Where I live in the US there is a movement to A) Prohibit phones from being used in schools B) use textbooks again instead of digital texts C) use handwriting and notebooks instead of Chromebooks for in-class note taking.
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
I’d honestly argue—in 2026—it’s more important for Americans to understand black history today than the Vietnam war. The idiots who keep propelling Presidents into the Oval who repeat Vietnam’s mistakes in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran are folks with a terrible understanding of our racial history and way too much surface knowledge about big guns and materiel.
What currently constitutes these studies seems to be a mix of propaganda and bullshit. But that sort of underlines the point that we have an impoverished set of common facts.
I think it's probably pretty important to teach that the government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Saddam's WMDs, and that the history of the last half century has been the federal government constantly starting wars for no benefit to the American people, often under false pretenses.
While we're at it we can teach how the government conducted a biological attack on San Francisco to see what would happen if there were a biological attack on San Francisco, sold weapons to terrorists, let people's syphilis go untreated intentionally so they could see what happens (to be fair that falls under black history), conducted torture experiments on Americans (possibly accidentally creating the unabomber), was caught spying on all of us, and developed plans that they brought to the president to conduct false flag attacks on Americans to start another war. But they definitely wouldn't still do any of that. And the other things people say are crazy conspiracy theories.
I agree that understanding gender theory helps understand Iran a lot better. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Iran" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Iran
Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort? They were fine until then, but then suddenly collectively and globally decided to start sucking?
I disagree with the grandparent comment, but you could imagine a few teacher related causes:
- Maybe the better teachers retired or quit due to burnout/better opportunities (the pando surely increased both of these and I think one could imagine reasons for better teachers to disproportionately stop teaching). One thing we observe is the best decile being a lot less affected than the average or worst, which vaguely lines up with the hypothesis. I didn’t try to look into attrition or retirement rates.
- There could be a new teaching method that is popular with teachers, teachers’ unions, administrators, or governments but which is actually quite ineffective. My weak understanding is that the quality of education research is very poor and that evidence-based decision making for how to teach is extremely rare, so this also feels plausible. I think many HN readers would have seen stories about math teaching in SF public schools, and there’s also the positive case of Mississippi seeing great successes from some teaching methods that are supported by good evidence. In some sense this isn’t really a case of teachers being bad.
There is a concerted attack on the teaching profession, that's why education is terrible.
Teachers at the middle / high school level are not allowed to fail kids anymore. Parents are extremely litigious in America, suing schools over every little thing. Admins don't want to deal with that + their school's funding is tied to attendance / outcomes, so together they pressure the teachers to lower their standards.
Add into this the tech ologopoly trying to get kids hooked on their products young, pushing for chromebooks and google classroom when there have been numerous studies showing handwriting is important for retaining information.
The quality of student (on average) has also decreased thanks to tech. On average, kids are watching brainrot while their parents are trying to make ends meet, instead of reading or educating themselves.
Teaching is a thankless job. You have lots of unpaid hours (teachers need to prep lessons outside of school time, need to grade papers outside of school time, etc). I think a lot of people also severely underestimate the effort needed to keep 30 rambunctious kids on track. It truly drains you.
Given all this, there is no surprise at the outcomes.
What changed with teachers? As if they were doing same thing as previously you would expect pretty much same result. But clearly something changed somewhere and it might not be the teachers. It might be for example be the tools they have...
Do some schools really use chromebooks for note taking outside of IT class? I can see the advantages for some types of exercises but using laptops as the default choice seems crazy to me. What is even the problem with textbooks and paper we're trying to solve?
The kids? I mean sure, they too - but seriously... It's not just the kids that have been affected.
Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
Ever more extreme positions are being agreed as the norm, and what had previously been the norm is being decried as evil itself.
I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Evil has lost its meaning, and people started randomly selecting other behaviors as "evil", and excusing actual evil deeds like rape, murder etc because "reasons".
This has opened up social media to become a echo chamber of ever increasing insanity.
I'm not seeing things get better through initiatives like that. I suspect things are gonna keep spiralling more and more out of control until we end up in a dystopia in which the populus looses a lot of their rights. And not in the too far future either, I'm almost certain I'll witness it before I grow old.
I'm not that doomer about what you are referring to. I think a lot of kids are wising up to the echo chamber.
Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.
I’m not sure it’s social media so much as the smartphones. It’s been surprising to me watching my parents become slightly senile in a way that seems related to phones – much less ability to cope when the phones aren’t quite working and a lack of the habits I see in my own generation (eg one should obviously try to avoid having a phone out at the dinner table).
