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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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?

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    45·
    11 days ago

    Also materially this is due to, at least in the US, to austerity and the infamous no child left behind act by bush junior which cut funding for “underperforming” schools. This gutted school curriculums to basically become test mills since the penalty for a “underperforming” cohort was potentially millions of dollars in cut funding. Some of these measures were walked back by progressives, but the neoliberals already got what they wanted and the trump era cuts are about building a parallel school system entirely controlled by private capital.

    This is very much not “the youth can’t read” and more that the US, with its contradictions mounting, will gut the federal education system. Miseducation is the goal and the system is succeeding. The successful students are not the most accomplished or achieve the most growth but the most obedient and privileged.

    These patterns aren’t new, minority groups have been feeling this since the beginning but now its universal and so its bubbling up more to the surface.