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The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothe

The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had to choose id start with social media, smart phones, tablets, etc. Technoloy needs to be seen as a tool and a resource, not primarily as the brainwashing entertainment that it is, and brainwashing them with entertainment is how most people introduce tech to their kids.

captainkrtek 1y ago
Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.
- timacles 1y ago
  One day we will look at social media, end less scrolling algos, 5 second clips as we do at cigarettes. It might not be causing cancer, but there is going to be a generation of people lacking emotional regulation because their dopamine circuits have been fried since they were 3 years old
AlwaysRock 1y ago
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.
- hungmung 1y ago
  The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - gdulli 1y ago
      Moe: Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!
    - Belopolye 1y ago
      You mean to tell me the dirt ISN'T magic?
barrenko 1y ago
Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end. If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.
jf22 1y ago
Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?" This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.
- jihadjihad 1y ago
  Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches. Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers. What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
  - bad_haircut72 1y ago
    Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
    - yepitwas 1y ago
      It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours. Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
  - yepitwas 1y ago
    If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something. I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care. Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.
Scubabear68 1y ago
I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending. The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools. Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses). Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues. Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.
- giantg2 1y ago
  They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.
- brewtide 1y ago
  > more School Bullshit System as a Service I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis. I hate it.
- verteu 1y ago
  Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education. The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
  - programjames 1y ago
VirusNewbie 1y ago
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.
- thepryz 1y ago
  I think it’s more a matter of both extremes. I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them. IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.
jimt1234 1y ago
> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind. Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof! So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!
- simpaticoder 1y ago
  >Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
  - titzer 1y ago
    A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.
    - linuxftw 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - simpaticoder 1y ago
      True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.
dotnet00 1y ago
>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.
- vharuck 1y ago
  Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.
julienchastang 1y ago
Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.
- araes 1y ago
  Add a couple thoughts to that general idea: - There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1] [1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_influence_in_reading.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in... - Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature." [2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-917a-4a96-b933-293a20723830/content#page=35 https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91... - The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money. - There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3] [3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compared%20to%202021%2C%20this%20is%20a%200.74%25,unit%20sales%20jumping%20by%2048.2%25%20since%202018. https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa... - You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4] [4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...
bananalychee 1y ago
The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.
- smelendez 1y ago
  I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home. It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd. I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
  - GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
    by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all. not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.
charlie90 1y ago
what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
estimator7292 1y ago
The core problem is actually twofold: 1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because: 2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity. Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial. There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent. America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.
- vondur 1y ago
  Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
  - bsder 1y ago
    > This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility. California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US. That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst. > I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
    - mothballed 1y ago
paulryanrogers 1y ago
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. No? Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids. They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table. Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives. Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime. Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.
- dmix 1y ago
  People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one. Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently. Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
  - moduspol 1y ago
    I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.
    - dmix 1y ago
      Nothing wrong with a bit of social control if you’re doing it in a controlled measurable way. As long as you’re not just treating it like a boogieman while ignoring how schools are simultaneously becoming less motivating places to learn. Bore a kid to death by not challenging them or holding them accountable then they will 100% default to their phone to escape the tedium.
straydusk 1y ago
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. What universe do you live in
giantg2 1y ago
I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing. Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.
k2enemy 1y ago
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom. Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing. We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
- ghostpepper 1y ago
  do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?
  - braincat31415 1y ago
    Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.
  - itake 1y ago
    > Seattle Public Schools cancels gifted program 'cohorts' for equity reasons https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-program https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...
    - mystraline 1y ago
      Then I think its time for an IEP to be formed for each of those students, for "special education". Sure, "special education" has traditionally meant slow, retarded, nonverbal, etc. We all know that euphemism. "Short bus". It always represents basically warehousing the bottom 10% of public education students where they cant affect the majority. But 'gifted students' also require special education. Its not normal, for reasons of academic rigor. And they are way past the curriculum of the middle 67% of the distribution. So, the answer is to demand an IEP. It is also a legal document, which outlines scholastic rights to the student, and holds these districts strongly accountable. And, at least for now, gets more federal funding to 'special education'.
lumost 1y ago
It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours. The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.
programjames 1y ago
I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.
Aurornis 1y ago
> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state. The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.
marcusverus 1y ago
Public school is a joke. My 5 year old started kindergarten recently. They're currently learning shapes, which she (and every other child I've encountered) knew when she was two years old. Meanwhile at home, she's already reading. She's at the hard part, when reading is so slow that it's painfully boring. It's still too slow for the entertainment value to justify the work, so she's not hooked yet. We spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, and I suspect she'll be over the hump in 3-6 months. Public school would have taken another two years to get her there, even though they get her for 7 hours per day. The one-size-fits-all model of education is a blight on our civilization.

