15 ms·

What's Happening to Students?

170 points by atombender 2y ago

jjgreen 2y ago
Everyone with a mobile is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along doom-scrolling celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...
- Handprint4469 2y ago
  Everyone with an imagination is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along daydreaming about celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...
  - yakcyll 2y ago
    There is a very big difference between engaging with your own stream of consciousness and being spoon-fed stimuli without any effortful engagement. While I get the sentiment that the parent comment may be snarkily over-generalizing (for the record, I don't think that it does), this retort doesn't land at all.
- healsdata 2y ago
  Reductionist statement is reductionist. I'm sure that Jasleen Kaur, Kendrick Lamar, and Bethany Baptiste all have mobile phones, and yet, they were all recognized as top creators in 2024. Plenty of people with jobs they hate were dead inside long before mobile phones were invented -- they were addicted to alcohol instead. People levied the same complaints you're making about newspapers and books. Instead of painting any technology or distraction with a broad brush, it's best to focus on the potential harms and find out who's most impacted. We can help those folks better if we don't just demonize their vice across the board.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Exceptions don't prove the rule, or refute them for that matter.
- navane 2y ago
  This zombie apocalypse hits different
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I’m reading your comment on a mobile right now.
- garfield_light 2y ago
  Replace mobile with television and this sounds quaint. Some people always find a excuse to be dehumanizing even if the "excuse" is a real problem.
supportengineer 2y ago
I'm in my 50's and looking forward, I just don't see anything good in the future for this world. Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.
- sarreph 2y ago
  > Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different. In my 30s and I make a habit of asking people in the generations above me if they felt the same when they were younger / my age. As in, did things always seem this futile, clogged, and broken? The answer is always "no".
  - ribosometronome 2y ago
    Cold War? World Wars? There's been a ton of doom. Perhaps elder millennial and younger Gen X got to go through their 30s without some of this worry?
    - scythe 2y ago
      Today's situation is not very similar. Previously we worried about specific threats. The Axis Powers, the Soviet world and its influence, even nuclear war. We had a pretty good characterization of what the threat was, even if it was devastating, even if we didn't have a great plan to prevent it. We knew how it would manifest. Today we are facing a sort of nebulous destabilization of social institutions and norms that seems to be related to digital computing and communication technologies but we can't nail down what particular aspects cause the problem or how it manifests. We are not sure if any particular problem is related to The Problem or not. Some people don't believe that The Problem exists at all. We have no idea what the consequences could be if The Problem is not addressed, nor do we have a good way to tell if it's currently getting worse, barring some kind of unexpected catastrophe like a bunch of high-ranking government officials accidentally inviting a journalist to an illegal chat room where they are planning air strikes. Perhaps none of this means that The Problem is worse than anything we have faced before, or even as bad. But humans have always gotten through our problems by turning our intellect onto them, and it frightens us when our best weapon doesn't seem to be working. What is the Internet doing to society? That's the trillion-dollar question.
juunpp 2y ago
Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.
- healsdata 2y ago
  There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students. > "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need." https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents
  - create-username 2y ago
    Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents. Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food. It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible
    - mystified5016 2y ago
      No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.
      - dumbmrblah 2y ago
        I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting. Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.
        ty6853 2y ago
        When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun. All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.
hibikir 2y ago
What we are seeing with students is that it's harder to get them to do work if they are demotivated, but that there's so many more tools for them to learn quickly and effectively when they are. Yes, LLMs can be used to cheat on an assignment, but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement. This has always been the issue of the internet: It's good at giving us what we want. It's just that many times, what we want is really bad for us. The same tool that finds friends that share a hobby is the same whether the hobby is building gundams or participating in conspiracy thinking. So what I expect we'll see is outcome divergence. For some people it's a great boon. For others, the worst thing we could have done for them. What made someone successful in the 1980s might be very different in the 2030s
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement. Honestly, the "advice" that I got from basically all of these chatterbots when I presented them some provocative, polarizing, "very different from ordinary thinking" political statements was far more "bossy" and "lecturing" than the judgements that basically every teacher would give. It was rather easy to get some AI models to actually stop willing to continue the communication with me.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Without context of what you mean, it's hard to tell how "different" your take is. I mean, are we taking "pineapple on a pizza", "sex with kids is OK actually", or something else in between? For many "very different from ordinary thinking" ideas, failing to engage/continue is not a bad result at all.
siliconc0w 2y ago
Ironically AI has the ability to improve education exponentially and it's being used to cheat on assignments to leave time for more AI-powered video addiction. It's the job of capitalism to ruthlessly seek profit but it's the job of regulators to ensure that profit is in long-term socially productive direction.
godelski 2y ago
I'm a (finishing) grad student and do a lot of teaching. While I definitely experience a lot of what's said in here I think a lot of people are getting things wrong. It is easy to point at technology and just say the youngins are dumb/lazy/have no attention. > Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things. First, I have mixed feelings about this. The first part is right but the second part isn't. And it illustrates part of the problem. They can learn new things but we are not incentivizing them to. The thing is we need to rethink how we educate people. In fact, I think we need to rethink a lot of things. The problem here is you need to ask a lot of "why" questions. What I do like about the article is that it does talk about the addiction in short form mediums. That instant gratification. This is definitely part of the problem, but I'd argue extends far beyond students and isn't just from social media. Further upstream, I think a problem we have is over-metricization. Or what one might call bureaucracy. I've been calling it "Goodhart's Hell". The reason Goodhart's Law is a thing is because you can never perfectly align a metric to the thing you actually want to measure. So no matter how good your algorithm is[0] it won't be perfectly aligned. You need to evaluate beyond the metric and watch for drift. Goodhart's Law is more a warning about how people are good optimizers, so if you strongly incentivize the metric and only the metric, you end up with a billion cobras while trying to eradicate them[1]. So students are kinda doing what students have done for awhile. We've been having this conversation with cheating and we've had jokes about how you remember material for the test and immediately forget it after. These things are indicative of misalignment! Part of the problem here is that so much pressure is put on getting good grades that you will punish students for being honest. You punish students for struggling and gaining deep learning while you reward those who look up solution manuals and get homeworks from peers or even ask GPT. This is the root of the problem, and we can't solve these things until we rethink this. This is in the same