This sounds like something legitimately terrifying, but I’m struggling to make it concrete. Could you expand on the example a bit?

I felt this way until recently, when I’m becoming much more aware of how limited our collective attention is. Every honest belief probably deserves to have one (maybe 3) reasonable people listen to it. But they definitely aren’t all worth national/state/city/expert attention.

I think it’s fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn’t bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don’t want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.

A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where’s the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?

One of the more important knowledge repositories right now… and it’s tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.

Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?

As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We’re also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious ‘oh that’s a problem’ than the AI stuff.

Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?

If we’re going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we’re better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.