captainkrtek 1y ago

Not to be too pessimistic, but it feels like this is impossible given how hyper-optimized our devices are to retain our attention. They’re beyond “tools” now and profits of countless companies are tied to our fixation on our phones.

timacles 1y ago
One day we will look at social media, end less scrolling algos, 5 second clips as we do at cigarettes. It might not be causing cancer, but there is going to be a generation of people lacking emotional regulation because their dopamine circuits have been fried since they were 3 years old

AlwaysRock 1y ago

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort The point is that students are doing worse, even though ^ is likely true today just like it was true 5, 10, and 20 years ago.

hungmung 1y ago
The generation raised by iPads are in HS now and American IQ tests scores are in decline, especially in the last 10-15 years.
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - gdulli 1y ago
    Moe: Immigants! I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!
  - Belopolye 1y ago
    You mean to tell me the dirt ISN'T magic?

barrenko 1y ago

Yes, and it's quadratically worse for the people that are on the lowest end. If I was born recently, I'd be just one of the kids that get stuck with a screen from day 0. There's no recovering from that.

jf22 1y ago

Is there any study or evidence supports that MOST parents "watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort?" This is a common trope but I've never seen any evidence.

jihadjihad 1y ago
Go to any park/playground sometime and observe the benches. Go to any sports field/venue and observe the bleachers. What you find may astound you, even if the percentage isn't literally 50%+.
- bad_haircut72 1y ago
  Taking your kid to a playground is a parents chance to get a break! Everyone judges parents constantly and blames them for everything, parents in general are doing their best.
  - yepitwas 1y ago
    It's legit kind-of great, because you can't be doing much productive, so the dozen things you should be doing (most of them due to kids...) if you were at home are out the window. You can just chill for a long stretch of time, without concern. Taking your kids to the park or whatever is awesome, it's one of the best breaks a parent gets during daylight hours. Or you can knock out some schedule stuff or teacher-emailing or bill-paying or whatever that you'd otherwise have to cram in some other time, that's nice too.
- yepitwas 1y ago
  If I'm in those situations and staring at my phone, it's because I forgot to bring a book. Staring into the middle distance while my kid sits on the bench for fifteen minutes and a bunch of kids I don't know ineptly play soccer, or closely watching my 500th hour of kids playing "tag", is a last resort. Hell sometimes I'll just start trying to find weird bugs or something. I do also play with them, but I'm not one of the parents who's always playing with them any time they're playing, they also need space to figure their own stuff out. Adults can do other things a lot of the time, it's fine.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

I think the root of the problem is that education is no longer seen as a fundamental foundation to a better life. Kids aren't doing well because kids don't care. They don't care because their parents don't care. Why don't they care? I think for many, they have given up any hope that a better life is possible. So education isn't the key, because nothing is the key, because the door doesn't even exist.

