A frustrated teacher recently took to social media with a desperate warning:
You guys don’t know what’s going on in education right now. That’s fine—how could you know unless you were working in it? But I think that you need to know….
First of all the kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night.
Because they are in a constant state of dopamine withdrawal at school, they behave like addicts. They’re super emotional. The smallest things set them off.
When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in….
They’re not there.
And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
They just care about the next fix—because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.
They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.
How bad is it for educators right now?
Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.
This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:
I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021….I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn’t comprehended the material before, but hadn’t faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn’t care….
Since 2021 I’ve been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn’t performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.
I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.
I’ve made a similar claim in this article—where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.
Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing—and at an accelerated pace.
Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis—and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists—shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.
This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.
Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.
Below are more ugly numbers from another in-depth study—which looks at how children spend their day. It reveals that children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens.
YouTube usage for this group has more than doubled in just four years.
Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than do
24 Comments
jjgreen
Everyone with a mobile is dead inside. Dead. Inside. But it's not so bad, they don't want to bite you, and there are a few living still out there; I reckon a couple of thousand in London. We recognise each-other and give a nod or a raise of the eyebrow, then back into the crowds of the undead stumbling along doom-scrolling celebrity's dinners or whatever the fuck it is they find so compelling …
supportengineer
I'm in my 50's and looking forward, I just don't see anything good in the future for this world.
Probably people have felt this way throughout all of history but this time seems different.
juunpp
Phones should be banned in school. Really that simple. No serious school/parent that cares about the kids' education would allow phones.
hibikir
What we are seeing with students is that it's harder to get them to do work if they are demotivated, but that there's so many more tools for them to learn quickly and effectively when they are. Yes, LLMs can be used to cheat on an assignment, but they can also be used to get instant feedback and reasonably good advice when the teacher might bring judgement.
This has always been the issue of the internet: It's good at giving us what we want. It's just that many times, what we want is really bad for us. The same tool that finds friends that share a hobby is the same whether the hobby is building gundams or participating in conspiracy thinking.
So what I expect we'll see is outcome divergence. For some people it's a great boon. For others, the worst thing we could have done for them. What made someone successful in the 1980s might be very different in the 2030s
siliconc0w
Ironically AI has the ability to improve education exponentially and it's being used to cheat on assignments to leave time for more AI-powered video addiction. It's the job of capitalism to ruthlessly seek profit but it's the job of regulators to ensure that profit is in long-term socially productive direction.
godelski
I'm a (finishing) grad student and do a lot of teaching. While I definitely experience a lot of what's said in here I think a lot of people are getting things wrong. It is easy to point at technology and just say the youngins are dumb/lazy/have no attention.
First, I have mixed feelings about this. The first part is right but the second part isn't. And it illustrates part of the problem. They can learn new things but we are not incentivizing them to.
The thing is we need to rethink how we educate people. In fact, I think we need to rethink a lot of things. The problem here is you need to ask a lot of "why" questions. What I do like about the article is that it does talk about the addiction in short form mediums. That instant gratification. This is definitely part of the problem, but I'd argue extends far beyond students and isn't just from social media.
Further upstream, I think a problem we have is over-metricization. Or what one might call bureaucracy. I've been calling it "Goodhart's Hell". The reason Goodhart's Law is a thing is because you can never perfectly align a metric to the thing you actually want to measure. So no matter how good your algorithm is[0] it won't be perfectly aligned. You need to evaluate beyond the metric and watch for drift. Goodhart's Law is more a warning about how people are good optimizers, so if you strongly incentivize the metric and only the metric, you end up with a billion cobras while trying to eradicate them[1].
So students are kinda doing what students have done for awhile. We've been having this conversation with cheating and we've had jokes about how you remember material for the test and immediately forget it after. These things are indicative of misalignment! Part of the problem here is that so much pressure is put on getting good grades that you will punish students for being honest. You punish students for struggling and gaining deep learning while you reward those who look up solution manuals and get homeworks from peers or even ask GPT. This is the root of the problem, and we can't solve these things until we rethink this. This is in the same way that we've created these addiction machines like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and others. We strongly fit the metric at the expense of fitting our goal. We all know people who did really bad in school and on tests like SATs and stuff but are brilliant. Similarly we also know people who did amazing on all those things yet are bumbling idiots. Those are just examples of misalignment. Weirdly the more meritocratic you try to make things the less meritocratic things become. Not because you impose metrics, but because you overfit metrics.
What's happening to students? It's the same thing that's happening to everyone else.
