America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy
299 comments
·October 14, 2025nostrademons
orochimaaru
>>>If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
It sort of is already. The segregation of Americans by school district based on what their property taxes are already accomplishes this. Observe the standards to which schools that are wealthier (because of better taxes) vs schools in areas with lower taxes. The parents of the kids in the former are expected to play a more imperative role, the kids are challenged a LOT more. My fourth grader was expected to do at least 3 detailed book reports, each book at least 200 pages per book, including learning to present her findings in a timed manner. They were graded informally on a detailed rubric. They advance kids to higher math grades based on the child’s skill level. So there are 4th graders doing 5th and some exceptional ones 6th grade math.
This contrasts with another school district we were in earlier. Very loving teachers. But they had no space to challenge the kids. Because the teachers had to own the responsibility of getting each kid across the finish line for the grade.
bodiekane
Texas has "Robinhood" rules where property taxes from affluent areas are taken away and given to lower income areas throughout the state, so that the schools have more similar budgets regardless of income level in the area.
They still have drastically different quality of schools and student experiences though, because the kids are coming from very different home environments, parental expectations, cultural norms, etc.
nostrademons
California does too. Parents get around it in all sorts of ways. Donating (and having your employer donate) to a 501(c)3 PTA that then directly funds many of the enrichment activities at the school. Parent volunteers for things like robotics classes. In-kind donations: my kid's teacher let slip that they were running out of paper, my kid shows up to class the next day with 2 reams. After-school enrichment through things like Kumon or RSM. Home tutoring. Study sessions after school.
I'm not sure it'd be desirable (let alone legal) to prevent that, though. The point is to raise up the kids that are doing poorly, not to make the kids doing well also do poorly.
Fade_Dance
Having had direct experience with a system like that, my anecdotal experience was that the affluent school still has more than enough money (anecdotal), while the poorer surrounding school districts were critically underfunded (not quite as anecdotal, newspaper stories from the time, etc).
That's not to say that the program wasn't helping, but the mere existence of such a program isn't enough to equalize that variable. Of course the points you bring up are important factors in education as well.
orochimaaru
I’ve heard teachers often dislike the term good or bad school district. And rightly so. The home environment that kids come from can vary. This makes a “great schools” score (or something equivalent) not a marker of the level of effort the teachers put in but rather a marker for parents to find “better peer groups” and “like minded pta”. Note I’m consciously avoiding the discussion of race here. Because in most suburban cases the good/bad doesn’t depend on race but more on income. This will obviously change if you look at urban districts.
aswanson
This isn't only reflected in educational standards. I've seen a ton more restrictions in traffic and speed limits in more affluent areas, and higher/less blatant enforcement in poorer areas, even when the poorer areas are more populated with children.
greygoo222
If you read the article, you'll know that the affluent kids never saw a decrease in performance begin with. The top 10% performed just as well as always.
coliveira
The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.
nostrademons
Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well:
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.
My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
jihadjihad
> It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading.
A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime.
The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."
isodev
> it’s also kids in elementary school
Maybe it’s because their parents are spending more time on screens (… and probably working due to the stagnation of wage vs. prices) instead of reading to/teaching their kids
jihadjihad
I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app restrictions. It's about setting the right example and providing an environment where reading a book is as stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game every once in a while on an iPad.
It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
aeternum
The screens thing is a diversion.
The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students.
Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.
coliveira
> the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children
You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least adults already learned how to read, so this is not something that will stop their development during their critical formative years.
noosphr
I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like war and peace.
pixl97
I mean I'm sure you disable most pop-ups and notifications on your phone too. The problem is most people don't and every type of distraction is vying for their attention every moment they are on that screen.
qqtt
I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to.
The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy.
Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets.
So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school.
As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better.
Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
rpcope1
I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education, it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require two people working full time to be able to afford a home and have kids, and we need to push against the various forces that have driven us to that.
sixtyj
This. People skim, they don’t read.
Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app (of the brain and attention).
renewiltord
That can't be true because the Mentava and Alpha School kids use screens for instruction and they're doing well from parental reports.
ribosometronome
>It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
Is there proof the affluent ever were suffering? From the article we're discussing:
>Across grades and subjects, the NAEP results show that the top tenth of students are doing roughly as well as they always have, whereas those at the bottom are doing worse.
nostrademons
The low-income story gets most of the airtime because most people are not interested in reading about how rich people are struggling, but there was also a significant decline in affluent districts as well. See eg. this Boston Globe article about how even the top districts in the state (which itself is historically the top in the country) are using poor instructional methods:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/10/metro/reading-skills-...
I grew up near most of these districts, and and my mom taught in one of them. I was shocked at how low MCAS Reading scores have fallen. I was the first class to take them; it's not a hard test, and it's reportedly gotten even easier in the 30 years since I took it. And yet 30% of students in affluent districts can't pass them.