Scubabear68 1y ago

I live in the US in New Jersey, and here a big problem was the State flooded school districts with money during Covid with no material oversight of its spending. The end result was huge increases in spending. But not on education. The money was spent on more MacBooks, more iPads, more buildings, more smart TVs, more consultants, more School Bullshit System as a Service, more scoreboards, more $50,000 signs in front of schools. Meanwhile the good teachers are fleeing the system and test scores are plummeting as schools focus more on day care and “social justice”, and a declining emphasis on teaching core subjects and learning in general, coupled with social promotion where everybody gets a C or higher, and 80% of the school gets on the honor roll (spoiler alert: our district is not some outlier where 80% of the kids are geniuses). Schools have very little to do with teaching, and really are just about baby sitting and trying to correct social issues. Oh, and endless buckets of tax payer money with meaningless oversight.

giantg2 1y ago
They do a pretty poor job at babysitting too. They do very little to create a calm and disciplined environment.
brewtide 1y ago
> more School Bullshit System as a Service I fully hear you on this. I miss the days where a simple phone call or email communication would occur when needed. Now it's a deluge of daily updates via 2 separate 'apps' for 2 different schools, and a requirement to login to 'app' or website to read the 'email' that they've sent out. Nevermind contacting someone that isn't directly associated with your child at the school -- Guess that's all need to know basis. I hate it.
verteu 1y ago
Hard to conclude much from this, given New Jersey is consistently rated one of the top 2 states in the nation for K-12 education. The lesson may even be the opposite: "If your school's biggest problem is 'too much money', outcomes will be pretty good."
- programjames 1y ago

VirusNewbie 1y ago

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort Citation? I've routinely seen statistics suggesting the opposite, that parents are moreI involved with their children in the modern time and more likely to play and engage with children.

thepryz 1y ago
I think it’s more a matter of both extremes. I’ve seen stay at home parents who put their kids in daycare so they can spend the day shopping and effectively have someone else raise their kids. Their kids end up largely just being status symbols. I’ve also seen parents that go everywhere with their kids, schedule every moment of their day and won’t even let them stand at the school bus stop by themselves. The parents build their entire lives around their kids and live vicariously through them. IMO, kids need a proper balance and I don’t think a lot of them are getting that.

jimt1234 1y ago

> The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. I resisted that narrative for years, thinking it was just a media-hyped scare tactic to get clicks. However, my niece started high school a few weeks ago (in mid-August, which is weird to me); her experience blew my mind. Her new high school is considered one of the better public high schools in the area. When I asked her how it was going, did she like being a high-schooler, I was expecting her to complain about the course load or something like that. However, she told me that after 2 weeks, they haven't spent one minute on actual education. She said they've been going over rules and policies for 2 weeks. Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray (they have a room dedicated to prayer), etc. Best/worst of all, they did an entire day on active shooter drills - the windows are now bullet-proof! So yeah, unfortunately, I'm fully onboard with this narrative now. While kids in Taiwan and Japan are learning calc, kids in the US are doing active shooter drills and staring at the Ten Commandments. USA! USA! USA!

simpaticoder 1y ago
>Things like no bullying, inclusiveness, fire safety, bring your own water bottle, how to pray When great controversy surrounds the curriculum, the safest thing to teach is nothing at all.
- titzer 1y ago
  A lot of controversy is fabricated willfully by ideologues who believe absolutely batshit insane things.
  - linuxftw 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - simpaticoder 1y ago
    True enough, but that has always been true. Something has changed on the institutional side such that it is no longer willing and/or able to simply reject batshit insanity and continue teaching children such that they are as well informed or better informed and capable as the last generation. What results is a positive feedback loop where a poorly educated public puts increasing pressure on an institution who's members are themselves poorly educated. The result is paralysis, and eventually, societal death.

dotnet00 1y ago

>Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort This lazy "answer" to every parenting problem makes me roll my eyes nowadays. It's the equivalent of an umbrella hypothesis, a convenient excuse for not having to consider things in-depth, further justified by seeing parents when they are taking a break and assuming they're always like that.

vharuck 1y ago
Not only that, but it's a dead end for societal policy. Even if a person actually believed parents deserve the most blame for kids' educational outcomes, that person should recognize there's no real way to influence this (short of dystopic levels of forcing kids into foster care). They would then find the second most blame-worthy cause to fix.

