This article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.
> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class
I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.
I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.
It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.
You're not suggesting the most overinflated asset class in the market might somehow be involved though predatory pushing of product into education to get em hooked while they're young are you?!
Tech industry composed of many of the smartest people in the world with the most money, and the backing of the current US presidency vs. average middle America school district. Hmm.
Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt.
It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.
It's not anti-capitalism to not spend public money on nonsense that doesn't further the goals of education, no is it anti-capitalism to control the learning environment in schools. What we have is a collective action problem.
> I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.
The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.
I'm not that old. "Just ban phones" worked perfectly fine when I was in high school in 2010. "Just ban cigarettes" also worked, and no one was smoking in the classroom. It's not a hard problem; the administration just refuses to solve it.
How do you expect anyone to take what you just wrote seriously when there's such a blatantly obvious difference in the detectability of the use of these two different products?
what do you mean? if some kid doesn't want to pay attention they can draw doodles, daydream, read a book under the table, talk to other students, and finally ... be on their phone. we did all of these! (played snake on a 3310.)
up to a point the teacher's job is to notice these, and motivate the student to pay attention (report cards, detention, extra homework), or ask for them to be removed from class if they are disruptive, if necessary permanently.
It's just not relevant. When I was in highschool some teachers had a thingy on the wall where you would hang up your cell phone in a pouch. If it wasn't there, you better have a good explanation, or you'll be counted absent.
The solutions are simple and effectively free. That's not the issue. The issue is nobody wants to do the solutions. Schools don't, parents don't, kids don't. Everyone is just lying to themselves.
You can't on one hand claim to care about kids and then on the other dismiss obvious tactics like banning cell phones.
And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.
Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.
And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.
We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)
I went to school in a poor country, and live in the US. The education budget was very low when / where I grew up, and it is pretty hefty where my kids go to school. I occasionally visit their school and volunteer to help. That has given me a good frame for comparison.
The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I receieved.
The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum. The "modern" methods that I have seen their teachers practice (which confuse the teachers, too, by the way; the teachers all have said that), are very visibly wrong. So wrong that even I can see all sorts of flaws, despite not having any background in education science. The curriculum is predictably set for failure.
I strongly believe technology, and AI in particular, can be a major enabler in improving education. However, for early education (first 5-6 grades), I think absolute lack of technology (except maybe a big e-ink class whiteboard, or some such) would be far more beneficial. Kids can learn to type very quickly when needed (ideally 6th / 7th grade). They can't learn thinking-while-writing, as quickly. They have to slowly build up that mental muscle. Let them have a few years of building structure and core understanding, then get exposed to tools for doing things faster.
> The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum.
Taking this at face value: how are you teasing apart "lack of real teachers" from the budget? You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
> The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I received.
How are you doing this comparison? Have you adjusted for cost of living and the alternative opportunities available to good teachers and such? I ask because usually people compare absolute amounts of money, which distorts the picture.
You say that in USA there are no good teachers because any that are good will find better-paying professions?
This sounds plausible. Like the previous poster, I have grown in an Eastern European country where everybody was extremely poor by today's standards. Education was not perfect and there were many mediocre teachers and even bad teachers.
However, there were also a great number of very good teachers, so there were good chances that you would happen to have at least a few good teachers. There were also many opportunities for the best students to learn beyond the normal curriculum, either by self-study in good free libraries or by attending special extra-curricular classes held by the best teachers for various sciences.
I have a lot of friends who have migrated to USA many decades ago. All of them complain about how bad is the education that their children are receiving, in comparison with what we had when we were young, which matches what the previous poster was saying.
While in the schools that I attended as a young child the teachers would have been considered very poor in comparison with any US teacher of today, in comparison with most other professions available at that time they had decent salaries, so indeed there were not many non-illegal alternatives that would have been a better career choice.
No, that is not remotely what I'm saying. It's both entirely factually false and also a ridiculous extrapolation to make to a country of hundreds of millions of people.
> because any that are good will find better-paying professions?
What I am saying is that to the extent the parent may have encountered bad teachers (taking what they said at face value, whether it's accurate or not), this could be a big part of the explanation. i.e. I find it dubious that the budget would be unrelated to whatever they believe the teacher quality is. That's all I'm saying.
> You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
Budget goes beyond teacher salary. It's also for giving teachers the tools they need, giving students the support they need, and schools the building maintenance that it needs. Good teachers can't teach and good children can't learn if they don't have the material, nor can they function well if their primary needs aren't met (well-fed, healthy, comfortable).
> No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160
The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.
No, we're talking about teacher quality, not student performance. Obviously they are not the same thing. You even listed some factors that affect them differently.
I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.
Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).
>I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level.
You just need to look at educational league tables between countries to see there is a spectrum of results and some places are much better than others.
Personally I think the problems are rooted in inequality. If the elite all send their children to private schools then why would they care about the poor state of public schools. The country that regularly comes out at the top of the league table for educational attainment has almost no private schools.
And when the outcomes don't improve because money isn't magical, we could double the salaries again! And again!
Seriously, how do you think that will work? Are you suggesting that the teachers could improve outcomes now, but are holding out as some sort of negotiation leverage? Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?
> Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?
That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task. When we talk about intellectual tasks, we call this IQ, when we talk about physical feats we call this athleticism, and when we talk about social maneuvering, we call it charisma. And all three of those are positively correlated.
With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher (or at least a substantially better than average teacher) might have other aptitudes that we choose to reward more, even if they'd be relatively much better at teaching. Right now, you'd have to take a ~$50,000 pay cut to choose to be the highest paid teacher in the median California school district compared to being a median Californian software developer.
It's like any other job. If I'm offering $80,000 a year for software developers in CA, I might find a few talented people overlooked by the rest of the job market, or someone exceptionally stoked to work at my particular company, but I'm far more likely to end up with someone well below mediocrity.
>That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task.
We need, for a nation the size of the United States, millions of teachers. Quite literally. The process that somehow selects not one good (or more literally, very few, just so the pedants don't complain) teacher now, but will select mostly/all good teachers if we were to implement it is 15% raises across the board? 40%? Never mind that doing that could only possibly attract something like 5-10% of personnel change... and I'm supposed to believe this is about increasing the quality of education instead of pandering to a voting bloc that will help you to enact your non-education agenda? No thanks.
>With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher
Blah blah blah, I've already moved past that. No need to try to make the sale here.
Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers? In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers they had over their educations. The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teachers, and hopefully raise the floor of the how good the worst teachers are.
Increasing pay probably won't raise the ceiling on how good the best teachers are. If they've got that strong a passion for teaching, they're probably already doing it.
Nope, it's been tried before and it had 0 affect on student outcomes. I'm not saying that teachers don't "deserve" more, but it is not going to help students one bit.
As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.
Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1).
Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches".
Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, and in America this is met with arguments about bad teachers, unions, and privatization/vouchers.
There is much that can be done to improve educational outcomes, but like everything, it is contested.
This is true, but only in the way that no manager, private or government will ever fix. What happened to give good teachers in the 1980s (who kept working afterwards) is ... a large economic crash.
Which created a relatively large supply of people from capable, respected positions, in the hard/positivist sciences who suddenly lost their job. They always had the ability to displace teachers, but never wanted to. Then, suddenly, they had a strong incentive.
Managers, or government committees, to point out what they mostly were, were utterly baffled at this happening. They had spent decades making the demands to become a teacher easier, because they were in the situation we have now: they couldn't find people willing to work for the wage, for the (lack of) respect/status. They didn't change the wage, because status: they will never accept that teachers have a status above theirs. But suddenly, that didn't stop a lot of capable people from becoming teachers.
So this cohort of fired people blew through the requirements, fixed the shortage and even displaced quite a bit of teachers. Some never left. Some are still there. They were also used to getting respect in their jobs, and so they demanded that from government, from kids and parents (with the good ... and the bad that that brought, for example giving teachers the right to exclude troublemakers from education). They built a power base and lifted education, including increasing the demands on new teachers.
This in turn resulted in an enormous cohort of relatively well-educated people coming out of schools.
But the economy came back. A lot of these teachers left and of course the unions and government changed the rules so they themselves would be secure against a repeat of this. Displacing teachers, should anybody again suddenly want to, is a lot harder now (ironically unions thought the government would stand by them, but now the government is in constant saving mode, so they want to replace existing teachers by the cheapest labor they can find and so they're killing off those rules).
