“These kids can’t read. They can’t decode. They have no vocabulary, no background knowledge.”
“They’re in environments where education and literacy are not emphasized or it’s not modeled.”
“How are we supposed to expect kids to learn anything or to retain any information, when they can just go online type one word into an AI bot and get an entire essay written for them with the snap of a finger?”
The above comments came from a video I found on YouTube after doing a search on “teaching” and “Gen Alpha.” The video itself, titled “Gen Alpha Kids Can’t Read and Teachers Are TERRIFIED,” has racked up 1.6 million views. Its main message is today’s kids are inattentive, rude, and illiterate. Permissive parenting, excessive phone use, and the absence of school life during the COVID lockdowns are cited as culprits.
My experience as a private tutor has given me an opposite view on Gen Alphas. I am, of course, not unaware that I’m only exposed to a certain segment of them, since the type of parents who can afford my fees usually also have the good sense to bring up their kids well. But I would then argue that the very fact that children are very much shaped by their home environment means that when kids are inattentive, rude, and illiterate, it is the adults in their lives, and not they, who bear the bulk of responsibility.
So, how are the Gen Alphas I know like? Over 50% write better than I did when I was their age; half of this group were already writing at a high level when I took them under my wing. There are cases of under-12s being so knowledgeable about the world that they can hold an adult conversation with me, and introduce me to people and things I’ve never heard of. I tutor a 13 year-old at 10:30-11:30pm on a weekday; another 11 year-old student I also teach late at night (she is always in her pyjamas when she appears on Zoom). And no, instead of dropping off to sleep, these kids remain alert and excited to learn (the father of the girl once overheard her talking to me in class and remarked to his wife, “I can hear joy in her voice”). A pair of brothers are enrolled at a grammar school where expectations are so high that each year, the principal will make a show of announcing the names of those who have gained admission to Oxbridge, the implication being if those in the lower forms work hard, one day, their names, too, will be announced in the same vein. Most of all, most of my students would never dream of typing one word into an AI bot and get an entire essay written for them, for they want to write. They have crossed that crucial threshold the great writing coach Donald Murray described, when students “become writers at that moment when they first write what they do not expect to write.”
If I were to make a video on Gen Alpha, I would therefore never dream of harping on their shortcomings. Among the things I would do is to bring up an issue I mentioned in a previous column, tech entrepreneur Daniel Priestley’s point that in the AI age, there are only kinds of people, creator and consumer. The former use AI to supercharge their productivity and multiply their earnings (some may go as far as “earning a million dollars a month”), while the latter wastes time on mindless AI-generated content and complain ‘I can’t even get a job for $15 an hour.” For kids who are the product of bad teaching and bad parenting, there is little doubt which group they’re going to end up in.
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式： michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站： https://michellengwritings.com
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