We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate.
Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness.
90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless
I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor.
For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating.
I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning.
If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for.
We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.
Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).
Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.
I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.
Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't
The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it.
What I want ultimately is that we strive to give a better life to everyone. And I don't think that's what meritocracy achieves.
> I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser
We already do this and we've done it throughout history too. There's always some excuse people will make to feel better than others. Wealth, religion, race, intelligence, education, all sorts of things.
But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.
But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different
Well, meritocracy isn't just who gets the jobs. It's who gets the jobs that run society. And that's important for everyone, because it matters to everyone that society be competently run, rather than run by incompetents who have important parents.
Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others.
Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.
My point implies that you have to be dynamic. If your evaluation methods are static for too long they get hacked. You have to balance that though. Change too often and your system is overly expensive and cumbersome. Change too infrequently and the cheaters end up at the top.
You're right that it can always be worse but you're wrong to say that we can't do better now
This is just a thought bubble, but it makes a certain amount of sense as to why the current administration is so dead-against DEI initiatives. Whilst they say it's about merit (and we all know it's not - just look at almost all of the appointees), it's actually about the added barriers in the way of assigning the individual (not the 'type of person') that they would choose for the role, based on their personal network of contacts and / or those who have made "charitable contributions" (which probably brings them into the fold of personal network contacts anyway).
DEI quotas make it hard to bring along a whole team of boot lickers.
Or in the case of this administration, window lickers.
I think people say they want a meritocracy, but they actually mean "everyone can succeed", which are different. In a meritocracy where everyone is trying hard (like in asian cultures), then hard work is not enough, not everyone can succeed. In America, there is some slack so hard workers can succeed with below average genetics (which is why, practically, meritocracy="everyone can succeed") but I think things are changing as competition is increasing.
Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people.
The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be?
You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't really want more of these.
So, more apprenticeship? That's actually a really good solution, but an entire system needs to change as it shifts the burden of training to employers rather than schools. Whatever the solution is, it would have an impact on every aspect of society, maybe positive, maybe negative, my guess is on an overall negative as even if lowest common denominator education is not ideal, it is still better than no education at all for the masses. But it is debatable, and it is often debated.
Also there is a correlation between countries tertiary education rate and GDP and life expectancy. It does not imply causation, but it supports the idea that it may be a good thing.
I wouldn't call the 4 years in college a waste, you still learn something even if it is not what will make you money later in life. General knowledge spread out over the entire population is a good thing I think.
The debt however is an other problem, a US specific one it seems. Many other countries have a lot of students and no student debt problem. But one way to think about that debt is that it is someone else's asset. Money is debt (maybe that's the kind of useless thing you learn in college ;)) and getting rid of a $100k debt is like removing $100k from the economy, and it will be felt in one way or another. I still think that student debt situation is terrible, but "solving" the student debt problem by removing students is not the way to go IMHO.
They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it.
Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.
Yes. But not as a first-order priority. Fixing the incentives in the schooling system can take priority over figuring out what to do with every single person passing through it. (Also, a market where a third of students fail to graduate high school will find use for that labor.)
(I realize this is an ungenerous and blunt take that lacks some amount of empathy)
I have worked in fortune 500 companies for 15 years, and my observation is that there is an alarming amount of people (engineering) who work in these companies are completely inept in their domain of expertise.
What they seem to get by on is a complete adherence to hierarchy: do not ask questions, do not push back on requests, do not engage in capability mindset, just execute on whatever slop is getting jammed down the throat of middle management.
Now, as someone who is on "the leadership team", I see this as generally widespread across many different orgs.
These folks obviously serve some function: which is to churn out whatever the whims are of the executive leadership team based on the Current Business Strategy.
So what do we do with these folks? Let them keep doing it. We could satisfy these roles with the standard factory style highschool education followed by an associates -like degree, e.g. a two year rule following program that introduces the domain and jargon that you're going to be in.
we have a school system that rewards graduation and punishes punishment. our public school especially is geared around progressing the lowest common denominator forward at all costs. private schools can run how they want, public schools are paid to do 2 things: 1. get butts in seats 2. have kids move up when the year is over
Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.
This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.
There are no resources for those who don’t progress, as there already aren’t enough teachers for the existing K-12 workload, and existing teachers are overloaded in the aggregate.
This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone.
Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10.
My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.
What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.
I'd say grade inflation is the clearest evidence. It has been a widespread, long-simmering issue; I've heard teachers bemoan the phenomenon in at least 3 different countries in as many decades, and each of them cited the ire of the public as the underlying reason.
I think the growing frustration is real, but it's coming more from employers than the populace in general.
High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)
> High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents
When I took the California high school exit exam, it was already a joke. Still, the news was filled with people treating every failure as a failure of the test.
I'm not sure if you realize you're basically saying most people with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean should not be pursuing higher education. Currently 40% of young adults are in higher education in the US. (based on a quick google, percent could be wrong, i also saw 60% pursue it at some point)
As a heuristic, let's assume they're the 40% with the highest IQ.
If 90% of them shouldn't be there, then you're effectively saying only the highest 4% IQ individuals should be there.
Two standard deviations cuts out 95% of people. What a very high standard. And I'm not even getting into the mountains of research that higher education makes workers better at their jobs, ceteris paribus.
So you're saying genius-level people don't belong at uni.
The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.
People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.
And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.
IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. It's the wrong thing to optimize for.
Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.
Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)
> IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills.
Meaning it can be learned. Trained.
I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago. Notable, it's been increasing, so someone taking an IQ test in the year 2000 getting an IQ of 100 would have had an IQ of 130 had they taken it in 1950. That's an incredibly important piece of information needed to even do basic comparisons of IQs
> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure.
That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.
Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and creativity. It’s high time for English teachers to do the same.
> Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.
The ancient shadow puppet story tellers were good enough evening entertainment until books, radio, tv, and the internet and porn came out.
I would argue the last 30 years have had more attention-competition than most of the last 370. These kids are actually different by growing up in a very different world.
I'm a lapsed English teacher, and I don't completely disagree with you: some of the Old Standards could be removed without losing anything, and there are contemporary texts that aren't but should be included in high school and college curricula.
However, the value of the Canon° is three-fold:
1) There are stories and ideas that are culturally important. Students need to be made familiar with them, and know where they came from.
2) The themes in the Old Stuff are not unrelateable. Shakespeare wrote about sex and death and jealousy and power, and the tension between individuals and society. Those are all perfectly familiar to anyone. One of my favorite assignments, when I taught a college lit course, was to read Beowulf, and then (during mid-term week, to give them a break) watch Jaws, because they're the exact same story. It's important to recognize common humanity in people who look and dress and talk and believe differently than you do. Using The Old Stuff to expand that skill side-steps many of the reflexive reactions students bring to contemporary literature.
3) Students need to be challenged to read hard texts. You're on HN, so I expect you recognize the value and pleasure of understanding something that was previously beyond you. Yes, there is contemporary writing that also works - I assigned more than some of my colleagues - but reading the classics hits all three of these points, so it's still worth doing.
All that said, there are way too many Humanities teachers who are just awful, and put people off reading rather than the reverse. I suspect that you may have encountered some of them, and that's a damn shame.