But the economy came back. To have capable teachers, schools would now have to outbid the private sector again. Which means government committees would have to vote their own status, their own pay, down. The way FANG managers have been forced to do: they'd have to accept that at least some of the people under them have more status, and more money, than they do. Needless to say, governments utterly refused this, because when such trivialities as the future of society conflict with their own money, their own status, the vote always goes the same way ... and here we are.
It's again not that well-educated people have disappeared, in fact there's more than ever before, it's that they, like in the 60s and 70s, will not accept the deal the government is offering, and the government doesn't want to offer even that deal.
But this all started happening 30 years ago and really pushed through 15 or so years ago. A whole generation has been educated already by teachers that just don't measure up to the teachers that came before. This new generation ... doesn't measure up and of course finds this situation very unfair, they never had a chance, and it really isn't their fault. Government explicitly chose to create this situation. Or to put it very bluntly: there are suddenly a great deal of young MAGAs, growing every year. The same goes for Europe too, especially since most countries have now decided they'll just outright stop education in a bunch of fields, killing off and defunding university department after department (so much cheaper to have Turkey, or China, or ... educate doctors and engineers), which then of course meant that most or all people in high positions are not locals, which means the path to high status that education used to be is a lot narrower now.
... and then Trump did the same in America. And yes, where Europe did it slowly, limiting damage, Trump decided to take a chainsaw (or what he actually used, as it turns out: a really bad LLM) to the US equivalent.
It always come back to the same argument: being inclusive, respectful, having authority, friendly, ... all of this matters. But having teachers capable in the hard sciences, is table stakes, and that is expensive. If you have a disrespectful teacher that has an excellent grasp of the subject, kids get educated. If you have a teacher that is inclusive, respectful, has authority, the friendliest person you've ever met, but limited grasp of the subject, kids don't get an education. NOT the other way around. You HAVE to start with teachers with excellent education and today that means you pay for it. But government refuses.
And yes, that's not much of a problem for the wealthy, who are educated and just educate their own kids, if need be, they do it themselves. Or they get tutors that they pay well. The rich are not the problem here. You will not fix this situation by sabotaging the rich's efforts to educate their kids. It's that government has decided they can spend just a little bit more money now if they close off the path that education provides. And the cohort of people that already got educated so much worse than people 10 years older ... they want revenge and so this is exactly what they want government to do.
Any study on education will always say that educating someone is comparable to a process of diffusion. The kids top out at the level of their teachers, no matter the process. Humans learn 99.99999% or more through imitation, so the subject grasp of the teacher is effectively the limit for the kids. At that level learning slows to a crawl at best. Imitation is the cheap, fast way humans learn (for obvious reasons if you've done even a little bit of machine learning. Think of how much information a teacher giving you the answer to a problem gives, and then about how much information an experiment gives)
It is of course true that students can exceed the teachers. But that is a very slow, very expensive process that takes years to learn even relatively simple things. And that requires providing resources directly to the students.
Resources matter ... but not laptops. I mean, by all means give teachers the resources they require. But first you must enforce a quality level in the teachers. That's table stakes and nothing will help until that's in place.
In the American historical example shared, education got lucky because of economic downturns.
If education is not valued by a nation, then this is not a surprising outcome. Do note, Americans as a whole tend to be extremely sensitive about critical discussions on the “way things are” in America. It’s a trait that results in a sort of “nothing can change” point of view, and hostility when it’s pointed out that other countries do better.
America has so far been able to attract that talent to their economy, but given the instability in place currently, that engine is reversing.
This means that investments in education are going to be needed. Right now teachers make their own print outs, teaching material, and the education system is generally underfunded.
Stating that it’s not a resource allocation problem, when resource allocation is what is required to attract talent, is inaccurate. Many people would prefer to work for meaning and to teach, even if they have talent and can be paid better. Given a livable wage, the super ambitious types will do the risky entrepreneurial things they should be doing. Others will be happy to teach.
Some of the smartest people I met in America chose to teach. America can change things, and it can enjoy the benefits.
There are a few people with a powerful platform in terms of money and influence for whom it would be much simpler if the majority of people were not capable of pointing out BS or seeing how they're getting screwed. Purely coincidentally I'm sure the loudest media voices constantly declare various versions of how we should throw in the towel on educating the majority of people while also funding initiatives to enshittify public education and it would be better for most people to go into the trades and not worry their little heads about how the wider world works.
Meanwhile those people's own children are getting educated at schools with no technology allowed and are not going into trades. So it seems it's both possible to educate people given enough effort and a lot of people are capable of tertiary+ education given the right intellectual capital.
> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright
Nature vs nurture, the old argument...
Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).
But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.
Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test.
I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something that can be achieved with money or digital tech. It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.
> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture.
The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics.
And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops.
It's getting better, slowly, no doubt, and we're seeing the results, but I'm not certain that progress comes fast enough to save some of the societies facing the demographic bomb the hardest (especially Japan, but China is also heading for serious issues). With China especially, it may also get interesting politically once a generation grows to adulthood that can see through the CCP propaganda.
> Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.
That assumes we have people actually interested in furthering the education of our children, and that is something I heavily doubt.
All we have here in the Western world is the contrary: we got austerity / trickle down finance ideologists that see education in general as a field ripe for savings on one side, then we got history revisionists actively trying to erase what children get taught about our past, and if all of that weren't bad enough we got the religious extremists trying to sell the gullible public that if you ban stuff like LGBT from even being mentioned in school books, children wouldn't turn out gay or trans - which is obviously bonkers.
> "And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops."
Usual Western racism, reassuring themselves they're better than those "uncreative" Asians, even as Asia continues to eat away at the West's technology lead in a variety of sectors.
One wonders if the Europeans ever told themselves that the backwards folk of the colonies could never catch up to the technological or scientific achievements of the continent's great centers of learning and industry.
China has a mathematical surplus of men. I'm not sure I can trust the rest of your comment considering that you're acting as if the one child policy didn't exist.
> Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
My kids have had Chromebooks for years at school, and their schools have had the devices pretty much fully unlocked. My eldest, who has struggled with ADHD and other mental health issues, was spending his entire day on YouTube and Discord. Accordingly, his grades were terrible. The school's IT said they don't lock it down because, more or less, "by this age, kids should be mature enough to make appropriate decisions about how to use technology." But they did concede that my son should have his account locked down.
Why on earth schools don't start from the perspective of whitelisting YouTube videos/channels, websites, etc., instead of allowing a wholly open web is mind-boggling to me.
I fully endorse making schools entirely phone-free. Get rid of Chromebooks altogether.
> Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
Sure. Teachers would love to ban cellphones and punish kids who disobey. The problem is, the parents who sit on the school boards as trustees won't let them.
Adding parents to the school system has single-handedly destroyed the North American education system. Why is there no homework? Because parents complain that kids find it too hard or too much. Why is there no discipline? Because parents complain that discipline is making their kids miserable. Why is there so much emphasis on schools to teach practical skills? Because parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach these skills at home, where they belong.
Parents are no experts on education yet they get to decide what teachers do in the classrooms. The law of averages dictates that 50% were below average students themselves. Guess who sits on the school boards? It's not the over-achievers, those people are too busy being successful in their careers.
There's a global competition for talent and our children are falling behind. Now you know why.
People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.
My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.
In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?
This is a new phenomena. It took over a decade for my school district to ban phones. Eventually parents relented - but for the longest time they were the single blocker. Oh, what about emergencies???
Well Nancy, it's not 1995 anymore. Phones aren't for phone calls, we all know that. The school has phones too, you know.
> I think you're actually just complaining about democracy
Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.
It's about it lowering the value of surrounding property, which is just "oh no poors" but roundabout.
But it's not your fault, it's a systemic issue. The fact you even care about your property value is the problem, not the fact you have to care about it. That's not your fault, you're just playing the game you have to play like everyone else.
Not directly, no it's not about lowering of property value. It's also not your fault that you make assumptions about how other people make decisions without critical thinking.
>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.
>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.
> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier
No stats, but it’s extremely real.
I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.
The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.
I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?
A parent with a certain temperament, which seems to overlap substantially with the sort with stupid expectations and demands, and a lot of time on their hands (which, ditto) can be extremely annoying, raise hell with the media, get the school board involved (some school boards have members who are these kinds of parents, haha) and everybody’s just too busy with actual work to deal with that shit. Enough of it, and they give in just to get them off their backs.
