In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?

The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.

Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.

But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.

Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effect vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

He loves it because he's good at it - he gets to talk with people, investigate their needs, and exercise his creativity. And he is very, very good at it! People leave happy, and he gets the glow of satisfaction in a job well done.

And every time he gets that moment of joy, he hates that shop a little more. Because it's not what he's meant to do - he was a member of the Obsidian Order, a spy, a genius! He loved his homeland, loved it so much, and to be banned from it, exiled to here, an alien shop on an alien station, never to see home again... every second is just a reminder of what he's lost. His status, critical in a military-controlled Cardassia; his father and mentor, gone from harsh respect to cold distaste; and his beloved homeland, lost forever to fools like Dukat.

How it must have galled, to find he can, in fact, forget - take pleasure in something as nothing as a dress design, when he once played the game of kings! To turn his keenly honed mind to guessing clothing styles! And, for even one second, enjoy it, and forget his well-earned misery!

It must have been fun once - a good cover, one he could sink himself into, knowing that he was fooling them all. How he must have reveled in his skills, the best of spies, the best of tailors!

And then he was asked to do something he couldn't countenance - finally crossing the line. And he made his choice, and got caught - not such a good spy after all - and reaped the consequences, falling back on his tailoring to make a living - a mean, poor living for a man once as powerful as he. And every second he sits in that shop, every dress he hems, every time he is assured that being a tailor isn't so bad, is more salt in the wound. Because it's not about being a good tailor - it's about betraying everything he once held dear, and losing it all, for a moral stance that ended up meaning less than nothing.