A screaming child who had his iPad taken might come to your mind. Alpha Kids are reportedly not doing well in school and many are subject to the algorithms of today. They will have a front row seat to the future we are headed towards.
Do you have hope that Generation Alpha will live happy and fulfilling lives?
Keep in mind, some of the children in Alpha had their schooling methodology switched up during the Covid-19 pandemic. They went from learning in a classroom environment to learning in an online environment for a couple of years.
The teaching strategies do not translate the same across those two mediums, and the teachers had to adapt to it as fast as they could, but they were not experienced online teachers.
Teachers with 10, 15, and 20+ years of classroom experience all of a sudden had to teach their classes online. They has to learn the system themselves, as well as teach their students how to use it.
Many schools were underfunded and were not able to offer adequate technology to accommodate for this change. Many families couldn’t even afford internet, so governments had to establish voucher programs to fund low-bandwidth tiers of internet for them (which develops at the speed of red tape government).
At least one adult had to be home with their children if schools were online-only, so they had one less income earning presence in the home, unless they were able to work online themself. That affects the longterm financial goals of each family, which they might still be recovering from to this day.
By the time children went back to a classroom setting, they were missing some key skills that they would have picked up normally. Now you have 3rd graders returning to a classroom in 5th grade, but they still have 3rd grade reading levels. They have to learn 5th grade level material, and take 5th grade level testing. The online material they learned online during the covid years were a completely different set of educational material versus whats used in a classroom, so now the students have to adjust AGAIN.
Anyway, thats just my thoughts on it.
Part of the issue with reading levels is that we switched from phonics-based to uhh… Fuck what was the name, hold on…
Three cueing! That’s it. With phonics you sound out the word (k-ah-t cat type thing), three queueing you… Guess based on context clues. Phonics was the standard for years, then for some weird reason three cueing took off despite producing lower literacy rates.
Covid definitely had a strong immediate negative impact on kids’ education, but the trend of children struggling more in school over time is older than that. Until recent decades, there was an observed increase in children’s IQ over later generations, called the Flynn effect. Children were on average expected to be 3-5 points higher in measured IQ than those born a decade earlier. But we have reversed that trend after peaking somewhere around the 80s. There are likely a lot of contributing factors, but they should all be environmental rather than genetic. So hopefully later generations will be able to reverse the trend again and support their kids’ development in ways their own parents had neglected.
I wouldn’t worry too much about IQ numbers falling. It doesn’t fully capture human intelligence, and definitely has some biases (IYKYK).
https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/criticism-of-the-iq-test