More and more teachers in the United States have been uploading videos and posts about an extremely worrying trend that they have experienced, and have been doing it for quite some years now.
And the phenomenon is the astonishing degradation of literacy, skills and cognitive capacity of the average student.
Literacy among students has become poorer and poorer during the last ten-or-so years. Even many high school students are literally incapable of reading and understanding text that's even slightly more complicated. They don't understand most "big words", they don't know what they mean, and often they don't even know how they are pronounced. Give them almost any book that's even slightly more advanced in the literary sense, using even slightly more uncommon terms and concepts, and they are unable to read and understand it. And we are not talking about some advanced philosophy or science, but just regular prose that anybody in their 30's and older can read and understand perfectly.
And it's not just the poor literacy but the clearly decreased attention span. Not only are they incapable of reading and understanding individual sentences that contain "big words", but even with simpler text they are incapable of paying attention to it for more than a paragraph.
These teachers have also noticed a very significant degradation in other related cognitive abilities, such as the ability to make even simple deductions from some description. Incapable of doing even simple inference. There are literally teenagers, lots and lots of them, whose deduction and inference skills are at the 3-year-old level. And that's no exaggeration. And don't even try to make them think about some kind of logic puzzle: The chances that they will even understand the puzzle at all, its description, is completely abysmal, not to talk about actually being able to solve the puzzle, no matter how simple it may be.
Unsurprisingly, math skills have dropped to absolutely abysmal levels. There's an absolutely staggering amount of students who can't even do simple arithmetic with small numbers.
And we are not even talking about first-graders, or second-graders, or even high school students. There are college professors who have made videos about how astonished they are that there are freshmen who literally do not know even the basics of arithmetic, or writing, or history, or anything. They are completely astonished how on Earth those students even got admitted to the college given that their knowledge and skills are literally at the first-grade level. Heck, there are 10-year-olds (especially in other countries) that have better math and literary skills than these college freshmen.
And the most appalling thing that these professors have noticed? The complete lack of curiosity among those students. Of even wanting to know. Not only do they don't know even basic things, they are not even interested to know. They are not interested in the actual answers or why those answers are correct. They are completely indifferent and show zero curiosity about anything that's even slightly intellectually challenging.
In the past couple of years more and more students have also become completely reliant on AI chatbots for pretty much everything. Pretty much anything, no matter what it is, no matter how simple the task or problem, they will ask an AI chatbot on their smartphones. And they are completely helpless without it, not being able to do even the simplest of intellectual tasks.
Many teachers note how many students have completely lost even the ability to follow simple instructions. For example, if the instruction is "underline this sentence in your textbook", and the teacher reads out loud the sentence, many of the students completely fail to do that. Either their attention span is not enough to even understand what's going on, or they can't find the sentence in question the book, or they just don't care.
And the reason for that last thing is that they actually don't have to care. They literally don't have to do anything at school. Literally nothing. About the only thing they cannot do at school is leave. That's pretty much the only thing they are actually forced to do: Stay in the school for the mandatory hours. But that's it. They are not required to do anything else.
That's because in the vast, vast majority of American schools, no matter which grade (below university/college), "failing class" and having to repeat a grade has completely stopped being a thing. Students are passed completely regardless of anything. Even if they do literally nothing, always get zero points in exams, don't even show up for exams, do not do any homework, do not do anything that they are tasked to do, they are still automatically passed, without question. Even the suggestion of having students fail and having to repeat a year has become completely out of the question. The very concept has been completely eradicated.
The fact is that primary and secondary schools in the United States have become daycare centers where parents can take their kids for the day while they are at work, and the kids don't have to do anything there other than just stay there. Nothing else is required of them. Thus, the students literally don't need to care about anything, don't need to learn anything, don't need to be able to do anything. And there's absolutely nothing that teachers can do about it.
On top of that, so-called "gifted student programs" have been eradicated from school after school. Which means that even students who are smart and would actually want to learn, and would want more advanced courses and more advanced teaching, are denied the opportunity. It's just not provided to them. The only recourse that these gifted students have would be to go to some expensive private school or for the parents to hire some kind of private tutor. However, most parents can't afford that, or are unwilling to do that. And, thus, these gifted students have to suffer and can't learn what they would want to, and their gifts will go to waste.
And the scary thing is that nothing is being done about this. Absolutely nothing. Nobody is doing anything to fix this problem.
And the other scary thing is that the United States is only on the forefront of this phenomenon. Slowly but surely, one after another, other countries are following suit. Most of them are still relatively ok, but the trend is clearly going into that same direction.
And nobody is doing anything to stop it.
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