I think we really need to rethink a lot of this. Luckily, there is action that a lot of you on HN can do! The problem is created through lots of small effects, thus the solution needs to be too. If you are just a junior engineer, ask questions about how well aligned a metric is to the goal. At worst you learn something, at best you make the product better. If you are a senior, think carefully about these things and encourage your team to too. Expertise is about understanding depth and nuance, so encourage that! If you're a manager, IT IS YOUR JOB TO CAREFULLY ENSURE THINGS ARE WELL ALIGNED. That's one of the most important things you can do!
I know a lot of the pushback, and I hear "but you can't assign value to <x>". But here's the thing, all those numbers are fucking made up anyways. Use your expertise and try to make products better. Not better defined by what makes share value go up or your manager says is "value" but just make the user experience better! Make things that make peoples' lives better! That was the promise of computing in the first place and why it created these billion dollar companies. I promise the money will follow. There is nothing stopping us from making money hand over fist WHILE making good products that make peoples lives better. If you believe these are at odds with one another, then do you really just want to build a dystopian Sci-Fi future? Are you really just okay "sacrificing your soul" for a paycheck? While I understand the calculus isn't so easy for everyone, we are talking about a field where $100k-$400k salaries are not uncommon, and you definitely have a choice in those ranges. But importantly, be a little grumpy. After all, that's your job as a developer/engineer/researcher: to find problems and fix them.
Tldr: think carefully if you want to enable others to think carefully
[0] I'll admit the irony of me saying this. I am extremely math oriented and work in machine learning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43442631)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
dmvdoug
Try talking to them. Try asking them questions about what they think about things and then challenging them to defend it. Above all, try listening to them. Truly listening. Not call and response. Not 3-second wait time followed by “good job” or “well, not exactly.” Students today, like kids always, eagerly seek connections with people, not content. Establish that first and the rest will fall into place.
(That’s the good news. The bad news is that our education system, from federal level on down to the individual school board, will readily jump in and agree, but then require metrics and other “measurables” to show that students are cranking out “learning outcomes.” So with the best will in the world, and genuine interest in our kids and their lives as a predicate to meaningful learning in an otherwise highly artificial classroom setting, you as a teacher are stuck banging your head against an immovable concrete wall that gets refreshed annually with million dollar consultant contracts for outsiders who spend two hours every two weeks in your school to tell you what you need to do to reach your students. And at some point, you just say fuck you to all of it.)
aeblyve
I tend to think that students preferring internet trash over schooling is more an indictment of the state of schooling than internet trash. Of course, that reflects on the kinds of worker units society is directed to produce as well, and their alignment with the economy as it actually exists and works.
kurofune
I live in a country where almost no one under 35 is able to purchase a house, no matter how educated you are. We live to pay the rent, the system is broken and we all know it, so we don't need to toil anymore; there is no incentive. As simple as that.
protocolture
Complaining about students is just as much of a crutch as parents using iPads as childcare.
Things (gasp) change. Teachers should be looking for funding to keep up with changes, not shitting on kids. If you dont like the kids, get out of education.
Honestly, its very likely that the vast majority of your curriculum is simply not useful or relevant to them, they have no interest or connection with you, and you have made no effort to engage them.
extension
> kids have no ability to be bored whatsoever
Funny how intolerance for boredom is framed as the problem, rather than the boredom itself.
> incarcerated students really want to learn
They also really want to see the sky. It's good that students in general don't behave as if they are incarcerated.
> children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens
Most two-year-olds can fit an hour of Cocomelon into their busy schedule. Kids, like adults, are going to burn a few hours every day vegging out. Before the phone screen, it was the TV screen, which was worse.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
Perhaps students increasingly feel that the things above obstruct and delay their future, rather than prepare them for it. Perhaps we should consider how to make school more relevant and engaging to them, rather than how to impoverish their lives outside of school.
jmye
> There must be thousands of people working at these tech behemoths—many in positions of great responsibility—who are horrified by what their own companies are doing. They need to speak up, and lead by example.
This seems wildly naive. Everyone working at Meta knows that the sum total of their work is giving teen girls depression more efficiently.
They don’t care or they’ve made excuses or they’ve made up a story about how that’s not really what they’re working on – that’s those other people, their work is different.
ern
I remember watching hours of TV as a child in the 80s. I remember my cousins, born in the 90s staring like zombies at Cartoon Network when they were toddlers. We're all reasonably functional adults (most high achievers academically, and holding down well-paid jobs, with families). We also had huge amounts of screen time playing games, mostly on PCs.