way that we've created these addiction machines like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and others. We strongly fit the metric at the expense of fitting our goal. We all know people who did really bad in school and on tests like SATs and stuff but are brilliant. Similarly we also know people who did amazing on all those things yet are bumbling idiots. Those are just examples of misalignment. Weirdly the more meritocratic you try to make things the less meritocratic things become. Not because you impose metrics, but because you overfit metrics. What's happening to students? It's the same thing that's happening to everyone else. I think we really need to rethink a lot of this. Luckily, there is action that a lot of you on HN can do! The problem is created through lots of small effects, thus the solution needs to be too. If you are just a junior engineer, ask questions about how well aligned a metric is to the goal. At worst you learn something, at best you make the product better. If you are a senior, think carefully about these things and encourage your team to too. Expertise is about understanding depth and nuance, so encourage that! If you're a manager, IT IS YOUR JOB TO CAREFULLY ENSURE THINGS ARE WELL ALIGNED. That's one of the most important things you can do! I know a lot of the pushback, and I hear "but you can't assign value to <x>". But here's the thing, all those numbers are fucking made up anyways. Use your expertise and try to make products better. Not better defined by what makes share value go up or your manager says is "value" but just make the user experience better! Make things that make peoples' lives better! That was the promise of computing in the first place and why it created these billion dollar companies. I promise the money will follow. There is nothing stopping us from making money hand over fist WHILE making good products that make peoples lives better. If you believe these are at odds with one another, then do you really just want to build a dystopian Sci-Fi future? Are you really just okay "sacrificing your soul" for a paycheck? While I understand the calculus isn't so easy for everyone, we are talking about a field where $100k-$400k salaries are not uncommon, and you definitely have a choice in those ranges. But importantly, be a little grumpy. After all, that's your job as a developer/engineer/researcher: to find problems and fix them. Tldr: think carefully if you want to enable others to think carefully [0] I'll admit the irony of me saying this. I am extremely math oriented and work in machine learning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
dmvdoug 2y ago
Try talking to them. Try asking them questions about what they think about things and then challenging them to defend it. Above all, try listening to them. Truly listening. Not call and response. Not 3-second wait time followed by “good job” or “well, not exactly.” Students today, like kids always, eagerly seek connections with people, not content. Establish that first and the rest will fall into place. (That’s the good news. The bad news is that our education system, from federal level on down to the individual school board, will readily jump in and agree, but then require metrics and other “measurables” to show that students are cranking out “learning outcomes.” So with the best will in the world, and genuine interest in our kids and their lives as a predicate to meaningful learning in an otherwise highly artificial classroom setting, you as a teacher are stuck banging your head against an immovable concrete wall that gets refreshed annually with million dollar consultant contracts for outsiders who spend two hours every two weeks in your school to tell you what you need to do to reach your students. And at some point, you just say fuck you to all of it.)
- saulpw 2y ago
  Your method works well as a tutor with a single student. Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.
  - dmvdoug 2y ago
    I have for the past four years averaging 180-200 students on my rosters.
    - sky2224 2y ago
      Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat. Apply this to middle/high school students and you're going to get a lot of students being annoyed since they're being challenged, are feeling stupid, and don't know how to deal with that feeling of being stupid; especially given that many of them don't see the point in attending school since they feel like it isn't helping them. There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.
aeblyve 2y ago
I tend to think that students preferring internet trash over schooling is more an indictment of the state of schooling than internet trash. Of course, that reflects on the kinds of worker units society is directed to produce as well, and their alignment with the economy as it actually exists and works.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  If I'd had handheld toys in class as a child, and no one stopped me from using them... ? Think Gameboy, or Sony Watchman w/ MTV. Well, no school subject could have competed with that. Certainly not those that require a bit of work.
  - aeblyve 2y ago
    Even if this is true, the condition can go as far back as your childhood as well. When it is clear that the organism should be doing something, it does it. If it is somehow not clear, it is likely just not necessary. A significant confounding factor is the lack of awareness of the productive forces. The average suburban school kid has relatively little idea of how the world works and what workers actually do, and why, in part due to a culture of corporate secrecy. "No phones in school" can be a stopgap but really produces a dead end arms-race situation, even if it worked for a time. The only solution is to make school genuinely interesting and relevant. Until institutionalized education is no longer interesting and relevant on the face of it.
    - ty6853 2y ago
      Yep, one of my favorite tradesmen is Larry Haun. He started carrying tools for carpenters for pay as a young kid -- which today would be illegal. Imagine being in school and learning math and science in the context of how it tied into building a house . Suddenly the majority of it is useful. Perhaps the problem is in part kids aren't economically 'exploited' enough so they have basically nill solidifying the utility of their schooling.
      - 2y ago
kurofune 2y ago
I live in a country where almost no one under 35 is able to purchase a house, no matter how educated you are. We live to pay the rent, the system is broken and we all know it, so we don't need to toil anymore; there is no incentive. As simple as that.
- ty6853 2y ago
  Buy a small parcel of land and park a trailer on it or build something expedient. My house cost like 20% of almost anyone else in my area by just doing it myself without any code inspections. All it takes is courage to bypass the conventional system, society was wrong and I won by calling bullshit.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    What about utilities? Unlimited electricity, fresh water, sewer?
    - ty6853 2y ago
      Generator, a cistern, and a diy septic system will get you started
      - mharig 2y ago
        [dead]
  - waweic 2y ago
    I don't think there is any place in the Schengen area (and I have a hunch that parent lives there) where this isn't absolutely illegal. At least in Germany, if you just buy a small parcel of land (and even that is really expensive), and "build something expedient", you won't be able to register that address with the government (which you are, by the way, legally required to, even if you're homeless). The local government will find hundreds of reasons, why your expedient building is not up to code (besides fire safety, which would be enough reasons in itself) and has to be torn down. But of course they don't have to, because you didn't even apply to get permission to build something (which is mandatory here), it wouldn't be granted anyways, because you bought a cheap parcel of land and those are outside the areas where permission to build something can even be granted. Of course people still do it. But the threat that you might be forced to tear down your home at any moment just to be homeless really is not that much fun. Edit: Oh, and a parked trailer is a building as well, of course. Just that tearing it down is a lot easier
protocolture 2y ago
Complaining about students is just as much of a crutch as parents using iPads as childcare. Things (gasp) change. Teachers should be looking for funding to keep up with changes, not shitting on kids. If you dont like the kids, get out of education. Honestly, its very likely that the vast majority of your curriculum is simply not useful or relevant to them, they have no interest or connection with you, and you have made no effort to engage them.
- protocolture 2y ago
  [flagged]
extension 2y ago
> kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself. > incarcerated students really want to learn They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated. > children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse. > And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college. Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.
- kulahan 2y ago
  The ability to cope with boredom is an essential skill, and boredom is a necessary aspect of life. Great ideas come from boredom. Great questions do too. Boredom is not the problem, attention spans are. Not to mention, who actually cares? Not every aspect of learning is going to be fun. Sometimes you have to sit down and memorize times tables, or read about an important historical event you just have zero passion for. That’s okay. As for the screen-time, it’s not about having enough hours in the day, it’s about the concerns regarding what this is doing to kids. Losing out on interaction with your parents because they throw the iPad at you when they’re tired of parenting is probably affecting kids in some unknown way. If it were just an hour a day, probably nobody would be complaining about it. As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    >As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one. It's pretty evident at this point. A degree has gone from something you get if you are genuinely interested in further learning and a career in that area to an absolute must-have if you don't want to be stuck in dead-end low-paying jobs. So yeah, the process is being seen as a gatekeeper to a successful adulthood as opposed to an opportunity, because while for some kids it may still be the latter, for all kids it is most definitely the former (and one that's likely to saddle them with a lot of debt in the process).
jmye 2y ago
> There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example. This seems wildly naive. Everyone working at Meta knows that the sum total of their work is giving teen girls depression more efficiently. They don’t care or they’ve made excuses or they’ve made up a story about how that’s not really what they’re working on - that’s those other people, their work is different.
- thunderfork 2y ago
  [dead]
- lapcat 2y ago
  Also: > Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles. The children of tech workers and tech leaders are not harmed as much by their products.
ern 2y ago
I remember watching hours of TV as a child in the 80s. I remember my cousins, born in the 90s staring like zombies at Cartoon Network when they were toddlers. We're all reasonably functional adults (most high achievers academically, and holding down well-paid jobs, with families). We also had huge amounts of screen time playing games, mostly on PCs. If screens per-se are the problem, we'd have seen the same issues manifesting decades ago. I think phones are the issue, rather than screens, specifically social media and notifications in particular. Someone suggested turning notifications off for social media, and it was a big change in my life, and something I've urged my own children to do as well.
- lapcat 2y ago
  It's an interesting question. If I were to speculate, I think the difference is the sheer volume of choices available now. When I was a kid, the choices were very limited. There were only 3 TV networks, and TV shows were on a fixed schedule, so you couldn't watch whatever you liked whenever you liked. Often, there was absolutely nothing good on. Moreover, watching a TV show required at least some degree of attention span: 30 or 60 minutes on one TV show. You couldn't scroll through an endless stream of 30 or 60 second videos. As for video games, we couldn't download them from the internet. We had a very limited number of physical game cartridges. So yes, you could spend hours playing a video game, but that again required a level of focus and attention, and you were stuck with the few games you had at home. Given the limited number of choices available to kids at the time, it was much easier to get bored with those choices, as the article mentions: "the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever".
  - flakeoil 2y ago
    And add to that, the phone is with you all the time. A TV or video game was fixed to one place.
    - fransje26 2y ago
      And we did go out to play.
johntitorjr 2y ago
[dead]
OutOfHere 2y ago
The article is just someone trying to save their job as an educator. I invite the author to count the percentage of people or students looking at their phone screen while crossing the road. That's the percent that need saving. The rest are fine.
- prawn 2y ago
  What are you suggesting that percentage is? I've been in many situations where it's well above 50%.
jmward01 2y ago
As a society, or I guess even as a species, we need to figure out how to deal with digital drugs, fast. I mean it, they are drugs. That doesn't mean ban them, but getting serious about understanding how to integrate them safely into our lives is important. Just like the chemical versions, digital drugs come in different potencies and with different effects and we need to think about classifying them as such. FB, Fox, HN, you name it. What is a 'safe' experience? How do we introduce our kids to them or how do we keep them away if it is too harmful? These are not easy questions for sure.
- Root_Denied 2y ago
  It's a good analogy, one that I think also applies to other things that really are "drugs" that people don't normally associate with the word: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, fast food, and sugar.
  - jackphilson 2y ago
    I think a way to maintain agency as well as avoiding overly restrictive regulations is an AI 'guardian' app that uses coherent extrapolated volition to nudge you toward your ideal self. Blocking sites, pushing productive content (aligned with what you deem productive of course). You can't stop digital drugs from being made, you can only stop yourself from accessing them. And you must find ways to do that for you and the people you care about. AI guardian aligned with your best interests would make this a lot easier.
csomar 2y ago
> The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class! A bit concerned about the hyper-stimulation but this actually gives me a lot of hope and I think it'll be worth it. What the teachers are concerned about here is their pathetic institution of teaching which has not revolutionized with the time. It's amazing (is that the right word?) that the teacher is annoyed by his students "cheating" on the test but they don't see the fallacy of determining one's trajectory through a single point (1 hour exam). The system is pathetic and hopefully the new generation is smarter, sees it for what it is, spends its time on screen/video games and let these bureaucrats infinitely scratch their heads. > And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college. This made my day...
- chrisco255 2y ago
  I'm sorry what? Exams aren't a fallacy, they're the only way to actually test someone's knowledge. There is no replacement for that. If you let students cheat on exams they will never learn anything.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    A traditional school exam is not the only way to test knowledge. Project work, for example. At work, your knowledge is tested by the output you produce.
    - chrisco255 2y ago
      Project work is even easier to cheat on than exams.
      - sethammons 2y ago
        You cheat at delivering projects at work?
brianhama 2y ago
This is just the latest episode of “Blame the Tech” for why kids supposedly suck now. Telephones, rock music, comic books, TV, video games—every generation has its boogeyman. Now it’s smartphones. Honestly, I’m more curious what’s gonna freak everyone out next, but I’m definitely not losing sleep over “the kids.”
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  True to a degree, although I know from myself that if I had something resembling a computer in class, the result of my education would probably be different. I believe there to be a difference between slide rule/calculator - calculator/smart phone that cannot be generalized.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    This is a great point. To me, calculators are very rarely entertaining. A smart phone is mostly a device to deliver ads and entertainment, and allow communication.
- willdr 2y ago
  That's a useful strawman for this issue, but you know as well as I do that none of those bogeymans were anywhere near as transformative as the smartphone. They were not networked, they were static, and they had limits (eg. TVs limited programming). They are incomparable to a never-ending firehose of stimulus, algorithmically engineered to be appealing to your personality and optimised for "engagement" (read: more screen time).
- lapcat 2y ago
  What do you make of the charts that show a marked increase is "Difficulty thinking or concentrating" and "Trouble learning new things"?
  - bloppe 2y ago
