My TikTok feed is full of American teachers complaining about how their kids can’t read or write. Like high schoolers who can’t write a short paragraph or can’t comprehend simple directions.
I was talking about this with a friend of mine who teaches at the literacy program for a local college and they had two comments:
- Those TikTok teachers almost universally blame the students for their deficits rather than seeing the trend and blaming the systems. Specifically, my friend blames the curriculum being written by textbook corporations and the decision to make the kids stop learning to read in 3rd grade.
- My friend is seeing similar, though less drastic similarities in their college students. Mind you, they mainly teach graduate courses, so they are teaching people who are usually already in the field teaching.
And I’m just left thinking… at what point do the illiterate students become illiterate teachers?
Yeah I feel like this “the kids these days don’t know their reading ‘riting and ‘rithmetics” kvetching has been going on for decades. Like you said, there’s definite problems with the US education system, but this particular facet feels more like adults looking at their generation with rose-tinted glasses.
We test for literacy. We do adult competency testing every handful of years. Western adults cant read. Its a fact.
I think the kvetching you are talking about was right decades ago too. We can identify teaching trends that blatantly miseducate students on how to read that have been popular in various forms for decades (since like the 1980s), and as those waned in popularity we then got the internet more widely available. The kvetchers were right before that literacy got worse, and the new kvetchers are right now about it continuing to get worse.