I don’t think I agree with your take around religion or ‘evil’. (Imo two big advantages of religion we are currently or will soon be wanting for society are firstly the social/community component and secondly the idea that one can lead a worthy and fulfilling life through acting virtuously and faithfully, rather than through the worth implied by educational or career achievements, which are often a rough proxy for certain kinds of intelligence, that are neither evenly distributed across the population nor easily changed, and which may become unimportant as machines outcompete us there)
I think if social media required logging into a desktop computer or laptop then it would be a lot less impactful. So I think I still disagree. I think smartphones can be bad even if they are limited to largely non-social media like YouTube or TikTok.
> Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.
> the populus looses a lot of their rights
People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.
> Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
We've recently gone through a very public trial about a women murdering kids and countless people showing support for the confirmed murderer. Claiming she's innocent. When the murderer itself admits the killing.
The whole influencer industry is - from the perspective of religion - as sinful as you can get and gets more insane with every year. Remember: narcism, vanity, showing off, envy, gloating -> that's 90% or the viral content and it's all based on behavior Christianity considered Sin until the modernity happened.
The other day a gangster publicly murdered another person and hundreds of thousands were raised in response for support
The fact that for almost 10 years variations of onlyfans, patreon before that have been some of the most profitable enterprises. And the way the "models" foster the para social behavior for money extraction
That there are people unironically thinking January 6th riots in the US were patriotic and not hooligans living out their power fantasies. Also patriotism is pretty close to a sin itself, as it gets very close to pride. It most definitely applies to the MAGA people.
greed is one of the primal Sins. If our societies were still deeply religious, we wouldn't even have anything close to the fallout from the unrestricted market exploitation we have today. It would still happen occasionally, but a lot less because currently people don't even consider greed "bad". It's considered the default and obvious MO
I could go on forever, but I think my point is clear and more would not convey this in any better way. One closing remark makes sense however: modern Christianity is a complete bastardization of it's origin. Pastors are humans too, and they're ultimately also grown from our society. And a sinful society mostly produces sinful people. The issue I see is that the idea of Sin has left our mind. In my teenage years I constantly argued that we don't need that, we can be moral without religion. I just think society has proven myself false, as our collective insanity has shown
bentt · · focus · HN ↗
While this might help, and I agree with all these steps, I'm concerned that the root of the problem is simply that the online experience has rewired our kids. Not screens per se, but the feeling of a constantly moving social space which demands their attention.
throw93038383 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Understanding them makes you understand Hegseth, Trump and Iran war a lot better.
throw93038383 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
What currently constitutes these studies seems to be a mix of propaganda and bullshit. But that sort of underlines the point that we have an impoverished set of common facts.
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
While we're at it we can teach how the government conducted a biological attack on San Francisco to see what would happen if there were a biological attack on San Francisco, sold weapons to terrorists, let people's syphilis go untreated intentionally so they could see what happens (to be fair that falls under black history), conducted torture experiments on Americans (possibly accidentally creating the unabomber), was caught spying on all of us, and developed plans that they brought to the president to conduct false flag attacks on Americans to start another war. But they definitely wouldn't still do any of that. And the other things people say are crazy conspiracy theories.
AlexandrB · · focus · HN ↗
Henchman21 · · focus · HN ↗
throw93038383 · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
Henchman21 · · focus · HN ↗
But then, I feel I was right in my initial assessment: you’re an ideological shit-stirrer. Stop stirring up shit.
wbxp99 · · focus · HN ↗
JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
Teachers collectively became useless a decade ago? As a cohort? They were fine until then, but then suddenly collectively and globally decided to start sucking?
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
- Maybe the better teachers retired or quit due to burnout/better opportunities (the pando surely increased both of these and I think one could imagine reasons for better teachers to disproportionately stop teaching). One thing we observe is the best decile being a lot less affected than the average or worst, which vaguely lines up with the hypothesis. I didn’t try to look into attrition or retirement rates.
- There could be a new teaching method that is popular with teachers, teachers’ unions, administrators, or governments but which is actually quite ineffective. My weak understanding is that the quality of education research is very poor and that evidence-based decision making for how to teach is extremely rare, so this also feels plausible. I think many HN readers would have seen stories about math teaching in SF public schools, and there’s also the positive case of Mississippi seeing great successes from some teaching methods that are supported by good evidence. In some sense this isn’t really a case of teachers being bad.
upboundspiral · · focus · HN ↗
Teachers at the middle / high school level are not allowed to fail kids anymore. Parents are extremely litigious in America, suing schools over every little thing. Admins don't want to deal with that + their school's funding is tied to attendance / outcomes, so together they pressure the teachers to lower their standards.
