data that suggests the problem is widespread and its rise coincides with smartphones. As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008. Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.) The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.
- me_me_me 3y ago
  There is another factor nobody will mention, countries in EU that accepted statistically significant number of immigrants from outside of EU are doing way worse on PISA scores. While countries like poland are not really that affected it seems. Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Nobody will mention? It’s mentioned in my comment that you’re replying to.
- AlanYx 3y ago
  Finland also leaned heavily into purely constructivist/inquiry-based teaching methods over the last 20 years. There is significant evidence going back to Project Follow-Through that these are not the best way to teach average and below-average students. The Finnish government announced earlier this year that they are doing a major revamp of the curriculum to reduce the emphasis on these instructional techniques.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  For this to be evidence, it requires that there are countries in the dataset where phones did not become widespread? Are the Asian countries better at controlling phone access?
andrewmutz 3y ago
But this phenomenon is happening across the developed world: > Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?
fullshark 3y ago
Sure, let's deflect because our livelihoods are owed to developing software for phones.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  > It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.
lupusreal 3y ago
> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.
kube-system 3y ago
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. Everyone wants a scapegoat for this problem, whether it be funding, teachers, or administration, but unfortunately the problem is societal. Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.
- orangepurple 3y ago
  Based on my own tiny "clinical trials" how much and how quickly children learn is proportional to the time spent working through problems together with their parents.
  - hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
    Yeah. My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials (He is a Math prof and my mom is an English prof). I hated it but TBH that's probably I'm going to do to my son :P Of course to a lesser extend as I need to take care of my career at the same time. Back then once you are prof you are safe for eternity.
    - gumby 3y ago
      > My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials…that's probably I'm going to do to my son Yep, that’s the way to do it, and it can be fun, especially since it’s just helping rather than full on home schooling. Most school curricula have different and concrete objectives (basically meeting aggregated KPIs) rather than “is the student actually learning?” Also teachers have a lot to deal with, and always have, tangential to actual teaching, like disruptive students. I think the best part of the supplement is that most school work has no context (“will this be on the test?”). Especially in math, where you spend 12 years “learning the alphabet” and only after high school do you get to the fun parts, if ever. So at home you can actually see how the stuff you’re getting in school actually relates to the realm world, and can pursue interesting paths.
billy99k 3y ago
[flagged]
- dymk 3y ago
  Propaganda?
  - billy99k 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - networkchad 3y ago
      [dead]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
Some people in America are just culture-war Don Quixotes; tilting at windmills 24x7. For every person that's rolling their eyes at a pointed "Merry Christmas" in response to their "Happy Holidays", there's someone feeling they scored a point for the authentic American way of life. You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.
smolder 3y ago
Blaming phones isn't arbitrary. The attention grabbing [/destroying] nuisance UIs that dangle dopamine hits in reach at all times are having an effect on people, adults that grew up w/ no smartphones included. Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.
- nextweek2 3y ago
  I’d like to hammer on this point. The problem isn’t phones, but how they are used. Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free. People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
  - smolder 3y ago
    You make a good point. To clarify mine, though: The treacherous thing about phones is not so much the phones capabilities, it's that the software deeply (but often subtly) disrespects end users. It's a normalized part of the industry. There's constant pressure from app-makers looking to shove content on you or to exfiltrate data about you, even if it's just recording a simple interaction. There's some of this on mouse-and-keyboard computers too, and increasingly so, but not to the same degree. For one example, the push notification system is absurdly abused, and it's difficult to get the right balance of awareness versus distraction. Trying to get the notifications settings how I want tends to fail in one of two directions: 1. I miss an important/urgent email or message (terrible), or fail to respond to a dating app message in time. (Not responding quickly to messages is offensive to some...) 2. I'm just constantly annoyed by irrelevant updates or even blatant SPAM. Ultimately, I disagree that the problem with phones lies with how users choose to use them. It's that the environment provided is overrun with software that's hostile, geared towards unhealthy usage. With new OS updates and new apps come new pitfalls and additional effort needed to get everything behaving how a reasonable, tech literate, self-respecting person would want. Some will jump through the hurdles to get things under control, but most just default to being abused, and I strongly believe it's asking too much of people, especially younger people, to understand what's at stake and to make all the right moves. When I point to phones as a source of problems, that's really what I'm talking about.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Several things can be true.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
We don't really have the problems you mentioned in Alberta and we have maintained our standing relative to everybody else in that academic world wide test or slightly improved (pisa??? I forget the name), however our performance over time is terrible. The percentage of people not sufficient in math has slipped from the low teens to low 20% comparing now to 20 years ago, if I recall the numbers correctly. Not to say it's phones, but something is certainly going on over time that is making at least a subset of the kids dumber. You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]
garyfirestorm 3y ago
definitely you got a point. teachers are not valued across the continents - teaching job is not stable not high paying...etc...people who would love to teach are quitting because of the economics. if you can't sustain yourself why get into that job market? obviously this is going to have an effect and this is it.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
This sort of stuff can be A-B tested, I'm not sure if I can buy into the idea that increased discussion of Peppa Pig would result in increased student intelligence, or the lack of has resulted in lower student intelligence. There was a time where Peppa Pig / Teletubbies / Barney was considered brain rotting TV and ideally avoided for its own sake. Shoehorning it in as a protected human right seems feels like it may be going in the wrong direction. I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?
drewcoo 3y ago
> I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig I was born in the 70s. We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school. No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons. A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect. It's insane? /s
bparsons 3y ago
There are obviously other factors at play, but the correlation with screentime is pretty stark. The apps kids are using on phones have the mechanics of slot machines. There is no way that this is good for them. Unfortunately, they are not using their time online to research 9th century Persian literature.