    I reckon I'll just join an anti-phone cult. Idk why everyone's freaking out.
hoseja 2y ago
Seems like it's clear to children that "education" has become nothing more than empty credential sold by a corrupt system. And of course the author likes criminals more.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  Education might be poor but that's not the reason they're disengaging. No, they're addicted to their digital cocaine. Nothing, not even video games (and certainly not education of any kind) can compete with the perfectly engineered dopamine delivery system found in these apps.
chromanoid 2y ago
I think China is on the right track here. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ While I don't like the privacy implications, I like the screen time limits China establishes. Social media and internet must be treated with much care. It's like a candy store open 24/7 - completely free and always within reach. Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like. The Internet has changed since I was a kid browsing through GeoCities webrings and the Yahoo Directory while searching with AltaVista. Generations of technology enthusiasts have to acknowledge that the internet of the past is no more and cannot be brought to our children as such. The temptations we faced then were nothing compared to what children today have to resist. Just as many countries regulate advertisements aimed at minors, we need to start regulating screen time for kids - before they get pulled into the vortex of influencers and endlessly accessible, mentally corrosive entertainment.
- fergie 2y ago
  It turns out that industry regulation can actually be a good thing sometimes.
  - prox 2y ago
    There’s nothing wrong with moderation in moderation.
  - Alwaysyeshere 2y ago
    Always not sometimes. Lead in fuel Normal product warranty ingridient list The industry has few selfregularly motivations to regulate itself. If they do, they do it after customer complains and others stealing there thunder but than i t would be too late for a few
    - dathinab 2y ago
      > Always not sometimes. always if objectively non lobby-corrupt thought throught if regulation is to much captured by lobby-corruption or ignore facts because of ideology thinking(:1) it can be very bad, then you can for example easily end up with what I like to call "red hearing regulation". A regulation which doesn't fix the problem at all but if you are naive looks like it might and prevent any further regulations from being done because it's already there. Or you can end up with monopoly-like companies cutting of access to markets for competition. --- (:1) to be clear I mean the innocent interpretation of that phrase, not the one a lot of right wing propaganda in many countries is using regular where it often means "take this out of context potentially outright lying statements and treat them as obvious facts while claiming all other facts are ideologist driven fake news and then complain why no one want to have fact based discussions with you anymore"
seydor 2y ago
It's about time for Education to adapt to the new generations
- __loam 2y ago
  Watching people in the tech industry make proclamations like this is like watching a Crack dealer tell teachers how to do their jobs.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    For the time being, the crack dealers are hacking through the US government instances..
CrLf 2y ago
Nothing to worry about. They don't need to learn anything anyway. Anything they would do in the future will be done by agentic AI, and generative AI will produce all the content they could possibly consume. They will be free to spend all day on their phones.
thrance 2y ago
Teachers are severly underpaid, classrooms are overcrowded, many parents believe teachers are out to indoctrinate their kids into transhood or whatever other conspiracy the right currently fancies. Republicans have been attacking public schooling for 50 years, they hate the idea of providing fair eduction. Democrats have been doing nothing to fight this. Here are the results. You can, and probably should, ban phones from school, but that won't fix that cult of ignorance [1] dictating every policy made on education. [1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
MrMcCall 2y ago
Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating. Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers. Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy. The question is, "Why?" First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others. Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car). We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent. And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight. My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit. The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them. I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot. My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations". They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect. They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves. So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about. Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake. "There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied, "She fucked him before she fucked him." I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.
iainctduncan 2y ago
This is really happening. I like taking courses, so I've been doing part time university studies (now into a PhD) for about 15 years now. I'm 50, so I remember uni before the internet was even really a big thing. The drop in engagement in students is shocking. I take some combined undergrad/grad level courses in my PhD program, and half the time I'm the only one, in a class of like 100, who says anything. And then so many do homework with ChatGPT and have no actual understanding. I shudder thinking what managing theses people will be like. I've heard from someone who is managing recent grads that it's awful. Obviously these are generalizations, not everyone is like that, etc. But this is a real problem. Pretending it's just old people not like change is sweeping it under the carpet. Tech has (deliberately) gotten more and more addictive and it's badly screwing people up.
rfwhyte 2y ago
Personally I think the phones, social media, dopamine addiction, etc. are all symptoms, not the systemic rot at the root of things here. Young people today simply realize, either consciously, or subconsciously, that they live in a broken world and are being forced against their will to play a rigged game they cannot win. Distraction and apathy are the only logical reactions to world that exclusively measures a person's value in monetary terms and does not give a single fuck about them beyond whatever "Value" they can create for soulless corporations their self-serving, narcissistic billionaire owners. Sure they could buckle down, study hard, get into a good college and work 60-80 hours a week for the rest of their lives, but even if they did all that they're still not guaranteed a decent life. They're not guaranteed to own a home, drive a nice car, take an annual vacation, or put away money for retirement. They're not even guaranteed a roof over their heads and meal on the table. The social contract that underwrites the entire western world has been fundamentally altered, as where once studying hard and doing all the things you're "Supposed to do" as a young person could at least guarantee you a pretty decent life, young people today have no guarantee of a better future whatsoever regardless of how hard they work or how talented they might be. This is an odd metaphor, but it just popped it my head so I'm going to try it out. It's like for generations there's been a boat and a dock. The young people while away their days on the dock, swimming and fishing for minnows and the adults take the boat out each day (generation) and return with a fish. Each day (generation) the fish the adults have come back with has gotten bigger and bigger, and so the youngsters would get excited that when it was their turn to go out fishing they might catch an even bigger fish. The last couple days (generations) the adults have come how with fish that were the same size as the day (generation) before or maybe even a little smaller, but the kids didn't think to much of it and were still excited to get out fishing and catch their own fish. This most recent generation the adults came back with the smallest fish yet, and oh, by, the way, the boat has a leak and is sinking and its also on fire. We're basically wondering why the kids aren't excited to go fishing when we're giving them a sinking boat that's also on fire. Of course they'd rather splash around in the shallows and fish for minnows when the best alternative we're giving them is a sinking ship.
deleted 2y ago
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170 points by atombender 2y ago

