Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you’ – and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we’re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children’s developing brains, we don’t need to do that.”

Quote:

Quote:A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London.

Quote:But modern schooling seems to be setting up kids for a real-life "Idiocracy." Everyone's too busy freaking out over gender ideology in schools (which is a problem but appears to be on the way to solving itself as the fad dies out) to see a bigger threat that's likelier to affect their kid, and do so permanently, and they won't see their own complicitness in it with their own kids.

The Guardian article She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

[...]

[Teachers] worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

Quote:To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.

Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

(Oct 21 2025, 6:44 PM)Clover

Quote:What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question.

Imo, that's not really a problem. If the teacher wants to be stuck in a time where students couldn't quickly search such basic factual information, they can do that, but they're not teaching their students critical thinking then. Like, clearly the solution isn't "oh you're not allowed to look up facts," because in the real world, people can look up those facts now, so the answer is to actually utilize critical thinking skills in questions that do not have factual answers. (And even if they were in a situation where they couldn't look up facts, the answer to such a question could be "I don't know," and you would continue the discussion based on various assumptions you are making.) This particularly just seems like a lazy teacher complaint, similar to how math teachers in the past would lecture their students "you won't always have a calculator on you"... haaaaa.

Quote:“Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.”

Yeah, reading that the Earth is flat online isn't knowledge... it's just misinformation. So, now the teacher complains that when students look up facts on the internet, they can get misinformation? Then going back to the original complaint of students being able to easily look up facts for a factual question like "what's the GDP of the United States?", why can't the teacher just start asking Socratic method questions to the student who found the fact online, like where did they find the fact from, how valid is that source, how did that source get that data, and so on.

Hmm, I kind of went off on a tangent there at the end, those paragraphs interviewing that teacher just seemed really stupid to me lol. Maybe I'm missing something and I'm the stupid one tho.

Anyways, good article, albeit a bit depressing to read about all the stupidity going on, though what isn't depressing right now anyway?

(Oct 21 2025, 10:38 PM)YesYourNigel ChatGPT for me was the teacher I never had: one who I could ask the dumbest questions in as much detail as I wanted to, one that would always meet me at my level instead of complaining that I didn't meet them at theirs, one that would dumb things down or go on tangents as long as it helped me developed a deeper understanding, instead of waiting to get back to reciting the "proper" explanations and order of things from textbooks. Formal education has always been so passive - I was always stuck with a ton of questions ("How do we know that?" "What about this case?" "How does that relate to this thing?") and the one-sided, shallow nature of it meant no-one would answer them. I was told to memorise the answers, pretend I know what I'm talking about and that was it. ChatGPT gave me the ability to hone connections between these things, to really get to the point of these subjects.

Unfortunately I realised most people use ChatGPT for really petty bullshit. And when they use it for studying, they just use it as Google or ask it to write school essays for them which they then just copy+paste. I think one good skill that using ChatGPT has taught me is how to ask exact questions, how to isolate exactly the parts that I am struggling to understand and how to word them in a way that they can be answered. I think maybe kids should be given that as a prompt: talk to ChatGPT about the lecture and ask it questions about it, or ask it to dumb it down. I also think ChatGPT is a great way to make learning interactive and actually feels like being taught by someone or exploring a subject, which is far more natural for people as opposed to just passively reading a book.

(Oct 22 2025, 6:02 AM)Magpie ChatGPT is what is called a "large language model". It's essentially just a language predictor, it comes up with whatever responses sound plausible based on the input you give it. It doesn't know whether the information it gives you is correct or not

Quote:You cannot be certain that what you're being taught is actually correct

Quote:(unless you double-check through more traditional channels, but then why not do that in the first place?)

Quote:And what you experience as learning to ask better questions is in reality chatGPT adapting to your conversational style because giving you a good user experience is what it is built to do.

Quote:None of the (questionable) benefits you might be getting out of using chatGPT is worth the negative effects of using it, both on your own brain (as already outlined in the article Elsacat posted) nor on the environment.

