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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Every generation writes this about the subsequence going back to ancient Greece. There's never any truth to it.[/quote]

Yes there is. When they worried in ancient Greece that writing would lead to people no longer memorizing the entire Illiad, they weren't wrong about that. I doubt there's been a human being alive in centuries, maybe even millenia, who has memorized the Illiad, but the Greeks used to do it. What the ancient Greeks could not have forseen was the positive benefits of writing for other things would (I think) outweigh the loss of that much memorization.

Will social media culture have benefits that are equivalent to writing? It...sure doesn't seem like it.[/quote]

I wouldn't trade having the Internet for the ability to recite the Iliad from memory, that's for damn sure.

I love books but now I mostly read on the Internet because it keeps my brain busy making all sorts of connections and pursuing broad interests.  I barely watch recorded/broadcast media, even videos, because I like controlling the speed with which I move through material instead of the speed at which it is shown to me.  So I've been heavily influenced by a smartphone-based world even though I'm a heavy reader.

I think the current crisis in advanced literacy is not due to social media.  It's due to the crisis in K-12 education. I don't blame the teachers, although I think teacher quality has dropped because we don't respect teachers as we should, they are low-paid, and bright women have a lot more job options now.  I also favor back to basics and getting tech out of classrooms.  I don't think it does much.  See Amanda Ripley's Smartest Kids in the World book for insights on that.

With my own kids, I think they would have learned a lot more and liked school better if their schools and classmates were more functional.  I think their writing has been most impacted by the short nature of the assignments, low expectations of quality, very little red ink correction, and poor choice of topics.  Over their entire K-12 years, I've hated their best practices writing curriculums since about 1st grade and my views are shared by many parents in my district. The single worst offense is too much writing related to one's own self instead of fiction or impersonal non-fiction assignments.  Kids don't really like all this journaling and navel-gazing self-analysis that educators believe kids find relatable and fun to write about.  We've come a long way from writing about "My summer vacation".

I'm expecting my oldest to get lower marks for writing skills when he goes to college but I will be directing him to the tutoring center & writing center.  He will likely be an average writer incoming and possibly outgoing from college.  However, I think he will easily be at the level of my average coworkers so I am not worried.  We have focused on remediating math during high school and haven't had time to work on other, more subtle pandemic-related deficits.[/quote]

LOL you clearly have never even read it.[/quote]

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