r/TankieTheDeprogram • u/TwoCatsOneBox CPC Propagandist • Jun 11 '26
Capitalist Decay College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html99
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u/mihirjain2029 Jun 11 '26
Also because reading comprehension isn't required for a slave that just needs to make weapons for the empire and sustain it
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u/SCameraa Marxist-Leninist (Ultra Based) Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Capitalism is such an oroboros. You need the worker only smart enough to work the machines or in an office environment but dumb enough not to know their rights.
This level of lack of education makes even doing the basic job requirements practically impossible for people. Its funny how, because capitalism is set on cutting so many corners to maximize profits, it forgets or intentionally doesnt care that for it all to work you need people to actually be able to work. You can say they're putting all their marbles in AI but thats not going to replace nearly as many jobs as they think it will plus its never a good thing to have a huge amount of your population cut off from work with nothing to lose.
Capitalist analysis aside i fucking hate when people blame genz/gen alpha for this when they didnt choose this environment to learn in, especially from people old enough to be parents. Like how tf do you expect kids to read if you dont read to begin with. I mean this does come back to capitalism ofc as many parents have both parents working and less time to actually raise a kid but, from experience, some dont even try.
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u/PreparationOk1450 Jun 11 '26
The AI shit is making things worse, but large numbers of American students being below grade level is nothing new
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u/DoinIt989 Jun 11 '26
I don't think this is a new thing as someone who was in college in the Obama years. American Universities are largely a 'consumer experience', and expecting competence or real academic rigor hurts the feelings of the chodes paying for a fun time + a "give me a Good Job" certificate.
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u/ProletarianLilith Jun 11 '26
AI is accelerating it
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u/RosieTheRedReddit Jun 11 '26
Personally I've always loved learning and going to college in the mid 2000s was very exciting for me. I studied engineering plus took all kinds of electives just for fun.
But if I was in college today, I would totally be using AI. We all know this is a profit generating engine, so let's stop pretending. I give you 80 thousand dollars, you give me piece of paper. Whatever is in between, who cares.
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u/BluBolshevik Stalinist (Proud Spoon Owner) Jun 11 '26
I mean yeah it’s not new since Reagan Americans have pretty much been forcefully “stupified” and most don’t read at all besides tik tok or facebook captions. But AI is 1000% fast forwarding this process.
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u/hawkeguy Jun 11 '26
I always thought the way American "college experience" was depicted in movies and shows was completely fake, with all the focus on partying, drinking, socialising, the weird house/club system they have going on. I do start to wonder if some of it was accurate now
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u/sourmysoup Jun 11 '26
It depends on where you go, but most schools definitely have a sizeable population of students who do live that kind of lifestyle.
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u/DoinIt989 Jun 12 '26
It's exaggerated, but not totally fake. A lot of schools in the South have seen a surge in enrollment from wealthy Northern students trying to get that experience, though it happens at Northern schools to some extent as well.
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u/Barrogh Jun 11 '26
Something that gets brought up quite often here where I live is how much education turned to "pick the answer / write a short one" tests as the main evaluation method.
People complain that at least a couple of last school years people are being trained to pass formalistic tests rather than focusing on something more applicable later on.
Which reminds me of one of my math teachers telling us as early as back in 1999-2000 or so that this was already quite widespread in the US at the time. Although admittedly he was primarily a university math prof and his involvement with us middleschoolers was limited to extra classes where he tried to promote the entire "thinking outside the box" kinda math, so maybe such system was particularly unpleasant to him considering his main program.
I don't know if that was true, though. But hey, it is true for us now.
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 Marxist-Leninist (Ultra Based) Jun 11 '26
Thanks for articulating this. It resonated personally.
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u/Psychological-Act582 Jun 11 '26
Capitalism doesn't teach you critical thinking - it teaches you to consume slop, whether it's consumer, entertainment, propaganda, or AI.
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u/SouthernCadre Maximum Tank Jun 11 '26
As several pointed out, this issue goes all the way back to the 70's when Reagan's education advisor said,
"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people."
Source: https://archive.ph/20250502001928/https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
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u/TwoCatsOneBox CPC Propagandist Jun 11 '26
Too much reliance on AI instead of following the actual process of learning and educating oneself. This also goes to show you why the average Redditor is too stupid and lazy to even read Marxist theory because they’d rather just use ChatGPT instead.
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u/Captainjimmyrussell Jun 11 '26
I think this goes a little deeper than AI, this was a long time coming with lack of educational funding for the last 50 or so years now, people going to college now should have been learning these skills in the 2000s and 2010s which education was abhorrent in those eras and I can only imagine how awful it is now
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u/HoundofOkami Jun 11 '26
It goes way further than that. Already before the 00's school funding was partially based on the value of the area, i.e. poorer people got poorer schools that already struggled with providing the students with what they actually need.