This is why state-level phone bans are so nice, as it keeps these sorts from focusing on school districts, where like five parents can be cause a lot of trouble, and shifts them to focusing on the state level, where a few hundred or a thousand scattered parents with stupid ideas can more easily be ignored and the bar for causing real irritation is a lot higher in terms of time and cost (want to go bother the state legislature, and they’re ignoring your calls? Get ready to travel…)
One super-power of private schools is that they can just tell parents with incompatible ideas of how the school should run to fuck off (and they in-fact do this). Public schools have to deal with them as long as they’re willing to keep poking, which can amount to a surprisingly long time.
OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?
Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.
Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.
So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.
In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.
“ familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster ”
I am having serious trouble coming up with a situation where it’s absolutely necessary for a kid to answer a text during class and not during a break or be notified by the principal office.
This behavior is present in plenty of families that don’t have the kinds of pressure on them that you’re describing. It’s not really connected to that (and needing to reach your kid instantly at 11:00AM on a Tuesday isn’t that common a thing to fall out of families being under most sorts of pressure)
I’m telling you, lots of parents just have very different attitudes toward school than one might expect (than I expected, certainly!). The phone stuff is just one manifestation of this.
">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."
I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.
I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".
A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.
I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.
"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier.
For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently.
---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special.
---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents.
---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
> ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
This specific meme has been floating around with the MAGA crowd for at least 4-5 years now. It’s not clear if it has any basis in reality, but it is one of those “I heard it on Facebook so it must be true” kind of things.
That is a meme and it does not matter whether it happened or not it would be too rare to matter.
What matters is the lack of discipline and respect for boundaries (beyond traditional teen behavior) possibly caused by social deprivation in our social app age. It is brought to the surface in the classroom where teachers have considerable less power than earlier. Physical attack once unthinkable are not rare anymore.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.
That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.
And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!
are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.
> are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.
Let me clarify - laptops/phones/tablets are objectively worse than books, because the intended design is to drive engagement, and not (as with books) to present learning material!
The fact that there may be a good teacher, a bad teacher, or no teacher at all is, frankly, irrelevant.
However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.
All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.
This does not require a persistent parent. Administrators whose job it is to administer consequences for misbehavior already reprimand teachers for enforcing school rules. The turnover on new teachers is crazy bad. It's kind of like what you hear about Russia "recruiting" foreigners to die in Ukraine. Our school district recruits teachers from places like the Philippines and Singapore. Even with the promise of fat American wages and a ticket to the promised land, a huge number of even those teachers don't last two years.
My wife is a teacher and I know several. All of the ones that have quiet have cited the worst part about teaching isn't the money or "bad" students. It's either the parents unrealistic demands or just dealing with them, or the same with the administration.
Teaching, kids or pay [although more is always better] was never the issue.
I hear the same from teachers I know. Pay could be better, some kids suck, but the real issue is parents and administration who do nothing to support the teacher.
No teacher (or parent) has ever managed to lock down a computer that was in my possession to a level where I wouldn't get distracted by it. You could shut the power off, and I'd still be poking around the hardware. I spent hundreds of hours programming my calculator instead of paying attention in class. Informative? Yes. Distracting to myself and those around me? You bet.
I completely agree with your phone take. There is no level of administrative control that can remove the distraction from the device.
For sure, I love my ReMarkable, but I think of it as an expensive toy. It functions slightly worse than a notebook and pen for over 100x the cost. I suppose it would enable students to save their notes digitally, but at no point have I ever felt the need to return to my earth science notes. In fact, I have fond memories of burning all my high school notebooks immediately after graduation.
Classroom ‚management‘ and teens can not be observed at the same time and space.
The problem is that these terns have not had meaningful interactions with technology at home where there roughly a 1:1 relationship parent:kid. Now try to get meaningfulness into kids where the ratio is 1:20+ in a classroom.
We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.
The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.
And what CC item can you point to for that. Teachers often have to write the actual thing they are teaching as a CC item on the board. Want people to teach tech, go to meetings and make them.
it's actually extremely hard to ban websites unless all students can only use chrome book, middle and high schoolers know how to install tor and free vpn to bypass all those domain blacklists in a few minutes with their laptop or phone.
Whitelist sites instead of blacklisting? I'm also not sure how kids are getting admin rights to install a VPN in the first place. For the overwhelming majority of cases a kiosk like experience should suffice, which should virtually eliminate any jailbreaks.
If you're using a whitelist approach, you may as well just turn off the internet. Maintaining a whitelist is almost hopeless. Turning off the internet isn't a bad idea, but it is a big change. Maybe some form of archiving interesting pages for kids to look at, but even that feels like too much work.
Plus, if you're using the google docs ecosystem, I suspect it's hard to avoid kids chatting in shared text files, and eventually figuring out how to get spreadsheets to fetch webpages for you.
Yeah, this never made sense to me and I’ve suggested it to the district, especially for lower grades. They will never block all of the websites they need to unless they block all of the websites. Allow teachers to unblock specific sites for the students they’re responsible for.
You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?
I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.
There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.
If we're spouting off unsubstantiated claims. I'll add teachers unions and the mandatory spend of tax money on their near monopolies versus a voucher system that allows parents to choose the best education the money can buy. (To be clear I do think we should fund educating our children, I disagree with forcing the purchase to go to a specific solution / system)
If you are looking for reform, consider rethinking how much "education" the public should fund. Should we keep paying to have every student sit through Algebra and Geometry if less than 15% of them can pass the proficiency test afterward? Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade? Can we require a student to be able to read at a 3rd grade level before we enroll them in dual enrollment English Literature?
I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?
What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.
That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.
But, the point of my post is that funding should not go to the underperforming public school systems and their unions. Instead parents should be free to purchase the education that delivers the most value for their dollar in a freemarket. But, because I do believe we should educate the kids of poor / low income parents, IMO we should still have public funding (a form of redistribution). Voucher systems is one such way this can be enacted.
> Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade...
IMO Kids should not be defunded for the failings of the adults around them. I do not believe it's basically ever a child's fault up to ~18-21 they are simply a product of the choices of the adults around them. Normal psychology says once someone is an adult then they may not be at fault, but they are responsible to handle and take care of whatever their childhood may have unfairly burdened them with...
I'm glad you recognize that you're participating in unsubstantiated claims, because that is most of the literature in support of vouchers.
Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).
Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.
Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.
As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.
> Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option?
It seems obvious that vouchers could be spent at schools that have entrance exams and don't let students in just because their parents choose the school.
ChatGPT suggests there's no evidence that home schooling leads to inferior outcomes. But I'm open to hear from you... I'd love to hear some evidence otherwise as I'm considering homeschooling my own children one day.
Ah, the teachers union, famous for the $30-$50/yr it costs the average tax payer. If we abolished the union and rolled back everything they fought for, we could almost pay for a $10B privacy suit after a year of saving.
The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.
Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.
Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.
I don’t know how you came to that conclusion when the most populous coastal states were almost saturated at 100% and very few states came in under 40% in your map.
We should treat phones on kids the same we treat alchohol. "What the fuck, is that a phone? Give me that!" The only other solution involves evaporating our privacy. Fuk 'em kids. I guess they don't get to use phones, we survived, why can't they?
In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.
Completely agree. One issue that I never hear mentioned is how disconnected parents become from their child's progress when there are no more paper books. It used to be that you'd progress from start to finish of a book over a term, and a parent could, at a glance, see what you should know and what you're about to learn. Now kids don't get books (which I think would surprise many parents and non-parents alike). Parents literally don't know what their child is learning at any point in time without asking them, and that is unreliable to say the least. Computers in school was supposed to be "an experiment" but everyone has decided, without proof, that it's great and therefore more screens in schools is great. Maybe in the 80's and 90's having computer knowledge was a valid shibboleth for "being smart" but it hasn't been true for 30 years. "Computer knowledge" has displaced "knowledge" in a zero-sum fashion, and it's getting worse.
My son is in the "gifted" program at his school which means they sit him down for 3 extra hours to play the Pokemon rip-off with trivia interspersed called "Prodigy". The public school system is in an unenviable state, being the fulcrum of vast societal forces and disagreements with the highest possible stakes. The districts are terrified of parents starting litigation against the school for any reason, which is why many of them have rules against ALL teacher physical contact with students, including holding the hand of pre-K, K and first graders, including stopping fights. They're supposed to tell the child no, and in the case of fights, distance themselves and call the police. In elementary school, there are no books, no teaching of handwriting, and 30 minutes of recess a day - if they're lucky. If they misbehave, taking away recess is the teacher's recourse.
Plus of course the schools are locked down like prisons, they have "code red" shooter drills once a month, every teacher has a panic button around their neck. No-one walks or rides their bike (at least not in elementary school). All of this is new, all of it is bad, and for some reason no-one seems to notice. I think it's in part that the kids don't know any different, so for them this all seems normal. Those of us having kids recently are shocked at all the changes, shocked that they've happened so quickly, and so silently.