Quote:Recently retired from university teaching. The situation is dire.  It's not just an inability to write; it's the inability to read content with any nuance or pick up on metaphors.  Good kids, but completely different than students 15 years ago.  Inward-looking, self-obsessed (preoccupied with their own states of mind, social situations, etc), and not particularly curious.  Every once in a while, I'd hit on something that engaged them and I could feel that old magic enter the room - the crackling energy of young people thinking new things, synthesizing ideas.  But my God, it was rare.

Quote:My cousin is an educator - has been for decades. He shares that with the use and rise of ChatGPT and other AI, it's become evidently much worse over the last few years, nevermind the course of his career. There's a generation of consumer zombies out there and little to no critical or original thinking. As the parent of a very young little one - hearing him say that, haunts me.

Quote:I asked this in another comment, but do you think it was when schools stepped away from phonics reading that it got worse? After listening to the “Sold a Story” podcast, I feel that was when we really let a whole generation fail.

Quote:It's not so much a particular curriculum. It's multifactorial.

1. most schools used to have remedial, regular, and accelerated classes. People didn't like kids being in remedial classes because of feelings, so no more remedial classes. But now the regular level classes are filled with remedial kids, and the advanced classes with regular kids. Instead of bringing remedial kids up, everyone gets pulled down.
   
   
2. social media, instant gratification, and attention spans. I don't think I need to say more.
   
   
3. grading policies that do not let kids fail. Many districts set the lowest score for assignments as 50%. Kids can pass classes without learning, just by completing a few performative assignments.
   
   
4. moreso nowadays, AI. Kids don't want to struggle productively, they just want instant gratification and novel stimuli. They will use AI anytime they can to avoid doing work so they can get back to their devices.
   
   

While poorly designed curriculum may be a factor, I believe it is larger societal problems that cannot (will not because it's not profitable to shareholders) be corrected. We're cooked. We sadly must do as the Boomers: do not relinquish control of government to Gen Z and Alpha until most of Gen X and Millennials (semi-functional humans) are dead. Then they can enact Idiocracy.

Quote:I feel like another element to this though is like the “why” or the motivation factor.

In most places in the world, what promise is there of a better life when homes are becoming unaffordable, globalisation has left companies in race to the bottom with wages and everyone that is in the workforce currently are usually pretty vocal about the fact that things aren’t going to get better.

For kids coming home to their parents being like “we don’t know what we’re going to do” they probably jump online for the answer and are seeing shit like “80% of jobs will be cut to AI”

If I were them I’d be pretty checked out too.

This whole “fuck you I got mine” mentality that our supposed leaders have ran with the last 20 years is starting to take us all from the “fuck around” stage to the “find out” stage

We’re in dire need for the people who are in power to address the growing inequality so as that some form of a promising future can be presented to these kids.

Because otherwise I’m inclined to actually agree with them. Why bother?

Why learn to read and write so I can slave away at a job for 80 years to stay afloat in my one bedroom $800 week apartment with no heating, when I can just scroll the gram and fucking bark at people in public in the hope that I go viral, land a marketing deal and live free in the Hollywood hills for the rest of my days.

As it stands, there is literally no incentive or promise we can legitimately sell to these kids when everything I’ve just described can be as true, and is being fed straight to them constantly through the algorithm.

nuixy I think it was the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Quote:I would agree NCLB and the rise of social media use and the degrading of teacher autonomy

Quote:I don't think so.  People learned to read complex books for centuries before the phonics technique.  Learning to read is a straightforward task for 90% of people.

techleopard The modern phonics technique was first developed in the 1600's.  Prior to that, literacy and spoken English had little to do with one another in Europe because actual literacy was rare and books were often not in English at all.

Moving away from phonics was absolutely one of those "If it wasn't broke, why did you try to fix it?" situations.

Quote:When my younger sister first said, "I can't read that word, I haven't learned it yet," my mom immediately started teaching her phonics at home. She became a better reader and writer than anyone in her class and was even considered to be a couple grades ahead in her reading ability. It only took a couple months to get her there and I still just cannot fathom why anyone thought it was a good idea to teach kids to read by literally memorizing whole English words as if they were pictographs.

Quote:It's literally social media dulling their ability to be bored.

