Archived copies of the article:
“The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never” - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent
No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.
Key word “had”
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
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I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper, and i hate having to do online tests too. I like my printed documents and physical books. Many students will say the same, and i also tend to dislike the trend to digitise every and each aspect of learning. The truth out there is that analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole, but many of you are not ready to hear that. Technology is also the problem.
The laptops should be a tool, in addition to other tools. Being well rounded is the best thing you can be.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Teachers are paid a pittance in the US. Shows our values as a society. They’re educating the next generations, but that doesn’t make number go up right this second, so they are compensated accordingly.
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
It’s more than just lack of effort here though, it’s systematic pollution they are allowing into our food and water with abandon.
into education too, into everything they can actually
Probubbly cuz you gave the tools and didn’t begin the process of using it for schools, dumbasses.
Right? I’ve seen plenty of people who don’t know how to swing a hammer.
The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.
Our government is useless
Our government is useless (for the poor)
Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It’s a conservative win-win.
And the begining of civil distruction
It’s so sad that we love shitting in younger generations and we love making things harder for them. This isn’t a new concept btw. Americas been doing that for generations
It’s a scam, y’all.
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
by design, and when you combine that with AI and generations of people with low attention spans, you get something bad I’m guessing
The US public school was always about training you how to behave in a post industrial world. When you disguise a lying machine as an equal or even a divine source of knowledge, nobody will question when it says “there is nothing more to learn about the civil rights movement” or anything else the ruling class doesn’t want you to learn.
The problem isn’t the technology, but the implementation.
The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?
I’m just not convinced that the technology isn’t part of the problem. All of these machines are designed to give a you an instant dopamine rush when you use them. I think they have a real and detrimental effect on attention span.
Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
Having worked for three separate companies trying to do just that, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too expensive for individuals to purchase and school districts had a hard time getting contracts approved due to NCLB and constant budget cuts. Strange though that a company like Google could ink a huge deal with an entire state even though none of the shit did anything it promised.
Google got exactly what they wanted out of it though. Get 'em young using and feeling comfortable with Google hardware and software, and trapped in the walled garden early. Most are not likely to change to another brand/OS later in life.
Oh trust me I know. They make big promises, and sell these devices dirt cheap to state education systems, and frame it as an altruistic, benevolent act. Meanwhile you can’t install any other software on them and it’s entirely locked into using google’s “education” software
Also where are the “think of the children” folks that are putting in the age verification laws. Shouldn’t they be concerned that a marketing agency built to profile individuals is privy to everything your kids do at school?
Privacy is too woke
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
In this instance, I’d say it doesn’t.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don’t care as much about failing grades, and the “no child left behind” has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means “your kids going to the next grade, regardless”
It’s also happening in areas where education HASN’T been defended or dismantled. It’s happening in areas that aren’t Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can’t be solved because whatever is happening isn’t being caused by them.
Which locations weren’t impacted by the first trump administration’s education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There’s basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it’s just US thing
No it isn’t. Finland did the same thing and now our schools are fucked up.
No, what’s messed up education in Finland is that it’s much, much harder now to fail and hold back a student. The semi-equivalent of the USA’s No Child Left Behind policy.
Schools here in Finland still use plenty of books, and at least they still teach how to use computers, like typing lessons, unlike the USA.
Here in Masala they even started teaching classes about detecting AI use, it’s usage in propaganda, and privacy on the internet plus usage of AdBlockers in elementary school. My wife gave the lessons - though she changed it up on the second one after seeing that kids don’t really care about this stuff much unless framed differently, like “you can watch YouTube without ads” rather than “it’s your legal right to not have ads as children” and “Linux has many many free games” for example.
Source?
Unfortunately I don’t find that source from YLE’s site. I will try to find it somewhere though.
Why do you think other countries did it right? Does the article say that kids in other countries are smarter?
No, common sense says that.
Common sense isn’t real, it’s knowledge we take for granted … when it happens to be correct, which often enough it isn’t.
Norway did the same thing, and have now swapped back to books. I don’t think any other country did it right.
Nope this conclusion is general everywhere. Replacing textbooks and pen and paper for tablets and digital technology has damaging effects on the learning process. We as a species are not built to learn by clicking and swiping on screens. We learn by touching, feeling and writing on coarse paper. Learning is an incredibly complex process and attempting to simplify it only leads to superficial gains as opposed to real knowledge.
Now when learning 3d geometry for example, people think that buying a bunch of 3d shapes they can touch and bend and visualize easier is better. But what they don’t realize is the effort to visualize the shape with ones mind’s eye is far better for the learning process even if it takes practice and it is slower.
This race for immediate results in everything created the impression that learning a few things quickly and applying them without actually understanding their depth is better than slowing things down and building knowledge. But the curve must go up up at all costs!
Everyone knows the real problem was moving from clay tablets to papyrus. So unnatural.
It is not the same thing and you know it but you do you!
What a silly naturalist falacy. Were not built by anyone and evolutionary speaking pen writing is not any more special than writing on a digital screen. All of the science here is unconvincing at best and fake bullshit at worst.
It’s entirely a skill issue.
It could be a skill issue but if that’s the case I’d argue that introducing digital learning should have been a slower process. Anyway there are countless studies showing the differences between typing and handwriting (like this one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/) but I also have a story. Years ago I had a friend who was doing different neurological studies and she measured once the difference in the brain when writing vs typing. She said it was night and day. When writing the brain lit up almost completely, because handwriting engages so many centers for so many motions and memory recall etc. Typing she said looked almost the same as pressing a single button over and over. There wasn’t much engaging of other motions. I found it very interesting. This was years ago before social media, I don’t think smartphones were a thing yet much less tablets.
I am not saying that there is no place in learning for digital technology. It would be stupid to ignore them. But some things are better learned with pen and paper.
I feel like that’s still an implementation issue not the fact of that “digital is worse” and yeah you’re probably right - the roll out should be better. Using proprietary apple devices and shit by multi trillion budget enterprises (countries) is stupid. The government should task entire governed system with years of preparation and diligent implementation with optimized ebook software and curriculum distribution.
This is entirely a skill issue not a technology / medium issue.
Digital is clearly here to stay and superior form of information exchange - it’s literally called IT. To say that we should go back to pen, paper and text books is just pure incompetence. I speak from experience myself as I am a published author but I’m never writing an educational book again when websites exists - physical textbooks are incredibly archaic and should be abandoned entirely and I’ll die on this hill.
I am a scientist myself and I cannot see how you can solve maths and physics problems on a tablet. Maybe I am incompetent and lack the imagination but the physical limitations of these devices just make them cumbersome at best. Again I am not arguing against tablets computers etc. Just that some things are better learned with pen and paper. There are far fewer distractions and you get a much better picture when you have 3 pieces of paper in front of you with all the steps you took to get to where you are now in your solution than swiping back on the tablet. I am obviously biased but it just makes more sense to me.
Writing an article absolutely digital I would never argue against it. But actual learning is better analogue in my opinion.
And then there are the issues you mention about forcing people to use a certain brand for their education. Pen and paper is for everyone. Easily available and ready to use. I can see your argument for textbooks and here it is where a tablet could be useful (provided is distraction free). Load it up with textbooks and go. But even then my bias makes me skeptical. There are mental mechanisms to remember information from books. One can remember the placement on a page, the place in the book. In a digital version that constantly changes depending on how you read that.
