I teach 18 year olds who range in reading levels from preschool to college, but the majority of them are in the lower half that range. I am devastated by what AI and social media have done to them. My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good “when used correctly.” I ask them, “How does one use it correctly then?” They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks. They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching. If I were to quit, it would be because of how technology has stunted kids and how hard it’s become to reach them because of that.
I understand the fear of technology stunting critical thinking but LLMs are pretty darn recent, what happened to these highschoolers the last 14-15 or so years that left them with little to no reading or critical thinking skills? Where is the talk of parental involvement, teachers and educational systems prior to this?
Teachers have an incredibly hard job but the constant stream of these articles feels more like they’re trying to pass off the failures of our education system and failures of parents/society for decades onto the admittedly retarded technology that’s very recently entered existence…