8 ms·

this is because of Youtube and kids screen time. Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. S

by slt2021 2y ago

this is because of Youtube and kids screen time. Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. Schools were doing pretty lousy job before proliferation of screens, and I have little hope they can do anything better. The recent dumbing down the math curriculum is just a last straw to keep students not failing on paper. check movements like Wait Until 8th https://www.waituntil8th.org/ https://www.waituntil8th.org/ if you want to learn more

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Yes, but only because the people in control of the screen are paid to reduce the user to a dumb clicking machine. Blaming the screen distracts from the fact that this is by design, and fixing it means rethinking the incentives of that designer.
- slt2021 2y ago
  Screen time is basically Tobacco of the 21st century
  - jb1991 2y ago
    More like crack cocaine.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I'd say tobacco is more insidious.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons, Rock and Roll, Harry Potter and other things parents got hysterical about but turned out to not actually lead us into evil. The jury seems to be still out. We don't really know yet if "screens" are bad, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from pointing their fingers at them.
      - Tade0 2y ago
        What we know about screens so far is that they're the perfect distraction and put processing of emotions on hold. That in turn creates a backlog which, as it grows, makes the person increasingly miserable. Personally I use the amount of screen time as an indicator of how bad I'm doing mentally at the moment. And therein lies the crux of the issue: we optimised ourselves out of downtime which traditionally allowed us to deal with emotions. Screens are just a side effect.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    Nah, screen time is the video games (1980s) of the 21st century, or the TV (1960s), or the radio (1930s), or the gin (1800s). I’m on mobile now, but if I were on desktop I’d dig up Clay Shirky’s essay on gin and the Industrial Revolution. There has always been a moral panic about new forms of entertainment and time-wasting, because people look at these diversions and think “Why don’t people use all that time to benefit society (ie me)?” That’s just a refusal to admit that people don’t have any obligation to you or larger society, and fundamentally are out to make themselves feel good.
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      Let's be fair, replacing involved parenting with any of those is bad and was bad in the past.
      - nostrademons 2y ago
        I don't disagree, but I think we often look at the past through rose-colored glasses of survivorship bias. Most parenting was bad by those standards. If you look at how children have historically been parented across a wide range of pre-industrial cultures, it's alloparenting (care by someone other than the biological parent). You had a village of extended family, neighbors, tribewomen, clan members, whatever, and they would trade off care of large groups of village children. Or the kids would just run around and make up their own games. This is actually considered fairly healthy today - it's what daycares, preschools, schools, aftercares, etc. do in an institutionalized setting, but maintained through person-to-person relationships. The nuclear family and industrial revolution was pathological from an anthropologic POV, and brought all sorts of other pathologies into child-rearing.
micromacrofoot 2y ago
a contributing factor for sure... but this is a lot more complicated than a single factor, and is an endemic problem to the whole of american society I'll also point out that whats additionally concerning is that parent's behaviors regarding smartphones can be even worse, at least kids aren't regularly operating heavy machinery.
WillAdams 2y ago
Yes, but what if the kids instead did: https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/ or spent time watching: https://ocw.mit.edu/ https://ocw.mit.edu/ or used their screens to read and experiment with: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... or https://www.motionmountain.net/ https://www.motionmountain.net/ or even: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/id364147847 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/... Or at a younger level: https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally underperform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes. They're certainly more enjoyable and easier to breeze through, which is a large factor behind their popularity. But I suspect that that might also be why they're less good for learning. Cognitive load is an important factor in forming strong memories of things you're studying, and optimal levels of cognitive load are inherently uncomfortable.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Yeah, but I grew up in a rural county in Virginia where when we first moved there, the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement of the old courthouse --- some sort of book, even if on a screen should be way better than no book. How do e-ink e-book readers fare? I do pretty well reading every evening on my Kindle Paperwhite, and have a fair quantity of notes on my Kindle Scribe, as well as using it for reference for technical subjects. Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet? https://www.fastcompany.com/section/one-laptop-per-child https://www.fastcompany.com/section/one-laptop-per-child
    - slt2021 2y ago
      Kindle for kids is the best purchase you can make. I either buy kindle unlimited subscription or find pirated epub
honkycat 2y ago
Give me a break lmao no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our people have gone through multiple massive market contractions. We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid. You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying? I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.
- reliabilityguy 2y ago
