Archived copies of the article:
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.
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?
Some one has PAID them to do this. They’re a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they’ve even had the majority of the time… and they took just as much of a part in the “dismantling the public education system”.
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They’ll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
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.
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”
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
“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”
Back in the 00’s when I was secondary school. My friends and I, would turn off the firewall, and bypass the website restrictions. This is just so we could download and play runescape, but I also played the halo combat evovled demo. It was only my group of friends who figured out how. We never shared the simple method with anyone, because we didn’t want it getting patched.
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
This. And chromebooks are glorified tablets. Much less capable than a proper laptop, much less for a child to learn than a proper laptop. Google did MASSIVE pushing to get chromebooks into the classroom to get kids hooked on their platform as early as possible
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.
In California most of my teachers were making 6 figures in my rural town, the problem is that kids don’t care about learning, their parents especially do not care at all.
Removed by mod
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
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
Teachers are a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We’ll all run out of money!
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?
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 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.
As someone in the classrooms (student teaching in fifth grade in Illinois), I don’t disagree that the tech provides this. However, I also see how it benefits the students with workflow and access to a diverse form on texts which is needed for a multitude of diverse learners whether they are multilingual, have a disability of some kind, are special education, or have IEPs or 504s.
The access to parents at home with instant ability to the same videos or resources as well as translation tools can mean more parental help for the kids.
What I see as the problem is that the way we measure students and their cognitive knowledge/capabilities hasn’t changed with how we teach. Everything is to the test and set up without any national standards. I see kids able to make some amazing inferences and see patterns with small prompting and the ability to deep think is there even with tech being a huge part of the classroom.
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
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
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Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it’s actively enraging.
You know, it wasn’t always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside’s out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we’ll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand~ Bo Burnham
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu’d windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It’s not merely tech that’s to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don’t have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends’ dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - “A hacker put a virus on there”), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
There are even people writing ‘software’ who don’t know that.
I’m so fucking happy I’m not the only one who has noticed that.
jesus christ we’re so fucked.
Wait I don’t get it. How is this possible?
-
Correlation
-
Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
But sure, also, they’ve replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
Don’t forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
https://seatingchartmaker.app/articles/class-size-statistics/ USA seems stable for class size?
The typical class size in US public schools is 16-23 students. In the academic year 2020-2021, the mean class size was 18.3 students, a slight decrease from the 2017-2018 average of 19.6 students. These figures represent the mean across both primary and secondary education.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/class-size
In the United States, average class sizes vary widely, with national averages indicating 21.2 students in elementary schools and up to 26.8 in secondary schools.
COVID exacerbated the situation over the last five years.
The situation of class sizes decreasing? The article you gave is from 2021 so im guessing its just methodology of oecd vs nces? the closest citation to that claim is from a 2013 NCES source though.
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I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.
The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.
I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t a dig at Gen Z. For as long as we’ve been testing, which is like 50 years I think, the new generation has outperformed the previous one and that’s a good thing.
Having this generation underperform means that we have failed them and we need to figure out exactly how we fucked up. The evidence is really strong that technology in the classroom is a significant contributor.
in the classroom specifically though? did they control for screen time outside of the classroom in the study?
As a Gen z who managed to not be an idiot I’m unconvinced it’s the technology when even in my elementary school years I was beginning to realize how shit the school system is. Technology probably doesn’t make things better but it was failing me in elementary school when the best of the best was the massive brick of a computer Macs in the computer lab was all we had
I’m not an expert on this, but I have listened to people talk who are and claim that you can pretty clearly link cognitive decline with the introduction of technology effectively everywhere.
I’m sure it’s not as clear as “tech bad” but it does seem like screen time and deferring the manual parts of learning to computers is not great for us.
Personal anecdote here, so grain of salt.
But I was born in the mid90s. My dad is a tech geek, so we had a personal computer with Windows 95 and I was playing Adiboo on it at 2-3 years old. Also had a Gameboy with Pokemon. Played CS/HL/DOD in the early 2000s. All before we were going to the computer lab at my school.
So I’ve been entrenched in computers and tech my whole life. So I don’t think screen time itself is bad, but we also did not have tech in the classroom (except for the old school throw projectors).
So it probably doesn’t help that the classroom nowadays is all tech while also the kid’s home is all tech. It’s a balancing act.
It’s closer to 100 years at this point.
See also Goodhart’s law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”, which may not be completely relevant here, but is likely a factor (probably a lesser one than the systematic underfunding and other political meddling in US schools).
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
Don’t forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
Correction: They are still making big bucks on that deal.
Vendor lock in, and brand recognition is bigly important.
Selling Apples ?
As a Computer Scientist, I increasingly believe this tech might actually be poison for the human mind, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I want to believe we can make it actually useful. But I don’t know if that’s possible or not.
I get your point bro, but it’s just half of the story. The real issue is not tech as a whole, but the conflict of interests of big evil corps. Tech is fantastic and can supercharge human learning, but the fact that most software is made with the sole purpose of maximizing engagement had led to those issues. The issue is the business model, not the tech itself
Lets be clear: the tech is fantastic, the application is not. We are handing children mind control feeds while they are still forming their identity. If we had these kids working in linux shells, learning the nitty gritty problem solving behind the tech, learning how to use it to build rather than shoehorning it into problems that absolutely dont need it then I think the story would be different
I think the problem with computers is when you make shit too easy.
Play a game. Tap on store. Tap on install. Play.
When I was growing up getting shit to run on my 286 was a challenge, Changing memory allocations, IRQ ports, a myriad of errors and work arounds, cfg files, memory editing, command lines, basic, and all that stuff meant you were forced to think.
The irony is script kiddies of the 90s would be viewed upon as hardcore hackers these days.
Indeed it warmed the cockles of my heart when my son got into Half Life and asked me to show him how to use the console.
I was like, awww you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
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!
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 think that the belief of pen and paper being “natural”, is a weird idea. We have less than 7,000 years of history with pen and paper, closer to 50,000 if we include cave paintings. Far as evolution is concerned, that is a pretty darn short. Our understanding of writing - and computers - arises from an incidental application of our intelligence, not the other way around.
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.
Why does it have to be a tablet? Most physics and math probles are already solved in ipython notebooks. Seeing immediate rich features is crazy good for learning.
As for book unique benefits - yes but that can be replicated with software very well if not better. For example having an infinite board is incredible for mind mapping and just as an efficient work space.
We could argue day and night about benefits and capabilities of each form but reality is that software is incredibly important in our society today and yet people are still mostly software illiterate. Even if tablets and computers were worse than pens and textbooks it would still be more valuable to use them to expand general computer use skills.
Why is this getting down voted? This whole thread is fully of techno nerds who seem to be under 30 and grew up in the generation this article is talking about and smoking copium to make themselves feel better for being part of the less capable generation.
“But kids dumb” says the lead-brained
Bro, I’ve been around quite a few Gen Z adults. A few are solid, but the average, has way more anxiety, struggles to stay off their phone, has difficulty understanding many basic concepts.
Not saying the generation is lost, but damn are they starting further behind. This is a fairly broad sampling, both high school educated through people with graduate degrees.
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!