In the schools here kids don't even get the marked up test results to take home any more. So they get some mark but they have no idea what they did wrong and I can't help them without making my own tests and seeing how they are doing.
It's maddening how all this digitization is just a way to collapse the complexity of running an education system into a black box that can not be inspected.
At least the school shooting angle isn't a real problem here.
For sure, but let's be honest - if us adults struggle with how good Big Tech is at making the devices addictive, the young mushy brains have no change.
I don't agree with them but many people now say that in 10-20 years computers will become magical thinking machines that can do pretty nearly any cognitive task. At that point I wonder what the point of learning technology will be? Perhaps it would be best to learn about logic and how the world works so you can interact with these magical machines more effectively, and not learn much about how the machines actually work - you won't be tinkering with their insides anyway.
So yeah, if that comes to pass why not go back to paper. Have the kids study science, logic, history, etc and forget about technology, except for the few weird ones who just can't keep away from it.
This issue has been a staple of sci-fi forever, because it trends towards a somewhat predictable outcome. What happens when technology outpaces the competence and understanding of people behind it, and then runs into a problem?
This only works if you can isolate your society from having to compete with others. Like American kids will have to compete with Chinese kids who are learning AI in middle school, and not just “I can write a prompt” AI. But then those kids are also starting to learn calculus while our middle schools claim algebra is too advanced for 8th graders. Sigh.
All tech out is too drastic but I agree it must be severely curtailed. There need to be computer labs and an emphasis on research which shouldn’t go back to asking the librarian for printed material in a library. Research online is supercharged and should not be done away with.
Other than that though, paper textbooks, paper notes, written on premises examinations should all be bought back.
Bring back the indestructible Apple ][e and put let the kids program in logo (turtle graphics) for 1 or 2 hours per week max. The will not hurt them while society takes a few years to figure out how the introduction of technology in education went so catastrophically bad.
You joke but I think there is value in ripping all tech out except for a computer lab where kids can learn something productive like programming, graphic design, etc.
Tech is ubiquitous now, there is no reason to need exposure to it in school (anymore). We should be doing what maximizes learning - which we now know is not tech.
Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster.
> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time
All of this is so far from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff'
It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing among children. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
I'm not sure anybody disputes that immersive language learning is the best path to picking up a language. It just isn't very practical for most people.
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
I’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.
Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Common core was a thing when my kids were in school, so I “did my research.” A number of states had published their CC standards online, so it was easy to figure out.
The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.
On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.
Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.
Any recommendations for how to approach K-12 math teaching? Got some (very) little ones and doing our best but both parents are definitely more humanities-brained
I think it helps to think in terms of keeping up with the demands of school without crushing their curiosity and interest. In my generation, at least where I grew up, school was less competitive and college admissions more laid back. We were at the tail end of when the people who worked on the line at Ford’s earned more than many college graduates. We had no idea what would happen next.
Today parents are freaked out because math scores are a sorting hat for college admissions and lucrative careers. Yet they don’t use math in their own careers, and many of them hate it.
My neighbor, who is a retired high school math teacher, told me that the kids who shine in advanced math are not the ones whose parents treated math as a series of competitive milestones. I started out “slow” in math, and my K-12 math grades were highly variable (to put it kindly), but eventually graduated cum laude as a math major while also becoming a fairly competent jazz musician.
My parents were both scientists, but loved the humanities. I think you can show your own interest and curiosity when talking to your kids about math, or helping them with their lessons. Rather than suggesting that you’re not “math people”, admit that it’s being taught in a new way and that you’re going to re-learn it along with them because it’s fun.
I would restructure school math if it were up to me, though I’m cautious about wholesale introduction of computers for the many reasons discussed in this thread. One idea for your kids is to explore some non-school math topics as they show an interest, such as pure logic, proofs, and computation.
> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.
The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".
Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.
Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...
People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.
What specifically is wrong with Common Core math? I've seen a lot of vague complaints about it but the materials my children brought home seem fine. It's different from the way I learned but I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's worse.
Yep. From what I recall from my time in education about a decade ago, Common Core standards were generally considered excellent. The rollout of Common Core tests wasn't that great, but that should have been a one-time adaptation period, but everything got mired in politics and bit by bit got torn apart as states all went their own way.
I guess my buddies using laptops in electrical engineering 10 years ago also got dumber? Ought to have done programming and CAD with pen and paper.
I wish I had a laptop earlier - or even better, a tablet with a good pen and attachable keyboard. I’m struggling to think of a disadvantage vs dead tree [note]books. Doodle right on the pdf textbook, dump things to remember into some flashcards app, have notes as searchable files / the ability to share them with everybody, or just a calendar of what’s happening when so you’re not surprised by a test that was announced when you blew off school for a day to do stupid teenager things.
The only actual issue is that computers are excellent slaves but terrible masters, and it’s a lot easier to get distracted by doom or tiktok when you got a computer you’re actively using. Yet surely this is solvable? Given how annoyingly locked down the average company-given dev machine is, surely it’s possible to restrict it for students during school time? It should certainly be much easier than to control private smartphones.
When I first started learning C in uni many years ago, we were forced to use vi and command line, despite there being functional IDEs.
The argument then was IDEs cause cognitive offloading and you don't actually learn to the fullest extent. By forcing us to do everything manually helped us understand how the compiler works, how to debug errors, etc.
This is what current systems are doing. There is a good article that explains it much better
Yeah, in an academic setting, in higher education, it might make sense like he mentioned. Still a personal preference. for me a laptop will never beat taking notes by hand on paper.
I have a 17 year old High School Junior, so I'm in the depths of the modern education system. Plus I had a brother that was a Professor of Education Technology. Plus, shocking on HN, I'm deep in tech myself.
I have mixed feelings on all this. The education system largely seems a bit better than when I was in school, however the impetus to learn has to be entirely provided by the parent (or innately by the rare student). Socially, it is a big problem because of phones, kids don't interact face-to-face nearly as much, as they can easily escape into the phone world.
But laptops? They seem fine, largely a positive, probably worth the cost? I'm undoubtedly far more aware of what and how my son does in school than my parents were. Teachers seem to use whatever works best, and there are lazy teacher and great teachers. The great ones use tech to great effect. One of my son's worst teachers didn't let them use laptops and did everything with paper, and she was terrible. Tech isn't a magic cure, but neither is paper!
I know my son is a better thinker, more informed, knows much more about life, history and science then I did at his age. If he wants to know something he can dig into it and learn what he wants. I had to bike up to the library and pray they had a decent book on the subject (they rarely did).
All that being said, AI is a big threat, but again, it will be a big differentiator. Those that want to learn we'll accelerate away from those that don't.
In many ways I feel like my son is on the proverbial last chopper out of 'Nam, when it comes to the public school system.
Of course, it also feels like going from the frying pan into the fire with the state of the world, but that's another topic.
It being the first time a generation scored worse surprises me because it has been pretty obvious in the UK at least that the syllabus for children has been systematically and progressively dumbed down for at least the last 30 years.
One concrete example I remember is in sixth form in the UK when I was there, in order to address poor example results in maths, they replaced Core Maths 1-6 with Pure Maths 1-6, the 6 modules of the latter only containing the material from the first 4 modules of the former
1. Parents whine and bitch every time their precious little baby is expected to do any actual work.
2. Governments dumb down education programs. Some do it to massage the statistics and make education look good, others do it because they honestly think that's how you help teachers give more attention to low-performing students.
The effect is the widening "education gap" - the difference between kids whose parents sign them up for extracurricular activities, and the ipad kids.
I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that the media/content is very visually biased these days, so when our children are exposed to it, they don't use the same parts of the brain that their parents used to use when reading and handwriting text. Visual content is more emotional than written content and doesn't process the same in the brain. If they would still keep laptops but bias it towards text content and still require handwriting and deliberate processes. Maybe it would help a bit. Throwing out technology is not an answer in an advancing world. Smells like "a handmaid's tale" to me.
We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...
Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be.
Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
There was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them.
And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol:
As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.
Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction.
Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools
these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
Just wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it.
eg. See [1] which finds:
"The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class."
and
"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."
There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.
Totally. We can't really measure the effect on people graduating from college right now but I'm pretty sure the value of the average college education is down since the advent of AI due to mass cheating and professors having to tailor their classes away from things AI can take advantage of. The students who love to learn will still be doing just fine, but the others - I doubt it.