  > it is because our schools are underfunded Do you have any data to back this up? NYC spends about $40,000/student (including teaches benefits, or $23,000/student without benefits and capital expenses) on average and the results are, how do I put it, suboptimal. Schools in the London spend $9,000/student. The CoL between NYC and London is similar. So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results? In other words: our schools fail not because of the lack of funding (on average, some probably are worse because they have no money), but for totally different reasons.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    I think it could be argued the problem isn't schools, but families. Or, more precisely, a large subset of families with school aged children do not value education, whether out of apathy or survival. Educational outcomes across socioeconomic strata vary greatly in the USA. Schools cannot educate kids that are not invested in their own education. I think if you corrected for household income, the disparities between NYC and London would be significantly smaller. My hypothesis is that students from upper- and middle-class households would come out looking fine, but lower-class students would lag significantly.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
whoitwas 2y ago
It's because of school privatization. Notice the sharpest declines in low performing students based on race and income. It's a disgrace. Idiocracy is booooooming.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Specifically the problem is tax vouchers. It's fine to send your kids to a private school, but that shouldn't have any bearing on where your tax dollars go.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    I don't think there's a need to distinguish for those alive in USA. This has all happened in the past 10 years. It was accelerated with DeVos in DoEd ... which is literally the epitome of regulatory capture. Coincidentally, this push for privatization coincides with the time frames in the study. Correlation ... causation ... Who cares. Fuckem let's get rich.
    - whoitwas 2y ago
      There is also the loosening of education standards since covid. I think literally anybody can just say they're a teacher in Florida now. That might be an exaggeration, but slightly.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I talk to many people who get excited about school choice and not having the state tell them how to educate their kids and totally gloss over the fact that your taxes are not for your kids, but for those of every other taxpayer, so I think it's an important callout.
      - whoitwas 2y ago
        There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a necessity for a successful country. Once people get enough first hand experience with schools being horrible, constantly closing, uneducated children, etc. They'll blame whatever their social media tells them to. Inequality can't get much worse before there's a tipping point. People are reallllllly dumb now though so change won't be for better when it comes.
byproxy 2y ago
> Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. Is this speculation, or are there statistics/studies that demonstrate this?
sankumsek 2y ago
I'm wondering if there is another significant variable here. I'd assume there that most of the other countries on the list would also have kids that have youtube and and increased screen times for kids.
nostrademons 2y ago
I’d argue the causality runs the other way. The popularity of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and casual games is a consequence of declining literacy, not a cause. The real cause was the abandonment of phonics in favor of whole-word approaches to teaching reading in the early 2000s. Those kids are now in their mid-20s and making their own purchase and usage decisions; with poor reading skills, is it any wonder that they prefer video and image forms of media? The timing doesn’t really line up for the screen time hypothesis. Tablet mobile games became mainstream in the mid-2010s; the kids who grew up with them are now about 15 and younger. We’ve been seeing an inability to grasp complex written discourse and perform critical thinking since about 2016; the kids on tablets would’ve been in elementary school then, but the first cohort of students who grew up with whole word reading methods was just entering adulthood.
- slt2021 2y ago
  its not only mobile games, it is proliferation of youtube and stupid streamers targeted for kids (colomelon and alike for elementary kids) and social media for middle schools (snap / tiktok)
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  Teaching phonics is good, but your history is off by about a century. The abandonment of phonics happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Whole word approaches with readers like Dick and Jane dominated 20th century reading instruction in the US. 4th grade reading results kept going up all the way until 2017. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement...
WillPostForFood 2y ago
Screentime is an issue, but you'd expect to be affecting most countries, not the US particularly.
ziddoap 2y ago
>Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. Sure, if you hand your kid a phone and walk away, that's a likely outcome. Phones/tablets/etc. are tools that can and should be leveraged. But you need to teach your kids how to properly use the tools (which is not a one-time conversation). It seems like many people skip that part for some reason or another. Age-appropriate oversight is also a necessity that is often skipped. Having a pocket library/language instructor/graph calculator/music theory coach/etc. (i.e. a phone) is an absolute superpower that can accelerate learning significantly. However, every time I suggest that you can teach kids to responsibly use technology it seems to be an unpopular opinion. I'm not exactly sure why, though. So if you don't agree, I'd love to hear your side.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Yes, but only because the people in control of the screen are paid to reduce the user to a dumb clicking machine. Blaming the screen distracts from the fact that this is by design, and fixing it means rethinking the incentives of that designer.

