“One of the things that I do appreciate about it is, for the most part, nearly every adolescent in America right now has access to some kind of digital wireless device connected to the internet.
And in some ways, if we think expansively about what it means, we are probably one of the most literate societies right now in terms of young people engaging in and reading multimodal texts every single day recreationally, doing that for fun, right? That might be YouTube videos or TikTok.
The kind of content might not be what parents want, but kids are reading and communicating and sharing and curating in incredibly powerful ways. And rather than building on that, what we’ve seen instead is schools building out these kinds of policies that ban cell phones and ban technology.
So I can be just like kids in classrooms right now and be on task and also maybe scroll over and look at my social media and maybe watch a YouTube video during lunch. And those are essentially practices that we have not allowed young people to do in these classroom settings.”
-Antero Garcia, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and President-Elect of the National Council of Teachers of English
This quote came from an interview Professor Garcia did with Meghna Chakrabarti, host of On Point. It offers a different viewpoint than the way most teachers and school leaders think about cellphones, social media, and artificial intelligence these days – get rid of it.”
But it seems like there might be a change in attitude regarding how our kids are exhibiting their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills, from “ban all of it” to “maybe our kids are changing the way they demonstrate learning,” much like we did as kids when television became “a threat” to the younger generation sixty years ago.
John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at Columbia University and a writer for The New York Times put it this way in an article written for The Atlantic last month:
“My tween-age daughters make me proud in countless ways, but I am still adjusting to the fact that they are not bookworms. I’m pretty sure that two generations ago, they would have been more like I was: always with their nose in some volume, looking up only to cross the street or to guide a fork on their plates. But today, even in our book-crammed home, where their father is often in a cozy reading chair, their eyes are more likely to be glued to a screen.”
“But the, as often as not, what I’m doing in that cozy chair these days is looking at my own screen.”
“In 1988, I read much of Anna Karenina on park benches in Washington Square. I’ll never forget when a person sitting next to me saw what I was reading and said, ‘Oh, look, Anna and Vronsky are over there!’ So immersed was I in Tolstoy’s epic that I looked up and briefly expected to see them walking by.”
“Today, on that same park bench, I would certainly be scrolling my phone.”
“As a linguist, a professor, and an author, I’m meant to bemoan this shift. It is apparently the job of educators everywhere to lament the fact that students are reading less than they used to, and that they are relying on AI to read for them and write their essays, too. Honestly, these developments don’t keep me up at night. It seems wrongheaded to feel wistful for a time when students had far less information at their fingertips. And who can blame them for letting AI do much of the work that they are likely to let AI do anyway when the enter the real world?”
This shift from a love of reading, writing, and problem-solving to “let AI do it” has a name now – it’s called “de-skilling”. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes about it in another October article in The Atlantic:
“The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT,’ ‘AI Is Making You Dumber,’ ‘AI Is Killing Critical Thinking.’ Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Not that chatbots are going to way of Google – moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted – the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy. Teachers, especially, say they’re beginning to see the not. The term for it is unlovely but no inapt: de-skilling.”
“…In a recent study, several hundred U.K. participants were given a standard critical-thinking test and were interviewed about their AI use for finding information or making decisions. Younger users leaned more on the technology, and scored lower on the test. Use it or lose it was the basic takeaway. Another study looked at physicians performing colonoscopies: After three months of using an AI system to help flag polyps, they became less adept at spotting them unaided.”
“But the real puzzle isn’t whether de-skilling exists – it plainly does – but rather what kind of thing it is. Are all forms of de-skilling corrosive? Or are there kinds that we can live with, that might even be welcome? De-skilling is a catchall term for losses of very different kinds: some costly, some trivial, some oddly generative. To grasp what’s at stake, we have to look closely at the ways that skill frays, fades, or mutates when new technologies arrive.”
Exactly. It would be very wrong to think that someone would learn the same knowledge and skills in 2025 as they did in 1979 (the year I graduated from high school), but then again when was the last time you visited a high school classroom today (meaning, there is still so much recognizable from the 20th century still going on in most of today’s classrooms)?
Maybe the right attitude with all of this is that “de-skilling” is something we as learners go through (or should go through) every 50 years or so. Maybe it’s okay for our kids to demonstrate reading, writing, and problem-solving in different forms than we did.
Maybe with “de-skilling” comes a new set of skills, skills that will help young learners better define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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