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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes.  I've been a high school English teacher for about 20 years.  General reading comprehension skills have plummeted in the past decade, and analytical skills and ability to form ideas and question/discern between fact and opinion are almost gone.

I would say about half of my juniors and seniors are not capable of reading and understanding on the most basic level a novel the majority of students could read/understand in the first decade of my career.  Even the best students are now using ChatGPT to quickly summarize articles, stories, and chapters, and don't kid yourself that they can easily revert to actually reading: those skils are gone.  I teach at a high-tuition private school where most parents believe their children are brilliant.

I guess I'm getting old and cranky at 46, but I was recently looking over some essays written by kids I taught when I was 25, which were written in class in a timed format (AP Lit timed writing practice), and the difference between then and now is shocking.

It frightens me that we are losing the ability to access the written thoughts and ideas of our ancestors, and must now trust AI to summarize and present the material to us in a condensed bite with (one) interpretation.  If I were an evil dictator in a dystopian novel, this is exactly where I would want my subjects to be: tractable because unable to think and analyze, wholly incapable of accessing alternative ideas in the form of surviving writing.

I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think the future is bright.  If you could all see what I see, you would be very unsettled indeed.

[/quote]

beautifully stated.[/quote]

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