“They’re Illiterate” — High School Teacher Says Her Students Don’t Even Know How to Text Anymore

A teacher is claiming that many American high schoolers are effectively illiterate. Educator and TikToker Miss Mackenzie (@gmakenzie) says that her students are so poorly versed in proper communication and writing techniques that they are unable to even text anymore.

She shared her rant in a recent post on her account, which begins with her sitting in her car as she speaks into the camera.

"For some reason there's still this argument that even though kids are a couple grade levels behind, it doesn't really matter. They can graduate, they can move on, it's no big deal. Who cares? As long as they can read and do random stuff, they're fine!"

However, she says that the newest generation of students at large are not fine. And that's because the bar for any type of achievement has been set so low.

"No. I want you to hear a serious conversation my co-worker and I had to have the other day," she began.

Miss Mackenzie then went on to elucidate on the sorry state of communicative affairs when it comes to the high school sophomores she instructs: "I teach 10th-grade English — these kids can't text each other."

She highlights just how serious of an issue this is. Referencing how it wasn't that long ago folks were worried the shorthand communication styles adopted through text messaging would supplant proper grammar altogether.

However now, it seems, Miss Mackenzie and others would much rather see kids utilize as many "lols" and "cyas" as they could muster.

"A couple of years ago we were so worried that texting was ruining grammar in writing. And these kids can't even text. They voice note. They voice note to text. These kids can't Google anymore, because they're speaking into the computers."

Furthermore, she intones that an ultra-reliance on artificial intelligence software is also contributing to a collective degradation of students' abilities to effectively communicate. It seems that this has spread to an overall inability to think for themselves or even know how to properly use a simple search engine.

And this is due to the fact that they are so out of practice when it comes to writing and speaking in a coherent manner. As a result, they simply aren't able to suss out how to even phrase a query search. " They're speaking into ChatGPT to find their answers and just copy and pasting."

Then, she proclaims that even with an abundance of technology and resources at their fingertips 24/7. They can help themselves understand basic sentence structure, learn the meanings, and use words correctly whenever they want. Even with all of this, they are unable to actually read.

"They are illiterate," Miss Mackenzie declares.

And she says that our education system's unwillingness to enforce stricter educational policies has ultimately ruined their chances of succeeding or fulfilling their personal ambitions and dreams. Or, at the very least, become functioning members of society. "How do you expect them to go into the world?"

She capped off her video by, again, expressing how dire the literacy situation in America's schools are. "Yes there's ways around it, it's called technology. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be teaching them how to friggin' read and write."

A New York Times opinion piece said teachers aren't allowed to expect accountability from their students. Subsequently, this creates a culture of blame. Since they can't be held accountable to study and ask questions in order to comprehend their school work, then certainly, the problem isn't with them. So the onus of failure rests on the shoulders of someone else.

Furthermore, educators have blamed "no zero grades" policies that don't allow them to give students a zero grade on assignments they don't complete or tests that they miss, refuse to fill out, or simply get every question wrong on.

NEA writes that as long as a student shows a "reasonable attempt" to get their work done, teachers cannot give their students a grade lower than a 50.

Bored Teachers also wrote that there seems to be a concentrated effort to redefine what failure is. I.e., making excuses for kids' failing grades. They say it's much healthier to give a kid who did terribly an F on an assignment they bombed, rather than placate their temporary feelings at the moment.

The article implores teachers to "let kids fail" and that if we don't let kids fail, we fail them."