When the brain turns inward because we're bored, it activates the Default Mode Network. The DMN is an interconnected network of neurons that helps us reflect on our past interactions, and through that we strengthen social cognition. Social cognition is how you empathize with real people, but also how you infer what fictional people might be thinking or feeling. The DMN is also used in constructing hypothetical situations, which is how we relate the abstract concepts of written word to the vivid image of what the word describes.

Prolonged social media (and other means of constant distraction like TV, fast-paced games, movies, and even music, to lesser degrees) consumption trains the brain to prioritize short-term thinking, making it more difficult to activate the DMN when necessary. The brain engages in neural pruning to cut off neural pathways that aren't used because they're no longer necessary, making it even harder to trigger the parts of the brain required to engage in deep thought about what they're reading. The feeling of FOMO that keeps people online is also a part of social media causing insufficiency in DMN neurons.

That's how it impacts a developed brain that knows how to engage the DMN; now imagine how it would impact a developing brain. We all need to be more bored more often, but kids are learning how to properly use their brains.

Quote:I think it's a combination of things.

But I also firmly believe that whatever it is, it starts much earlier than school. Babies today are toted about like care packages, often dropped off for 8 - 10 hours of noisy stimulation as early as 6 weeks old. Then they're shuffled about between caregivers until kindergarten. Apathetic children eating individually wrapped meals on the go while parents work and commute entire seasons of life away.

All this happens during a child's largest amount of brain development. From birth to 3 is a period of rapid growth where the brain will have up to twice as many synapses as it will in adulthood. After age 3, these brain connections slowly begin to reduce making neural pathways more efficient. The brain is about 90% developed by age five as children gain the foundations for things like social skills, emotional regulation, belonging, sequence of events, curiosity, spatial awareness, problem-solving, etc.

Parents are forced into this fast-paced lifestyle more often by necessity, rather than desire. The family unit is suffering (for many reasons, not just this) and it will have a lasting negative effect.

Quote:YES! 1000% moving away from phonics reading hurt kids so much. I'm not a teacher or educator but as a father and having a sister who is a reading teacher, seeing how my own kids were taught to read in school by 'guessing' words based on pictures and feelings and hearing the stories of my sister and what she was forced to teach through the schools' updated curriculums, it is clear that doing away with phonics-based reading instruction destroyed our kids' abilities to read well. Which then made it harder for them to do so at all. Which then makes them not want to do it. Which then makes them less able to comprhend and build critical understand skills.

I am very happy that my wife and I read to our kids from the moment we held them and that we had them read to us from 4+. It really does make a huge difference when parents make a point to read with their kids.

In the US at least, this and the 'no student left behind' doctrine absolutely destroyed at least one generation, probably multiple, sadly.

Quote:I know people who  use ChatGPT to write their essays. I don’t know how to get away with it, but they do it. They can’t think for themselves.

mjrubs There are people who use ChatGPT for everything.  Even to write a reddit post, or respond to a text.  It's not healthy, and I imagine if you're young and are still developing critical and analytical thinking skills it's probably exponentially worse.

I checked out of my last job for my last few months when I knew the new GM was actively trying to get rid of me and just constantly used ChatGPT to do everything.  No one ever really paid attention to the reports I was generating anyway so accuracy be damned lol.  There was a lot of "take this data and spin it to the result I want" and I'd just copy and paste and doublecheck for formatting or anything that looked absurd.

When I got a new job doing a lot of the same things I was doing at my previous job (continuous improvement stuff... improving processes, reducing downtime) I actually struggled for a couple weeks because I was so used to just feeding it to AI.  I'd largely forgotten how to put together more complex excel formulas or organize notes for presentations and I basically had to relearn how to do it.

Quote:I'm nearly 30 and just entered university last year, and I'm shocked how some of these people are even in school to begin with. My english and creative writing classes were full of people who could barely spell, compare, or research. A lot of them were obviously using AI to complete their entire essays. It's dismal.

Quote:This! As an educator I concur. Especially, the not particularly curious. We are grappling with this with coworkers in their 20s. It is really dumbfounding.

