This is a superficial take.

Kids are worse at reading, period. Not just stuffy texts from 50 years ago, current stuff too according to the research.

The "skills" you claim they are learning have such a low barrier to entry they aren't skills at all.

Instructing a machine "make me a Foo" requires no thought.

None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.

Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.

Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.

According to PISA they did change the tests to be more relevant to using computers. Reading tasks are mostly practical: websites, emails, forum posts, comparing multiple sources and judging whether a source is credible.

So this "old testing" framework is at least from 2010s rather than from 1950s.

> 1950s texts

The Hobbit was published in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings was published 1954-55.

If the kids can't develop an emotional connection to them, that says much more about their teachers than it does the children or modern times.

Kids are not training LoRas without a big budget. I fought for $5 from my parents, I could write C for free.

> I see kids ... discuss post-modern philosophy

Tell us more?

Fair, maybe finding other ways to measure performance - like actual achievements of kids that you mention - is a better benchmark

Yes - the older I get, the more obvious it is that the mind of a child (and young adult) is better suited to learning, reacts faster, and is more creative than mine.

The attention-deficit that is so common among especially (but not only) young people today means that grabbing their interest is of paramount importance to their learning. Just repeating that kids are bad at reading stuffy texts. But if you can put them onto something that they find interesting, they can definitely excel. I've got tales of high school students who are terrible students, but give them a CAD and 3D printer and they will solve any problem you have.

So - in other news, education is broken. How do we fix it?

> they are so much better in a plethora of skills that did not exist 20 years ago

Such as?

I teach college… you rent wrong on what they output, you are wrong on the inference drawn from it.

On a regular basis I have students bring me “machine learning” models they have trained, which sounds great. But they have no idea what problem they are solving, what data they have or should have, and no idea why that method, etc. There is no understanding. They use words and concepts from a broad variety of fields, with confidence, but with little deep understanding. The Internet and AI give access to knowledge which is necessary but not sufficient for wisdom.

While K-12 bears a lot of blame (as a system not “teachers”) I’ve come to believe the problem is more societal. What we value and what kids logically perceive will be them ahead in life. If all they ever see is that surface level performance of knowledge is enough…why bother with more?

If they have no emotional connection to texts from the 50s, then how are they discussing post-modern philosophy? Or rather, how shallowly?