Also we encountered this personally when hiring a babysitter for our kids. She was a college junior, grew up in an adjacent city with $2.5M average house prices, was otherwise great with the kids. She struggled to get through The Lorax - my kindergartner could read it better than her.
ribosometronome
I'm still not sure that article supports that rich people are struggling. My take away is that the core point of the article is the achievement gap between rich and poor students, especially in affluent schools. It kind of drives home that the rich kids aren't struggling, really.
>Although the kids who are lagging come from all backgrounds, they are disproportionately Black or Latino, live in a low-income household, are not native English speakers, or have a disability.
The "Income and Disability Achievement Gaps" graphs seems to show a higher percentage of non-income disadvantage / disabled students are meeting or exceeding expectations in the wealthy districts than statewide.
throwaway314155
> It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids.
America is not solely made up of affluent kids.
null
tayo42
>middle class has largely stopped having kids,
Anecdotal I guess but I feel like I'm seeing alot of people having kids suddenly.
dfxm12
If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.
When you look at the conservative attack on public education, the prison industrial complex, et al., it really seems that this is the intention.
9cb14c1ec0
Oh yes, the public education that has done such a wonderful job. God forbid parents had better options. /s
ribosometronome
The article, and presumably this discussion, is specifically about a recent decline, e.g. the largely public school system doing a worse job than it used to. It should obviously be worth thinking about the reasons, including things like the attacks on schools.
tyleo
This was on HN a few weeks ago and provides a similar take: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choi...
It has examples of states which are seeing some improvements. Those states seem to be addressing one of the main problems this article highlights: they hold students to expectations and prevent them from advancing grades if they don’t meet the bar.
TheOtherHobbes
"A clear policy story is behind these improvements: imposing high standards while also giving schools the resources they needed to meet them."
Resources doesn't mean iPads and software subscriptions, it means teachers. Good teachers.
There's been a catastrophic collapse in numbers in the profession, and many of the leavers are at the more talented end. They're the ones who have the skills and quals to get better jobs elsewhere.
There's no point "raising expectations" unless you provide the resources to change what's possible.
Individually, students have the least agency in the entire system. They're at the mercy of parents, school boards, and administrators who may be actively hostile to the very idea of a broad liberal education, of corporate opportunists who are trying to sell unproven study aids of all kinds, and of the disapproval of their peer culture.
The one thing that can cut through this - sometimes - is inspiration and motivation from educators.
zozbot234
The proper job of teachers is to provide far more than simple "inspiration and motivation", especially to students who are at significant risk of failure. Teachers must be given the skills they need to provide clear and understandable information and direction to these students in the course of their job duties. They should actively educate, not just act as coaches who simply expect their "inspired" students to learn the school curriculum on their own, as with the now-popular "sink or swim" approach.
coliveira
Well, that's a simple way of "solving" the problem: exclude everyone who has the problem you're supposed to fix.
graeme
If you don't exclude people who failed to learn the material then the next year's material has to dumb itself down to account for the people who can't understand it. And conversely the students who didn't understand but went forward often still have some missing factor which means they'll spend 12 years not understanding and falling behind.
Obviously you could make a metric for this and if you're holding back say 50% of students there's probably a problem but a small portion isn't obviously a bad thing. Snark is fun but it isn't analysis.
ianferrel
People being held back a grade aren't being excluded from education, though. They're being educated.
Sending kids who haven't learned to read on to higher grades and having no standards for success is not a more "inclusive" policy than having benchmarks that must be passed.
CobrastanJorji
The top ranked schools figured out long ago that removed students do not count against the scores that make them top ranked schools.
null
WillPostForFood
It doesn't exclude them, it just defers them for a year. Rich kids "red shirt" all the time.
ToucanLoucan
It's not exclusion. If you fail to meet standards, you should be retained for another year for additional time to meet them. That only becomes a "problem" when we treat it like one, usually because of warped institutional incentives or misplaced shame.
We’ve built a system where the performance of teachers and schools is measured by graduation rates, as if every student who doesn’t graduate on time is a failure of instruction. That’s nonsense. Some kids need more time. Some face life circumstances that derail their progress like undiagnosed learning disabilities, unstable home environments, trauma, poverty. There are hundreds, if not thousands of reasons a child might struggle in a given year, and pretending that all of them can be solved by pushing them forward anyway is not accomplishing anything but putting them in academic and later career situations that they are not prepared properly for.
What No Child Left Behind did was make an AWFUL perverse incentive where schools are indirectly ordered to pass every kid at every opportunity lest their already meager budgets get slashed even further. Children are not widgets moving along on an assembly line and we have spent decades now proving this fact.
