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 would hazard a guess and say that a lot of these sorts of complaining teachers haven’t differentiated between a student who “can’t” do an assignment, vs those who don’t see the point and are just not bothering. And in turn, if they’re the sort of teacher to complain online about how horrible all their students are, they probably aren’t a very popular teacher, and their students probably aren’t particularly motivated.
I’m not saying things aren’t bad and getting worse, but I think it is also a case of the kids recognising that the entire school system over there is pointless and a waste of time, the kids are smarter than they are given credit for, they can recognise a broken, useless system that isn’t going to properly prepare them for the adult world, and don’t see the point in putting in effort.