julienchastang 1y ago

Parent here with school-aged kids. I think this sub-thread blaming the parents is particularly depressing and not founded in reality. Here is the way I see it. The social media companies with quasi infinite resources have won. They hired the best and the brightest engineers to hack our minds and steal our attention and they have succeeded beyond expectations. As evidence look that the market capitalization of Meta, etc. The data showing that children are reading way less compared to when I was growing up is consistent with what I see, but I did not an infinite ocean of distractions available via device that has become indispensable for modern living (i.e., the smart phone). By the time I was thirteen, I had read the Lord of the Rings to completion, but if I had grown up in present times I doubt that would be the case.

araes 1y ago
Add a couple thoughts to that general idea: - There's also a reward issue, in that reading, especially long form is "soft punished." It's not directly punished, yet there's very little reward, mostly a lot of struggle, not much of the candy feedback of TV, movies, and video games. It requires personal imagination and visualization of often difficult concepts rather than simply taking what someone else has "imagined correctly" for you. If you've never seen the Lord of the Rings movies, imaging what Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest are actually doing, where they're going, and the struggling through Tolkien's complicated prose is quite challenging. And socially, there's also significant peer pressure issues involved, that evoke “epidemic” or “contagion” comparisons. Once large numbers of peers discount reading, then the population on average starts receiving negative feedback. Notably, if peers are high achievers, then students who interact with these peers may also adopt those habits. [1] [1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_influence_in_reading.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jameskim/files/jep-peer_in... - Part that's less nefarious, like a teen highlights about the difficulties of reading in this paper [2] (pg 34.) "You can’t ask a book to explain what it means right now. I go to people because of their interactive nature." [2] https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-917a-4a96-b933-293a20723830/content#page=35 https://alair.ala.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0051cf84-91... - The social media companies and the world wide web culture in general have also implemented a form of reading detriment. There's little reward to blogging, writing, or reading long form writing. Incendiary writing and rage-farming was long ago found to be an extremely effective tactic compared to informative discussion. And a lot of the time, almost all you can look forward to with your informative post is your contribution being aggressively scraped, while being compensated nothing, and then churned out to make someone else money. - There's actually a few positive though, apparently teen and juvenile literature is actually increasing in sales somewhat from [2] compared with adult literature sales. Young adult books have been the fastest-growing category over the last 5 years, with print unit sales jumping by 48.2% since 2018. 35.03 million print copies of young adult (YA) books are sold each year as of 2022. [3] [3] https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compared%20to%202021%2C%20this%20is%20a%200.74%25,unit%20sales%20jumping%20by%2048.2%25%20since%202018. https://wordsrated.com/young-adult-book-sales/#:~:text=Compa... - You may be slightly down biasing how much people read Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit edition from 2007 has 76,000 ratings and 12,000 reviews on Amazon. [4] [4] https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0618968636/re...

bananalychee 1y ago

The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.

smelendez 1y ago
I was thinking about that recently. I don’t anyone ever pulling out a Game Boy in elementary or middle school in the 90s, even though many of us had them at home. It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd. I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  by the time i was in elementary school, it was common enough for geeky kids to have game boys at school. this was the height of the pokemon craze, after all. not in class, of course, but at lunch and on the bus, it was fair game.

charlie90 1y ago

what you are suggesting means that economic activity will decrease. we are a consumerism driven society, we want people looking at screens and watching ads. that's how we grow the economy.

deleted 1y ago

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estimator7292 1y ago

The core problem is actually twofold: 1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because: 2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity. Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial. There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent. America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.

vondur 1y ago
Where my wife works the average salary is over 100K per year, so not bad for 9 months of work. This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation, California politics is heavily influenced by Teachers Unions, and yet we score near the bottom of the entire US.
- bsder 1y ago
  > This is in California where the test scores are some of the worst in the nation. This is an easily disprovable statement that calls into question your credibility. California schools generally score right at or just below the median for the entire US. That doesn't make them good, but they sure aren't the worst. > I would not lean too hard at political party affiliation In the US, it's not hard to look at a map of political party affiliation and a ranking of the worst schools and not notice the correlation.
  - mothballed 1y ago