Terr_
> retained for another year
It strikes me that US K-12 systems don't have a clear architecture to support, er, non-uniform progress. A student either moves to the next grade in all classes, or "repeats" a year. Or perhaps has remedial classes over the summer? Maybe in high-school the concept of "honors" classes becomes available.
Perhaps that represents a conflict between the social goals (keeping cohorts together) versus per-subject educational ones.
someothherguyy
Why have grade levels at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through. Then, in order to advance, you can focus the labor effort toward correcting skill deficits in a dynamic way. This is not possible with how educational institutions are traditionally organized, but it doesn't seem intractable to restructure to support this methodology.
It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.
JumpCrisscross
> Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through
FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress
These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.
cognisent
This is exactly how it is at my husband's high school: no penalties, no consequences, unlimited turning in of work until the end of the quarter. Didn't finish it all and ended up with a D or lower? Doesn't matter, because you can't be held back anyway.
Let's not even get into how kneecapped teachers are in classroom management. A student reported him for pointing at them and touching them when he was never fewer than 3 feet away pointing away from them. The students know they have the power now, and they're definitely not going to be told what to do.
someothherguyy
Right, the nodes of such a skills graph would require standardized evaluation.
To be clear, I am talking about replacing grade levels (K, 1, 2, ..., 12), not graded assessments. I updated my comment to clarify this.
rpcope1
I have a suspicion that you'd wind up with a lot of places that would care even less and with people making it to 18 without ever having advanced at all without some sort of stick ("being held back"), probably impacting the most vulnerable even more.
someothherguyy
That might be a possibility, but from what I've read, retention (the stick) does more harm than good. One of those harms is that students get held back by struggling with one skill, like math, when they are progressing on other skills at a normal pace.
A system like this would address that issue, and could prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.
micromacrofoot
This is a short term fix that may cause long term problems though, kids that are held back are more likely to drop out before graduating
bluGill
Is there any reason to think they would graduate with useful knowledge otherwise? The kids in my day who did poor may have graduated - but they still lacked knowlege and to the diploma was paper...
also those kids who don't pass will hold those who do pass - as the next year teachers waste time teaching what the majority already knows
variadix
When graduating is essentially just aging out, it isn’t really graduating
micromacrofoot
what does "really graduating" even mean in 2025? you're eligible for a slightly less bad minimum wage job?
Jensson
Whats the point of graduating if you can't read?
micromacrofoot
jobs, it's pretty much the driving force of the entire US economy
NoMoreNicksLeft
It's interesting that you'd prefer that they move upwards with their cohort and damage the education of those students too.
mikkupikku
[dead]
rglover
"You'll graduate more competent students with this one simple trick." /s
tyleo
There’s a few other things they do. The link I shared actually provides 3 examples.
I just thought it aligned particularly well with the OP on that specific point.
mindslight
Ugh, 3 simple tricks sounds too hard. I'm not going to read something that long. (/s)
gjsman-1000
[flagged]
JumpCrisscross
> remember when the popular academic consensus was "you can't imprison your way into a safe society."
Who said this?
I thought the argument was always you can’t do this and maintain the high living standards of a modern economy built on the rule of law. It’s essentially a challenge to a society: fuck up enough on security and you lose the fruits and freedoms of a modern state fielding a growing economy.
> more or less saying "you can't just discipline children."
Who said this?
I thought the argument was it inhibits learning in the long run and is not fair to poor kids or something. (We know that’s B.S. now.)
But totally unrelated to El Salvador.
gjsman-1000
Bukele has 91% approval. If that doesn't meet the formal academic definition of people feeling like they are living under the rule of law, then the academic definition was wrong.
Both are related in the sense that they said you can't just discipline people, more or less, with the same spirit of focusing on people's good side, to their detriment. Different application, same principles, same failure.
array_key_first
Red states went from dead last in education to still dead last in education but trending upwards.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
heavyset_go
Safe for whom?
null
empath75
Of course you can imprison your way to a safe society. At the limit, you can just put everyone in prison. Nobody would ever say you can't imprison your way to a safe society. What people actually say is that the consequences of attempting to do that are not worth the trade off. Most people would not want to live in a dictatorial police state even if it is "safe".
watwut
America is already imprisoning more then other countries. Russia puts more people in prison, but that is it.
actionfromafar
Georgia (the country) has Russia beat in the prisoners per capita game.
anon291
Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does. Their sole purpose is to siphon off as much public funding for their members, not to teach children. In fact failing kids justifies more money spent (guys, this is literally in the article as a point where liberal assumptions are being challenged; please read the article before downvoting me at least).
While all this sold a story 'whole word' nonsense was going on in public schools (my mom was a public school teacher), our Catholic school (non union) used a phonics based curriculum. It was the teachers unions circulating misinformation to public school teachers about the efficacy of the 'whole word' method.