Everyone with a mobile is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along doom-scrolling celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...

Handprint4469 2y ago
Everyone with an imagination is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along daydreaming about celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling ...
- yakcyll 2y ago
  There is a very big difference between engaging with your own stream of consciousness and being spoon-fed stimuli without any effortful engagement. While I get the sentiment that the parent comment may be snarkily over-generalizing (for the record, I don't think that it does), this retort doesn't land at all.
healsdata 2y ago
Reductionist statement is reductionist. I'm sure that Jasleen Kaur, Kendrick Lamar, and Bethany Baptiste all have mobile phones, and yet, they were all recognized as top creators in 2024. Plenty of people with jobs they hate were dead inside long before mobile phones were invented -- they were addicted to alcohol instead. People levied the same complaints you're making about newspapers and books. Instead of painting any technology or distraction with a broad brush, it's best to focus on the potential harms and find out who's most impacted. We can help those folks better if we don't just demonize their vice across the board.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Exceptions don't prove the rule, or refute them for that matter.
navane 2y ago
This zombie apocalypse hits different
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
I’m reading your comment on a mobile right now.
garfield_light 2y ago
Replace mobile with television and this sounds quaint. Some people always find a excuse to be dehumanizing even if the "excuse" is a real problem.

supportengineer 2y ago

I'm in my 50's and looking forward, I just don't see anything good in the future for this world. Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.

sarreph 2y ago
> Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different. In my 30s and I make a habit of asking people in the generations above me if they felt the same when they were younger / my age. As in, did things always seem this futile, clogged, and broken? The answer is always "no".
- ribosometronome 2y ago
  Cold War? World Wars? There's been a ton of doom. Perhaps elder millennial and younger Gen X got to go through their 30s without some of this worry?
  - scythe 2y ago
    Today's situation is not very similar. Previously we worried about specific threats. The Axis Powers, the Soviet world and its influence, even nuclear war. We had a pretty good characterization of what the threat was, even if it was devastating, even if we didn't have a great plan to prevent it. We knew how it would manifest. Today we are facing a sort of nebulous destabilization of social institutions and norms that seems to be related to digital computing and communication technologies but we can't nail down what particular aspects cause the problem or how it manifests. We are not sure if any particular problem is related to The Problem or not. Some people don't believe that The Problem exists at all. We have no idea what the consequences could be if The Problem is not addressed, nor do we have a good way to tell if it's currently getting worse, barring some kind of unexpected catastrophe like a bunch of high-ranking government officials accidentally inviting a journalist to an illegal chat room where they are planning air strikes. Perhaps none of this means that The Problem is worse than anything we have faced before, or even as bad. But humans have always gotten through our problems by turning our intellect onto them, and it frightens us when our best weapon doesn't seem to be working. What is the Internet doing to society? That's the trillion-dollar question.

juunpp 2y ago

Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.

healsdata 2y ago
There's a recent article that basically sums it up as the parents being the ones pushing back against the bans, not teachers or students. > "Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying, 'I miss you and can’t wait to see you,'" Hochul told the NYT. "That’s a parental need, not a student need." https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents https://futurism.com/school-phone-bans-parents
- create-username 2y ago
  Newborn Stroller babies are not asking to be looking at a tablet. It’s the parents. Newborn Babies do not ask to watch YouTubes while being fed ultra-processed food. It’s the parents who purchase all those electronic devices to their children. I gather that they do it because shutting them off is illegal and irreversible
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    No. Try actually asking someone who's raised kids recently.
    - dumbmrblah 2y ago
      I’m raising two kids right now (4 & 6) and I agree with them. Strollers with built-in tablets are abhorrent and shitty parenting. Learning how to be ‘bored’ is an important part of growing up, and any parent that is not teaching their children that lesson is failing their children.
      - ty6853 2y ago
        When I was a kid and got bored I roamed the creek or biked miles around. Sometimes even with a real or bb gun. All these things now end in arrest or investigation or at the least a Karen stirring up shit, unless you are real rural. I weep for today's kids. You can do almost nothing nowadays what I did as a kid unless your parents are rich enough to not work and accompany you. The parents want to let their boredom drive them to discover the world, but they usually can't. Instead they're locked in with a tablet where a Karen can't snitch on them for being a kid.

hibikir 2y ago

What we are seeing with students is that it's harder to get them to do work if they are demotivated, but that there's so many more tools for them to learn quickly and effectively when they are. Yes, LLMs can be used to cheat on an assignment, but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement. This has always been the issue of the internet: It's good at giving us what we want. It's just that many times, what we want is really bad for us. The same tool that finds friends that share a hobby is the same whether the hobby is building gundams or participating in conspiracy thinking. So what I expect we'll see is outcome divergence. For some people it's a great boon. For others, the worst thing we could have done for them. What made someone successful in the 1980s might be very different in the 2030s

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement. Honestly, the "advice" that I got from basically all of these chatterbots when I presented them some provocative, polarizing, "very different from ordinary thinking" political statements was far more "bossy" and "lecturing" than the judgements that basically every teacher would give. It was rather easy to get some AI models to actually stop willing to continue the communication with me.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Without context of what you mean, it's hard to tell how "different" your take is. I mean, are we taking "pineapple on a pizza", "sex with kids is OK actually", or something else in between? For many "very different from ordinary thinking" ideas, failing to engage/continue is not a bad result at all.

siliconc0w 2y ago

Ironically AI has the ability to improve education exponentially and it's being used to cheat on assignments to leave time for more AI-powered video addiction. It's the job of capitalism to ruthlessly seek profit but it's the job of regulators to ensure that profit is in long-term socially productive direction.