paulryanrogers 1y ago

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. No? Most of the parents around me are busy each working a full time job and doing their best to raise their kids. They now spend some of their free time reading on the phones instead of a newspaper, magazine, or book. Some listen to books while they mow the lawn, clean the house, or do other chores like laundry. They also hang out a mix of kids and parents nearby, both inside and out, in front of bonfires and kitchen tables. RN I'm commenting on HN while my kids and neighbor kids turn dinner into an imaginary cooking show at the table. Parents around here are also often tending to elderly parents or physically/mentally challenged relatives. Too few can afford to have one parent stay home fulltime. Of course there have always been parents neglecting their kids to do anything else: bowling, drinking, partying, traveling, tinkering, obsessively reading, etc. The fact that more activities are behind screens isn't the catch all explanation it's often promoted to be.

dmix 1y ago
People always want to blame the new thing in culture. Some collective sin if only we had better self control. Every generation has one. Usually it’s just institutional failure at multiple levels and a whole bunch of people who don’t care about the institution’s output sufficiently. Every time I read about new education stories they’re busy trying to solve wider social issues instead of being the best place to get an education. Just like how libraries turned into homeless shelters instead of being a place for the community to learn and read.
- moduspol 1y ago
  I agree, but it’s tough to see the studies showing average daily screen time of different age groups and not see that as a pretty obvious contributor.
  - dmix 1y ago
    Nothing wrong with a bit of social control if you’re doing it in a controlled measurable way. As long as you’re not just treating it like a boogieman while ignoring how schools are simultaneously becoming less motivating places to learn. Bore a kid to death by not challenging them or holding them accountable then they will 100% default to their phone to escape the tedium.

straydusk 1y ago

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. What universe do you live in

giantg2 1y ago

I generally agree. However, I don't think most parents are neglectful for using a screen. The ones that can't be bothered would just be drinking, reading gossip magazines, going to bars, or whatever else they felt like if screens simply stopped existing. Admittedly my kids get more screen time than I'd like, but we try to make it educational. An observation that I made that is on topic for this thread, is that there are very few modern US shows that seem to fit our criteria of being educational and not over-stimularing. It seemes there are many more international shows that are better.

k2enemy 1y ago

Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom. Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing. We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!

ghostpepper 1y ago
do you live in Canada or is this happening elsewhere?
- braincat31415 1y ago
  Chicago for example. Look up recent action on magnet schools.
- itake 1y ago
  > Seattle Public Schools cancels gifted program 'cohorts' for equity reasons https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-program https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/sps-highly-capable-cohort-...
  - mystraline 1y ago
    Then I think its time for an IEP to be formed for each of those students, for "special education". Sure, "special education" has traditionally meant slow, retarded, nonverbal, etc. We all know that euphemism. "Short bus". It always represents basically warehousing the bottom 10% of public education students where they cant affect the majority. But 'gifted students' also require special education. Its not normal, for reasons of academic rigor. And they are way past the curriculum of the middle 67% of the distribution. So, the answer is to demand an IEP. It is also a legal document, which outlines scholastic rights to the student, and holds these districts strongly accountable. And, at least for now, gets more federal funding to 'special education'.

lumost 1y ago

It’s a function of time. For far too many people, the existence of modern life consumes more time than it did a generation ago. We work more hours, we work harder hours, we consume entertainment for more hours. The costs of this societal shift fall on those who can’t compete for time. Student’s go unparented and unmentioned.

programjames 1y ago

I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.

Aurornis 1y ago

> Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. You must live in a very sad place. This does not describe the average parent of any of the kids around me. I know these people exist, but it’s not the norm at least in my state. The most common complaint among my teacher friends is about helicopter parents who are too involved.

marcusverus 1y ago

Public school is a joke. My 5 year old started kindergarten recently. They're currently learning shapes, which she (and every other child I've encountered) knew when she was two years old. Meanwhile at home, she's already reading. She's at the hard part, when reading is so slow that it's painfully boring. It's still too slow for the entertainment value to justify the work, so she's not hooked yet. We spend 5-10 minutes a day on it, and I suspect she'll be over the hump in 3-6 months. Public school would have taken another two years to get her there, even though they get her for 7 hours per day. The one-size-fits-all model of education is a blight on our civilization.