EDIT: Because I'm getting downvoted, let's go straight to the source. Here is the California Teacher's association itself highlighting its efforts to ban mandatory phonics-based instruction:
https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
greenie_beans
> Teachers unions are political organizations that lean left. They are never going to want to get behind anything Mississippi does.
Mississippi Association of Educators (a teacher's union that is part of the National Education Association, aka the largest union in the US) supported the efforts to improve the literacy rates.
anon291
MAE is a wholly different beast than teacher's unions in most states. Mississippi does not require teachers to join the union, thus the union needs to compete to attract teachers. Thus, it is incentivized to actually do stuff. Usually, when people say teacher's unions (or at least when I refer to them), I refer to the set up in the most populated states like CA, NY, IL, etc, where it is a requirement for teachers to join the union, regardless of what they think of the union.
I'm fine with employees banding together. What CA and other states do (require teachers to pay dues to the union) is criminal.
Basically, the strength of the union correlates with educational outcomes: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
As of 2006 (a bit dated), only 36% of MS teachers were in the union.
cheschire
What about where MAE[0] got their Republican governor[1] to approve the largest teacher salary increase in state history[2]?
You're painting with an awfully broad brush there.
0: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/our-history
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves
2: https://www.maetoday.org/about-mae/media-center/press-releas...
anon291
I addressed this in another comment. Unlike many states, Mississippi does not require teachers to pay dues to the union (California for example, does). Mississippi has a low rate of teachers union membership as a result (only ~36%). Mississippi has one of the weakest teachers unions in the country.
Because of this, the union has to do what teachers want, rather than vice versa.
I'm speaking from experience with the California Teacher's Association. CA mandates even non-member teachers to pay union dues.
EDIT: Here is an article from the CTA highlighting their efforts to fight phonics-based reading instruction: https://calmatters.org/education/k-12-education/2025/04/read...
Woohoo! teachers unions!!!
legitster
> But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents.
Easy. Parents of young children are on their phones more than ever before. That means less reading and more screen time.
One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home. Kids who are exposed to books and reading at home overwhelmingly out-achieve kids who are not. It starts earlier than people think and the effects are longer lived than people think. School standards have almost nothing to do with it.
greygoo222
> One of the single largest determiners of schooling success is the number of books at home.
This "effect" is the textbook example of correlation != causation. By which I mean, it was literally in my AP Psych textbook in high school.
bodiekane
Except, programs which give free books to children in households without books demonstrably improve reading.
There's a correlation component, but also there absolutely is a causal connection of access to books and parents reading to children.
a1pulley
This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile (in California). Kids are pushed harder to learn things earlier than when I was growing up. For example, nearly all of my kid's classmates could read before they started kindergarten. All could do basic arithmetic. Now that he's in first grade, most can read chapter books and have a grasp of multiplication. My mom pushed me hard to get me ahead of my peers, but I didn't hit those milestones until a year later. The standards and expectations are extremely high now because it's never been harder to get a spot at a top 20 university—perhaps because a top 20 school is the best chance you can get to maintain your living standards.
kulahan
I've not seen anything saying all kids are lacking in important skills these days, but rather they all seem (to me) to imply that we're on the way to an even more-stratified society. Smart kids will be just as educated as smart kids used to be - probably even moreso. Dumb kids will fall further and further behind, and the middle range of "kinda smart at a bunch of stuff" will disappear.
With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
ryandrake
Everything is bifurcating now. Haves are having more and more, and have-nots are having less and less. Middle class jobs are disappearing in favor of a mix of 1. low-wage unskilled/service jobs and 2. "elite" jobs for the upper crust. There used to be a place in society for A, B, C, and D students, but now you're either top-college material or you risk being swept into a growing underclass.
BrenBarn
> With the extreme stratification of wealth follows the stratification of... everything else, really.
That's one reason that the solution to educational inequalities may not lie in education policy at all, but in tax/economic policy. Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else.
JumpCrisscross
> Maybe the most expedient way to improve education outcomes is to just take a large amount of money from wealthy people and give it to everyone else
Given the evidence in the article, wouldn't it make sense to try simply holding students to standards--the thing that caused the last wave of achievement gain--instead of another novel and divisive policy treatment?
JumpCrisscross
> This is (anecdotally) not true for families in the highest income decile
FTA: “High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses.”
drivebyhooting
How are they teaching 4 year olds reading and arithmetic? That wasn’t an option in my affluent area in SoCal. Somehow Chinese and some Russian kids can do it, but mine didn’t. Despite my paying $20k/year per child for preschool.
nostrademons
Same way they used to teach it in 1st grade, but 2 years earlier. There's often more of an emphasis on visuals, manipulatives, and songs too, eg. my kid's kindergarten teacher linked us to this song [1] on the first day, and there's dozens of similar resources on YouTube.