°To anyone reading over our shoulders in this conversation: don't @ me over this. I'm well aware of the problems with the notion, but it's still the best layman's term for the idea under discussion. I'm a broad-tent guy, though: whatever you think oughta be included is probably fine with me.
Obviously my experience is a little dated (graduated high school in 1997), but Shakespeare was a recurring theme throughout my high school English classes. We read The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and a number of poems, some of which we had to memorize and recite. I didn’t mind the poetry; I still remember bits of the Whitman, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll poems I memorized. In addition, we read The Odyssey (which felt like torture to me), various Dickens novels, Jane Austin (also torture), etc.
Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
We hope the social redistribution that would have to be there to help those that fail, and those employed to teach them, is less expensive than every citizen forced to sacrifice 8 years of prime life time and tens of thousands of dollars.
Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.
You can't make people more knowledgeable by not attempting to measure their knowledge. You can maybe try to improve things for subsequent generations. But issuing a false credential won't solve the problem.
> They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money.
The problem is that because you can no longer get a non-minimum wage job without a college degree, universities are now basically just a place to get a piece of paper so you can get a job, any job. They're no longer "halls of higher learning". A bachelor's degree is the new high school degree.
If you could earn a living without a college degree, like you used to be able to, those going to uni would be those who want to educate themselves.
Who the hell can go 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to have Socratic discussions without gaining a credential valued by employers at the end of it?
Why would you pay 10s of thousands of dollars to get a credential everyone knows is meaningless? The first ChatGPT grads are just now entering the workforce. I have a son entering his junior year of high school. Who knows if a degree will be worth even the time investment 5 years from now.
That’s my point. It is only so expensive because it is a gate to earning money. The concept that everybody should go to college and the Federal Pell grants and funding to that effect is what causes college to be expensive.
So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.
A student populace not taught financial literacy and memed they have to go to college to succeed. High schools hiring "advisors" whose entire job is to maximize the college application rates to make the school look good.
My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off.
Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.
The comment you were replying to was about school kids, not foreign students in post secondary programs looking for work/immigrant visas.
Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out.
Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
> Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
In this hypothetical you’re a teacher, not world emperor, so you’re limited to pass/fail decisions of a particular class at a particular school.
I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards. They are a strong but imperfect defense against racism at the teacher level.
If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.
The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).
There's no hypothetical here IMO, this is a real-world problem, and also you aren't limited to pass/fail decisions as a teacher, except in exceptional cases of borderline grades. Otherwise, there is a passing grade / requirements, and grades can be determined by objective tests (all students get the same difficulty tests). Also you have something like an average of many courses over many years to make the pass/fail decisions, ultimately, if we are talking about getting a diploma and/or graduating high-school here.
Also, it depends what you see the discussion as. If laws are supposed to do the right thing, then "pass everyone always" is really starting to look like the wrong thing, even where the intentions are seemingly "good" because they avoid "disparate impact" (in the short term on very narrowly-chosen metrics). Then if your argument is "yeah well we can't do the right thing because lawsuits", well, yes, I agree, practically, but then these lawsuits are basically also evil and/or misguided.
Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.
If the choice is between eroding the recognition of excellence and risk being sued, then the foundation upon which the society has been built is the problem. The solution to which is, as @JumpCrisscross says, correcting legislation in such a way as to direct the society towards better outcomes.
Disparate impact laws are a spin off from civil rights act 1964 so you’d have to repeal at least a part of that act. Much of modern society is shaped by these laws so you’d be completely changing the structure of society. Many people benefit from the status quo and those people, who have substantial means, will fight any attempts to repeal these laws.
I want these laws changed, it is the whole reason I brought up the issue, but I also understand how monumentally difficult it would be to do that. I suspect the US would have to degrade far further to even consider this.
So your solution for the system failing a person is to punish the person but reward the powerful people engaged in the bad behavior. The ones who brainwashed the kids into thinking that this is what they're supposed to do.
People have agency. The system didn't fail a person. That framing completely ignores their actions. Especially for paying so little on their loans and complaining about it. 18 year olds can vote. If we trust them with that, surely they can be responsible for their own choices.
Moreover, they said the accreditation of both institutions should be investigated.
Not so. The consideration should include the fact that when a child has been spawn camped by school, family and society at large to implant the idea that tertiary education is required to participate in society and without a degree one amounts to nothing, as is often the case, then it indeed is a failure of systematic nature and it would be not fair to put the blame on the now young adult's shoulders alone.
literally no one tells working class kids to study history, literature, philosophy, or all the retarded useless shit the US invented degrees in the past decades. nepo babies can study whatever the fuck they want, sure - they can study music in college and end up being a chief security officer, for example, or simply work a nonjob. but if you don't come from money, and you get into debt to study something useless and/or retarded, then you have no one to blame but yourself.
First, colleges don't generally give loans. The lenders are not affiliated with the college.
Second, as with anything it is more complex than you are making it. For example, I've known people who have:
- Had a variable interest go up with little to no notice and no adjustment to the payments so if you're not paying attention month to month you end up underpaying.
- Been put in deferment without notice (so their payments stopped) and without requesting it, but continued to accumulate interest.
- Interest is sometimes compounding while in deferment or paying less than interest.
- Were mislead about how interest accumulated while they were still in school (i.e. lead to believe there was no interest when in reality there was just "no payments")
And in that last one in particular, the person I know in that situation (happened to be married to her now), it was her boomer parents that signed the loan paperwork and they didn't even give her access until after she graduated when she found out interest compounding that whole time.
I think the whole debate is putting too much on 17 kids and not enough on their parents who need to co-sign these documents. When I was that age the school didn't tell me how interest worked, my parents did.
I am not saying it is simple. And yes technically the lenders are separate but the incentives align them so the effect is the same as if they weren’t.
As examples:
- loans are given equally for an English major and an electrical engineer. No market force at play here.
- Interest rates are the same as well even though the risk of default is not the same across majors
- Your interest rate remains the same for subsequent years even if you get a 2.0 your first year.
- College tuition rises in lockstep with additional Federal grants and loan programs
Also, I am not saying there isn’t bad or unscrupulous behavior by lenders but the default case is poor money management and a faulty understanding of interest. I think this fault lies with the student, but also the government allowing its lenders and institutions to prey upon their youth as well as allowing high schools to graduate students without this basic understanding.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.
I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today
Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.
A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.
A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.
> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.
In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.
My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
I'm not sure it matters anyway.
I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points.
I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points.
I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM.
If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos.
The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.
We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.
> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies
The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.
If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are.
But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely.
The next generation are just further along on this curve.
And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing.
It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.
> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are
They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it
> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.
Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.
Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.
The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!
> The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible
Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)
I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is.
I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us.
Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit.
Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.
That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms.
Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.
> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it
A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.
Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.
If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.
A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.
>I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis.
I recorded some tutorial videos for some kids a while back, to help them prepare for an exam.
The feedback I got was very positive, but I suspected they weren't learning as much as they thought. So I made a practice exam for them, and they failed it.
This was a wake-up call for them. They revisited the material, and got a good score on repeating the practice exam, and a good score on the actual exam.
So, there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use.
(Ditto for if you want to retain a skill or faculty!)