I doubt it's the laptops. The problem is they removed the physical books. I have a hard time teaching my kids using their laptops. Before, you could just crack open their textbooks and follow along.
By the time I was in high school, we had laptop carts that were rolled out for a few classes (as in a handful of times per year). This was 2004+. We also had computer labs since elementary school. Iirc laptops were used when labs were booked up.
I recall the experience being distracting. Computers are more fun than classes. No matter how much you lock down the machine, a kid will figure a way to make it more interesting than class. Computers can do so much. Children are curious.
I remember sneaking in flash games, ms paint/kidpix, browsing the web and whatever.
Anecdotal.. but i certainly wasn’t the only kid fooling around.
I don’t know what the “right amount” is, but I turned out ok. Though the iPhone was introduced after I graduated high school
Cognitive weakness, at least in the West, go in parallel with other social phenomena: diminishing fertility, finacial deterioration (then one job fed 6, now two are not enough for 3), smart devices that make people dumb, trendy wars, stress/depression pandemia etc
Some are causes and the rest results but nobody knows which ones: the egg made the chicken or the chicken the egg?
I went to schools that had the latest tech for computer labs. Apple Macintosh computers…the colorful ones. Anyway, we had the latest but I did not learn what I wanted to; which was how a computer works. Instead class was just about browsing within the walled garden of the operating system and making videos and typing.
Just because one has the latest tech dos not mean they’ll learn. I learned more on my own with used computers then I did in school. I was able to break things and fix them.
Laptops also didn’t integrate special ed in mainstream classrooms. While it’s the right thing to do for other reasons, the net effect hasn’t been to make all kids experiences or learning better.
I went to school at what I realise was an unusual interregnum between computerisation. Too young for the BBC micro (there was one, in the library, at my secondary school, that was never turned on), too old for PCs or Archimedes or whatever came later in the 90s. In retrospect, not a bad thing.
Many many many people warned against this step, the same people that told you not to let the gov. into healthcare, but the same people didn't listen and we are left with degrading outcomes.
Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
I lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.
the article blames the laptops but conveniently ignores that the same generation was also raised by parents who handed them iPhones at age 3. isn't school screen time a rounding error compared to the 6+ hours of daily personal screen time happening at home?
It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
The "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription.
But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions.
The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years.
Fascinating. I'm reminded of the 'conservation of ninjutsu' trope. We've known for a while that birth rates fall as education rates increase, but this almost suggests there's a 'conservation of iq' principle at a population level- you can have growing population or iq, but not both!
You didn’t ask me, but (aside from the effects of tech and social media) my #1 hypothesis is the rise in single parenthood. Parenting is so hard that I doubt pretty much everyone’s ability to do it well on their own.
Utter rubbish, designed as clickbait for older folks. Every generations dunks on the next one, right up until it's time to change the clock on the VCR and only the kids can do that.
Kids are growing up in a different world than we did. They need different skills, and probably a different cognition. Teaching them to deal with rapid attention shifts is probably going to equip them better for their actual lives than trying to make them focus on one subject for hours.
This is probably misleading information. Kids and their parents aren't responsible for their math performance. Teachers are. Especially the ones that demotivate their students.
The issue isn't the laptops, but the proprietary software and the fact that teachers don't know how to use even a desktop on average, so they're even less capable of teaching it.
IF you teach how to use a FLOSS desktop, you're providing what's actually needed in the modern world; if you do Big Tech a favor by using their services in schools, you get a collapse in cognitive ability, which is exactly what happened. People just need to understand this and actually have the will to understand it.
That's because you haven't seen IT in action outside of your job yet, I'm talking about its true potential. It's not about the terminal or Emacs (the 2D shell), it's about the paradigm.
If you teach free software, you're teaching people how to know, not just how to follow the tracks someone else laid down. You're teaching them how to tell if a news is fake or not, how to use a feed reader to follow various sources instead of relying on whatever aggregator is popular at the moment, and how to communicate from their own home without depending on third parties, and so on. You're creating a population that understands the meaning of digital ownership/property and knows how to manage it, so they aren't slaves to the tech giants and instead have a hunger for knowledge. In other words, you're putting the gnoseological tools of the present into the hands of the masses.
With the GAFAM model, which is basically just mainframes made worse and expanded, you're creating dependency instead. You're creating slaves, not citizens; people who just comment under articles provided by some PR hack, who don't know how to start a thread on their own topic or write their own piece, people who don't have a domain name as their home address IRL, and so on. People who own nothing and, as such, not Citizens, but subjects of the few who do own everything.
I don’t know anyone in my life who, given enough time, could recite entire epics like Homer’s The Odyssey the way some of the Ancient Greeks could. But I wouldn’t say modern people are cognitively “less capable” than those Ancient Greeks. Organisms adapt to their environments or perish -- the mind is no different.
Given the current technological landscape, I think we may eventually have to admit that Gen Z and the ones after have adapted to their environments, too. Maybe retaining information is simply less valuable as a skill (like memorizing entire epics) when easy access to a modern Library of Alexandria is right at our fingertips? Yes, it's painful to think about and uncomfortable on some level. It's probably like how Socrates felt about reading and writing when he described it as, "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding" and that reliance on it will "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it."
Though, one caveat that is important to mention is that education is not valued on a mass cultural level in this country, comparatively speaking. But that is a discussion for a different time.
Computers have gotten too good. In my time they broke all the time (sometimes your own fault for downloading those sketchy videogames) and they never did what you wanted them too. You had to actually learn stuff- including highly technical English.
In written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology.. Horvath blamed.. tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.
The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles.
Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.
Let's see what this study actually says, shall we?
> Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in mathematics than students who spent no time, even after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, and this positive relationship is observed in over half (45 countries and economies) of all systems with available data.
> But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author
Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy. Not one. Not the other. The failure mode is that BOTH are untrustworthy and not that EITHER is untrustworthy on their own. This is different from no peer review where the author is a single point of failure. There is furthermore the overall system of peer review with some level of checks within it if a peer or author end up being visibly untrustworthy. Not perfect however the same can be said for every single part of human society.
> Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.
And I sort of chuckle at people like you who don't realize that all of human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework. It's not about absolutes but about levels of trustworthiness and system level checks.
Edit: In this case, for example, the quote is based on a study that the speaker did not publish. The study actually says the exact opposite. So now there's THREE levels of trust that can cross verify. The speaker, the original study authors and the peer reviews. In this case the speaker clearly is not trustworthy as their own source material disagrees with them. Had I simply blindly trusted the speaker this would not have been evident but due to having a study I can verify.
Is A has a p chance of being malicious and B has a q chance of being malicious then the chance of them both being malicious is pq. pq <= p and p*q <= q.
I'm honestly not sure why its so hard for you to understand that TWO people being malicious at the same time is less likely than either being mailicous on their own.
This article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.
> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class
I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.
I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
I can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense.
It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.
Are we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?
You're not suggesting the most overinflated asset class in the market might somehow be involved though predatory pushing of product into education to get em hooked while they're young are you?!
/s
Tech industry composed of many of the smartest people in the world with the most money, and the backing of the current US presidency vs. average middle America school district. Hmm.
What would be better policy, in your opinion?
Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt.
It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.
It's not anti-capitalism to not spend public money on nonsense that doesn't further the goals of education, no is it anti-capitalism to control the learning environment in schools. What we have is a collective action problem.
> It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism'
These things are opposites - the former is a downside, the latter an upside.
Faraday cages built into school buildings.
there will be one school shooting and no one would be able to call 911 and then there will be a public outcry.
the big tech companies making these phones and apps will amplify that outcry hard, and the phones will be let back in. the addiction will continue.
> I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.
The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.
Good luck!
I'm not that old. "Just ban phones" worked perfectly fine when I was in high school in 2010. "Just ban cigarettes" also worked, and no one was smoking in the classroom. It's not a hard problem; the administration just refuses to solve it.
How do you expect anyone to take what you just wrote seriously when there's such a blatantly obvious difference in the detectability of the use of these two different products?
what do you mean? if some kid doesn't want to pay attention they can draw doodles, daydream, read a book under the table, talk to other students, and finally ... be on their phone. we did all of these! (played snake on a 3310.)
up to a point the teacher's job is to notice these, and motivate the student to pay attention (report cards, detention, extra homework), or ask for them to be removed from class if they are disruptive, if necessary permanently.
It's just not relevant. When I was in highschool some teachers had a thingy on the wall where you would hang up your cell phone in a pouch. If it wasn't there, you better have a good explanation, or you'll be counted absent.
