Schools across America are quietly admitting that screens in classrooms made students worse off and are reversing years of tech-first policies

Even disregarding the google planned obsolescence stuff, they expect to get 10 years out of a computer that is used daily for 3/4 of the year AND being given to teens/kids who are on the go from class to class and then home. It’s not a reasonable expectation. Even treating a laptop perfectly, its just too much of a dangerous environment for a piece of tech to reasonably expect it’s going to make it to the 10th year.

Right?

“What’s that Google? When you design things from the ground up with planned obsolescence in mind, it’s suddenly hard to UNDO the mess you made of the hardware? Who would have thunk it.”

You’re kidding right? Most of Gen X hated tech when it came out. You were a fucking nerd if you were into computers when the PC first came about. Only a small subset of Gen X really grasped tech.

I think I got reasonable tech training in high school in the early 2000s. I was taught how to use Word and Excel, and made to type up some of my assignments. Years later I’d watch my Gen X boss doing the company books by doing the math on a calculator and then typing the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

That said, I didn’t learn to type in keyboarding class, I learned to type hitting on girls on MSN messenger.

Agreed, also encouraging curiosity probably is more beneficial IMO

Flashbacks to being in elementary school in like 2004 and they had to teach us how to use calculators. “Had” is a strong word. They literally spent an entire day of math one day telling us how to use a normal non-graphing calculator. I distinctly remember hearing “don’t hold it like a Gameboy, don’t use your pencil to press the buttons,” and even then thinking how useless of a day that was. They wanted it to still seem so important. Remember, you won’t have one of these in your pocket every day.

I don’t entirely disagree, but it’s worth noting that to some extent learning is inherently boring, like, making it more interesting makes it less effective. Reiterating the same thing to the point of boredom and beyond had been shown to be effective if I remember correctly. It’s why things like Duolingo take so much longer to teach you a language, because they’re trying so hard to be somewhat fun they actually compromise the effectiveness of the teaching.

So I do think schools need to remove distractions, especially ones engineered to be distracting like Facebook.

But your point is valid too, just because some boredom is necessary doesn’t mean they can’t do better, a lot better.

I was hoping AI would take us there. All the kids have computers. A guided LLM walks them through videos and concepts. tests them, lets them advance at their own pace.

I wanted to zoom through the lessons, learn everything, but I didn’t want the awful college-prep bullshit or the high scrutiny of my essays. Did I understand the work? Yes, and that’s enough. I showed up to every class, knew what they asked, and aced tests.

How cool would it be for every kid to be able to ask unlimited questions and be given different ways to understand a problem and its corresponding answer until they understood them properly?

Set the text books and workbooks, guardrail the conversations. Double-check for incorrect assertions.

Let them go and seek out on their own whatever subject they wanted at whatever time they wanted.

or kids need to stop expecting learning to be easy and entertaining…

and do the work required if they want to learn.

because that’s what adult life is like, learning and working doing difficult shit all day. not being entertained.

The trick is to let teachers teach what they are passionate about

I grew up in the 90’s, there were Apple //es orMacs with edutainment software on them that we’d be taken to once a week, and by high school there were several computer labs full of Windows XP machines scattered around, a couple “public” ones that teachers would occasionally schedule to take the class to to do some research or type up an essay, and a few that were computer focused, I took a class on MS Office in one of those, and that’s where I was when I first heard the planes hit the towers.

About that time is when it felt like the manager and politician class latched on. That putting computers in schools made them look good, it was a bragging point, “Look how modern and up to date we are” so they’d start to cram computers in where they didn’t need to be. My junior year in college I took a calculus class that was in a CAD workstation classroom. We were told not to touch the large, loud computers on our desks and had to try to see the board around the monitors. That was probably the most egregious case but it happened a lot. “Don’t touch the computers, this isn’t a computer class.” Like all the fresh shiny equipment colleges will walk tour groups into, turn on the lights, show off that they have it, turn the lights back off because no classes take place in there, that equipment is for owning not teaching.

Now the shift is, kids get issued a chromebook and use that instead of pencil, paper and textbook. “We’ll use these because that’s what it’s like these days.”

Can confirm. I’ve spent several hours the last few weeks teaching a friend’s 24 year old daughter basic computer literacy on a W11 system. None of her friend group could help because they know just as little. When we started, she didn’t know how to shut down or reset the system.

I worked in a school system after 2011 in a county going technology first hard. They had thinkpads initially but the cost was so high for them that chromebooks became much more tantalizing as a budgetary measure. I do agree with you though whole hearted, because of a lack of instruction on computer usage and understanding kids were taught to just click this icon, do the work, be done with out. There was little to no attempt to explain the technology behind what they were doing. As a tech I would try to for the ones that’d listen but for them to really grasp it would require an actual class to do so.