I noticed that in myself. I’d read a chapter and be convinced that I’d absorbed the information. It wasn’t until I learned networking from a second-hand college text-book that I realised that wasn’t really the case. Each chapter concluded with questions to verify that the reader had understood the concepts. When I tested myself, I found that I could only answer around half of the questions and had to go back and re-read sections in order to answer the others. I had completely over-estimated how much I had learned while reading.
On Stack Exchange sites, I used to see questions and think “Oh! I know the answer. It’ll only take a few minutes to answer”. Invariably, I discovered that I didn’t have all the knowledge to provide a complete answer. While typing, I’d realise that there were gaps in my knowledge (e.g., is what I’m writing true for BSDs as well as Linux OSs?) or there’d be edge cases that I hadn’t previously considered (differences between program versions, how software behaves in different locales, etc.). A good, comprehensive answer ended up taking around half an hour but I found the effort was worth it: writing Stack Overflow answers was a great way to learn.
Speaking of “forcing functions”, I’m currently learning guitar and my goal for this year is to learn a song in full and record myself to objectively see how well I’m actually playing.
> there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use
Yes! The brain is optimized to be lazy. A forcing function to actually use/apply knowledge is required.
I can confirm this from community colleges in both California and Oregon over the past two years; every non-science, non-math general education class (n=10+) has at least one student who cannot read or write at more than a couple sentences per minute. They’re perfectly able to keep up verbally but their education passed them through standardized tests without requiring reading and writing at a reasonable velocity.
I enjoy doing home-lab project work at home because I have to plan things out and concentrate on a single problem for a contiguous string of time, and at the end I feel a sense of achievement in reaching, or getting closer to, the goal.
At work I spend maybe five minutes on something before being asked a question about something else, and it doesn't feel as if I really achieve much at all.
I don't get paid for the first one and do get paid for the second one, but I think for the quality of work (as a direct result of the continuity of attention) it should be the other way round.
I'm refreshing a language on Duolingo and I'm careful not to blast through the exercises without actively processing them. You can treat it as mindless puzzle solving without internalizing anything. I suspect many reading averse digital natives do something similar when they can't consume video or audio.
I know formerly smart people, the same people are phone addicts. They’re not kids.
It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.
It's an attention issue. We have these phones with constant dopamine hits. We were getting it a little bit on the web before the rise of smartphones, but it's just out of control now. We have 100 apps constantly vying for our attention and giving us endless things to scroll through.
The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.
I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.
Agreed with all of the above, except the "100s of apps."
Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems.
The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.
> … smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
Does anyone know what’s the importance of sighing in this context? I notice one of my work colleagues sighs a lot when reading but I assume that’s due to the nature of the work he’s doing – or emails he reads.
On a related note, I recently read an article¹ by an Irish fiction writer who teaches her craft to others. While her article focusses on the stages to achieving mastery, the teacher found that even students who want to be writers don’t want to read. I found that to be a bizarre concept and hard to believe; it’d be like wanting to be a musician without listening to music or a film-maker not watching Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Capra, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Lee, Spielberg, etc.
Yep. Smartphones and social media were the jab, jab, and now AI is the knockout punch. We're raising a generation of people who quite literally do not know how to think for themselves and completely lack the motivation (and attention span required) to even try.
I think it's just the culture. I'm old. I used to regularly read long books. Now I can't even get through a 20 minute video unless I'm walking or driving. I mean I could if I had to, but I wouldn't do it for fun.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Multiple times in my career in tech, I've had people complain that a 2-page write-up is too long. These are well compensated people that went to top universities. I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article.
I’ve said this myself myriad of times over a very long career as SWE. never because I can’t read 20 pages but because 20-page write-up is always 18 pages too many. be succinct and keep it simple. if you can’t explain on few pages another 50 won’t help you
Note: I could not find posts about US reading / writing educational failures prior to this in the archives, though they may still exist; but there are still many about math education and bad business writing. However, I believe this post was the bellwether warning of what would follow:
There was a study "They don’t read very well: A study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities" last year where they had university students try to read the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, they couldn't do it at all.
Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."
Respondent: "It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street."
I consider myself quite literate, and (I think) can both read and construct complex sentences that remain grammatically- and content-descriptively-correct.
Having said that, when I read Thomas Pynchon, and I've only progressed through four of his more beginner-friendly books, in a number of places I feel that reading his work is something that is passively happening to me, as opposed to my actively following along with the action / description.
There's something I enjoy about Pynchon's writing, but I don't think I'm picking up everything that he's putting down.
Similarly with the older language used by Dickens. But damn it sounds good.
Response looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.
It's not so much that they can't read, it's just that they have a short attention spam, which is an even bigger issue. And yes, I blame Tiktok and co. Your students couldn't sit through Ben-Hur.
Perhaps we can take some guidance from college teaching, which has effectively abolished unions. Well over half of college level teaching is done by adjuncts, who are not on the tenure track and have no training or licensing requirements.
So eliminate their bargaining power and job and wage protections because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning? Doesn't seem fair to me.
> because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning?
Someone isn’t doing their job. And we can’t fire the parents. Tackling teachers’ unions seems like a necessary difficult step if we want to take this seriously. Alternatively: we keep letting public education deteriorate until so much of the population opts out of it that killing it outright becomes politically possible.
>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college.
Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade.
>showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests
Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on…
>Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.
Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat.
>districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding
I remember this first hand.
>The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation…
There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.
When I was in school we joked about it being 13th grade, that was seeing all the kids as freshmen who CLEARLY didn’t belong there, but their guidance counselors told them for 12 years about how they need to go to college.
To the degree that AIs are good at re-creating the style of the training data, you would expect there to be non-AI-generated text that would "look like" AI output.
They use, unwittingly, proxies for "AI" stylometry, with no specific or explicable features they can point to and say "Look! That is evidence that the text is written by AI", as if there were such features in the first place. The best they can do is validate the very lazy one-shot patterns that humans should be able to highlight in the first place.
Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.
Ai was trained on news and journal articles and this is the reason we see so many em-dashes as well. The side effect is that good writing is now classified as AI generated, which makes it bad writing. What a messed up world we live in
I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.
If teachers could teach, students might be able to read. If students could read, maybe more of them would learn how to write. If more of them learned to write, maybe it'd be inspirational to their peers and future generations.
Its unfair to dump all the blame on teachers. Yes, some teachers could make a difference (and some do), inspire students but that’s also a match made in haven, students need be receptive to learning something that is arduous at first. Id blame most of it on how technology is weaponized/ financialized to steal attention and fill it with junk.
We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate.
Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness.
90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest to actually go deep or learn anything. Socratic style seminars are silent. Deep critique or wrestling with a topic only if pandering or grade related. Humanities watered down to irrelevance compared to STEM which has to keep some rigor or the bridges collapse and lights dont turn on. Academia is inflated by, wasted on, and ruined by them. They would be much better served by a high school diploma that wasn’t meaningless
I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor.
For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually deserved their badge of honor. But for students whose parents were "fortunate" enough to send them to private school, they became a part of a corrupt system, whose only incentive is to have its students pass the national exams. Most private schools had high graduate rate, due to them bribing testing officials to allow cheating.