slt2021 2y ago
Screen time is basically Tobacco of the 21st century
- jb1991 2y ago
  More like crack cocaine.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I'd say tobacco is more insidious.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Or maybe like Dungeons and Dragons, Rock and Roll, Harry Potter and other things parents got hysterical about but turned out to not actually lead us into evil. The jury seems to be still out. We don't really know yet if "screens" are bad, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people from pointing their fingers at them.
    - Tade0 2y ago
      What we know about screens so far is that they're the perfect distraction and put processing of emotions on hold. That in turn creates a backlog which, as it grows, makes the person increasingly miserable. Personally I use the amount of screen time as an indicator of how bad I'm doing mentally at the moment. And therein lies the crux of the issue: we optimised ourselves out of downtime which traditionally allowed us to deal with emotions. Screens are just a side effect.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Nah, screen time is the video games (1980s) of the 21st century, or the TV (1960s), or the radio (1930s), or the gin (1800s). I’m on mobile now, but if I were on desktop I’d dig up Clay Shirky’s essay on gin and the Industrial Revolution. There has always been a moral panic about new forms of entertainment and time-wasting, because people look at these diversions and think “Why don’t people use all that time to benefit society (ie me)?” That’s just a refusal to admit that people don’t have any obligation to you or larger society, and fundamentally are out to make themselves feel good.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    Let's be fair, replacing involved parenting with any of those is bad and was bad in the past.
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      I don't disagree, but I think we often look at the past through rose-colored glasses of survivorship bias. Most parenting was bad by those standards. If you look at how children have historically been parented across a wide range of pre-industrial cultures, it's alloparenting (care by someone other than the biological parent). You had a village of extended family, neighbors, tribewomen, clan members, whatever, and they would trade off care of large groups of village children. Or the kids would just run around and make up their own games. This is actually considered fairly healthy today - it's what daycares, preschools, schools, aftercares, etc. do in an institutionalized setting, but maintained through person-to-person relationships. The nuclear family and industrial revolution was pathological from an anthropologic POV, and brought all sorts of other pathologies into child-rearing.

micromacrofoot 2y ago

a contributing factor for sure... but this is a lot more complicated than a single factor, and is an endemic problem to the whole of american society I'll also point out that whats additionally concerning is that parent's behaviors regarding smartphones can be even worse, at least kids aren't regularly operating heavy machinery.

WillAdams 2y ago

Yes, but what if the kids instead did: https://www.khanacademy.org/ https://www.khanacademy.org/ or spent time watching: https://ocw.mit.edu/ https://ocw.mit.edu/ or used their screens to read and experiment with: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... or https://www.motionmountain.net/ https://www.motionmountain.net/ or even: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/id364147847 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/... Or at a younger level: https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products https://wanderfulstorybooks.com/products

bunderbunder 2y ago
I haven't followed up in a while, but last I did the research indicates that digital media generally underperform good old-fashioned print books in terms of learning outcomes. They're certainly more enjoyable and easier to breeze through, which is a large factor behind their popularity. But I suspect that that might also be why they're less good for learning. Cognitive load is an important factor in forming strong memories of things you're studying, and optimal levels of cognitive load are inherently uncomfortable.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Yeah, but I grew up in a rural county in Virginia where when we first moved there, the county library was a carrel of used paperbacks in the basement of the old courthouse --- some sort of book, even if on a screen should be way better than no book. How do e-ink e-book readers fare? I do pretty well reading every evening on my Kindle Paperwhite, and have a fair quantity of notes on my Kindle Scribe, as well as using it for reference for technical subjects. Whatever happened with "One Laptop Per Child"? Apparently it's now an Android tablet? https://www.fastcompany.com/section/one-laptop-per-child https://www.fastcompany.com/section/one-laptop-per-child
  - slt2021 2y ago
    Kindle for kids is the best purchase you can make. I either buy kindle unlimited subscription or find pirated epub

honkycat 2y ago

Give me a break lmao no it's not. it is because our schools are underfunded and our people have gone through multiple massive market contractions. We don't put enough money into our schools. Our teachers are incredibly overworked and underpaid. You can't get blood from a stone. If you make being an educator a loser job that doesn't make any money, ONLY LOSERS WILL DO IT. And then the loser teachers do a shitty job teaching your kids, because why bother if you are never rewarded for trying? I would have LOVED the self-learning resources kids have today. When I was growing up, you had a textbook. Now they have Brilliant and endless youtube tutorials.