godelski 2y ago

I'm a (finishing) grad student and do a lot of teaching. While I definitely experience a lot of what's said in here I think a lot of people are getting things wrong. It is easy to point at technology and just say the youngins are dumb/lazy/have no attention. > Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things. First, I have mixed feelings about this. The first part is right but the second part isn't. And it illustrates part of the problem. They can learn new things but we are not incentivizing them to. The thing is we need to rethink how we educate people. In fact, I think we need to rethink a lot of things. The problem here is you need to ask a lot of "why" questions. What I do like about the article is that it does talk about the addiction in short form mediums. That instant gratification. This is definitely part of the problem, but I'd argue extends far beyond students and isn't just from social media. Further upstream, I think a problem we have is over-metricization. Or what one might call bureaucracy. I've been calling it "Goodhart's Hell". The reason Goodhart's Law is a thing is because you can never perfectly align a metric to the thing you actually want to measure. So no matter how good your algorithm is[0] it won't be perfectly aligned. You need to evaluate beyond the metric and watch for drift. Goodhart's Law is more a warning about how people are good optimizers, so if you strongly incentivize the metric and only the metric, you end up with a billion cobras while trying to eradicate them[1]. So students are kinda doing what students have done for awhile. We've been having this conversation with cheating and we've had jokes about how you remember material for the test and immediately forget it after. These things are indicative of misalignment! Part of the problem here is that so much pressure is put on getting good grades that you will punish students for being honest. You punish students for struggling and gaining deep learning while you reward those who look up solution manuals and get homeworks from peers or even ask GPT. This is the root of the problem, and we can't solve these things until we rethink this. This is in the same way that we've created these addiction machines like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and others. We strongly fit the metric at the expense of fitting our goal. We all know people who did really bad in school and on tests like SATs and stuff but are brilliant. Similarly we also know people who did amazing on all those things yet are bumbling idiots. Those are just examples of misalignment. Weirdly the more meritocratic you try to make things the less meritocratic things become. Not because you impose metrics, but because you overfit metrics. What's happening to students? It's the same thing that's happening to everyone else. I think we really need to rethink a lot of this. Luckily, there is action that a lot of you on HN can do! The problem is created through lots of small effects, thus the solution needs to be too. If you are just a junior engineer, ask questions about how well aligned a metric is to the goal. At worst you learn something, at best you make the product better. If you are a senior, think carefully about these things and encourage your team to too. Expertise is about understanding depth and nuance, so encourage that! If you're a manager, IT IS YOUR JOB TO CAREFULLY ENSURE THINGS ARE WELL ALIGNED. That's one of the most important things you can do! I know a lot of the pushback, and I hear "but you can't assign value to <x>". But here's the thing, all those numbers are fucking made up anyways. Use your expertise and try to make products better. Not better defined by what makes share value go up or your manager says is "value" but just make the user experience better! Make things that make peoples' lives better! That was the promise of computing in the first place and why it created these billion dollar companies. I promise the money will follow. There is nothing stopping us from making money hand over fist WHILE making good products that make peoples lives better. If you believe these are at odds with one another, then do you really just want to build a dystopian Sci-Fi future? Are you really just okay "sacrificing your soul" for a paycheck? While I understand the calculus isn't so easy for everyone, we are talking about a field where $100k-$400k salaries are not uncommon, and you definitely have a choice in those ranges. But importantly, be a little grumpy. After all, that's your job as a developer/engineer/researcher: to find problems and fix them. Tldr: think carefully if you want to enable others to think carefully [0] I'll admit the irony of me saying this. I am extremely math oriented and work in machine learning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

dmvdoug 2y ago

Try talking to them. Try asking them questions about what they think about things and then challenging them to defend it. Above all, try listening to them. Truly listening. Not call and response. Not 3-second wait time followed by “good job” or “well, not exactly.” Students today, like kids always, eagerly seek connections with people, not content. Establish that first and the rest will fall into place. (That’s the good news. The bad news is that our education system, from federal level on down to the individual school board, will readily jump in and agree, but then require metrics and other “measurables” to show that students are cranking out “learning outcomes.” So with the best will in the world, and genuine interest in our kids and their lives as a predicate to meaningful learning in an otherwise highly artificial classroom setting, you as a teacher are stuck banging your head against an immovable concrete wall that gets refreshed annually with million dollar consultant contracts for outsiders who spend two hours every two weeks in your school to tell you what you need to do to reach your students. And at some point, you just say fuck you to all of it.)

saulpw 2y ago
Your method works well as a tutor with a single student. Try doing that as a teacher with a classroom of 30+ students.
- dmvdoug 2y ago
  I have for the past four years averaging 180-200 students on my rosters.
  - sky2224 2y ago
    Which I'm assuming is in a university setting, yes? In which case, I would also assume that at least a majority of the students in your class actually want to be in school somewhat. Apply this to middle/high school students and you're going to get a lot of students being annoyed since they're being challenged, are feeling stupid, and don't know how to deal with that feeling of being stupid; especially given that many of them don't see the point in attending school since they feel like it isn't helping them. There will be some that will engage, but those aren't the students we're concerned about here.

aeblyve 2y ago

I tend to think that students preferring internet trash over schooling is more an indictment of the state of schooling than internet trash. Of course, that reflects on the kinds of worker units society is directed to produce as well, and their alignment with the economy as it actually exists and works.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
If I'd had handheld toys in class as a child, and no one stopped me from using them... ? Think Gameboy, or Sony Watchman w/ MTV. Well, no school subject could have competed with that. Certainly not those that require a bit of work.
- aeblyve 2y ago
  Even if this is true, the condition can go as far back as your childhood as well. When it is clear that the organism should be doing something, it does it. If it is somehow not clear, it is likely just not necessary. A significant confounding factor is the lack of awareness of the productive forces. The average suburban school kid has relatively little idea of how the world works and what workers actually do, and why, in part due to a culture of corporate secrecy. "No phones in school" can be a stopgap but really produces a dead end arms-race situation, even if it worked for a time. The only solution is to make school genuinely interesting and relevant. Until institutionalized education is no longer interesting and relevant on the face of it.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    Yep, one of my favorite tradesmen is Larry Haun. He started carrying tools for carpenters for pay as a young kid -- which today would be illegal. Imagine being in school and learning math and science in the context of how it tied into building a house . Suddenly the majority of it is useful. Perhaps the problem is in part kids aren't economically 'exploited' enough so they have basically nill solidifying the utility of their schooling.
    - 2y ago

kurofune 2y ago

I live in a country where almost no one under 35 is able to purchase a house, no matter how educated you are. We live to pay the rent, the system is broken and we all know it, so we don't need to toil anymore; there is no incentive. As simple as that.

ty6853 2y ago
Buy a small parcel of land and park a trailer on it or build something expedient. My house cost like 20% of almost anyone else in my area by just doing it myself without any code inspections. All it takes is courage to bypass the conventional system, society was wrong and I won by calling bullshit.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  What about utilities? Unlimited electricity, fresh water, sewer?
  - ty6853 2y ago
    Generator, a cistern, and a diy septic system will get you started
    - mharig 2y ago
      [dead]
- waweic 2y ago
  I don't think there is any place in the Schengen area (and I have a hunch that parent lives there) where this isn't absolutely illegal. At least in Germany, if you just buy a small parcel of land (and even that is really expensive), and "build something expedient", you won't be able to register that address with the government (which you are, by the way, legally required to, even if you're homeless). The local government will find hundreds of reasons, why your expedient building is not up to code (besides fire safety, which would be enough reasons in itself) and has to be torn down. But of course they don't have to, because you didn't even apply to get permission to build something (which is mandatory here), it wouldn't be granted anyways, because you bought a cheap parcel of land and those are outside the areas where permission to build something can even be granted. Of course people still do it. But the threat that you might be forced to tear down your home at any moment just to be homeless really is not that much fun. Edit: Oh, and a parked trailer is a building as well, of course. Just that tearing it down is a lot easier

protocolture 2y ago

Complaining about students is just as much of a crutch as parents using iPads as childcare. Things (gasp) change. Teachers should be looking for funding to keep up with changes, not shitting on kids. If you dont like the kids, get out of education. Honestly, its very likely that the vast majority of your curriculum is simply not useful or relevant to them, they have no interest or connection with you, and you have made no effort to engage them.

