EDIT: Hi everyone! Before you read this post, you should probably know I missed the mark with it. You can read the comments for more information about it, but essentially, I'm asking from the perspective of a layperson with limited reliable exposure to the issue. My intention was to explore the ways certain things could be affecting / exasperating the way we understand the measurable decline in literacy performance among young students, which is a legitimate question, but I did have some initial misunderstandings about what those assessments are and how they're being interpreted. Before people assume I don't believe the literacy crisis is well substantiated and a legitimate concern, please hear now that I do. I may not have been super clear about that. I was wondering, based on my perusals into the social internet reading things like "the kids can't read" and "is everyone just stupid now" [paraphrases/generalizations] how we might be misrepresenting the issue and falling into some social traps characteristic to moral panics. Also thank you to u/Mathandyr for mentioning that AI and similar advances are not the only things being discussed in relation to this pattern, but also the defunding and deliberate sabotage of public schools, which has been a thing for a long time.
THE ORIGINAL POST:
To start, I should probably tell you I've been out of high school for a few years and am currently in postsecondary. I am past my most important developmental years, and so this conversation isn't really about me. In no way am I trying to diminish any real problems faced by younger students right now. I do, however, have some unresolved questions about the literacy crisis (EDIT: I have removed quotation marks around the words "literary crisis," because I think I came across like I believed the findings were invented hysteria, as opposed to wondering how certain biases are accounted for in certain assessments).
I will explain why I bring moral panics into the discussion.
Stanley Cohen, the person credited with coining the term "moral panic," describes it as when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values or interests," and further iterates that while the threat in question can be totally real, many representations will "exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm." I'm hearing a lot of discussion online about the literacy crisis, and am struggling to distinguish what is credible from disproportionate response.
As far as I'm aware, the literacy crisis is typically characterized by young students of similar demographics performing worse on literacy assessments today than in previous years / generations (it should be noted here that "generations" as we define them, like gen z, alpha, boomers etc, are recently invented & somewhat arbitrary analytical tools). I am wondering to what degree this performance decline might be related to the following factors, and how well they are accounted for as limitations in your average online discussion about the crisis:
- Changing assessment methods & criteria for what is considered "literate"
- More testing & increased awareness of literacy challenges (to illustrate what I mean by this, consider an older person complaining about how "everyone has autism nowadays" and "nobody was autistic back when I was younger")
- Cultural shifts, but especially linguistic differences between time periods, and how they could impact someone's perceived literacy
- Limitations of assessments themselves (I'd like to reference limitations to the concept of "IQ" as a parallel; if this is an inappropriate comparison, lmk. But IQ is a limited metric in that it measures your performance at one time, and is interpreted as a measure of innate and oftentimes of *fixed* intelligence. If this were true, then you could not practice / train for IQ tests and achieve a higher score, but this has been shown to be untrue. Students who practice for IQ tests tend to perform better. Additionally, IQ tests are a statistical measure that compare your performance to others and calculate your score by comparison. This means that depending on who you are compared to - for example, depending on age groups you are sorted into - you can receive a variety of different scores corresponding to the exact same performance.)
I find it important to be careful about disentangling these things from pure, isolated critical thinking skills in order to paint a more accurate picture.
Speaking of critical thinking skills, a lot of teachers are speaking out about the difficulty of teaching students and the perceived decline in critical thinking skills, usually related to living in the age of generative AI, which I also have some curiosities about.
Firstly, I believe critical thinking is something that needs to be taught. There is something so incredibly human about the progress we continue to make as a species, which requires innate critical thinking capacity; but approaches in every field, whether culinary or literary or scientific etc. are devised slowly with a lot of hard work, recording and passing down ideas, criticizing and building on and asking about them, which is in no ways easy and is definitely a learned skill. When I started to write this post I was going to point out that some students might perform poorly on assessments not because of some inherent lack of thinking skills, but because they are no longer required to put in as much effort to demonstrate them. While I think this is probably still true to a non-negligible extent, I would have misrepresented critical thinking as a skill set you have to develop intentionally. Obviously if you don't put a lot of effort into something, it's not going to get very far. If you don't stay intentionally curious, I suppose you can get a lot worse at asking questions and fairly analyzing issues.
I also wonder how we should interpret these anecdotes. Obviously there's more awareness of the topic now, which could compel teachers to speak more about it and even to notice some struggles more than when they weren't actively worrying about a literacy crisis (confirmation bias). But on the other hand, teachers (/people in general) aren't stupid, and if there's a noticeable difference between skill sets across generations, we as a society should take those seriously. Human stories, needs, and interpretation are complementary to statistical findings. Both are important.
With that, it's also important to consider how implicit bias plays a role in this, like... to what degree could generational prejudice subconsciously impact older peoples' perceptions of young children? What if the "dumb ipad kid" stereotype and other moralizing judgements about younger generations are clouding our judgement?
Lastly, how could people mitigate any real declines we are noticing? My first thought is that if we are attributing literacy issues in large part to the rise in generative AI usage, comprehensive AI literacy education could be used to combat that, in a similar "harm reduction-" based sense to how comprehensive sex education is used to prevent teen pregnancies, help young people understand consent, and avoid STDs. I also think that destigmatizing reliance on generative AI might actually help more people escape that reliance; if a dependence / addiction is destigmatized, people are more likely to seek actual help. Maybe a population of students that understands ethical vs. unethical, and productive vs. unproductive usage of AI, and has somewhere to go when they're struggling to get things done without AI and need guidance on how to use it honestly / how NOT to use it at all, would benefit.
But as with most complex societal issues, it's usually never just one thing, even if one thing takes the center stage. What do you guys think? Sorry if this is long.