If screens per-se are the problem, we'd have seen the same issues manifesting decades ago.
I think phones are the issue, rather than screens, specifically social media and notifications in particular. Someone suggested turning notifications off for social media, and it was a big change in my life, and something I've urged my own children to do as well.
johntitorjr
[dead]
OutOfHere
The article is just someone trying to save their job as an educator.
I invite the author to count the percentage of people or students looking at their phone screen while crossing the road. That's the percent that need saving. The rest are fine.
jmward01
As a society, or I guess even as a species, we need to figure out how to deal with digital drugs, fast. I mean it, they are drugs. That doesn't mean ban them, but getting serious about understanding how to integrate them safely into our lives is important. Just like the chemical versions, digital drugs come in different potencies and with different effects and we need to think about classifying them as such. FB, Fox, HN, you name it. What is a 'safe' experience? How do we introduce our kids to them or how do we keep them away if it is too harmful? These are not easy questions for sure.
csomar
> The situation is so extreme that more than 40% of students were caught cheating recently—and it happened in an ethics class!
A bit concerned about the hyper-stimulation but this actually gives me a lot of hope and I think it'll be worth it. What the teachers are concerned about here is their pathetic institution of teaching which has not revolutionized with the time. It's amazing (is that the right word?) that the teacher is annoyed by his students "cheating" on the test but they don't see the fallacy of determining one's trajectory through a single point (1 hour exam).
The system is pathetic and hopefully the new generation is smarter, sees it for what it is, spends its time on screen/video games and let these bureaucrats infinitely scratch their heads.
> And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.
This made my day…
brianhama
This is just the latest episode of “Blame the Tech” for why kids supposedly suck now. Telephones, rock music, comic books, TV, video games—every generation has its boogeyman. Now it’s smartphones. Honestly, I’m more curious what’s gonna freak everyone out next, but I’m definitely not losing sleep over “the kids.”
hoseja
Seems like it's clear to children that "education" has become nothing more than empty credential sold by a corrupt system.
And of course the author likes criminals more.
chromanoid
I think China is on the right track here. https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/kid-mode-guidelines/ While I don't like the privacy implications, I like the screen time limits China establishes. Social media and internet must be treated with much care.
It's like a candy store open 24/7 – completely free and always within reach. Even adults have a hard time to resist TikTok and YT Shorts and the like.
The Internet has changed since I was a kid browsing through GeoCities webrings and the Yahoo Directory while searching with AltaVista. Generations of technology enthusiasts have to acknowledge that the internet of the past is no more and cannot be brought to our children as such.
The temptations we faced then were nothing compared to what children today have to resist.
Just as many countries regulate advertisements aimed at minors, we need to start regulating screen time for kids – before they get pulled into the vortex of influencers and endlessly accessible, mentally corrosive entertainment.
seydor
It's about time for Education to adapt to the new generations
CrLf
Nothing to worry about. They don't need to learn anything anyway. Anything they would do in the future will be done by agentic AI, and generative AI will produce all the content they could possibly consume. They will be free to spend all day on their phones.
thrance
Teachers are severly underpaid, classrooms are overcrowded, many parents believe teachers are out to indoctrinate their kids into transhood or whatever other conspiracy the right currently fancies. Republicans have been attacking public schooling for 50 years, they hate the idea of providing fair eduction. Democrats have been doing nothing to fight this. Here are the results.
You can, and probably should, ban phones from school, but that won't fix that cult of ignorance [1] dictating every policy made on education.
[1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C…
MrMcCall
Our kids, both teens, are beloved by everyone they meet. I'm not exaggerating.
Our oldest, our daughter, has had a few jobs working in her craftland, and both loved it and was loved by her fellow employees and customers.
Our son is an open chess champion who is beloved by his chess club compariots. When he played out of his mind and won the open tournament, the cool part was that his chess club mates were really happy that he won, and a parent of one of his friends excitedly told me how happy they were. Even thought his son was much younger, my son's friendliness and kindness really endeared him to that young Indian boy.
The question is, "Why?"
First off, we're not particularly religious at home. We sometimes pray before meals, but we tend to eat when we're hungry, i.e. not all together, always. We rarely pray together because I feel strongly that religion is a personal affair. I also do not pray in front of them, to prevent putting any kind of pressure on them towards my preference. We Sufis feel there is no superiority in one form of religion over others, and I manifest that most deeply by letting them know that their path is theirs to choose. I'm only here to love them and teach them how to be lovingly kind and respectful to others.