protocolture 2y ago
[flagged]

extension 2y ago

> kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself. > incarcerated students really want to learn They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated. > children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse. > And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college. Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.

kulahan 2y ago
The ability to cope with boredom is an essential skill, and boredom is a necessary aspect of life. Great ideas come from boredom. Great questions do too. Boredom is not the problem, attention spans are. Not to mention, who actually cares? Not every aspect of learning is going to be fun. Sometimes you have to sit down and memorize times tables, or read about an important historical event you just have zero passion for. That’s okay. As for the screen-time, it’s not about having enough hours in the day, it’s about the concerns regarding what this is doing to kids. Losing out on interaction with your parents because they throw the iPad at you when they’re tired of parenting is probably affecting kids in some unknown way. If it were just an hour a day, probably nobody would be complaining about it. As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  >As for kids thinking college or grades somehow obstruct their future… I have no idea how you overcome such ignorance. I’m actually at a loss for that one. It's pretty evident at this point. A degree has gone from something you get if you are genuinely interested in further learning and a career in that area to an absolute must-have if you don't want to be stuck in dead-end low-paying jobs. So yeah, the process is being seen as a gatekeeper to a successful adulthood as opposed to an opportunity, because while for some kids it may still be the latter, for all kids it is most definitely the former (and one that's likely to saddle them with a lot of debt in the process).

jmye 2y ago

> There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example. This seems wildly naive. Everyone working at Meta knows that the sum total of their work is giving teen girls depression more efficiently. They don’t care or they’ve made excuses or they’ve made up a story about how that’s not really what they’re working on - that’s those other people, their work is different.

thunderfork 2y ago
[dead]
lapcat 2y ago
Also: > Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles. The children of tech workers and tech leaders are not harmed as much by their products.

ern 2y ago

I remember watching hours of TV as a child in the 80s. I remember my cousins, born in the 90s staring like zombies at Cartoon Network when they were toddlers. We're all reasonably functional adults (most high achievers academically, and holding down well-paid jobs, with families). We also had huge amounts of screen time playing games, mostly on PCs. If screens per-se are the problem, we'd have seen the same issues manifesting decades ago. I think phones are the issue, rather than screens, specifically social media and notifications in particular. Someone suggested turning notifications off for social media, and it was a big change in my life, and something I've urged my own children to do as well.

lapcat 2y ago
It's an interesting question. If I were to speculate, I think the difference is the sheer volume of choices available now. When I was a kid, the choices were very limited. There were only 3 TV networks, and TV shows were on a fixed schedule, so you couldn't watch whatever you liked whenever you liked. Often, there was absolutely nothing good on. Moreover, watching a TV show required at least some degree of attention span: 30 or 60 minutes on one TV show. You couldn't scroll through an endless stream of 30 or 60 second videos. As for video games, we couldn't download them from the internet. We had a very limited number of physical game cartridges. So yes, you could spend hours playing a video game, but that again required a level of focus and attention, and you were stuck with the few games you had at home. Given the limited number of choices available to kids at the time, it was much easier to get bored with those choices, as the article mentions: "the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever".
- flakeoil 2y ago
  And add to that, the phone is with you all the time. A TV or video game was fixed to one place.
  - fransje26 2y ago
    And we did go out to play.

johntitorjr 2y ago

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OutOfHere 2y ago

The article is just someone trying to save their job as an educator. I invite the author to count the percentage of people or students looking at their phone screen while crossing the road. That's the percent that need saving. The rest are fine.

prawn 2y ago
What are you suggesting that percentage is? I've been in many situations where it's well above 50%.

jmward01 2y ago

As a society, or I guess even as a species, we need to figure out how to deal with digital drugs, fast. I mean it, they are drugs. That doesn't mean ban them, but getting serious about understanding how to integrate them safely into our lives is important. Just like the chemical versions, digital drugs come in different potencies and with different effects and we need to think about classifying them as such. FB, Fox, HN, you name it. What is a 'safe' experience? How do we introduce our kids to them or how do we keep them away if it is too harmful? These are not easy questions for sure.

Root_Denied 2y ago
It's a good analogy, one that I think also applies to other things that really are "drugs" that people don't normally associate with the word: alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, fast food, and sugar.
- jackphilson 2y ago
  I think a way to maintain agency as well as avoiding overly restrictive regulations is an AI 'guardian' app that uses coherent extrapolated volition to nudge you toward your ideal self. Blocking sites, pushing productive content (aligned with what you deem productive of course). You can't stop digital drugs from being made, you can only stop yourself from accessing them. And you must find ways to do that for you and the people you care about. AI guardian aligned with your best interests would make this a lot easier.

csomar 2y ago

> The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class! A bit concerned about the hyper-stimulation but this actually gives me a lot of hope and I think it'll be worth it. What the teachers are concerned about here is their pathetic institution of teaching which has not revolutionized with the time. It's amazing (is that the right word?) that the teacher is annoyed by his students "cheating" on the test but they don't see the fallacy of determining one's trajectory through a single point (1 hour exam). The system is pathetic and hopefully the new generation is smarter, sees it for what it is, spends its time on screen/video games and let these bureaucrats infinitely scratch their heads. > And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college. This made my day...

chrisco255 2y ago
I'm sorry what? Exams aren't a fallacy, they're the only way to actually test someone's knowledge. There is no replacement for that. If you let students cheat on exams they will never learn anything.
- sethammons 2y ago
  A traditional school exam is not the only way to test knowledge. Project work, for example. At work, your knowledge is tested by the output you produce.
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    Project work is even easier to cheat on than exams.
    - sethammons 2y ago
      You cheat at delivering projects at work?

brianhama 2y ago

This is just the latest episode of “Blame the Tech” for why kids supposedly suck now. Telephones, rock music, comic books, TV, video games—every generation has its boogeyman. Now it’s smartphones. Honestly, I’m more curious what’s gonna freak everyone out next, but I’m definitely not losing sleep over “the kids.”

raxxorraxor 2y ago
True to a degree, although I know from myself that if I had something resembling a computer in class, the result of my education would probably be different. I believe there to be a difference between slide rule/calculator - calculator/smart phone that cannot be generalized.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  This is a great point. To me, calculators are very rarely entertaining. A smart phone is mostly a device to deliver ads and entertainment, and allow communication.
willdr 2y ago
That's a useful strawman for this issue, but you know as well as I do that none of those bogeymans were anywhere near as transformative as the smartphone. They were not networked, they were static, and they had limits (eg. TVs limited programming). They are incomparable to a never-ending firehose of stimulus, algorithmically engineered to be appealing to your personality and optimised for "engagement" (read: more screen time).
lapcat 2y ago
What do you make of the charts that show a marked increase is "Difficulty thinking or concentrating" and "Trouble learning new things"?
- bloppe 2y ago
  I reckon I'll just join an anti-phone cult. Idk why everyone's freaking out.