arp242 3y ago

> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple lolwut? What's the context on this? But that phones are a huge distraction devices isn't particularly controversial; this has been observed internationally, and also in contexts outside of education. That there are also other issues with education is a separate thing.

jjulius 3y ago

>Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. I have kids, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone mention this. "Peppa Pig" and "[x] likes Peppa Pig" are phrases thrown around with reckless abandon among parents and children.

tfandango 3y ago
Yet never addressed is why Daddy Pig's professional colleagues also call him "Daddy Pig"... I don't know why but this got into my brain and won't leave.

antiframe 3y ago

I'm sorry your school is so weird. Could or be true, though, that your lived experience is one factor and phones are another factor? For context, my experience with school had been different, so I do think they is a lot of variety. I also see that different families have different uses of technology. Some I find healthier than others, for my definition of healthy which is using it more to explore and be curious but less to mindlessly pass time.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Yes, let's. PISA scores have been dropping here in Finland too, and we don't have close to the magnitude of the problems I personally saw as a US high school student last decade. I'd be willing to bet a lot of countries have seen a decline since 2010 or so.

pavlov 3y ago

While that sounds admittedly ridiculous, there is international data that suggests the problem is widespread and its rise coincides with smartphones. As recently as 2006, Finland used to lead the PISA studies designed by the OECD to evaluate educational systems. The latest PISA results show kids in Finland have fallen substantially behind their Asian counterparts, and the trend is very clear since 2008. Finnish schools haven't had serious budget cuts, don't suffer very badly from parents' culture wars, and also remain largely single-language environments as they used to be. (While the number of immigrants has increased in 15 years, it's nowhere near as large to explain the PISA score drop.) The primary culprit seems to be students' phones and the poorly thought rollout of various digital gadgets into classrooms to replace books and chalkboards. While Finland's scores have dropped, neighboring Estonia has risen to the top of the rankings with its more old-school educational environment.

