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?
I’m not saying it’s impossible to learn stuff on the computer. I love learning stuff on the computer.
I’m saying that school, where we try to teach a whole bunch of people the same set of information and skills in a structured way, doesn’t work when the people are all alone in their rooms. And further, that the commonly attempted fixes for this such as forcing them to be on camera the whole time or making their computers worse at being computers just make the whole process worse for everyone.