reliabilityguy 2y ago
> it is because our schools are underfunded Do you have any data to back this up? NYC spends about $40,000/student (including teaches benefits, or $23,000/student without benefits and capital expenses) on average and the results are, how do I put it, suboptimal. Schools in the London spend $9,000/student. The CoL between NYC and London is similar. So, how much more money should we pour into DOEs to achieve better results? In other words: our schools fail not because of the lack of funding (on average, some probably are worse because they have no money), but for totally different reasons.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- LargeWu 2y ago
  I think it could be argued the problem isn't schools, but families. Or, more precisely, a large subset of families with school aged children do not value education, whether out of apathy or survival. Educational outcomes across socioeconomic strata vary greatly in the USA. Schools cannot educate kids that are not invested in their own education. I think if you corrected for household income, the disparities between NYC and London would be significantly smaller. My hypothesis is that students from upper- and middle-class households would come out looking fine, but lower-class students would lag significantly.
- nostrademons 2y ago

whoitwas 2y ago

It's because of school privatization. Notice the sharpest declines in low performing students based on race and income. It's a disgrace. Idiocracy is booooooming.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Specifically the problem is tax vouchers. It's fine to send your kids to a private school, but that shouldn't have any bearing on where your tax dollars go.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  I don't think there's a need to distinguish for those alive in USA. This has all happened in the past 10 years. It was accelerated with DeVos in DoEd ... which is literally the epitome of regulatory capture. Coincidentally, this push for privatization coincides with the time frames in the study. Correlation ... causation ... Who cares. Fuckem let's get rich.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    There is also the loosening of education standards since covid. I think literally anybody can just say they're a teacher in Florida now. That might be an exaggeration, but slightly.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I talk to many people who get excited about school choice and not having the state tell them how to educate their kids and totally gloss over the fact that your taxes are not for your kids, but for those of every other taxpayer, so I think it's an important callout.
    - whoitwas 2y ago
      There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a necessity for a successful country. Once people get enough first hand experience with schools being horrible, constantly closing, uneducated children, etc. They'll blame whatever their social media tells them to. Inequality can't get much worse before there's a tipping point. People are reallllllly dumb now though so change won't be for better when it comes.

byproxy 2y ago

> Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. Is this speculation, or are there statistics/studies that demonstrate this?

sankumsek 2y ago

I'm wondering if there is another significant variable here. I'd assume there that most of the other countries on the list would also have kids that have youtube and and increased screen times for kids.

nostrademons 2y ago

I’d argue the causality runs the other way. The popularity of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and casual games is a consequence of declining literacy, not a cause. The real cause was the abandonment of phonics in favor of whole-word approaches to teaching reading in the early 2000s. Those kids are now in their mid-20s and making their own purchase and usage decisions; with poor reading skills, is it any wonder that they prefer video and image forms of media? The timing doesn’t really line up for the screen time hypothesis. Tablet mobile games became mainstream in the mid-2010s; the kids who grew up with them are now about 15 and younger. We’ve been seeing an inability to grasp complex written discourse and perform critical thinking since about 2016; the kids on tablets would’ve been in elementary school then, but the first cohort of students who grew up with whole word reading methods was just entering adulthood.

slt2021 2y ago
its not only mobile games, it is proliferation of youtube and stupid streamers targeted for kids (colomelon and alike for elementary kids) and social media for middle schools (snap / tiktok)
lern_too_spel 2y ago
Teaching phonics is good, but your history is off by about a century. The abandonment of phonics happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Whole word approaches with readers like Dick and Jane dominated 20th century reading instruction in the US. 4th grade reading results kept going up all the way until 2017. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement...

WillPostForFood 2y ago

Screentime is an issue, but you'd expect to be affecting most countries, not the US particularly.

ziddoap 2y ago

>Tablets/Phones/screen time disables cognitive abilities of kids and reduces them to dumb clicking machines. Sure, if you hand your kid a phone and walk away, that's a likely outcome. Phones/tablets/etc. are tools that can and should be leveraged. But you need to teach your kids how to properly use the tools (which is not a one-time conversation). It seems like many people skip that part for some reason or another. Age-appropriate oversight is also a necessity that is often skipped. Having a pocket library/language instructor/graph calculator/music theory coach/etc. (i.e. a phone) is an absolute superpower that can accelerate learning significantly. However, every time I suggest that you can teach kids to responsibly use technology it seems to be an unpopular opinion. I'm not exactly sure why, though. So if you don't agree, I'd love to hear your side.