The Chronicle of Higher Education carries a piece by Tyler Jagt, a literature and critical writing professor, entitled, “My Student’s Can’t Read.”  (I am forced to note that for any such prof I had, the use of a contraction in the headline would have been an automatic “B.”)  The article is behind a paywall, but is summarized and discussed by Frank Landymore in an online outlet called Futurism.  It is stunning in its assessment.

We’ve seen the decline in math coming out of San Diego for about a year now.  So I guess it would be inevitable we would see the same thing coming out of the humanities.  Things are finally getting formally data driven.  From Landymore:

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment’s “basic” level in reading, meaning they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” Younger children aren’t better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can’t read at a proficient level.

There is a lot of discussion of AI and smartphones, but no mention of the pandemic.  One would hope that the sudden decline in recent years is as much pandemic related as anything else, but we have not been “back to normal” long enough yet to know if that is the case.  AI certainly creates the opportunity for “cheating” and I am certain a lot of students are doing so.  But I am also reminded of my education when electronic calculators were first coming into widespread use.  They were initially considered anathema as a shortcut to understanding the underlying mechanic in mathematics.

Calculators soon became ubiquitous in universities as those higher ed instructors could rely on high school teachers to insure students had mastered the basics.  Apparently such reliance cannot be counted upon in this current tech advancement, “Jagt’s final grievance is how the reading crisis is a structural problem, yet institutions let it be a ‘private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts.'”  Making me recall the fifty page lab reports I had to write for my analytical chemistry course that were in fact graded compositionally as well as scientifically.

Do we have the will to figure this out? We have spent the last few weeks trying, on-and-off, to explain the lunatic nature of the current political scene.  From California’s obviously undemocratic voting to candidates that not that long ago would be considered not merely unviable but objectionable, it is difficult to understand the current state of our politics.  Unless you consider that based on what we are seeing here, there no longer is such a thing as an extended argument.  The Landymore article concludes quoting Jagt:

“When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger,” he wrote. “Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not ‘free students up for higher-order work.’ It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.”

A lack of substantial cognitive work could pretty easily explain our current political situation.  The public education system was created because an educated public is necessary for a democracy to function.  Beginning to wonder if we have forgotten that idea.  Best we remember it before we lose our democracy.