My Students Can't Read

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.

jm4• 2 months ago

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.

kevin_thibedeau• 2 months ago

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.

yonaguska• 2 months ago

I highly recommend comprehensible input if you're refreshing a language. Free via youtube.

floxy2• 2 months ago

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.

BLKNSLVR4• 2 months ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

I think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.

SV_BubbleTime3• 2 months ago

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.

mr-pink• 2 months ago

what was the article?

ngriffiths4• 2 months ago

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.

jimbokun2• 2 months ago

nobody can read a bill

Especially not our politicians.

jhbadger2• 2 months ago

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.

stult• 2 months ago

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.

ipsento606• 2 months ago

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.

duped• 2 months ago

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.

awepofiwaop• 2 months ago

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.

atmavatar• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway2016a3• 2 months ago

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.

beej713• 2 months ago

The author should have said "read a voter information pamphlet".

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.

marcus_holmes7• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.

raddan2• 2 months ago

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!

tasuki2• 2 months ago

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 the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.

One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?

KevinMS• 2 months ago

are the voters who will not be able to read a bill

politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large

thefz• 2 months ago

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.

godelski6• 2 months ago

  > which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it

Literacy isn't just the ability to read words, it's the ability to interpret them.

You can read while still being illiterate

ngriffiths4• 2 months ago

Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.

altairprime3• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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

jimbokun2• 2 months ago

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?

beepbooptheory• 2 months ago

Why wouldn't employers value it?

delfinom• 2 months ago

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.

jeremyjh• 2 months ago

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.

tejtm• 2 months ago

If an employer really valued the credential, they would supply it.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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.

foolfoolz• 2 months ago

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

toomuchtodo• 2 months ago

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

yourapostasy• 2 months ago

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.

jkestner• 2 months ago

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.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

There is something about devoting effort to maintaining the form of a thing while ignoring its essence.

XorNot• 2 months ago

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.

Xeoncross• 2 months ago

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.

qball• 2 months ago

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.

whimblepop4• 2 months ago

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.

D-Machine4• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.

ifidishshbsba• 2 months ago

It’s often not even about the job but to get visas

saimiam• 2 months ago

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

jimbob45• 2 months ago

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.

lmm• 2 months ago

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.

floxy2• 2 months ago

Citation needed for American public high schools that have a Shakespeare-heavy curriculum.

eszed• 2 months ago

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.

jmspring• 2 months ago

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.

tasuki2• 2 months ago

This has been going on for thousands of years...

cjbgkagh8• 2 months ago

And what if the 35% failure rate had a disparate impact, would you still fail them?

D-Machine4• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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

KPGv23• 2 months ago

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.

whatever120• 2 months ago

You’re an obnoxious, pretentious prick

johnobrien1010• 2 months ago

This assertion seems light on sources. What evidence do you have to support your claims?

KPGv23• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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.

whimblepop4• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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)

keeda• 2 months ago

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.

abaymado• 2 months ago

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.

godelski6• 2 months ago

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

cmxch• 2 months ago

So basically you want to tier bin people’s lives and careers because of one or two numbers?

Fuck No.

GuB-422• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.)

pclowes11• 2 months ago

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.

jkubicek• 2 months ago

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

potsandpans• 2 months ago

(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.

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

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.

thrance• 2 months ago

Notice that how hard a diploma is to get is completely irrelevant to literacy rates.

LocalH• 2 months ago

The US has a really bad problem with parents thinking they should have deity-level say over every single aspect of how their kids are raised. This is very ironic, since the US also has a really bad problem with other parents thinking they can tell people how to raise their kids (witness all the "free-range" children who have innocently gotten their parents in trouble because some other parent saw them alone and called the police).