I was one of those privileged students who went a private school, who passed the national test without even reading a single question. I paid the price for it once I started college in the US. But unlike my origin, I had a chance to take a break from college and recalibrate my brain in a sense and find joy in learning.
If failing were normalized and did not have so much social stigma or financial implications (to an extent), we would produce more educated people instead of once just chasing credentials.
I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for.
We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change.
Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The rich and well off still tend to have the advantage. Let's even pretend that a rich person and poor person goes to the same school, in the same class. It's more likely that rich person will get extra tutoring for those exams. The more important those exams are, the more valuable those tutors become (allowing them to charge more and more).
Are there not test taking strategies? The mere existence of this should tell you that the test is measuring something more than knowledge.
I'm just using this as a simple example but I'd encourage others to think more deeply about it because these things do matter if we're going to try to make a meritocracy. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but I'm saying one of the most critical parts to creating a meritocracy is recognizing the limitations in the metrics. It's an alignment problem and Goodhart always comes back to bite you. As soon as you become complacent you drift further from meritocracy.
Meritocracy will always be a dream. We should chase our dreams, but we need to recognize the difference between dreams and reality. You'll never make those dreams come true if you can't
Is meritocracy a dream for a society?
The danger of a meritocracy is in the word. What do you merit? Your job? Fair enough. More rights? Certainly not. I'm afraid it's easy for some to start viewing others as lesser because they don't merit one's position, consequently one's status and thus should not have a seat at the important tables because after all they don't "merit" it.
What I want ultimately is that we strive to give a better life to everyone. And I don't think that's what meritocracy achieves.
But we do want high social mobility. If you work hard it is easy to climb the ladders. If you squander your wealth it is easy to slip. I'm not saying there should be no friction, the correct balance is always hard to find.
But whatever that merit is is something we need to decide as a society. It can be anything we want. It can be your work that contributes to monetary growth. It could be work that contributes to scientific growth. It could be how great of an artist you are. How popular you are. Our anything. We decide and we decide how much one means more than the other. Or we could even decide that there are no "lessers" and we could decide that the person traveling the world on their parent's dime has the same value to our society as a scientist, businessman, or artist. Mind you, I'm not talking about their value as a human, that's different
Well, meritocracy isn't just who gets the jobs. It's who gets the jobs that run society. And that's important for everyone, because it matters to everyone that society be competently run, rather than run by incompetents who have important parents.
Standardized testing so far is the worst solution, except for all the others.
Sure, wealthy people can pay for standardized testing prep. However, test prep is a much lower barrier than having to pay for exotic experiences abroad to pad admissions essays or connections to gain political exposure so you know the appropriate shibboleths to utter or racial features to highlight.
My point implies that you have to be dynamic. If your evaluation methods are static for too long they get hacked. You have to balance that though. Change too often and your system is overly expensive and cumbersome. Change too infrequently and the cheaters end up at the top.
You're right that it can always be worse but you're wrong to say that we can't do better now
This is just a thought bubble, but it makes a certain amount of sense as to why the current administration is so dead-against DEI initiatives. Whilst they say it's about merit (and we all know it's not - just look at almost all of the appointees), it's actually about the added barriers in the way of assigning the individual (not the 'type of person') that they would choose for the role, based on their personal network of contacts and / or those who have made "charitable contributions" (which probably brings them into the fold of personal network contacts anyway).
DEI quotas make it hard to bring along a whole team of boot lickers.
Or in the case of this administration, window lickers.
I think people say they want a meritocracy, but they actually mean "everyone can succeed", which are different. In a meritocracy where everyone is trying hard (like in asian cultures), then hard work is not enough, not everyone can succeed. In America, there is some slack so hard workers can succeed with below average genetics (which is why, practically, meritocracy="everyone can succeed") but I think things are changing as competition is increasing.
How can we claim to have a meritocracy if we allow inheritance?
So basically you want to tier bin people’s lives and careers because of one or two numbers?
Fuck No.
Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people.
(Much irony, given the topic of TFA.)
The problem is that as the education system degrades the products of that system gain power over it and accelerate the decline.
The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be?
You need to give these people something to do. You say they just want to get the job, another way to say it is that if they don't graduate, they won't get the job, so what are they going to do instead? Some low skill jobs don't require much study, but there are only so many in modern society, and we don't really want more of these.
So, more apprenticeship? That's actually a really good solution, but an entire system needs to change as it shifts the burden of training to employers rather than schools. Whatever the solution is, it would have an impact on every aspect of society, maybe positive, maybe negative, my guess is on an overall negative as even if lowest common denominator education is not ideal, it is still better than no education at all for the masses. But it is debatable, and it is often debated.
Also there is a correlation between countries tertiary education rate and GDP and life expectancy. It does not imply causation, but it supports the idea that it may be a good thing.
> The problem is: what are you going to do with these 35%? where should the people who shouldn't be there be?
Doing the exact same thing they’re doing now, just without wasting 4 years in college and being $100k in debt
I wouldn't call the 4 years in college a waste, you still learn something even if it is not what will make you money later in life. General knowledge spread out over the entire population is a good thing I think.
The debt however is an other problem, a US specific one it seems. Many other countries have a lot of students and no student debt problem. But one way to think about that debt is that it is someone else's asset. Money is debt (maybe that's the kind of useless thing you learn in college ;)) and getting rid of a $100k debt is like removing $100k from the economy, and it will be felt in one way or another. I still think that student debt situation is terrible, but "solving" the student debt problem by removing students is not the way to go IMHO.
They are already doing it. They just have a useless degree and if they went onto college, another worthless degree and likely a bunch of debt in order to do it.
Whether or not our programs are rigorous, does not change the reality on the ground or make the actual capabilities of the population different. It’s not like a person with a worthless degree is more capable than a person who dropped out of a worthwhile rigorous program. We just perceive them to be. A rigorous high school program corrects that perception, saving time and money.
> You need to give these people something to do
Yes. But not as a first-order priority. Fixing the incentives in the schooling system can take priority over figuring out what to do with every single person passing through it. (Also, a market where a third of students fail to graduate high school will find use for that labor.)
(I realize this is an ungenerous and blunt take that lacks some amount of empathy)
I have worked in fortune 500 companies for 15 years, and my observation is that there is an alarming amount of people (engineering) who work in these companies are completely inept in their domain of expertise.
What they seem to get by on is a complete adherence to hierarchy: do not ask questions, do not push back on requests, do not engage in capability mindset, just execute on whatever slop is getting jammed down the throat of middle management.
Now, as someone who is on "the leadership team", I see this as generally widespread across many different orgs.
These folks obviously serve some function: which is to churn out whatever the whims are of the executive leadership team based on the Current Business Strategy.
So what do we do with these folks? Let them keep doing it. We could satisfy these roles with the standard factory style highschool education followed by an associates -like degree, e.g. a two year rule following program that introduces the domain and jargon that you're going to be in.
we have a school system that rewards graduation and punishes punishment. our public school especially is geared around progressing the lowest common denominator forward at all costs. private schools can run how they want, public schools are paid to do 2 things: 1. get butts in seats 2. have kids move up when the year is over
Something something about metrics ceasing to be a good measure. Texas has draconian measures for districts containing a failing school, even as they redistribute the majority of funding from cities to rural districts. No surprise the schools want to pass by any means.