As well kids are being given screens far too young for their developing minds and those screens allow access to short attention span favoring content and slop. If you Googled something you might remember more likely when I was a teen, you didn’t have instant access to it. Now y do and I think it’s detrimental what can be accessed.

When I first started working on computers in 1994, I thought that by 2010 every kid/teen/adult would be able to repair their computers themselves. How wrong I was. They know how to use computers and tablets but the hardware is a mystery to them.

I worked at a STEM university and was helping a Computer Science student with his laptop. It had a SSD and a platter HD in it for storage. The platter HD was failing and needed replacing. I wrote to the student stating he “needed a new HD”. He had no clue what I meant. He didn’t even know it was possible to replace. He was going to buy a new laptop.

I was born in 1996, but the older generation (it’s Russia) that remembers Soviet schools sometimes remembers Soviet educational PCs. Those were a few series, I don’t remember names, the point is there were Apple II clones and there were PDP-11 clones (but in PC form factor, even with networking ability in the sense of there being one master machine and slave machines booting from it ; but those were not terminals).

So, that older generation remembers as if something normal being taught to program in BASIC, FORTRAN, later C or Pascal and operate machines. Soviet life was quite a lot poorer than even 90s despite all the retroactive disdain for that decade, still informatics classes were apparently at least educationally useful and had at least one operable machine usually.

The 90s generations at least got some computer instruction of general use.

And my generation got Windows machines and no real understanding by anyone what informatics classes are even for. Unless it’s some special school or at least with math focus.

Things people were taught in the 80s and which somehow don’t transition at all to their operation of modern PCs, that contrast still terrifies me.

So - it’s the same everywhere, it seems, because of the idea prevalent in the 00s that my generation is going to just wing it because of being exposed to electronics since childhood. An absolutely nutcase and absolutely winning (in the sense of popularity) idea.

I even have a pre-school brochure somewhere, if I’m not mistaken, with algorithmic problems and solutions. The earlier the better.

One can think in paranoid/cynical ways - “fools are easier to rule” or “so that’s why they were pushing hacker movies in the 90s to scare everyone”. I honestly think it was just fear of some day being less than capable of understanding the technology we rely upon to keep breathing. And that fear is unsubstantiated, because similarly to that most people don’t understand city planning, logistics, oil refineries, electrical engineering and one can go on. But due to that fear of singularity it was easier to start imagining that somehow new generations will gain hard knowledge naturally.

But even that wouldn’t be much of a problem if not for Microsoft. Hate them with passion. EDIT: For managing to sell, coerce and impose their monopoly upon the world and upon education most of all

I feel this is just a tangent though. The main issue is kids test scores in math and reading not improving/dropping since switching to utilizing more technology. Whether they know how to use the OS properly or type faster was supposed to be a bonus to PCs in the classroom.

This article shows a lot of examples of teaching failures, but we need an actual study showing tech isn’t helping, or the correct way to teach with tech.

And they wouldn’t have to have the screen do everything if they were paid the appropriate amount given the importance of their station

Screen use should be relegated to a smart board/overhead projector and computer lab. Makes kids use real books/pencil & paper and every test score will improve as long as a zero smartphone policy is enforced.

It often is the technology itself though. Or at least “the technology” defined in any way that’s relevant here.

No one is proposing that we remove every computer from school buildings. The mistake appears to be the “one laptop per child” policies that made laptops and tablets essential to school instruction. Crucially, these devices could ever be justified because they also took the place of the students’ books. Their books are on these devices. They don’t have physical books anymore.

People naturally want to make things as easy as they can for themselves; if you introduce a tool that can make things better when used in moderation, but worse if overused, it will inevitably be overused so long as that’s the easier thing to do. Convenience is one of the biggest factors in making the global population dumber and more complacent, and it’s often introduced as a useful tool in moderation.

Definitely. While I agree with rolling back some of these tech first policies, I think we need to be focusing on HOW it’s used.

I worry that disabled kids will be caught in the line of fire, too.

That’s insane! How could any teachers think that’s acceptable?

If it so much as has a button to change text size I know kids would rather mash that button and watch the screen go crazy than to pay attention to the lesson.

I knew the school laptops were fucked up when my kids started choosing to spend their limited screentime on them instead of iPads or the Switch or the TV.

And if they did, all the tech in schools probably wouldn’t be as big a problem. Who tf learns coding from scratch on a tablet?

Honestly that wouldn’t be a bad idea. Even if few people ever code themselves, learning a little logic is good for anyone.

The problem is the tech companies didn’t actually deliver on the promise. We didn’t hand kids devices that encouraged tinkering and discovery. We handed them locked-down iPads suitable only for content consumption, not knowledge creation.