The solutions are simple and effectively free. That's not the issue. The issue is nobody wants to do the solutions. Schools don't, parents don't, kids don't. Everyone is just lying to themselves.
You can't on one hand claim to care about kids and then on the other dismiss obvious tactics like banning cell phones.
The two products of phones in 2026 and phones in 2010? In 2010 they were smaller.
And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.
Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.
And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.
We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)
[1] https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...
[2] https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
[4] https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...
[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...
I went to school in a poor country, and live in the US. The education budget was very low when / where I grew up, and it is pretty hefty where my kids go to school. I occasionally visit their school and volunteer to help. That has given me a good frame for comparison.
The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I receieved.
The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum. The "modern" methods that I have seen their teachers practice (which confuse the teachers, too, by the way; the teachers all have said that), are very visibly wrong. So wrong that even I can see all sorts of flaws, despite not having any background in education science. The curriculum is predictably set for failure.
I strongly believe technology, and AI in particular, can be a major enabler in improving education. However, for early education (first 5-6 grades), I think absolute lack of technology (except maybe a big e-ink class whiteboard, or some such) would be far more beneficial. Kids can learn to type very quickly when needed (ideally 6th / 7th grade). They can't learn thinking-while-writing, as quickly. They have to slowly build up that mental muscle. Let them have a few years of building structure and core understanding, then get exposed to tools for doing things faster.
> The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum.
Taking this at face value: how are you teasing apart "lack of real teachers" from the budget? You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
> The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I received.
How are you doing this comparison? Have you adjusted for cost of living and the alternative opportunities available to good teachers and such? I ask because usually people compare absolute amounts of money, which distorts the picture.
You say that in USA there are no good teachers because any that are good will find better-paying professions?
This sounds plausible. Like the previous poster, I have grown in an Eastern European country where everybody was extremely poor by today's standards. Education was not perfect and there were many mediocre teachers and even bad teachers.
However, there were also a great number of very good teachers, so there were good chances that you would happen to have at least a few good teachers. There were also many opportunities for the best students to learn beyond the normal curriculum, either by self-study in good free libraries or by attending special extra-curricular classes held by the best teachers for various sciences.
I have a lot of friends who have migrated to USA many decades ago. All of them complain about how bad is the education that their children are receiving, in comparison with what we had when we were young, which matches what the previous poster was saying.
While in the schools that I attended as a young child the teachers would have been considered very poor in comparison with any US teacher of today, in comparison with most other professions available at that time they had decent salaries, so indeed there were not many non-illegal alternatives that would have been a better career choice.
> You say that in USA there are no good teachers
No, that is not remotely what I'm saying. It's both entirely factually false and also a ridiculous extrapolation to make to a country of hundreds of millions of people.
> because any that are good will find better-paying professions?
What I am saying is that to the extent the parent may have encountered bad teachers (taking what they said at face value, whether it's accurate or not), this could be a big part of the explanation. i.e. I find it dubious that the budget would be unrelated to whatever they believe the teacher quality is. That's all I'm saying.
> You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
Budget goes beyond teacher salary. It's also for giving teachers the tools they need, giving students the support they need, and schools the building maintenance that it needs. Good teachers can't teach and good children can't learn if they don't have the material, nor can they function well if their primary needs aren't met (well-fed, healthy, comfortable).
>You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?
No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160
The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.
> No, this has been proven many times that money is not a leading factor: Just one : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED418160 The only clear indication of student performance is parent participation and involvement.
No, we're talking about teacher quality, not student performance. Obviously they are not the same thing. You even listed some factors that affect them differently.
Which is often downstream of zip code.
I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.
Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).
>I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level.
You just need to look at educational league tables between countries to see there is a spectrum of results and some places are much better than others.
Personally I think the problems are rooted in inequality. If the elite all send their children to private schools then why would they care about the poor state of public schools. The country that regularly comes out at the top of the league table for educational attainment has almost no private schools.
We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?
And when the outcomes don't improve because money isn't magical, we could double the salaries again! And again!
Seriously, how do you think that will work? Are you suggesting that the teachers could improve outcomes now, but are holding out as some sort of negotiation leverage? Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?
> Or that there's some secret corps of millions of super-teachers who could educate the nation's children, but who would rather be network technicians and underwater welders because they need that half-median software income?
That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task. When we talk about intellectual tasks, we call this IQ, when we talk about physical feats we call this athleticism, and when we talk about social maneuvering, we call it charisma. And all three of those are positively correlated.
With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher (or at least a substantially better than average teacher) might have other aptitudes that we choose to reward more, even if they'd be relatively much better at teaching. Right now, you'd have to take a ~$50,000 pay cut to choose to be the highest paid teacher in the median California school district compared to being a median Californian software developer.
It's like any other job. If I'm offering $80,000 a year for software developers in CA, I might find a few talented people overlooked by the rest of the job market, or someone exceptionally stoked to work at my particular company, but I'm far more likely to end up with someone well below mediocrity.
>That basically is the suggestion. The world is not an RPG, where being good at one thing necessitates you being bad at everything else. On the contrary, aptitude in one task is pretty well correlated with being good at any task.
We need, for a nation the size of the United States, millions of teachers. Quite literally. The process that somehow selects not one good (or more literally, very few, just so the pedants don't complain) teacher now, but will select mostly/all good teachers if we were to implement it is 15% raises across the board? 40%? Never mind that doing that could only possibly attract something like 5-10% of personnel change... and I'm supposed to believe this is about increasing the quality of education instead of pandering to a voting bloc that will help you to enact your non-education agenda? No thanks.
>With that in mind, it's not at all unreasonable to believe that somebody who would make a great teacher
Blah blah blah, I've already moved past that. No need to try to make the sale here.
Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers? In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers they had over their educations. The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teachers, and hopefully raise the floor of the how good the worst teachers are.
Increasing pay probably won't raise the ceiling on how good the best teachers are. If they've got that strong a passion for teaching, they're probably already doing it.
Nope, it's been tried before and it had 0 affect on student outcomes. I'm not saying that teachers don't "deserve" more, but it is not going to help students one bit.
It's more about passion then money.
Why don't you try paying your bills with passion and report back.
As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.
passion makes sense when people can afford the rent
Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1).
Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches".
Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, and in America this is met with arguments about bad teachers, unions, and privatization/vouchers.
There is much that can be done to improve educational outcomes, but like everything, it is contested.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
This is true, but only in the way that no manager, private or government will ever fix. What happened to give good teachers in the 1980s (who kept working afterwards) is ... a large economic crash.
Which created a relatively large supply of people from capable, respected positions, in the hard/positivist sciences who suddenly lost their job. They always had the ability to displace teachers, but never wanted to. Then, suddenly, they had a strong incentive.
Managers, or government committees, to point out what they mostly were, were utterly baffled at this happening. They had spent decades making the demands to become a teacher easier, because they were in the situation we have now: they couldn't find people willing to work for the wage, for the (lack of) respect/status. They didn't change the wage, because status: they will never accept that teachers have a status above theirs. But suddenly, that didn't stop a lot of capable people from becoming teachers.
So this cohort of fired people blew through the requirements, fixed the shortage and even displaced quite a bit of teachers. Some never left. Some are still there. They were also used to getting respect in their jobs, and so they demanded that from government, from kids and parents (with the good ... and the bad that that brought, for example giving teachers the right to exclude troublemakers from education). They built a power base and lifted education, including increasing the demands on new teachers.
This in turn resulted in an enormous cohort of relatively well-educated people coming out of schools.
But the economy came back. A lot of these teachers left and of course the unions and government changed the rules so they themselves would be secure against a repeat of this. Displacing teachers, should anybody again suddenly want to, is a lot harder now (ironically unions thought the government would stand by them, but now the government is in constant saving mode, so they want to replace existing teachers by the cheapest labor they can find and so they're killing off those rules).
But the economy came back. To have capable teachers, schools would now have to outbid the private sector again. Which means government committees would have to vote their own status, their own pay, down. The way FANG managers have been forced to do: they'd have to accept that at least some of the people under them have more status, and more money, than they do. Needless to say, governments utterly refused this, because when such trivialities as the future of society conflict with their own money, their own status, the vote always goes the same way ... and here we are.
It's again not that well-educated people have disappeared, in fact there's more than ever before, it's that they, like in the 60s and 70s, will not accept the deal the government is offering, and the government doesn't want to offer even that deal.