> private schools can run how they want...
This cuts both ways. Very well-known, competitive private schools conservatively financed have a waiting list a line around the block long and can enforce high standards. Private schools that are struggling for funding can find the compromises more tempting than they can bear. Finding that difference in the moment instead of as past historical anecdotes is surprisingly hard, though if someone has come up with a formula I’m all ears.
There are no resources for those who don’t progress, as there already aren’t enough teachers for the existing K-12 workload, and existing teachers are overloaded in the aggregate.
This is the failure mode of a system exceeding its capacity with no ability to apply back pressure. Slowly failing as gracefully as possible, eventually passing everyone.
Nguyen, T. D., Lam, C. B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What Do We Know About the Extent of Teacher Shortages Nationwide? A Systematic Examination of Reports of U.S. Teacher Shortages. AERA Open, 10.
https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241276512
My step daughter graduated this last week (high school). Watching the curriculum over the last 4 years, they had 5-8 validictorian (all a's) and 6-8 salutarians (sp?) (all a's one b). They would have been at the 3.x level in my high school 25 years ago. The rigor in high school is no longer there, community college is adopting to the lesser expectation as well.
> the populace would not accept that
What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.
I'd say grade inflation is the clearest evidence. It has been a widespread, long-simmering issue; I've heard teachers bemoan the phenomenon in at least 3 different countries in as many decades, and each of them cited the ire of the public as the underlying reason.
I think the growing frustration is real, but it's coming more from employers than the populace in general.
High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents who are mad that you are ruining their kids chance at an Ivy by giving them a B- in HS algebra (meanwhile the ivies remedial math classes are packed more than ever)
> High Schools don’t support teachers who are confronted by angry parents
When I took the California high school exit exam, it was already a joke. Still, the news was filled with people treating every failure as a failure of the test.
Notice that how hard a diploma is to get is completely irrelevant to literacy rates.
This assertion seems light on sources. What evidence do you have to support your claims?
> 90%+ of all people in undergrad
I'm not sure if you realize you're basically saying most people with an IQ two standard deviations above the mean should not be pursuing higher education. Currently 40% of young adults are in higher education in the US. (based on a quick google, percent could be wrong, i also saw 60% pursue it at some point)
As a heuristic, let's assume they're the 40% with the highest IQ.
If 90% of them shouldn't be there, then you're effectively saying only the highest 4% IQ individuals should be there.
Two standard deviations cuts out 95% of people. What a very high standard. And I'm not even getting into the mountains of research that higher education makes workers better at their jobs, ceteris paribus.
So you're saying genius-level people don't belong at uni.
https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS...
The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.
People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.
And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.
It used to be 130, which is two standard deviations above the mean. I think this is the appropriate amount.
IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. It's the wrong thing to optimize for.
Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.
Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)
I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago. Notable, it's been increasing, so someone taking an IQ test in the year 2000 getting an IQ of 100 would have had an IQ of 130 had they taken it in 1950. That's an incredibly important piece of information needed to even do basic comparisons of IQs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
> > IQ is about aptitude
> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
It's also pretty well known and well studied that you can train people to score higher on IQ tests. I'm not talking about years of training either
In short yes. Top 10% is not genius level. You see the outcome of this all the time at the PhD level. Even top 2% often just does not cut it when trying to do novel research. So many PhD’s get stuck in the post-doc adjunct cycle with never a real shot at tenure.
That is fine. Nothing to feel bad about. But also we don’t want our top 10% but not 2% to waste eight plus years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Again, this is all dedicated on the high school diploma being actually hard and valuable. Associates degree replace undergrads, undergrad replace masters, etc.
Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Math teachers had the balls to radically revamp their curriculums with Common Core and now their teachings are no longer formulaic but instead stimulate original thought and creativity. It’s high time for English teachers to do the same.
> Is the problem participation? Or is it that entire years are devoted to reading ancient books with bad English and unrelatable themes simply because of tradition? Shakespeare wrote some neat plays but they’re not helping the reading epidemic.
Were Shakespeare's plays "relatable" 370 years after being published and then suddenly became unrelatable in the last 30? I think not. If students' participation in classes about them has changed, it's not because of the plays aging.
The ancient shadow puppet story tellers were good enough evening entertainment until books, radio, tv, and the internet and porn came out.
I would argue the last 30 years have had more attention-competition than most of the last 370. These kids are actually different by growing up in a very different world.
I'm a lapsed English teacher, and I don't completely disagree with you: some of the Old Standards could be removed without losing anything, and there are contemporary texts that aren't but should be included in high school and college curricula.
However, the value of the Canon° is three-fold:
1) There are stories and ideas that are culturally important. Students need to be made familiar with them, and know where they came from.
2) The themes in the Old Stuff are not unrelateable. Shakespeare wrote about sex and death and jealousy and power, and the tension between individuals and society. Those are all perfectly familiar to anyone. One of my favorite assignments, when I taught a college lit course, was to read Beowulf, and then (during mid-term week, to give them a break) watch Jaws, because they're the exact same story. It's important to recognize common humanity in people who look and dress and talk and believe differently than you do. Using The Old Stuff to expand that skill side-steps many of the reflexive reactions students bring to contemporary literature.
3) Students need to be challenged to read hard texts. You're on HN, so I expect you recognize the value and pleasure of understanding something that was previously beyond you. Yes, there is contemporary writing that also works - I assigned more than some of my colleagues - but reading the classics hits all three of these points, so it's still worth doing.
All that said, there are way too many Humanities teachers who are just awful, and put people off reading rather than the reverse. I suspect that you may have encountered some of them, and that's a damn shame.
°To anyone reading over our shoulders in this conversation: don't @ me over this. I'm well aware of the problems with the notion, but it's still the best layman's term for the idea under discussion. I'm a broad-tent guy, though: whatever you think oughta be included is probably fine with me.
Citation needed for American public high schools that have a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum.
Obviously my experience is a little dated (graduated high school in 1997), but Shakespeare was a recurring theme throughout my high school English classes. We read The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, and a number of poems, some of which we had to memorize and recite. I didn’t mind the poetry; I still remember bits of the Whitman, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll poems I memorized. In addition, we read The Odyssey (which felt like torture to me), various Dickens novels, Jane Austin (also torture), etc.
Despite being an avid reader, I did not enjoy all of the above. However, now that I am middle aged, I count myself fortunate that my public school teachers forced me to do it.
What do you plan to do with the people who don't pass though?
Everyone's very excited to have failure rates or whatever and then mute on the real problem: those people don't just go away.
> What do you plan to do with the people who don't pass though?
Remedial classes. Or, realistically, unskilled labor.
Like, what do we do with these kids now? The same thing, except after we’ve saddled them with a meaningless diploma and a pile of debt.
We hope the social redistribution that would have to be there to help those that fail, and those employed to teach them, is less expensive than every citizen forced to sacrifice 8 years of prime life time and tens of thousands of dollars.
Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.
They are still there either way. They don't suddenly become smarter and/or hard working because we pretend.
If anything, it simply increases the pool of people who realize you don't need to try.
