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?
The sense I get us, absolute literacy is in an okay place, relative to historical literacy rates in the US. I think the problem, and it’s not just the young’ns, is a lack of functional literacy, being able to take a written piece and understand not just the individual words and sentences, but the overall meaning, implications, and biases.
Personally, I blame the rise of standardized tests. It moves education away from exploratory, growth teaching that gets people to grapple with the subject matter and instead teaches to the test and to juice the metrics.