A family friend of ours (retired Tesla engineer) taught his 18 month the alphabet. He did it with a bunch of alphabet puzzles [2] and blocks. My 16mo is showing similar interest, but unfortunately I don't have the time to sit down with him, go over each letter, and explain how they go together. He will grab a book (or 5) off the bookshelf, bring it over to me, and say "Read this", though.
For math - my kid had learned the powers of two up through 4096 by kindergarten through playing Snake-2048. My wife and I started introducing addition and subtraction just in ordinary life - we'd say "Okay, if we have 4 strawberries, and you reserve one each for mommy and daddy, how many do you get to eat?"
Now (age 7) he'll quiz me in the car with seemingly random numbers like "What's 177 * 198?", and it's a good opportunity for me to introduce a bunch of mental math tricks like binomial expansions for multiplying numbers near 50 or 100, or prime factorizations. I'll usually turn the questions back on him too, like "Well, that's 200 * 177 - 2 * 177. What's 2 * 177?" and then he's like "I dunno" and then I'll say "What's 2 * 180?" and he says "360" and then I say "Now subtract 2 * 3" and he says "354" and then I'm like "Okay, if 2 * 177 = 354, what's 200 * 177" and he'll say "35,400" (because he already knows the trick for adding zeros) and then I'll say "Subtract 354" and he'll say "35,046" which is the correct answer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36IBDpTRVNE
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Attmu-Toddlers-Alphabet-Preschoolers-...
gtk40
I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school. This was 25+ years ago.
drivebyhooting
You touch upon an issue near to my heart but I am loathe to utter it: women in workforce is robbing our children and country of a future.
Disagree if you will.
daedrdev
I don't know, but I new a guy who had gotten a 5 in AP calc BC before entering high school. He was understandably depressed
anarticle
My mom taught me math by playing cards with me, and taught me reading by reading me books. It has nothing to do with money. I grew in a house that had a giant hole in the floor, lead paint, and asbestos tiles in North Carolina at that time. My mom is a high school graduate from New Jersey, my parents were late 20s and made barely any money in the 1980s.
Some things you cannot buy for love or money!
JKCalhoun
This is generally true for all professional (white collar) families.
coliveira
Yes, but what is the proportion of the population reaching those standards? High income families are a very small percentage of the US demographics.
nostrademons
Depends where you set the bar, but GP's post explicitly said "Highest income decile", which means 10% by definition.
null
jf
It’s weird, and a little unnerving, to have a line from Anathem by Neil Stephenson immediately come to mind:
“Can you read? And by that I don’t just mean interpreting Logotype…” “No one uses that any more,” said Quin. “You’re talking about the symbols on your underwear that tell you not to use bleach. That sort of thing.”
ashton314
Quin stood up and tossed his long body in a way that made his jacket fly off. He was not a thick-built man but he had muscles from working. He whirled the jacket round to his front and used his thumbs to thrust out a sheaf of tags sewn into the back of the collar. I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler. Below it was a grid of tiny pictures that moved. “Kinagrams. They obsoleted Logotype.”
…
“Why do you suppose it became obsolete, then?” asked Orolo.
“So that the people who brought us Kinagrams could gain market share.”
Orolo frowned and considered this phrase. “That sounds like bulshytt too.”
“So that they could make money.”
“Very well. And how did those people achieve that goal?”
“By making it harder and harder to use Logotype and easier and easier to use Kinagrams.”
“How annoying. Why did the people not rise up in rebellion?”
“Over time we were led to believe that Kinagrams really were better.”
…
“Where were we?” Quin asked, then answered his own question: “You were asking me if I could read, not these, but the frozen letters used to write Orth.” He nodded at my leaf, which was growing dark with just that sort of script.
“Yes.”
“I could if I had to, because my parents made me learn. But I don’t, because I never have to,” said Quin. “My son, now, he’s a different story.”
---------------------------
That section plus Samman's little bit about the "Artificial Inanity" systems that made the internet basically unusable are hitting way too close to home these days.
phendrenad2
> I could see the logo of a company, which I recognized from ten years ago, though they had made it simpler
2008. Stephenson is 10 years ahead of the current discourse, as usual.
ribosometronome
Things have been feeling very Snow Crash and Diamond Age, lately, except I don't think there are any literally underground sex cults that are worthwhile.
mapontosevenths
Similarly, I thought of "A Canticle for Leibowitz." Stephenson is right, of course, but I think that Miller more fully understands that our fall begins not just with the fading of literacy and the rise of ignorance, but also in post modern relativism and the reign of cynicism. If one more otherwise clever person tries to explain to me how there's no such thing as objective truth, I might just scream.
“Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.”
XorNot
Everyone who wants to tell me about objective truth is about to tell me about which group of humans it's okay to persecute in about 2 more sentences.
People making an actual good argument don't front, nor bookend it with a thesis on "the nature of truth".
pixl97
Heh, ya it seems that the term objective truth has been ate by conspiracy theorists and psychos.
I like using the term thermodynamic truth myself. Such as what you would find if you ran time backwards. The problem we humans have is we attempt to put absolute truth on complex statistical systems. They don't realize they outcome they saw once was either random or by a set of circumstances that can't be replicated.
nicwolff
Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis (who wrote The Hustler and The Color of Money, and Queen's Gambit, and The Man Who Fell To Earth – quite an oeuvre!) has long been one of my favorite books and it's been eerie to see how right he was about how eager mankind is to hand over all intellectual labor to the robots.
(The last level 9 robot that hasn't killed itself is now the Dean of NYU, and in the 25th century it hires the first man who has learned to read in 400 years – to translate the title cards in silent films. Hilarity ensues. Well, no, but there is kind of a happy ending.)
jdonaldson
I thought that book was pretty dull, and had a terrible romance subplot. But I do have to say it pops in my head more and more often, just like Idiocracy. Someone should definitely do a movie so the illiterates know what they're missing at least.
shagie
It's a philosophy text with a lot of ideas masquerading as a work of fiction. The closest analogy to it that I can think of is the Symposium... which is a philosophy work that uses a plot and stories to express the ideas. Incidentally, there's a part of Anathem that feels a lot like the Symposium (complete with chatting about philosophy around a table).
Jtsummers
I haven't read that book, but the concept is also in his book The Diamond Age.
Liquix
Mediatronic glyphs on our chopsticks when? Love the way the Nell's vocabulary and disposition evolve as the Primer (or Miranda) teaches her to spell, read, and eventually understand Turing machines via binary and logic gates.
trenchpilgrim
I don't remember that line in Anathem. It seemd pretty clear that the Saecular society at the time of the novel was a literate, 21st century tech level. e.g. there were characters like Samman who was basically a sysadmin.
WolfeReader
It's in the first chapter. The quote you were replying to was in the book, verbatim.
ashton314
They all use Kinagrams—a moving picture script. Very few are literate. Well-off burgers typically can read and write, but lots of the workers and virtually all the slines can't read.
trenchpilgrim
Aren't Kinagrams and Logotype Arban forms of logograms, like Chinese characters or Kanji? I interpreted that as "most extramuros can read and type their daily language, but not the alphabet used for technical writing"
Nasrudith
Weren't the ita basically 'half-concents' essentially? Where the caste, despite being allowed more of the trappings and technological luxuries of the Saecular society, specifically were kept away from the other sciences to handicap them because they couldn't enforce the same asceticism on one whose job it is to maintain the technology.
coliveira
Some young people have started to widely use emoji in personal communications. We may not be far away from a society that partially abolished written language and relies only on images and videos to communicate.
trenchpilgrim
"some young people?" I hardly know anyone who _doesn't_, regardless of education level or age.
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kouru225
What I’m most surprised by is how visually illiterate the older generations seem to be.
As a video editor, I’ve encountered multiple moments where an older person is incapable of even noticing that we’ve cut from one angle to another, and the amount of times I’ve had to convince them that “yes the audience will absolutely notice that incredibly obvious mistake and we need to fix it” is astronomical.
I’ve seen video after video of old people seemingly incapable of identifying even the most basic CGI or AI videos. And all you techies know how clearly this issue extends into the basic usage of a computer interface. How many times do I need to remind my dad how to turn on the subtitles?
We can sit here and lambast the younger generations all we want, but I refuse to do it without accurately comparing them to the previous generations, which IMO were clearly less capable than we previously thought.
walkabout
Media literacy seems to be one of those things it's easy to forget you ever had to learn. I'm routinely amazed at how little of it most other people are capable of, when a lot of it is now so automatic for me that I can't turn it off, it's just a permanent part of how I experience things—but at some point I'm sure I was about that limited, and I'm better at it now only because I found improving my literacy to be interesting and fun, so I effortlessly put a lot of time into it.