hoseja 2y ago

Seems like it's clear to children that "education" has become nothing more than empty credential sold by a corrupt system. And of course the author likes criminals more.

dns_snek 2y ago
Education might be poor but that's not the reason they're disengaging. No, they're addicted to their digital cocaine. Nothing, not even video games (and certainly not education of any kind) can compete with the perfectly engineered dopamine delivery system found in these apps.

chromanoid 2y ago

I think China is on the right track here. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ While I don't like the privacy implications, I like the screen time limits China establishes. Social media and internet must be treated with much care. It's like a candy store open 24/7 - completely free and always within reach. Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like. The Internet has changed since I was a kid browsing through GeoCities webrings and the Yahoo Directory while searching with AltaVista. Generations of technology enthusiasts have to acknowledge that the internet of the past is no more and cannot be brought to our children as such. The temptations we faced then were nothing compared to what children today have to resist. Just as many countries regulate advertisements aimed at minors, we need to start regulating screen time for kids - before they get pulled into the vortex of influencers and endlessly accessible, mentally corrosive entertainment.

fergie 2y ago
It turns out that industry regulation can actually be a good thing sometimes.
- prox 2y ago
  There’s nothing wrong with moderation in moderation.
- Alwaysyeshere 2y ago
  Always not sometimes. Lead in fuel Normal product warranty ingridient list The industry has few selfregularly motivations to regulate itself. If they do, they do it after customer complains and others stealing there thunder but than i t would be too late for a few
  - dathinab 2y ago
    > Always not sometimes. always if objectively non lobby-corrupt thought throught if regulation is to much captured by lobby-corruption or ignore facts because of ideology thinking(:1) it can be very bad, then you can for example easily end up with what I like to call "red hearing regulation". A regulation which doesn't fix the problem at all but if you are naive looks like it might and prevent any further regulations from being done because it's already there. Or you can end up with monopoly-like companies cutting of access to markets for competition. --- (:1) to be clear I mean the innocent interpretation of that phrase, not the one a lot of right wing propaganda in many countries is using regular where it often means "take this out of context potentially outright lying statements and treat them as obvious facts while claiming all other facts are ideologist driven fake news and then complain why no one want to have fact based discussions with you anymore"

seydor 2y ago

It's about time for Education to adapt to the new generations

__loam 2y ago
Watching people in the tech industry make proclamations like this is like watching a Crack dealer tell teachers how to do their jobs.
- fransje26 2y ago
  For the time being, the crack dealers are hacking through the US government instances..

CrLf 2y ago

Nothing to worry about. They don't need to learn anything anyway. Anything they would do in the future will be done by agentic AI, and generative AI will produce all the content they could possibly consume. They will be free to spend all day on their phones.

thrance 2y ago

Teachers are severly underpaid, classrooms are overcrowded, many parents believe teachers are out to indoctrinate their kids into transhood or whatever other conspiracy the right currently fancies. Republicans have been attacking public schooling for 50 years, they hate the idea of providing fair eduction. Democrats have been doing nothing to fight this. Here are the results. You can, and probably should, ban phones from school, but that won't fix that cult of ignorance [1] dictating every policy made on education. [1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

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MrMcCall 2y ago

Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating. Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers. Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy. The question is, "Why?" First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others. Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car). We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent. And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight. My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit. The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them. I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot. My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations". They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect. They have NEVER -- and I mean NEVER -- had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves. So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about. Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake. "There's still time to change the road you're on." --Stairway to Heaven And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied, "She fucked him before she fucked him." I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.

iainctduncan 2y ago

This is really happening. I like taking courses, so I've been doing part time university studies (now into a PhD) for about 15 years now. I'm 50, so I remember uni before the internet was even really a big thing. The drop in engagement in students is shocking. I take some combined undergrad/grad level courses in my PhD program, and half the time I'm the only one, in a class of like 100, who says anything. And then so many do homework with ChatGPT and have no actual understanding. I shudder thinking what managing theses people will be like. I've heard from someone who is managing recent grads that it's awful. Obviously these are generalizations, not everyone is like that, etc. But this is a real problem. Pretending it's just old people not like change is sweeping it under the carpet. Tech has (deliberately) gotten more and more addictive and it's badly screwing people up.

rfwhyte 2y ago

Personally I think the phones, social media, dopamine addiction, etc. are all symptoms, not the systemic rot at the root of things here. Young people today simply realize, either consciously, or subconsciously, that they live in a broken world and are being forced against their will to play a rigged game they cannot win. Distraction and apathy are the only logical reactions to world that exclusively measures a person's value in monetary terms and does not give a single fuck about them beyond whatever "Value" they can create for soulless corporations their self-serving, narcissistic billionaire owners. Sure they could buckle down, study hard, get into a good college and work 60-80 hours a week for the rest of their lives, but even if they did all that they're still not guaranteed a decent life. They're not guaranteed to own a home, drive a nice car, take an annual vacation, or put away money for retirement. They're not even guaranteed a roof over their heads and meal on the table. The social contract that underwrites the entire western world has been fundamentally altered, as where once studying hard and doing all the things you're "Supposed to do" as a young person could at least guarantee you a pretty decent life, young people today have no guarantee of a better future whatsoever regardless of how hard they work or how talented they might be. This is an odd metaphor, but it just popped it my head so I'm going to try it out. It's like for generations there's been a boat and a dock. The young people while away their days on the dock, swimming and fishing for minnows and the adults take the boat out each day (generation) and return with a fish. Each day (generation) the fish the adults have come back with has gotten bigger and bigger, and so the youngsters would get excited that when it was their turn to go out fishing they might catch an even bigger fish. The last couple days (generations) the adults have come how with fish that were the same size as the day (generation) before or maybe even a little smaller, but the kids didn't think to much of it and were still excited to get out fishing and catch their own fish. This most recent generation the adults came back with the smallest fish yet, and oh, by, the way, the boat has a leak and is sinking and its also on fire. We're basically wondering why the kids aren't excited to go fishing when we're giving them a sinking boat that's also on fire. Of course they'd rather splash around in the shallows and fish for minnows when the best alternative we're giving them is a sinking ship.

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