But this all started happening 30 years ago and really pushed through 15 or so years ago. A whole generation has been educated already by teachers that just don't measure up to the teachers that came before. This new generation ... doesn't measure up and of course finds this situation very unfair, they never had a chance, and it really isn't their fault. Government explicitly chose to create this situation. Or to put it very bluntly: there are suddenly a great deal of young MAGAs, growing every year. The same goes for Europe too, especially since most countries have now decided they'll just outright stop education in a bunch of fields, killing off and defunding university department after department (so much cheaper to have Turkey, or China, or ... educate doctors and engineers), which then of course meant that most or all people in high positions are not locals, which means the path to high status that education used to be is a lot narrower now.
... and then Trump did the same in America. And yes, where Europe did it slowly, limiting damage, Trump decided to take a chainsaw (or what he actually used, as it turns out: a really bad LLM) to the US equivalent.
It always come back to the same argument: being inclusive, respectful, having authority, friendly, ... all of this matters. But having teachers capable in the hard sciences, is table stakes, and that is expensive. If you have a disrespectful teacher that has an excellent grasp of the subject, kids get educated. If you have a teacher that is inclusive, respectful, has authority, the friendliest person you've ever met, but limited grasp of the subject, kids don't get an education. NOT the other way around. You HAVE to start with teachers with excellent education and today that means you pay for it. But government refuses.
And yes, that's not much of a problem for the wealthy, who are educated and just educate their own kids, if need be, they do it themselves. Or they get tutors that they pay well. The rich are not the problem here. You will not fix this situation by sabotaging the rich's efforts to educate their kids. It's that government has decided they can spend just a little bit more money now if they close off the path that education provides. And the cohort of people that already got educated so much worse than people 10 years older ... they want revenge and so this is exactly what they want government to do.
Any study on education will always say that educating someone is comparable to a process of diffusion. The kids top out at the level of their teachers, no matter the process. Humans learn 99.99999% or more through imitation, so the subject grasp of the teacher is effectively the limit for the kids. At that level learning slows to a crawl at best. Imitation is the cheap, fast way humans learn (for obvious reasons if you've done even a little bit of machine learning. Think of how much information a teacher giving you the answer to a problem gives, and then about how much information an experiment gives)
It is of course true that students can exceed the teachers. But that is a very slow, very expensive process that takes years to learn even relatively simple things. And that requires providing resources directly to the students.
Resources matter ... but not laptops. I mean, by all means give teachers the resources they require. But first you must enforce a quality level in the teachers. That's table stakes and nothing will help until that's in place.
In the American historical example shared, education got lucky because of economic downturns.
If education is not valued by a nation, then this is not a surprising outcome. Do note, Americans as a whole tend to be extremely sensitive about critical discussions on the “way things are” in America. It’s a trait that results in a sort of “nothing can change” point of view, and hostility when it’s pointed out that other countries do better.
America has so far been able to attract that talent to their economy, but given the instability in place currently, that engine is reversing.
This means that investments in education are going to be needed. Right now teachers make their own print outs, teaching material, and the education system is generally underfunded.
Stating that it’s not a resource allocation problem, when resource allocation is what is required to attract talent, is inaccurate. Many people would prefer to work for meaning and to teach, even if they have talent and can be paid better. Given a livable wage, the super ambitious types will do the risky entrepreneurial things they should be doing. Others will be happy to teach.
Some of the smartest people I met in America chose to teach. America can change things, and it can enjoy the benefits.
There are a few people with a powerful platform in terms of money and influence for whom it would be much simpler if the majority of people were not capable of pointing out BS or seeing how they're getting screwed. Purely coincidentally I'm sure the loudest media voices constantly declare various versions of how we should throw in the towel on educating the majority of people while also funding initiatives to enshittify public education and it would be better for most people to go into the trades and not worry their little heads about how the wider world works.
Meanwhile those people's own children are getting educated at schools with no technology allowed and are not going into trades. So it seems it's both possible to educate people given enough effort and a lot of people are capable of tertiary+ education given the right intellectual capital.
> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright
Nature vs nurture, the old argument...
Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).
But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.
Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test.
I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something that can be achieved with money or digital tech. It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067496
> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture.
The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics.
And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops.
It's getting better, slowly, no doubt, and we're seeing the results, but I'm not certain that progress comes fast enough to save some of the societies facing the demographic bomb the hardest (especially Japan, but China is also heading for serious issues). With China especially, it may also get interesting politically once a generation grows to adulthood that can see through the CCP propaganda.
> Perhaps if the people so invested in trying to improve the education of children were, themselves, having more kids - we might not have such a problem.
That assumes we have people actually interested in furthering the education of our children, and that is something I heavily doubt.
All we have here in the Western world is the contrary: we got austerity / trickle down finance ideologists that see education in general as a field ripe for savings on one side, then we got history revisionists actively trying to erase what children get taught about our past, and if all of that weren't bad enough we got the religious extremists trying to sell the gullible public that if you ban stuff like LGBT from even being mentioned in school books, children wouldn't turn out gay or trans - which is obviously bonkers.
> "And on top of that, you may get really obedient children, excelling at following what they know to do... but creativity? Thinking outside the box? Going against the script? Thrown into unfamiliar situations? Whoops."
Usual Western racism, reassuring themselves they're better than those "uncreative" Asians, even as Asia continues to eat away at the West's technology lead in a variety of sectors.
One wonders if the Europeans ever told themselves that the backwards folk of the colonies could never catch up to the technological or scientific achievements of the continent's great centers of learning and industry.
China has a mathematical surplus of men. I'm not sure I can trust the rest of your comment considering that you're acting as if the one child policy didn't exist.
Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.
> Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
My kids have had Chromebooks for years at school, and their schools have had the devices pretty much fully unlocked. My eldest, who has struggled with ADHD and other mental health issues, was spending his entire day on YouTube and Discord. Accordingly, his grades were terrible. The school's IT said they don't lock it down because, more or less, "by this age, kids should be mature enough to make appropriate decisions about how to use technology." But they did concede that my son should have his account locked down.
Why on earth schools don't start from the perspective of whitelisting YouTube videos/channels, websites, etc., instead of allowing a wholly open web is mind-boggling to me.
I fully endorse making schools entirely phone-free. Get rid of Chromebooks altogether.
> Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen.
Sure. Teachers would love to ban cellphones and punish kids who disobey. The problem is, the parents who sit on the school boards as trustees won't let them.
Adding parents to the school system has single-handedly destroyed the North American education system. Why is there no homework? Because parents complain that kids find it too hard or too much. Why is there no discipline? Because parents complain that discipline is making their kids miserable. Why is there so much emphasis on schools to teach practical skills? Because parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach these skills at home, where they belong.
Parents are no experts on education yet they get to decide what teachers do in the classrooms. The law of averages dictates that 50% were below average students themselves. Guess who sits on the school boards? It's not the over-achievers, those people are too busy being successful in their careers.
There's a global competition for talent and our children are falling behind. Now you know why.
> Guess who sits on the school boards?
People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.
My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.
In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?
This is a new phenomena. It took over a decade for my school district to ban phones. Eventually parents relented - but for the longest time they were the single blocker. Oh, what about emergencies???
Well Nancy, it's not 1995 anymore. Phones aren't for phone calls, we all know that. The school has phones too, you know.
> I think you're actually just complaining about democracy
Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.
I see this troll response all the time stating families don't want "poors" as some kind of attempt at manipulation to feel I am a bad person.
I [given the chance] would also vote against apartments in my particular neighborhood, and it has nothing to do with being poor at all.
It's about it lowering the value of surrounding property, which is just "oh no poors" but roundabout.
But it's not your fault, it's a systemic issue. The fact you even care about your property value is the problem, not the fact you have to care about it. That's not your fault, you're just playing the game you have to play like everyone else.
Not directly, no it's not about lowering of property value. It's also not your fault that you make assumptions about how other people make decisions without critical thinking.
Saying it's about poor people is the polite version, unfortunately
Nope, you are wrong. But I'm sure you feel confident that you're right. Hope that works out for you.
My province banned all electronic devices brought by the kids from all schools all at once. No one can complain, it's provincial law.
>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.
>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.
> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier
No stats, but it’s extremely real.
I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.
The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.
I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?
A parent with a certain temperament, which seems to overlap substantially with the sort with stupid expectations and demands, and a lot of time on their hands (which, ditto) can be extremely annoying, raise hell with the media, get the school board involved (some school boards have members who are these kinds of parents, haha) and everybody’s just too busy with actual work to deal with that shit. Enough of it, and they give in just to get them off their backs.