Ironic because it is the people who push for just passing everyone that are actually doing it to just "make the problem go away", in reality.
You can't make people more knowledgeable by not attempting to measure their knowledge. You can maybe try to improve things for subsequent generations. But issuing a false credential won't solve the problem.
[dead]
> They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money.
The problem is that because you can no longer get a non-minimum wage job without a college degree, universities are now basically just a place to get a piece of paper so you can get a job, any job. They're no longer "halls of higher learning". A bachelor's degree is the new high school degree.
If you could earn a living without a college degree, like you used to be able to, those going to uni would be those who want to educate themselves.
[dead]
Who the hell can go 10s of thousands of dollars in debt to have Socratic discussions without gaining a credential valued by employers at the end of it?
Why would you pay 10s of thousands of dollars to get a credential everyone knows is meaningless? The first ChatGPT grads are just now entering the workforce. I have a son entering his junior year of high school. Who knows if a degree will be worth even the time investment 5 years from now.
[dead]
That’s my point. It is only so expensive because it is a gate to earning money. The concept that everybody should go to college and the Federal Pell grants and funding to that effect is what causes college to be expensive.
So now we pay twice. Once with our tax dollars for a high school system that does not appropriately stratify students. And then again with insane amounts of debt that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy to teach remedial algebra to adults that have no interest in learning it.
If an employer really valued the credential, they would supply it.
Why wouldn't employers value it?
A student populace not taught financial literacy and memed they have to go to college to succeed. High schools hiring "advisors" whose entire job is to maximize the college application rates to make the school look good.
My high school, quite a few years ago had 10 "advisors" you only met in senior years their entire existence was to milk those college numbers. The one I got assigned to ended up throwing a major fit even including the principal because I refused to let her write a recommendation letter for me. I didn't know her and she knew nothing of me but some bullshit she wanted me to write down to guide her. I told them to fuck the right off.
Boomers turned college into an industrial pipeline.
It’s often not even about the job but to get visas
The comment you were replying to was about school kids, not foreign students in post secondary programs looking for work/immigrant visas.
Also, foreign students enrolling in American colleges are (a) here as a result of decades of conscious policy choices (b) provide a not insignificant portion of the operating budget of many institutions (c) would go elsewhere if America wasn’t an option - so you aren’t really gaining much by keeping them out.
Source: former F1 visa masters student here
And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?
Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
Are you willing to risk a lawsuit to stand on your principles? Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
> Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
In this hypothetical you’re a teacher, not world emperor, so you’re limited to pass/fail decisions of a particular class at a particular school.
I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards. They are a strong but imperfect defense against racism at the teacher level.
If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.
The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).
There's no hypothetical here IMO, this is a real-world problem, and also you aren't limited to pass/fail decisions as a teacher, except in exceptional cases of borderline grades. Otherwise, there is a passing grade / requirements, and grades can be determined by objective tests (all students get the same difficulty tests). Also you have something like an average of many courses over many years to make the pass/fail decisions, ultimately, if we are talking about getting a diploma and/or graduating high-school here.
Also, it depends what you see the discussion as. If laws are supposed to do the right thing, then "pass everyone always" is really starting to look like the wrong thing, even where the intentions are seemingly "good" because they avoid "disparate impact" (in the short term on very narrowly-chosen metrics). Then if your argument is "yeah well we can't do the right thing because lawsuits", well, yes, I agree, practically, but then these lawsuits are basically also evil and/or misguided.
These laws have a strong impact on behavior so you’re not going to fix the behavior without fixing the laws, which I agree, need to be fixed.
This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards.
Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.
It is easier to make that call when you’re not at risk of being sued.
Legislative step number one then, remove the legal basis for such suits.
If the choice is between eroding the recognition of excellence and risk being sued, then the foundation upon which the society has been built is the problem. The solution to which is, as @JumpCrisscross says, correcting legislation in such a way as to direct the society towards better outcomes.
Disparate impact laws are a spin off from civil rights act 1964 so you’d have to repeal at least a part of that act. Much of modern society is shaped by these laws so you’d be completely changing the structure of society. Many people benefit from the status quo and those people, who have substantial means, will fight any attempts to repeal these laws.
I want these laws changed, it is the whole reason I brought up the issue, but I also understand how monumentally difficult it would be to do that. I suspect the US would have to degrade far further to even consider this.
Additionally any college grad that:
1. Takes out six figures of loans for a degree in a field with no hope of commensurate income
2. Pays minimum payments below interest
3. Whines on social media that after X years of not even covering the interest payment they now owe more than ever
Should:
1. Lose both their college and HS degrees. They clearly dont understand HS math.
2. Their college’s accreditation should be investigated
3. Same with their HS
You’re an obnoxious, pretentious prick
So your solution for the system failing a person is to punish the person but reward the powerful people engaged in the bad behavior. The ones who brainwashed the kids into thinking that this is what they're supposed to do.
No, the people giving degrees that say a person can do basic math when the person can’t do math should not be able to give out degrees anymore.
Similarly, the person with the credential that says they can do basic math that cannot do basic math should not have the credential.
People have agency. The system didn't fail a person. That framing completely ignores their actions. Especially for paying so little on their loans and complaining about it. 18 year olds can vote. If we trust them with that, surely they can be responsible for their own choices.
Moreover, they said the accreditation of both institutions should be investigated.
Not so. The consideration should include the fact that when a child has been spawn camped by school, family and society at large to implant the idea that tertiary education is required to participate in society and without a degree one amounts to nothing, as is often the case, then it indeed is a failure of systematic nature and it would be not fair to put the blame on the now young adult's shoulders alone.
[flagged]
literally no one tells working class kids to study history, literature, philosophy, or all the retarded useless shit the US invented degrees in the past decades. nepo babies can study whatever the fuck they want, sure - they can study music in college and end up being a chief security officer, for example, or simply work a nonjob. but if you don't come from money, and you get into debt to study something useless and/or retarded, then you have no one to blame but yourself.
(I'm not agreeing with the poster above though.)
[flagged]
Publicly funded colleges should not be able to loan 6 figures to people who don’t understand interest rates.
I am happy to vote to take their funding away if they want to continue doing that.
First, colleges don't generally give loans. The lenders are not affiliated with the college.
Second, as with anything it is more complex than you are making it. For example, I've known people who have:
- Had a variable interest go up with little to no notice and no adjustment to the payments so if you're not paying attention month to month you end up underpaying.
- Been put in deferment without notice (so their payments stopped) and without requesting it, but continued to accumulate interest.
- Interest is sometimes compounding while in deferment or paying less than interest.
- Were mislead about how interest accumulated while they were still in school (i.e. lead to believe there was no interest when in reality there was just "no payments")
And in that last one in particular, the person I know in that situation (happened to be married to her now), it was her boomer parents that signed the loan paperwork and they didn't even give her access until after she graduated when she found out interest compounding that whole time.
I think the whole debate is putting too much on 17 kids and not enough on their parents who need to co-sign these documents. When I was that age the school didn't tell me how interest worked, my parents did.
I am not saying it is simple. And yes technically the lenders are separate but the incentives align them so the effect is the same as if they weren’t.
As examples:
- loans are given equally for an English major and an electrical engineer. No market force at play here.