Still, the idea of watching as much video, listening to as much music, et c., as most people do and not putting a little thought & effort into "reading" it better/more-fully seems like an odd choice, yet it's the norm. Apparently not even wanting to engage with the "why did the creator make that choice? OK, this part achieves effect X, but how does it do that? What does it seem like this other part was trying to do, and does that illuminate or enhance any elements of or mysteries in the rest of the work?" side of things seems totally alien to me.
criddell
Back when high def TVs were relatively new and cable TV and separate channels for SD and HD feeds, it used to drive me crazy that my parents would watch the SD channel with the image stretched to fit the screen. I’d show them where the HD channel was (it was something like SD channel # + 200) but they just didn’t care. The stretched SD image was good enough.
kouru225
I’m almost certain that if we were to do a test, less than 10% of 60+ year olds would be able to identify a messed up aspect ratio.
carefulfungi
As an "older" person, watching video critically wasn't a literacy skill that mattered throughout my education. I was taught how to use a (physical) card catalog, how to distinguish primary and secondary sources, how to use printed indexes to discover relevant news articles, how to find and read material on microfiche, ...
I'm often impressed by the multi-media literacy and production capabilties of younger colleagues. But to be honest, I will likely always prefer to think and to communicate by writing and not by making videos.
I think your criticism is fair - assessing the quality and reliability of information is different today than it was 40 years ago. And getting harder as more of it becomes un-bylined, remixed, bot-driven propaganda pushed by platforms without reputational skin the game for truthfulness.
But I'm not sure I can be convinced that reading and writing aren't critical thinking skills, regardless of what other mediums exist. Maybe that's just generational myopia on my part. Certainly, these seem like more critical skills than mastering the remote control.
meindnoch
I think some people simply have a bad visual cortex. Countless times I've tried to show people how to turn off motion interpolation on their TV to prevent the soap opera effect, and they just didn't see any difference.
shortrounddev2
Tech illiteracy at some age groups is insane to me. I understand that my 93 year old grandma wasn't great at this sort of thing. But I encounter people who are in their 20s who don't know how to print a document, or people in their 50s falling for obvious AI scams. Didn't Jurassic Park come out in 93? Did they just think people were getting eaten by dinosaurs?
bad_haircut72
Between this, Chinas rise (the lights-out factories etc) and the gestures around general atmosphere here in the USA it really doesnt seem like we're in for a good 20-50 years.
legitster
In the US, the kids are doing poorly. But unlike China, there is actually a large number of children being born.
One of the deep ironies of the current world order is that as America recedes in power, other countries are receding even faster (and less documented). America has too much in the way of natural resources and favorable demographics and can continue to fail forward for a long time.
johnsillings
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/fertility-rate-unit...
edit: fertility rate in the US is near historic lows. maybe you're thinking of something else re: demographic trends, but that seems pretty alarming to me.
coliveira
Economic problems create their own demographic problems. The current government policies against immigration are a sure way to reduce population growth in the US for the next decades.
greygoo222
China's fertility rate, even assuming it does not improve, won't cause problems for several decades. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/can-anything-knock-china-off-i...
nxor
What do you mean by fail? Even if we have flaws we still seem to have a decent education system
surgical_fire
Looking at fertility rates online, the most recent numbers I could find is 1.6 in the US and 1.4 in the EU. Both indicate population decline.
China is at 1.7, but I am not sure I trust the number if they report it themselves.
Either way, I have no idea where you take that there's a large number of children being born.
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techblueberry
I do wonder, and this is probably way too optimistic - but if China or another country were to open their economy, I wonder if there would be benefit to perhaps some of the wealth leaving the US, especially as too many of our modern businesses are too extractive.
davidw
What's kind of depressing about this moment in general is that there isn't really a 'shining beacon on the hill'. If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US. Europe is good in a lot of ways, but kind of muddling along in others - and won't even policy democratic backsliders like Hungary.
tmountain
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Kinda like the adult equivalent of learning that Santa isn’t real or finding out your parents are getting a divorce. I believe that we put too much faith in our “bedrock institutions” because we were taught to. Now, the facade is gone, and we’re left to figure things out as best we can. I don’t have a clue where the future will take us (nobody does). But, there’s usually some good that comes with the bad, and I do have the feeling that we’re living through history, much more so than I ever thought we’d get to. If we are truly witnessing the downfall of the United States, well… it’s going to be very interesting to say the least.
esafak
Canada could benefit.
mullingitover
> If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US
The US only has one additional political party beyond China has, and arguably both US parties are simply 'wings' of a larger party owned by the actual ruling class, something neither party wishes to acknowledge. When viewed through this lens the US and China aren't that different politically, and at the same time China is far more meritocratic and promotes leaders on a much more results-oriented basis.
It's like a household where the voters are the kids and the leaders are the parents. In China the parents are happily married and communicate with each other. Kids can't really manipulate the parents, but the parents are reasonable and the household is demonstrably a successful one. In the US the parents are bitterly divorced, bickering, and are easily played against each other by the kids. The household is a disaster, in constant disarray and the kids are going to end up dropping out of high school. However, at the end of the day both of these households are overseen by the same leadership system: the parents.