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

It should be less stigmatized to fail, study, try again, and pass. This way more people would have the credential because they have the knowledge as more people would have the knowledge. The credential would mean something, even though most people would have it.

phyzix5761• 2 months ago

Maybe they can't read because the article is behind a pay wall.

youarenotyu• 2 months ago

hahahaha exactly

andai3• 2 months ago

Your readers also cannot read, due to paywall.

https://archive.ph/XvPXE

jjulius2• 2 months ago

The irony of not reading the comments... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48377930

altairprime3• 2 months ago

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

altairprime3• 2 months ago

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

throw_m239339• 2 months ago

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.

baggy_trough3• 2 months ago

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

manoDev2• 2 months ago

Maybe read TFA. It has supporting evidence for the actual causes, not imaginary ones.

baggy_trough3• 2 months ago

The fundamental cause is lack of accountability which my points address. Also, you are rude.

analog31• 2 months ago

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.

sohrob• 2 months ago

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.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 months ago

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.

beej713• 2 months ago

You left off: pay teachers top wages to draw top talent, didn't you?

baggy_trough3• 2 months ago

California already spends half the state budget on education. Isn’t that more than enough, if spent with a modicum of sanity?

marcus_holmes7• 2 months ago

Why does every conversation in the USA always involve race?

bmn__3• 2 months ago

Because the country is full of people who always have race on their mind?

andai3• 2 months ago

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!)

sethammons2• 2 months ago

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.

Anthony-G2• 2 months ago

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.

andai3• 2 months ago

I was thinking today that there is no longer a forcing function for knowing how a computer works. I think that went away in the 90s.

People who got into programming in the 80s generally learned assembly because it was the only way to get the job done (BASIC being too slow for games and graphics).

They don't generally use assembly much anymore, but often still rely on that knowledge (checking the disassembly).

This ability is no longer forced by the environment, nor is it taught. So the last few generations of programmers did not learn how a computer works.

manoDev2• 2 months ago

"Idiocracy (2006)" wasn't supposed to be a documentary!

nsainsbury• 2 months ago

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.

lordfrito• 2 months ago

I use the term "programmable people" for people like this, in that they believe what the screen tells them to believe and they do what the screen tells them to do. It bothers me that it won't be long before these programmable people represent the overwhelming majority of voters. Not sure what happens then but history tells me it won't be good.

joegibbs• 2 months ago

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."

jagged-chisel2• 2 months ago

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.

rahimnathwani2• 2 months ago

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...

BLKNSLVR4• 2 months ago

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.

rpdillon• 2 months ago

I only tried reading Gravity's Rainbow, but boy, was that a totally different literary experience than I've ever had. I could only make progress while listening to trance.

nelox• 2 months ago

Home schooling will boom as a result

nhhvhy• 2 months ago

https://archive.is/XvPXE

jimmydddd• 2 months ago

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.

charlie902• 2 months ago

My teachers can't use a computer.

nazgulnarsil• 2 months ago

I can't read this article because it's pay walled

mattas• 2 months ago

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.

bdangubic• 2 months ago

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

hagbard_c• 2 months ago

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.

ZPrimed• 2 months ago

Irony: can't read TFA without bypassing a signin-wall.

Anthony-G2• 2 months ago

… 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...

matthewfelgate• 2 months ago

tl;dr

GregDavidson• 2 months ago

I learned to read English the same way I learned to understand it spoken: exposure. As a young child a relative would put me in their lap and a book I liked in my lap and read to me. After awhile I was reading fluently without effort. Most schools teach reading as a conscious intellectual decoding task which leaves little brain power left to engage with the material - the same way most schools teach "foreign" languages. Engage the brain's language centers and language skills will be fluent.

pavel_lishin• 1 month ago

When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger

This reminds me of a thing my spouse and I argue about sometimes. She'd get mad as a kid when she turned in homework, because she'd get points taken off for now showing her work. My view is that the teacher doesn't give a shit about the answers, the teacher doesn't need to know what the solution to an equation is, the teacher needs to know that the students are learning the correct techniques to solve a problem, and without showing work, there's no way to evaluate that.

My Students Can't Read

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