As this author mentioned yesterday, test scores for American students are worsening. However, scores have also fallen worldwide — and have been trending that way for decades.
This raises an important question: Why are scores for students worldwide dropping?
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), teens who regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) and social media scored the worst, particularly on problem-solving questions.
“You don’t get fit by watching sport,” explained OECD Director Andreas Schleicher. “If AI makes things easy, it’s not great for you in the long run. It gives you better results, but it doesn’t enhance learning. You have to make an effort. If learning is easy, it’s not learning.”
Schleicher is correct. As humans, we find the most efficient and often lazy way to solve problems. AI has heightened that tendency. It will write papers, do the research, and outsource the thinking and discoveries that make education stick.
Furthermore, social media has rewired our brains, making students crave instant gratification and answer questions too quickly (i.e., incorrectly) because they want to get to the next question rather than think a problem through and answer it thoughtfully.
Reading, in particular, suffered a battering in countries where AI and social media use were ubiquitous. Columnist Rich Lowry suggests the technology that makes our kids dumber is like our obesity problem: We don’t have to scrounge for food or perform physical tasks all day long that burn calories; we have a calorie surplus, and with that surplus comes a tendency toward a lack of discipline.
With AI to outsource our thinking and social media to outsource our attention, it’s no wonder this cocktail of technology is rotting our students’ minds.
These findings echo the work of Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at New York University Stern School of Business, who has researched technology’s influence in schools and its effects on students for over a decade. He has long sounded the alarm about screens in the classroom. He strongly advocates removing smartphones from schools and firmly supports getting teens off social media.
Like Lowry, Haidt suggests that a screen-free school that hands out pencils and paper and forces kids to think, read, write, solve math problems, and interact with their friends would boost scores and attention spans.
Some colleges have caught on to this idea, too. My alma mater is making students write their papers by hand. This not only solves the AI problem but also strengthens the mind-body connection between encoding and decoding, forcing students to cross the midline and exercise both sides of the brain.
There are ways to fix our academic issues and improve opportunities for students. Australia has taken the first step to address these problems by banning social media for kids under 16. Will America rise to the challenge by weaning our screen-addicted kids off their instant gratification machines? Time will tell, but the backlash to the status quo is already gaining momentum.
