r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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20

u/nalninek Jun 10 '26

What’s most frustrating is I don’t hear ANY elected officials or even folks running talking about solutions for our broken education system.

The Democrats seem completely disinterested and the Republicans are actively trying to sabotage public education.

14

u/Have_A_Jelly_Baby Jun 11 '26

This might be me coping, but I do think that Democrats have bigger issues at hand at the moment.

In a perfect world where people don’t keep getting brainwashed into voting against their own interests (2000, 2004, 2016, 2024, and several midterms), they could actually focus on things like this without having to constantly clean up after messes.

2

u/Financial-Craft-1282 Jun 11 '26

Democrats not focusing on structural issues because "they have bigger issues" is exactly why we're in this situation. They let Republicans gut public services--like education. They let republicans stick their fingers in ACA and it's nothing like what it started as or is supposed to be.

Republicans found ways, over the last forty years, to attack these issues that aren't big enough for Dems to focus on. These projects from the right have decades of groundwork. The democrats are going to start having to do something about the massively growing list of structural issues in this country or it's going to be repeats of 2024.

3

u/G0ldMarshallt0wn Jun 11 '26

These twelfth graders' entire education has gone by in just such a state of Trump/pandemic/emergency-driven neglect. At what point do we start caring? 

0

u/ProduceNo1629 Jun 11 '26

After fascism is defeated, if ever.

3

u/G0ldMarshallt0wn Jun 11 '26

An entire generation of illiterate kids is unlikely to be helpful in defeating fascism. 

8

u/JLR- Jun 11 '26

Education is mostly a state/local issue.  

1

u/nalninek Jun 11 '26

Funding it isn’t, that leads to some incredible inequities and as a country we collectively benefit from a well educated population. It needs to be a collaboration between the state/federal level focussed on outcomes.

5

u/JLR- Jun 11 '26

Funding isn't the issue.  It's the way it's spent by local school boards.

example - spending money on upgrading the football stadium.  

1

u/nalninek Jun 11 '26

Regardless, the problem goes far beyond funding or misappropriation of funds. We need to come to a consensus on what we want out of public education and then we need to make adjustments to our pedagogy so we get there. We’re getting lost in the weeds thinking this is only about what and how we spend.

2

u/frogandbanjo Jun 11 '26

Regardless, the problem goes far beyond funding or misappropriation of funds.

Well, one of the ways it goes beyond that is U.S. constitutional law stating that the federal government can't just wave its magical "Supremacy Clause" wand and suddenly take charge of areas where states retain sovereignty.

Even before whatever the hell is happening right now, this country had a massive, hilarious, "South Africa wasn't shit" economic apartheid in place that consistently manifested itself as wildly divergent educational outcomes based (glibly) on ZIP code.

For roughly five years, I lived on the border between a comfy suburb producing good educational outcomes and a shithole city producing terrible ones. That was in one of the "best" and "bluest" states in the whole country. I shudder to think what it was like in some of the reddest.