me_me_me 3y ago
There is another factor nobody will mention, countries in EU that accepted statistically significant number of immigrants from outside of EU are doing way worse on PISA scores. While countries like poland are not really that affected it seems. Also covid happened and online only schools might have an effect too
- pavlov 3y ago
  Nobody will mention? It’s mentioned in my comment that you’re replying to.
AlanYx 3y ago
Finland also leaned heavily into purely constructivist/inquiry-based teaching methods over the last 20 years. There is significant evidence going back to Project Follow-Through that these are not the best way to teach average and below-average students. The Finnish government announced earlier this year that they are doing a major revamp of the curriculum to reduce the emphasis on these instructional techniques.
lordnacho 3y ago
For this to be evidence, it requires that there are countries in the dataset where phones did not become widespread? Are the Asian countries better at controlling phone access?

andrewmutz 3y ago

But this phenomenon is happening across the developed world: > Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average Are you saying that the developed world as a whole is misappropriating school funds and cutting budgets?

fullshark 3y ago

Sure, let's deflect because our livelihoods are owed to developing software for phones.

hotpotamus 3y ago
> It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. Over the last decade or so, quotes like that and the parable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" have gone from old pearls of wisdom for me to basically just describing the way the world works.

lupusreal 3y ago

> Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig cause of one gay couple in the show and other parents are somehow offended. Sounds like bullshit. If you're talking about the so called "don't say gay" law, that's not what the law does and nobody is barring students from talking about gay things.

kube-system 3y ago

US schools are some of the best funded in the world. Everyone wants a scapegoat for this problem, whether it be funding, teachers, or administration, but unfortunately the problem is societal. Test scores are probably declining because parents are more worried about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters rather than their child's test score, among other distractions. The root of the problem is that respect for education in the US is low.

orangepurple 3y ago
Based on my own tiny "clinical trials" how much and how quickly children learn is proportional to the time spent working through problems together with their parents.
- hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  Yeah. My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials (He is a Math prof and my mom is an English prof). I hated it but TBH that's probably I'm going to do to my son :P Of course to a lesser extend as I need to take care of my career at the same time. Back then once you are prof you are safe for eternity.
  - gumby 3y ago
    > My dad literally sits with me for extra Math and English materials…that's probably I'm going to do to my son Yep, that’s the way to do it, and it can be fun, especially since it’s just helping rather than full on home schooling. Most school curricula have different and concrete objectives (basically meeting aggregated KPIs) rather than “is the student actually learning?” Also teachers have a lot to deal with, and always have, tangential to actual teaching, like disruptive students. I think the best part of the supplement is that most school work has no context (“will this be on the test?”). Especially in math, where you spend 12 years “learning the alphabet” and only after high school do you get to the fun parts, if ever. So at home you can actually see how the stuff you’re getting in school actually relates to the realm world, and can pursue interesting paths.

billy99k 3y ago

[flagged]

dymk 3y ago
Propaganda?
- billy99k 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - networkchad 3y ago
    [dead]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

Some people in America are just culture-war Don Quixotes; tilting at windmills 24x7. For every person that's rolling their eyes at a pointed "Merry Christmas" in response to their "Happy Holidays", there's someone feeling they scored a point for the authentic American way of life. You can't live your life being worried about offending people who have chosen to be offended.

smolder 3y ago

Blaming phones isn't arbitrary. The attention grabbing [/destroying] nuisance UIs that dangle dopamine hits in reach at all times are having an effect on people, adults that grew up w/ no smartphones included. Speaking from personal experience, when I try to read a book nowadays I find I need to reread paragraphs a lot at first until my mind settles and can get into the flow. Being away from tech distractions for a day or two, e.g. camping, seems to have a similar restorative effect on my attention span. Even then, am I at 100% of the attention span I'd have if I never indulged in scrolling feeds and reacting to social media and whatnot? Maybe. I'd guess not. It's worth trying to understand.

