Many of us thought that COVID education disruptions caused recent declines in reading and math test scores. But the latest OECD education reports that teen reading and math skills have continued to decline across wealthy and middle-wealth nations. Based on classroom and personal experience, student attention hacking by screens and digital media seem like an obvious driver for this continued downward spiral:
Notice that the overall decline in reading starts after 2012, around the time that smart phones attained majority adoption in many countries. Things were already going in the wrong direction by 2019. And there was no rebound in the 3 years since most of the COVID education disruptions.
Per Chris Hayes’ The Siren’s Call etc, big tech in the smart phone and digital media markets are effectively drug cartels with much of their business built on mass addiction. Like cartels, they don’t even compete against each other much. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said way back in 2017 that his competitors were not Amazon or HBO but people sleeping instead of streaming: “You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep… And we’re winning!”
Digital technology can be a great tool for research, analysis, and even teaching in some cases. But little harms learning like addictions (and sleep deprivation) that make it impossible to devote the time and focus needed for the hard work of learning, whether you’re in middle school or an adult. Yet we let big tech sells its addictive products to teens with almost no regulation at all.
It would be great to have more research about whether learning suffers more from particular kinds of youth tech allowances in school or at home. Please direct me to any good stuff if you know of something. But we shouldn’t be waiting on more research to regulate. Nor should we expect rushing AI into the classroom will help reverse declining literacy and numeracy.
What other options do we have? Well, the tech and financial oligarchs have accumulated trillions in wealth from profits on smart device sales and advertising around digital media. Instead of letting billionaires incinerate this money with the AI data center build out, perhaps we should tax a portion of their wealth to provide all the individualized instruction that students could possible need with a real-life teacher?