Last night I met up with my favorite English teacher, a lifelong friend who teaches both high school and college courses.
In thirty-five years of teaching, she has never been more worried about her students.
In thirty-five years of teaching, she has never been more worried about her students.
She suspects half of her college students use chatbots to generate their essays. They’re turning in “master’s level papers” on subjects they can’t answer basic questions about. She’s started grading on a curve: if a paper is badly written but shows effort, she gives it an A.
She teaches an English course for aspiring elementary school teachers. She asks these future educators if they read. Most of them don’t. They can’t name a favorite author. Several students have told her the thought of teaching kids to read bores them.
It’s worse at the high school level. Her kids don’t talk to each other, they don’t recognize the most basic cultural allusions, they struggle to watch movies. She used to place them in groups for fun creative projects but no longer does because “they have no imagination.”
She’s retiring this year from teaching high school and feels despair over the future of education. Her colleagues are burnt out, are leaving teaching, and their positions are increasingly filled by long-term subs who don’t know the material.
I asked her why she thinks the situation has gotten so dire and she had several theories. Covid school closures. Online classes. Parents who aren’t invested in their children. The ubiquity of phones in schools, which makes it difficult for developing brains to focus.
“Kids used to goof around in the halls between classes,” she told me, near tears. “Now there’s complete silence. I tell stories to make the material fun and they’re not interested. They don’t get jokes. I showed them a clip from Monty Python & the Holy Grail and one kid laughed.”
She also cited the way reading has been taught in the lower grades. A generation ago, many schools made the mistake of replacing phonics instruction (which has been proven to make kids into readers) with “whole-language learning” (which does not).
Phonics (the way most people over 35 learned to read) involves sounding out words until they make sense. Whole-language learning involves looking at the first letters and essentially guessing the rest of a word. It does not work. And it has been a disaster.
Luckily—and this is why I’m ultimately hopeful for the future of education—a growing number of educators recognize that whole-language learning has wrecked a generation’s ability to read. In the past few years, *forty* states have reinstated phonics instruction.
And with the recent push to restrict phone use during school hours—Virginia, California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana and South Carolina have all banned phones in classrooms—I truly believe that the future of learning in America will be better than the recent past.
Many folks wrongly assume education is a ship that runs itself. It can’t work if teachers aren’t fully funded, if their students aren’t invested in learning, if their parents aren’t invested in them. “People are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” We can’t let that be our fate.
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