- Interest rates are the same as well even though the risk of default is not the same across majors
- Your interest rate remains the same for subsequent years even if you get a 2.0 your first year.
- College tuition rises in lockstep with additional Federal grants and loan programs
Also, I am not saying there isn’t bad or unscrupulous behavior by lenders but the default case is poor money management and a faulty understanding of interest. I think this fault lies with the student, but also the government allowing its lenders and institutions to prey upon their youth as well as allowing high schools to graduate students without this basic understanding.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.
I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today
Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.
A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.
A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.
> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?
This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.
In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.
My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.
> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.
No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.
> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
I'm not sure it matters anyway.
I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points.
I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points.
I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM.
If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos.
The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.
We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.
> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies
The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.
Define "power".
If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are.
But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely.
The next generation are just further along on this curve.
And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing.
It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.
> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are
They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
I'm more thinking of Dickens - long run-on sentences, with points stretched over sub clauses. It's difficult, and that was the pulp of the day.
>long run-on sentences
long yes, run-on no.
So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it
> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.
Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.
Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.
The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!
> The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible
Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)
I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is.
I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us.
Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit.
Exactly. Legal language is basically a programming language for lawyers. It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it any more than to expect a non-coder to understand source code. Even most politicians keep staff to do the actual reading of bills.
That's not true at all. Modern legal education has focused on plain English drafting and avoidance of arcane jargon precisely to make legal documents comprehensible to non-specialists. There are almost no situations where legal drafting requires use of jargon. Jargon is pretty much only necessary where the domain requires use of jargon. Contracts are meant to be followed by the parties, and if the parties can't understand the terms of the contract because of obscure drafting, they can't abide by the terms.
Also legal language is in no way a programming language. And I would know, I'm a lawyer and a software engineer. It would actually be a dramatic improvement if lawyers were more consistent in their use of terms of art, but in practice there are very few terms of art that aren't either in general use or easily understood with a brief definition, and none are defined with anything like the precision or consistency of a programming language.
I think you overestimate how much the average person can understand opaque jargon like "party of the first part". I'm sure good legal writing can avoid these things, but often (such as in the licenses people are theoretically supposed to click on that they have read and agree to for software), the opaqueness is the point -- they don't really want the user to understand what they are agreeing to.
> It isn't reasonable to expect a non lawyer to understand it
A closing argument - the specific example the parent comment used - is made to the jury. It is intended to persuade the jury. If the jury can't understand it, something has gone very wrong.
It is not written though
> are the voters who will not be able to read a bill
politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large
The author should have said "read a voter information pamphlet".
> nobody can read a bill
Especially not our politicians.
> nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument
Really? I have no legal training. I can follow a SCOTUS opinion and most local legislation.
Bills are not hard to read. Especially the closer to local government you get. The problem is that bills are worth the paper they're written on until courts affirm what the language means in the context of the legal system.
Bills are not hard to read because they are complex, but because they are poorly written. They generally contain lots of comma-separated lists in sentences, as well as nested conditional clauses.
If they were written in a structured format instead of in prose (think nested bullet points, conditional blocks like a programming language, etc.) then they'd be _significantly_ easier to understand.
A literate person is able to read an article in a newspaper and understand it has a bias or a certain angle, though. Or see an headline in social media and understand it's fake, or bullshit.
>I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis.
I recorded some tutorial videos for some kids a while back, to help them prepare for an exam.
The feedback I got was very positive, but I suspected they weren't learning as much as they thought. So I made a practice exam for them, and they failed it.
This was a wake-up call for them. They revisited the material, and got a good score on repeating the practice exam, and a good score on the actual exam.
So, there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use.
(Ditto for if you want to retain a skill or faculty!)
I noticed that in myself. I’d read a chapter and be convinced that I’d absorbed the information. It wasn’t until I learned networking from a second-hand college text-book that I realised that wasn’t really the case. Each chapter concluded with questions to verify that the reader had understood the concepts. When I tested myself, I found that I could only answer around half of the questions and had to go back and re-read sections in order to answer the others. I had completely over-estimated how much I had learned while reading.
On Stack Exchange sites, I used to see questions and think “Oh! I know the answer. It’ll only take a few minutes to answer”. Invariably, I discovered that I didn’t have all the knowledge to provide a complete answer. While typing, I’d realise that there were gaps in my knowledge (e.g., is what I’m writing true for BSDs as well as Linux OSs?) or there’d be edge cases that I hadn’t previously considered (differences between program versions, how software behaves in different locales, etc.). A good, comprehensive answer ended up taking around half an hour but I found the effort was worth it: writing Stack Overflow answers was a great way to learn.
Speaking of “forcing functions”, I’m currently learning guitar and my goal for this year is to learn a song in full and record myself to objectively see how well I’m actually playing.
> there needs to be a forcing function. The brain will generally be as lazy as it can get away with, in any situation. So if you want to develop some skill or faculty, you need to create a situation which demands its use
Yes! The brain is optimized to be lazy. A forcing function to actually use/apply knowledge is required.
Maybe they can't read because the article is behind a pay wall.
hahahaha exactly
I can confirm this from community colleges in both California and Oregon over the past two years; every non-science, non-math general education class (n=10+) has at least one student who cannot read or write at more than a couple sentences per minute. They’re perfectly able to keep up verbally but their education passed them through standardized tests without requiring reading and writing at a reasonable velocity.
https://archive.ph/WY1yk
Says unable to connect
Hit refresh
Working now
Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times?
I suspect that has something to do with it.
I enjoy doing home-lab project work at home because I have to plan things out and concentrate on a single problem for a contiguous string of time, and at the end I feel a sense of achievement in reaching, or getting closer to, the goal.
At work I spend maybe five minutes on something before being asked a question about something else, and it doesn't feel as if I really achieve much at all.
I don't get paid for the first one and do get paid for the second one, but I think for the quality of work (as a direct result of the continuity of attention) it should be the other way round.
I'm refreshing a language on Duolingo and I'm careful not to blast through the exercises without actively processing them. You can treat it as mindless puzzle solving without internalizing anything. I suspect many reading averse digital natives do something similar when they can't consume video or audio.
I know formerly smart people, the same people are phone addicts. They’re not kids.
It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.
It's an attention issue. We have these phones with constant dopamine hits. We were getting it a little bit on the web before the rise of smartphones, but it's just out of control now. We have 100 apps constantly vying for our attention and giving us endless things to scroll through.
The only thing that fixes it is to put the phone down. Do something else. Play video games. Read books. Go outside. Anything to stay away from the phone (but not TV). These phones are as bad as drugs.
I've been pushing to read a lot more books this year and it helps a lot.
Agreed with all of the above, except the "100s of apps."
Turning notifications off of most apps solves a bunch of little problems.
The big problems need to be forcibly named at every chance. In no particular order, youtube, tiktok, insta, facebook (or meta?), are all guilty of making the world a worse place. Reddit and twitter's endless scroll is bad, too, but it seems their content got so bad the addiction is less strong there, like poop-flavored cigarettes.
I guess there are lots of ways to do it, making it less user friendly? ^a ^a, or ^a n or ^a p or ^a <space>, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
https://archive.is/XvPXE
> … smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
Does anyone know what’s the importance of sighing in this context? I notice one of my work colleagues sighs a lot when reading but I assume that’s due to the nature of the work he’s doing – or emails he reads.