nextweek2 3y ago
I’d like to hammer on this point. The problem isn’t phones, but how they are used. Too many people leave the default notifications on and assume it’s just how things work. People need to be taught to realise their attention is valuable and that notifications are taking it for free. People need to be tech literate, banning phones for students won’t help them down the road, it’s only deferring the problem.
- smolder 3y ago
  You make a good point. To clarify mine, though: The treacherous thing about phones is not so much the phones capabilities, it's that the software deeply (but often subtly) disrespects end users. It's a normalized part of the industry. There's constant pressure from app-makers looking to shove content on you or to exfiltrate data about you, even if it's just recording a simple interaction. There's some of this on mouse-and-keyboard computers too, and increasingly so, but not to the same degree. For one example, the push notification system is absurdly abused, and it's difficult to get the right balance of awareness versus distraction. Trying to get the notifications settings how I want tends to fail in one of two directions: 1. I miss an important/urgent email or message (terrible), or fail to respond to a dating app message in time. (Not responding quickly to messages is offensive to some...) 2. I'm just constantly annoyed by irrelevant updates or even blatant SPAM. Ultimately, I disagree that the problem with phones lies with how users choose to use them. It's that the environment provided is overrun with software that's hostile, geared towards unhealthy usage. With new OS updates and new apps come new pitfalls and additional effort needed to get everything behaving how a reasonable, tech literate, self-respecting person would want. Some will jump through the hurdles to get things under control, but most just default to being abused, and I strongly believe it's asking too much of people, especially younger people, to understand what's at stake and to make all the right moves. When I point to phones as a source of problems, that's really what I'm talking about.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Several things can be true.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

We don't really have the problems you mentioned in Alberta and we have maintained our standing relative to everybody else in that academic world wide test or slightly improved (pisa??? I forget the name), however our performance over time is terrible. The percentage of people not sufficient in math has slipped from the low teens to low 20% comparing now to 20 years ago, if I recall the numbers correctly. Not to say it's phones, but something is certainly going on over time that is making at least a subset of the kids dumber. You see places like Thales academy growing and killing it on a budget far smaller than our per student budget and you really have to wonder as well, because it implies the budget isn't the real issue either. I sometimes wonder if the big thing is parents at home who are pushing in the right direction followed by teachers that just teach and don't taint things with political BS, as my best teachers were the ones I couldn't tell you who they were going to vote for (suspect left to far left candidates but I couldn't be sure because they presented issues mostly neutrally).

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

[dead]

garyfirestorm 3y ago

definitely you got a point. teachers are not valued across the continents - teaching job is not stable not high paying...etc...people who would love to teach are quitting because of the economics. if you can't sustain yourself why get into that job market? obviously this is going to have an effect and this is it.

cjbgkagh 3y ago

This sort of stuff can be A-B tested, I'm not sure if I can buy into the idea that increased discussion of Peppa Pig would result in increased student intelligence, or the lack of has resulted in lower student intelligence. There was a time where Peppa Pig / Teletubbies / Barney was considered brain rotting TV and ideally avoided for its own sake. Shoehorning it in as a protected human right seems feels like it may be going in the wrong direction. I did attend a US high school at a time and place where evolution was given equal footing to creationism which was bizzare for me having moved from a largely atheistic society. One minute talking about plasma as the 4th state of matter the next minute about the 'theory of dinosaurs'. My concern is any rights used to protect access to Peppa Pig will also be wielded by religious zealots to force religion back into science and everywhere else. Is Peppa Pig really that important to be worth that risk?

drewcoo 3y ago

> I’m born in the 90s and my kids are now school age. You have to even bring your own damn tissue boxes! Kids can’t even say their favorite show is Peppa Pig I was born in the 70s. We needed to take our own tissue boxes to school. No one mentioned Peppa Pig, of course, but for other reasons. A grammarian my age would tell you that "in a myriad of politics" is incorrect. It's insane? /s

bparsons 3y ago

There are obviously other factors at play, but the correlation with screentime is pretty stark. The apps kids are using on phones have the mechanics of slot machines. There is no way that this is good for them. Unfortunately, they are not using their time online to research 9th century Persian literature.