Add into this the tech ologopoly trying to get kids hooked on their products young, pushing for chromebooks and google classroom when there have been numerous studies showing handwriting is important for retaining information.
The quality of student (on average) has also decreased thanks to tech. On average, kids are watching brainrot while their parents are trying to make ends meet, instead of reading or educating themselves.
Teaching is a thankless job. You have lots of unpaid hours (teachers need to prep lessons outside of school time, need to grade papers outside of school time, etc). I think a lot of people also severely underestimate the effort needed to keep 30 rambunctious kids on track. It truly drains you.
Given all this, there is no surprise at the outcomes.
Ekaros · · focus · HN ↗
toilet · · focus · HN ↗
cvwright · · focus · HN ↗
ffsm8 · · focus · HN ↗
The kids? I mean sure, they too - but seriously... It's not just the kids that have been affected.
Things have been spiralling out of control ever since social media was introduced.
Ever more extreme positions are being agreed as the norm, and what had previously been the norm is being decried as evil itself.
I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
Evil has lost its meaning, and people started randomly selecting other behaviors as "evil", and excusing actual evil deeds like rape, murder etc because "reasons".
This has opened up social media to become a echo chamber of ever increasing insanity.
I'm not seeing things get better through initiatives like that. I suspect things are gonna keep spiralling more and more out of control until we end up in a dystopia in which the populus looses a lot of their rights. And not in the too far future either, I'm almost certain I'll witness it before I grow old.
bentt · · focus · HN ↗
Nah to me it's more about a loss of connection with the physical world, les slowing down, less being bored. Without that, it's a different reality and I think studying requires that kind of brain. Otherwise you're just flitting this way and that and never really focusing.
tick_tock_tick · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah it's a fun situation to be in I'm also an atheist but while not perfect the Judeo-Christian moral and legal framework is pretty damn good compared to everything else we've created.
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t think I agree with your take around religion or ‘evil’. (Imo two big advantages of religion we are currently or will soon be wanting for society are firstly the social/community component and secondly the idea that one can lead a worthy and fulfilling life through acting virtuously and faithfully, rather than through the worth implied by educational or career achievements, which are often a rough proxy for certain kinds of intelligence, that are neither evenly distributed across the population nor easily changed, and which may become unimportant as machines outcompete us there)
ffsm8 · · focus · HN ↗
It's probably the combination of both. The smartphone itself is innocuous, but increases the availability of the social media.
However if social media wasn't as ubiquitous it'd likely be less of an issue then it is today.
However, if social media wasn't a thing people just wouldn't constantly pull out their phones, hence id blame it instead of the form factor.
dan-robertson · · focus · HN ↗
ffsm8 · · focus · HN ↗
They're actually prime examples of the toxicity it spreads.
heresie-dabord · · focus · HN ↗
Where do you observe things "spiralling out of control"? It isn't everywhere, but it is certainly true of at least one country.
> I'm an atheist myself but I cannot help but think that a lot of our western issues is because we generally no longer see the world from the lens of religion.
The lense that has replaced religion is callous for-profit exploitation.
> the populus looses a lot of their rights
People will certainly lose the rights that they do not exercise.
ffsm8 · · focus · HN ↗
We've recently gone through a very public trial about a women murdering kids and countless people showing support for the confirmed murderer. Claiming she's innocent. When the murderer itself admits the killing.
The whole influencer industry is - from the perspective of religion - as sinful as you can get and gets more insane with every year. Remember: narcism, vanity, showing off, envy, gloating -> that's 90% or the viral content and it's all based on behavior Christianity considered Sin until the modernity happened.
The other day a gangster publicly murdered another person and hundreds of thousands were raised in response for support
The fact that for almost 10 years variations of onlyfans, patreon before that have been some of the most profitable enterprises. And the way the "models" foster the para social behavior for money extraction
That there are people unironically thinking January 6th riots in the US were patriotic and not hooligans living out their power fantasies. Also patriotism is pretty close to a sin itself, as it gets very close to pride. It most definitely applies to the MAGA people.
greed is one of the primal Sins. If our societies were still deeply religious, we wouldn't even have anything close to the fallout from the unrestricted market exploitation we have today. It would still happen occasionally, but a lot less because currently people don't even consider greed "bad". It's considered the default and obvious MO
I could go on forever, but I think my point is clear and more would not convey this in any better way. One closing remark makes sense however: modern Christianity is a complete bastardization of it's origin. Pastors are humans too, and they're ultimately also grown from our society. And a sinful society mostly produces sinful people. The issue I see is that the idea of Sin has left our mind. In my teenage years I constantly argued that we don't need that, we can be moral without religion. I just think society has proven myself false, as our collective insanity has shown
juanani · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]