Kids prefer memes and make-up videos to 'War and Peace'

Students are reading less and "relying on AI to read for them and write their essays," writes linguist John McWhorter in The Atlantic. He's not worried that "prizing images over the written word, short videos over books, will plunge us all into communal stupidity."

He wonders whether his teen-age children will read classic novels, but thinks print will not disappear. Instead, it will compete with "the proliferation of thoughtful writing and insightful dialogues, the rise of Substack newsletters and podcasts, which speaks to a demand for more ideas, more information — more opportunities to read and think, not less."

You're kidding yourself, responds Rick Hess. "This is a bad time to resign ourselves to a vacuous, dopamine-driven TikTok culture, given that a decade of academic decline has finally sparked broad-based interest in content-rich curricula, rigorous instruction, and the importance of literacy."

Students need to read and write essays unassisted by these new tools because that’s how they learn to think critically and communicate clearly. It’s fine for a student to use a calculator once she’s mastered computation. But insisting students can skip foundational skills because, when they’re older, “they are likely to let AI do [it] anyway” is to hobble them for life.

Hess is reminded of the eternally disappointed faith that technology -- a laptop on every desk, a smartphone in every hand -- would transform teaching and learning.

In a 2012 Edutopia story on new classroom devices, he writes, teachers were told they didn't have to worry students would be distracted from their work. “If students are given engaging, open-ended problems to solve, they won’t want or need to play games.” And, yet, they were.

"Tech enthusiasts also had a bad habit of slighting the importance of academic rigor," Hess write. "A 2006 TIME Magazine cover story, How to Build a Student for the 21st Century, "explained that schools could no longer afford to fixate on math, reading, or content knowledge," because they could look everything up on Google.

Now AI has entranced tech enthusiasts, he writes. They forget that "technology is a tool" that "can be used poorly or well." And we don't let kids drive a car or use a power drill without supervision and training.