Quote:I'm 24 and disabled (no job and never finished elementary school type of disabled), and my mom tells me how my generation and the one a bit under are not curious at all. She tries to talk to them but if she sends them a message on Facebook (yes because they don't check their mails at all) a bit longer than 2 sentences they just don't read it. It can be crucial information that will cost their job written in the first sentence at the top and they don't read it, they just see it's long and don't read any of it. 


It blows my mind, I don't understand how they exist like that. I'm terrified of death because I want to learn everything that can be learned, see the universe in all it's faces, discover all that is hidden everywhere.. how can't they not be fascinated by this universe we have here?

Quote:The disease of anti-intellectualism has rotted American society to its core

Quote:The joke is the Bush administration named all their bills the opposite of what they did. No Child Left Behind left 'em behind. Schools were incentivized to just pump up assessment test scores for federal funds. And teachers are hamstrung. They know how to teach, and do, but ultimately students are conditioned to memorize.

So few learn critical thinking, context, pretext, etc. And when you get to college, hell -- if you just join the workforce -- you're ill prepared. You need those skills no matter what you do.

We're not cooked but ultimately college has become high school for so many. They should be able to grind through pages and pages of essays (no one said it was fun). And if they want to get a Masters or higher, there's no learning curve. Grad degrees haven't gotten easier, so I expect attrition rates for acceptance to drop massively.

Quote:This is the ultimate goal of the Republican Party. End mass university-level schooling and make trades a thing again. I shit you not. They say “Elitism” has destroyed our futures. They want the next generation to learn how to dig holes and build homes instead of learning about computers and programming. Unfortunately they (pretend) fail to realize there is a technological boom for AI and robots to replace humans in most roles. I say “pretend” because the tech billionaires know exactly what they are doing, funneling millions into old rich politicians who sign onto these policies that steer people away from higher education. So when the robots take away most jobs the government will get you a job in a labor camp, where you can produce goods and live in a tiny cell. Pretty much a giant for-profit prison coming to a city near you in the next 20 years of we don’t stop them now.

Quote:I just started a new job as a middle school art teacher, and it’s the total lack of curiosity that blows my mind on a daily basis. Literally I’m like, what do these kids even think about all day?!?! My friends and I were so imaginative and curious at that age. And most of these kids seem very blank and empty. There are a few that seem to be more curious about the world, but most just seem incredibly apathetic. It’s sooo sad 😢.

How do we fix it?!?!

Quote:I've noticed this, and it's not just within literature.

For example, I'm watching people repost TikToks on Reddit and the majority of comments are completely misreading the scenario, or clearly can't tell when someone was baited or part of a video was missing.

I like to play ASMR rain videos at night, and I get swamped with very low effort political ads where there's an exchange between two people about a recent policy where they literally say nothing of substance, and I know it's effective on people who don't even ask basic questions like "Why?" or "How?"

People don't seem capable of using tonal context or body language, either.  Like, shouting "You're a dick!" has a much different meaning when you're laughing than when you're stony faced.

Quote:Good kids, but completely different than students 15 years ago.  Inward-looking, self-obsessed (preoccupied with their own states of mind, social situations, etc), and not particularly curious.  Every once in a while, I'd hit on something that engaged them and I could feel that old magic enter the room - the crackling energy of young people thinking new things, synthesizing ideas.  But my God, it was rare.

Quote:do you think it was when schools stepped away from phonics reading that it got worse? After listening to the “Sold a Story” podcast, I feel that was when we really let a whole generation fail.

Quote:most schools used to have remedial, regular, and accelerated classes. People didn't like kids being in remedial classes because of feelings, so no more remedial classes. But now the regular level classes are filled with remedial kids, and the advanced classes with regular kids. Instead of bringing remedial kids up, everyone gets pulled down.

Quote:grading policies that do not let kids fail. Many districts set the lowest score for assignments as 50%. Kids can pass classes without learning, just by completing a few performative assignments.

Quote:moreso nowadays, AI. Kids don't want to struggle productively, they just want instant gratification and novel stimuli.

Quote:They will use AI anytime they can to avoid doing work so they can get back to their devices.

