>>122866842Not a chance.
Brilliant people stared at screens all goddamn day in decades past.
What is happening is simply a matter of people not learning how to do things,and instead learning how to find things.
Subsequently, search engines improved and now know how to find the thing you are looking for even if you ask for some thing horribly misspelled or wrong.
You learn by doing. This means that the best way to learn how to learn how to learn is to do many different things. It is why schools used to have auto shops, drafting labs, and would actually use hazardous chemicals and flame in science.
Everyone learned how to do many things. Around the early to mid 90s there was a push to teach "critical thinking" rather than practical application of skills. Rather than learn from experience, children were trained instead to use techniques that let them "strategize" through a problem.
It backfired. Rather than having to do stuff and fail, they never had to try. Good students still would try and would learn, bad students would assume they have it all figured out, after all they "critically thought" their way through this problem.
Teachers also no longer had an objective metric to grade on and could push their opinions as facts. The ones that cared had their hands tied and the ones that didn't were enabled to be shit.
Everything peaked in 2005, the last generation to avoid this nightmare. A record percentage of students taking the SAT with a record high average score.
Mind you, the sat is a renornalized yearly. As scores increase, the test gets harder. People were not only doing better, but they were doing better than than the previous years compounded gains.
Now things are so bad that they are redesigning the test. No longer are reading passages about interpreting meaning from something not explicitly stated, but instead about "finding information" (reading the passage and finding the reference)
Math has been changed to "narrow focus". 1/2