Second, and probably most importantly: they have never had unfettered access to the Internet and we have no TV of any kind, and they do not have or use smartphones or social media of any kind (except our daughter is a good navigator in the car).
We did have Hulu for a minute, but mainly for the powerful "Summer of Soul". We have also watched some Tubi for, for example, "Death on the Nile" and a few select others. And the old Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series are a mainstay, as well as a few select movies, such as the Avengers series and "Knives Out", but it is very minimal, nothing too sexy, and nothing at all too violent.
And ZERO internet or social media. Sure, we might look some stuff up, we watch some stuff like Tosh Show (after I pre-screen it), but stuff more like Veritasium (that they love), and some random YT videos we find interesing. Plus, we watch a fair bit of NHKOnline for Design Stories, 72 Hours, and, of course, Grand Sumo Highlights (just for how entirely foreign and intense that sport is) for maybe a decade now. They have their favorite EPL and Serie A teams, plus Champion's League, as they like to knock the ball around at the park. My son and I follow the NBA through a few pods (while he chesses online on his computer, which is in the living room with this one, our "media computer") and the occasional highlight.
My point here is that I keep their media appetites satiated with interesting, curated content, but they're spared the titilating fiction that I grew up on. The only horror movie they've seen (multiple times) is Jordan Peele's fantastic "Nope". But absolutely no gratuitous sex stuff, whatsoever, not that we don't have the occasional conversation about such stuff. And we watch a bit of comedy, with three of Tom Papa's stand-up specials on Tubi being a big recent hit.
The important thing is that we human beings have a part of us that gravitates towards the lewd and lascivious, and our media is naturally permeated with it, and they just don't need it, and my approach has worked. They help the family around the house because they understand that they're valuable parts of the team and that doing good work is good for everyone. And when they do catch wind of something gross (usually said by a comedian), they appreciate that we'll talk about it but that we screen off that part of the world for them.
I was exposed to porn at a young age (6th grade recycling dumpster "Oui" magazines) and then Playboy Channel and HBO in my early teens. No teenager needs Animal House or Porky's in their lives. Being homeschooled (our daughter's choice because middle school orientation was brutal, and our son to play more chess), they're also not socialized by kids with smartphones who watch "Game of Thrones" rapescenes and whatnot.
My daughter has listened to and/or read half of my favorite author William Gibson's novels, plus Anna Karenina and lots and lots of other literature plus Langston Hughes' own poetry collection plus the biographies of some famous women. We all together listened to 2018ish's Pullitzer Prize-winning 900pg biography of Frederick Douglass (5-6 hours/day for 2-3 weeks, weekends off), so they know how brutal America is to Black folks, and how talented and capable they are. And my son and I have listened to Stephen E. Ambrose's "D-Day" and "Citizen Soldier" multiple times, and we all love his book and Tom Hanks' miniseries "Band of Brothers". My son and I have also listened to a lot of the excellent podcast "Fall of Civilizations".
They understand the importance of love and they know enough of history to understand how brutal most of this world has been and still is, to some extent. We watched Jan6's debacle unfold live on CNN's live website, to our shared horror. That this orange bastard pardoned those fuckers is truly evil, and my kids understand that full-well. We hold no ethnic animus, or consider ourselves superior in any way to others, except perhaps in our worldview that centers on universal compassion, kindness, and mutual respect.
They have NEVER — and I mean NEVER — had an ill word said against them by anyone, ever, and that's no exaggeration. A teacher of our daughter's cried on their last day when she pulled me aside to tell me how much she will miss our daughter, and our son was chosen to be in the 4th grade class that spent part of the day mainstreaming ASD kids; he was chosen for his kindness. We love and care for each other, without even having to ask. We enjoy hanging out and we laugh a LOT, with each other, at each other, and, most importantly, at ourselves.
So, when I say that nothing in the universe is more important than we human beings choosing compassion, for one and all, I mean it, and I have the fucking proof. And when I say we're living in a world full of purblind fools who are destroying this world with their ignorant selfishness, I know what I'm talking about.
Wake up to compassion, my friends. Both your and our collective happiness is at stake.
"There's still time to change the road you're on." –Stairway to Heaven
And I've always sworn around the kids and let them swear freely (but only in the house), because that's the only way to learn the difference between profane and vulgar. Fucking is a very useful word, so long as it's not the verb form, but even that rule was broken when, at the end of Bale's Batman trilogy, Ras al Ghoul's daugher betrays him, after having slept with him, my wife asked why she did both those things, our daughter replied,
"She fucked him before she fucked him."
I couldn't be prouder that she both understands that truth and knows enough to not say it in public.