Barrin92
>If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US.
as a European who frequently travels to both, in recent history it was at an American airport, not China that I was being asked for my social media profiles and had a 30 minute discussion because they didn't believe me when I told them that I don't actively maintain a social media presence.
Of course China has no free discourse as such, but at least there is a gentleman's agreement in the sense that if I don't stage a protest they'll not bother me, whereas the US now increasingly looks like Latin America, where you need to be afraid of being harangued by some goon squad of people hired off the streets at the behest of some kleptocrat
ambicapter
Everyone always complains that if you raise taxes, rich people will "leave", with the assumption that only the richest can actually run productive companies, which obviously isn't the case. On the other hand, there must be some fraction of the truly richest that are just relentlessly good at accruing wealth, and not much else, no? Wouldn't you _want_ those people to leave?
mschuster91
Forget it. As long as China remains a dictatorship, investors will not pump in too much money - it's too uncertain what happens to your investment.
The reality is that everyone in China who managed to build up some wealth sooner or later exfiltrates it despite capital controls. And Russia prior to the war was similar. That's a large part of why London's and Vancouver's real estate markets got screwed up so hard - tons of real estate just sitting empty because it's just a proxy, a storage for wealth in a country that has laws and follows laws instead of the will of a dictator.
kulahan
All billionaires still in China (and some much who've left) exist only at the pleasure of Xi. I don't think Jeff or Mark or Warren want to worry about being disappeared. I think you're probably right here.
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Animats
From the article:
"One in four students today is chronically absent, meaning that they miss more than a tenth of instructional days, a substantial increase from pre-pandemic averages. ... Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."
That alone may explain the declines in at the bottom. "80% of success is showing up", as Woody Allen once said.
lexarflash8g
I notice the trend that people are reading much less in public and on public transporation -- before if you went on a long-haul flight you would bring a couple of books or magazines, now people much prefer to consuming video content. On a flight every row I saw passengers either watching a movie on their phone/laptop/ or screen seat.
If you walk into a cafe it would be odd to see someone reading a book. And its almost impossible to buy physical newspapers even the Sunday edition for the NY Times as most grocery stores or convenience stores don't carry them.
Personally I'm also guilty of listening to more podcasts and background play -- but I only watch YT visual content when its interesting there is just too much stuff out there. I consume most of my news online -- so my reading comes from mostly articles. Its just more convenient and practical now -- though requires much less effort than say reading longer form content of a book or long essay.
Lately I've been going on TikTok just out of curiosity for entertainmentto watch amusing or funny videos. Its basically like digital crack -- before you know it you spent an hour just watching mindless content and its designed to get you hooked. It really is low-effort instant gratification at its worst (probably worse than porn -- because you stop after a while once satisfied.)
And you see kids as old as 1-2 years old with personal devices watching videos -- so it seems to be a disturbing trend And I heard that professors don't even assign books since they know their students won't read them and will just ChatGPT for summaries.
lukewrites
There's really interesting research about children/people learning to read without formal instruction; as John Taylor Gatto points out in Dumbing Us Down, back when Thomas Paine was writing, there were ~600,000 copies of Common Sense printed for a population of three million. People learned to read on their own or with very little instruction because they were interested in reading.
There's a convincing body of evidence that the way you get kids to read books is pretty simple: read them books that interest them and then give them access to more interesting books as well as time to read to self. Unfortunately, the lethal combo of Common Core and No Child Left Behind has left teachers at best too time-strapped (or, at worst, uninterested) in doing so because of mandatory curriculum and testing.
I read to my kids, make sure they see me reading, and talk to them about both what I'm reading and what they're reading. They've done fine despite awful reading instruction at school.
nabla9
You must read well to write well.
Writes and Writes not (October 2024) https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
>I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.
>One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing.
>The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard. ...
buu700
Anyone who spends any amount of time perusing discussions on social media will quickly observe what a rare gift strong reading comprehension turns out to be.
It seems to be reversing, at least among affluent kids. "Sold a story" had a huge impact on the educational establishment. My local district reintroduced phonics for the 2023-2024 school year, and reintroduced it in kindergarten. By the end of kindergarten, every single one of my kid's classmates could read. This class is today's 2nd graders; they are avid readers today, I'll usually run into one of them walking with a book in front of their face at aftercare. They're too young to show up in the test scores, though, because these kids won't have their first round of standardized testing for another 2 years.
Schools and parents are also banning cell phones and cutting down on computer use, which should help with the distraction angle.
The socioeconomic divide mentioned in the article is still worrisome, though. I doubt that kids in the bottom 30% of America have the same experience. And simultaneously, the middle class has largely stopped having kids, which means there's a top 20% and a bottom 30% and pretty much nothing in between. If this continues for another couple generations, we're potentially faced with an America of an educated nobility and illiterate peasantry, and the future may look very Medieval indeed.