On a related note, I recently read an article¹ by an Irish fiction writer who teaches her craft to others. While her article focusses on the stages to achieving mastery, the teacher found that even students who want to be writers don’t want to read. I found that to be a bizarre concept and hard to believe; it’d be like wanting to be a musician without listening to music or a film-maker not watching Hitchcock, Welles, Bergman, Capra, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Lee, Spielberg, etc.
¹ https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/05/04/some...
Yep. Smartphones and social media were the jab, jab, and now AI is the knockout punch. We're raising a generation of people who quite literally do not know how to think for themselves and completely lack the motivation (and attention span required) to even try.
I think it's just the culture. I'm old. I used to regularly read long books. Now I can't even get through a 20 minute video unless I'm walking or driving. I mean I could if I had to, but I wouldn't do it for fun.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Multiple times in my career in tech, I've had people complain that a 2-page write-up is too long. These are well compensated people that went to top universities. I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article.
> I can't imagine what they would do if faced with a 20-page article.
They'd feed it to a chatbot and glance over whatever summary it came back with and believe it represents the contents of the article.
I’ve said this myself myriad of times over a very long career as SWE. never because I can’t read 20 pages but because 20-page write-up is always 18 pages too many. be succinct and keep it simple. if you can’t explain on few pages another 50 won’t help you
See also:
Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM (5 days ago, 866 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309233
If you can read cursive, the Newberry has a job for you (62 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607255
Kids rarely read books anymore, even in English class (5 months ago, 346 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233
US high school students’ scores fail in reading and math (8 months ago, 1089 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182657
Ask HN: How to gain the ability to read with focus and learn? (11 months ago, 39 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346359
Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics (2023) (41 days ago, 292 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47867755
It sure looks like phones are making students dumber (2.5 years ago, 151 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695500
UK surgery students ‘losing dexterity to stitch patients’ (7.5 years ago, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18339299
Several Baltimore schools have no students proficient in state tests (9 years ago, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385703
Many McGill education students cannot calculate an average (11 years ago, 274 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080665
U.S. students from educated families lag in international tests (12 years ago, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744918
Note: I could not find posts about US reading / writing educational failures prior to this in the archives, though they may still exist; but there are still many about math education and bad business writing. However, I believe this post was the bellwether warning of what would follow:
A writing career becomes harder to scale (16 years ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109011
Irony: can't read TFA without bypassing a signin-wall.
"Idiocracy (2006)" wasn't supposed to be a documentary!
Your readers also cannot read, due to paywall.
https://archive.ph/XvPXE
The irony of not reading the comments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930
There was a study "They don’t read very well: A study of the reading comprehension skills of English majors at two midwestern universities" last year where they had university students try to read the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, they couldn't do it at all.
Text: "it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."
Respondent: "It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street."
I consider myself quite literate, and (I think) can both read and construct complex sentences that remain grammatically- and content-descriptively-correct.
Having said that, when I read Thomas Pynchon, and I've only progressed through four of his more beginner-friendly books, in a number of places I feel that reading his work is something that is passively happening to me, as opposed to my actively following along with the action / description.
There's something I enjoy about Pynchon's writing, but I don't think I'm picking up everything that he's putting down.
Similarly with the older language used by Dickens. But damn it sounds good.
Response looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.
IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...
My teachers can't use a computer.
Home schooling will boom as a result
It's not so much that they can't read, it's just that they have a short attention spam, which is an even bigger issue. And yes, I blame Tiktok and co. Your students couldn't sit through Ben-Hur.
I can't read this article because it's pay walled
Do we have the courage to do what's necessary to fix education in the United States? That is:
- abolish teachers unions
- fail / keep back students who don't meet standards, in a completely objective fashion with no regard for racial / ethnic / gender sensitivities
Perhaps we can take some guidance from college teaching, which has effectively abolished unions. Well over half of college level teaching is done by adjuncts, who are not on the tenure track and have no training or licensing requirements.
So eliminate their bargaining power and job and wage protections because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning? Doesn't seem fair to me.
> because parents aren't doing their part to ensure their kids are learning?
Someone isn’t doing their job. And we can’t fire the parents. Tackling teachers’ unions seems like a necessary difficult step if we want to take this seriously. Alternatively: we keep letting public education deteriorate until so much of the population opts out of it that killing it outright becomes politically possible.
You left off: pay teachers top wages to draw top talent, didn't you?
California already spends half the state budget on education. Isn’t that more than enough, if spent with a modicum of sanity?
Why does every conversation in the USA always involve race?
Because the country is full of people who always have race on their mind?
Maybe read TFA. It has supporting evidence for the actual causes, not imaginary ones.
The fundamental cause is lack of accountability which my points address. Also, you are rude.
I can't read either. I think the paywall might have to do with it.
This was shared about a half-hour prior to your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930
Different issue
what was the article?
>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college.
Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade.
>showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests
Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on…
>Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.
Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat.
>districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding
I remember this first hand.
>The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation…
There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.
I think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.
That’s fair.
When I was in school we joked about it being 13th grade, that was seeing all the kids as freshmen who CLEARLY didn’t belong there, but their guidance counselors told them for 12 years about how they need to go to college.
[flagged]
tl;dr
[flagged]
I ran pre AI articles through pangram last week and it gave similar kind of numbers so I think it's pretty bad at distinguishing.
Someone ran the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution through an AI detector and apparently our country was founded by an AI.
I just checked on Pangram and it turns out that the U.S. Constitution is 100% human-written. Who would have thought?
Saying "an AI detector" is a bit like saying "an AI" - there's a pretty big difference between Llama 3B and Opus 4.8.
I KNEW IT!
To the degree that AIs are good at re-creating the style of the training data, you would expect there to be non-AI-generated text that would "look like" AI output.
AI detectors are all garbage, with very high false positive rates.
They use, unwittingly, proxies for "AI" stylometry, with no specific or explicable features they can point to and say "Look! That is evidence that the text is written by AI", as if there were such features in the first place. The best they can do is validate the very lazy one-shot patterns that humans should be able to highlight in the first place.
Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.
[dead]
Ai was trained on news and journal articles and this is the reason we see so many em-dashes as well. The side effect is that good writing is now classified as AI generated, which makes it bad writing. What a messed up world we live in
Pangram is basically a made-up number.
I've tried it on large docs I've written well before the AI times, and that are nowhere available on the Internet (so it can't be a corpus issue) - and it is happily classifying me as 60%-80% AI.
pangram is AI garbage spewing AI garbage
Is that irony? Or did the author just use a tool to help? It would be ironic if the author was unable to write about how the students can’t read.
If teachers could teach, students might be able to read. If students could read, maybe more of them would learn how to write. If more of them learned to write, maybe it'd be inspirational to their peers and future generations.
It's too bad the teachers can't teach.
Its unfair to dump all the blame on teachers. Yes, some teachers could make a difference (and some do), inspire students but that’s also a match made in haven, students need be receptive to learning something that is arduous at first. Id blame most of it on how technology is weaponized/ financialized to steal attention and fill it with junk.