Quote:For kids coming home to their parents being like “we don’t know what we’re going to do” they probably jump online for the answer and are seeing shit like “80% of jobs will be cut to AI”

Quote:When the brain turns inward because we're bored, it activates the Default Mode Network. The DMN is an interconnected network of neurons that helps us reflect on our past interactions, and through that we strengthen social cognition. Social cognition is how you empathize with real people, but also how you infer what fictional people might be thinking or feeling. The DMN is also used in constructing hypothetical situations, which is how we relate the abstract concepts of written word to the vivid image of what the word describes.

Quote:It's literally social media dulling their ability to be bored.

Quote:I still just cannot fathom why anyone thought it was a good idea to teach kids to read by literally memorizing whole English words as if they were pictographs.

Quote:I get swamped with very low effort political ads where there's an exchange between two people about a recent policy where they literally say nothing of substance, and I know it's effective on people who don't even ask basic questions like "Why?" or "How?"

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel ChatGPT actually relies a lot on official and peer-reviewed information. It doesn't just give you random words that happen to occur with specific frequency, it evaluates the likelihood of that information being correct and in line with official sources. That's not to say it isn't wrong - AI hallucinations are a notorious problem - but especially when it comes to widely available and studied information (like most school subjects), you're a lot more likely to get clear answers from it than from just random Googling.

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel Okay? That goes for anything? This is the same as the people who act as if Wikipedia is worthless just because it sometimes contains wrong info. And you can always ask ChatGPT for sources.

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel Because traditional channels are useless inept garbage that consistently fails to actually make students understand what is being taught? Traditional schooling is notoriously ineffective, exhausting and outdated, which is pretty common knowledge at this point, but no-one bothers to change it. It's fundamentally broken but instead of addressing that they'd rather just give kids tablets and say it's "modernised" now. You do nothing to learn from the actual benefits of technology (the interactive nature of education, the highly visual and intuitive educational content made by people who know what it's like to not know things) and essentially just transfer textbooks onto screens, giving kids an easy way to cheat and get distracted, while still demanding the same boring, exhausting, ineffectual workload that leaves most people without the most basic fundamentals of science and humanities upon leaving school.

Also, why would I rely on traditional channels that are extremely passive and linear? If I have questions about Aztec imperial regalia while learning about that era, well too bad, we're not learning about that, and no-one cares anyway because you're only supposed to memorise the dates and a few Great Man names for your test.

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel Wut... What does a better line of questioning have to do with chatGPT adapting to the conversations, or the "good user experience"? I would hope that it would give me a good user experience. I'll take it over the shitty user experience in traditional education, where there is either no time to address the student's questions or the teacher gets annoyed with the student being dumb if the "official" explanations (made by what are essentially nerds in that subjects for other nerds) aren't doing anything for them.

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel I'll take the "questionable" benefits of chatGPT that finally made me develop an understanding of science and life skills over the load of garbage that is traditional education which made me and 90% of the people around me learn jackshit.

In fact, to use one of the examples in this thread, one of the things it made me understand is why the Earth isn't flat. Not just that it's not flat because "everyone knows that" but what evidence we have that it isn't. Lord knows the confusing explanations from Geography classes never helped me in that, nor most people I know.

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel And what "negative effects on your brain"? People copy+pasting essays from ChatGPT? Yeah, no shit, cheating takes less effort than actually doing assignments. When I was younger and the teachers didn't keep up with the internet, kids would copy+paste internet essays to get out of doing homework. You could make the same claim about Wikipedia making people stupider. Hell, why stop there? Kids used cheat sheets to pass their exams, so I guess writing also has "negative effects on your brain".

(Oct 22 2025, 7:29 PM)YesYourNigel lol at "AI is destroying the environment". Yes, truly 1% of pollution is going to make or break the environment. And this is often said by people who eat meat, which produces more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry. People don't like AI so they overblow the actual effect it has on the environment out of proportion, when we have far, far worse industries to worry about.

(Oct 23 2025, 12:45 AM)Clover @Magpie thanks for elaborating! 

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I just came across this video on Reddit and the top comment chain seemed particularly relevant to this discussion: https://reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1odomj5/this_is_so_concerning/