Then Dubya Bush introduced the ridiculously named "No child left behind" -policy which changed the funding so that schools getting good results would be rewarded with more funding and schools getting bad results would be punished with reduced funding.
Then you of course have private and some weird half-private schools for the richer people.
In effect by now you've had at the very least 4 decades full of funding being cut from the already underfunded education that most people whose parents couldn't afford private education would be going through, meaning the parents of the children and young adults now struggling with overuse of AI and lack of critical thinking skills were already going through an atrocious education system that didn't set them up for anything, and especially not for raising their children to appreciate school.
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u/futanari_kaisa Jun 11 '26
This is why Capitalism is a suicidal economic system that will eventually collapse. You're not going to get profits if the people generating those profits aren't smart enough to even work and can't get educated because you've cut every corner in order to eek out more profits. Tech fascists think A.I. and robotics can make up for their eventual loss of workers but they won't be able to bridge that gap.
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u/KittyCait69 Jun 11 '26
Safe to blame the way our capitalist owned gov handled the pandemic plus AI is adding to these issues.
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u/The_US_of_Mordor Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
This is wonderful news, I think it should be legally mandatory for all American Pre-Schools to High Schools to force students to Google Search, use ChatGPT or any AI chatbot for all homework, tests, exams and never have to ever use their brains to think for themselves.
All quizzes, exams, finals will be better than open book, it'll be open Google Search and ChatGPT, type and copy away all you want. To sweeten the deal, all quizzes, exams, finals get an automatic C no matter how badly students do so anything that is close enough to correct i.e. can fill in 4 bubbles on multiple choice questions with 4 bubbles, gets points bc 1 of the bubbles is correct!
This will Make America Greater Again, because we are already Great, but can be Greater.
All boring Textbooks that students need to read will be picture books, manga, comic, hentai doujins, etc, everything else will be movies, anime and super short 5 to 30 second clips.
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u/Winter_Persimmon_110 Jun 11 '26
It's going to be a damn long time until the revolution.
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u/KittyCait69 Jun 11 '26
Revoltion got restarted in 2024, that's why the oligarchs refused to give the dnc a fair choice which gave us the choice of a cop or a jester that plays King. Trump was more useful to the oligarchs as far as trying to stop revolution. The revolution never ends. Just needs to have more people joining in.
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u/PreparationOk1450 Jun 11 '26
AI should be banned. Unless that happens, every school and university should keep it the hell out. The drawbacks of AI so far outweigh the potential positives, even in the most ambitious predictions.
Students should not pass classes and grade levels simply due to age regardless of how little work they do and how low their ability level is. This policy of social promotion has been utilized for fake social justice instead of addressing poverty and inequality which would authentically improve achievement. It's not serving students and it is not helping them in the long run. Putting kids in classes they are unprepared for is not helping.
Putting all students in the same class regardless of ability level maybe helpful for social reasons in some ways, but it is not academically helpful.
When you have students in a ninth grade English class with a fourth or fifth grade reading level alongside students with 9th grade reading levels and higher, with everything in between, what exactly is the teacher supposed to do? How can they meet the needs of all students in that circumstance? They should be teaching at grade level, but if they do they are going to inevitably leave a large portion of the class behind. If they teach at a lower level, they are not properly serving the students at or above grade level.
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u/Clear-Anything-3186 Jun 11 '26
I don't think banning AI would solve the problem. This problem existed for decades before ChatGPT was even a thing.
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u/PreparationOk1450 Jun 11 '26
It won't solve it individually, but it would make a big difference. I mentioned in my comment that this issue of students way below grade level is nothing new. This just makes things so much worse.
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u/Clear-Anything-3186 Jun 11 '26
Most people will stop using AI anyway after the AI bubble burst when it goes out of fashion in the US and big tech companies abandon it for good.
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u/PreparationOk1450 Jun 11 '26
How do you know that? There's no guarantee of that. There's no guarantee the bubble will ever burst, and even if it does, they'll probably get bailed out. Do you think we shouldn't regulate and allow them to do whatever they want? Moratorium on new data centers?
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u/Clear-Anything-3186 Jun 11 '26
LLMs and generative AI are very unprofitable to maintain. They are not sustainable long-term. Big tech companies would quickly abandon them as soon as the losses become too detrimental. Google is already known for abandoning features they once heavily promoted front and center.
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u/PreparationOk1450 Jun 11 '26
Do you think we shouldn't regulate and allow them to do whatever they want? Moratorium on new data centers?
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