This is why state-level phone bans are so nice, as it keeps these sorts from focusing on school districts, where like five parents can be cause a lot of trouble, and shifts them to focusing on the state level, where a few hundred or a thousand scattered parents with stupid ideas can more easily be ignored and the bar for causing real irritation is a lot higher in terms of time and cost (want to go bother the state legislature, and they’re ignoring your calls? Get ready to travel…)
One super-power of private schools is that they can just tell parents with incompatible ideas of how the school should run to fuck off (and they in-fact do this). Public schools have to deal with them as long as they’re willing to keep poking, which can amount to a surprisingly long time.
OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?
Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.
Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.
So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.
In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.
“ familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster ”
I am having serious trouble coming up with a situation where it’s absolutely necessary for a kid to answer a text during class and not during a break or be notified by the principal office.
This behavior is present in plenty of families that don’t have the kinds of pressure on them that you’re describing. It’s not really connected to that (and needing to reach your kid instantly at 11:00AM on a Tuesday isn’t that common a thing to fall out of families being under most sorts of pressure)
I’m telling you, lots of parents just have very different attitudes toward school than one might expect (than I expected, certainly!). The phone stuff is just one manifestation of this.
">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."
I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.
This equates to the experience of the various teachers in my social orbit.
I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".
A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.
I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.
Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?
The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.
gee, it seems like you are somehow in agreement with my point that probably laptops are worse than books, but also angry at me for some reason.
"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier. For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently. ---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special. ---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents. ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
> ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
This specific meme has been floating around with the MAGA crowd for at least 4-5 years now. It’s not clear if it has any basis in reality, but it is one of those “I heard it on Facebook so it must be true” kind of things.
That is a meme and it does not matter whether it happened or not it would be too rare to matter.
What matters is the lack of discipline and respect for boundaries (beyond traditional teen behavior) possibly caused by social deprivation in our social app age. It is brought to the surface in the classroom where teachers have considerable less power than earlier. Physical attack once unthinkable are not rare anymore.
Kids punching teachers without consequences is real though. Or it may even have negative consequences for the teacher who got punched.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.
That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.
And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!
are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.
> are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.
Let me clarify - laptops/phones/tablets are objectively worse than books, because the intended design is to drive engagement, and not (as with books) to present learning material!
The fact that there may be a good teacher, a bad teacher, or no teacher at all is, frankly, irrelevant.
No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.
However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.
20+ years feels like a very long time for this to be the norm. Smartphone hegemony in general isn't that old.
Close to twenty years. First iPhone was 2007, I got my first one in 2012 or so.
Before smartphones, texting during class was very common when I was in high school. That’s more or less how I learned that 9/11 happened.
All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.
This does not require a persistent parent. Administrators whose job it is to administer consequences for misbehavior already reprimand teachers for enforcing school rules. The turnover on new teachers is crazy bad. It's kind of like what you hear about Russia "recruiting" foreigners to die in Ukraine. Our school district recruits teachers from places like the Philippines and Singapore. Even with the promise of fat American wages and a ticket to the promised land, a huge number of even those teachers don't last two years.
My wife is a teacher and I know several. All of the ones that have quiet have cited the worst part about teaching isn't the money or "bad" students. It's either the parents unrealistic demands or just dealing with them, or the same with the administration.
Teaching, kids or pay [although more is always better] was never the issue.
I hear the same from teachers I know. Pay could be better, some kids suck, but the real issue is parents and administration who do nothing to support the teacher.
No teacher (or parent) has ever managed to lock down a computer that was in my possession to a level where I wouldn't get distracted by it. You could shut the power off, and I'd still be poking around the hardware. I spent hundreds of hours programming my calculator instead of paying attention in class. Informative? Yes. Distracting to myself and those around me? You bet.
I completely agree with your phone take. There is no level of administrative control that can remove the distraction from the device.
Why would you think laptops are different?
We could reduce it to the level of distraction of a notebook and pen. Grayscale would help.
For sure, I love my ReMarkable, but I think of it as an expensive toy. It functions slightly worse than a notebook and pen for over 100x the cost. I suppose it would enable students to save their notes digitally, but at no point have I ever felt the need to return to my earth science notes. In fact, I have fond memories of burning all my high school notebooks immediately after graduation.
Classroom ‚management‘ and teens can not be observed at the same time and space.
The problem is that these terns have not had meaningful interactions with technology at home where there roughly a 1:1 relationship parent:kid. Now try to get meaningfulness into kids where the ratio is 1:20+ in a classroom.
This is an insane take.
We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.
The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.
And what CC item can you point to for that. Teachers often have to write the actual thing they are teaching as a CC item on the board. Want people to teach tech, go to meetings and make them.
real Free Laptops has never been tried.
it's actually extremely hard to ban websites unless all students can only use chrome book, middle and high schoolers know how to install tor and free vpn to bypass all those domain blacklists in a few minutes with their laptop or phone.
Whitelist sites instead of blacklisting? I'm also not sure how kids are getting admin rights to install a VPN in the first place. For the overwhelming majority of cases a kiosk like experience should suffice, which should virtually eliminate any jailbreaks.
If you're using a whitelist approach, you may as well just turn off the internet. Maintaining a whitelist is almost hopeless. Turning off the internet isn't a bad idea, but it is a big change. Maybe some form of archiving interesting pages for kids to look at, but even that feels like too much work.
Plus, if you're using the google docs ecosystem, I suspect it's hard to avoid kids chatting in shared text files, and eventually figuring out how to get spreadsheets to fetch webpages for you.
Yeah, this never made sense to me and I’ve suggested it to the district, especially for lower grades. They will never block all of the websites they need to unless they block all of the websites. Allow teachers to unblock specific sites for the students they’re responsible for.
You are sort of giving away the game here.
You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?
I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.
There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.
If we're spouting off unsubstantiated claims. I'll add teachers unions and the mandatory spend of tax money on their near monopolies versus a voucher system that allows parents to choose the best education the money can buy. (To be clear I do think we should fund educating our children, I disagree with forcing the purchase to go to a specific solution / system)
If you are looking for reform, consider rethinking how much "education" the public should fund. Should we keep paying to have every student sit through Algebra and Geometry if less than 15% of them can pass the proficiency test afterward? Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade? Can we require a student to be able to read at a 3rd grade level before we enroll them in dual enrollment English Literature?
I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?
What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.
That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.
> Public should fund ... Algebra and Geometry
Yes.
But, the point of my post is that funding should not go to the underperforming public school systems and their unions. Instead parents should be free to purchase the education that delivers the most value for their dollar in a freemarket. But, because I do believe we should educate the kids of poor / low income parents, IMO we should still have public funding (a form of redistribution). Voucher systems is one such way this can be enacted.
> Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade...
IMO Kids should not be defunded for the failings of the adults around them. I do not believe it's basically ever a child's fault up to ~18-21 they are simply a product of the choices of the adults around them. Normal psychology says once someone is an adult then they may not be at fault, but they are responsible to handle and take care of whatever their childhood may have unfairly burdened them with...
I'm glad you recognize that you're participating in unsubstantiated claims, because that is most of the literature in support of vouchers.
Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).
Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.
Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.
As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.
> Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option?
It seems obvious that vouchers could be spent at schools that have entrance exams and don't let students in just because their parents choose the school.
ChatGPT suggests there's no evidence that home schooling leads to inferior outcomes. But I'm open to hear from you... I'd love to hear some evidence otherwise as I'm considering homeschooling my own children one day.
Ah, the teachers union, famous for the $30-$50/yr it costs the average tax payer. If we abolished the union and rolled back everything they fought for, we could almost pay for a $10B privacy suit after a year of saving.
The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.
Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.
Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.
Even with vouchers, there are specific solutions and systems you're allowed to use.
The entire point is that parents make poor choices (phones in class, etc) and that's why an entire generation has been dumbed down.
Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.
Teachers’ unions are pretty inconsequential in much of the United States.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-with...
Also, https://teacherquality.nctq.org/contract-database/collective...
I don’t know how you came to that conclusion when the most populous coastal states were almost saturated at 100% and very few states came in under 40% in your map.
Teachers unions are highly influential.
> Teachers unions are highly influential.
In popular imagination, perhaps. It’s not the sixties anymore.
There is a large body of research that shows it's not what you're saying it is FYI.
We should treat phones on kids the same we treat alchohol. "What the fuck, is that a phone? Give me that!" The only other solution involves evaporating our privacy. Fuk 'em kids. I guess they don't get to use phones, we survived, why can't they?
In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.
One small problem is that we used to have landlines to call friends (for chats or homeworks) and those are practically dead
Perhaps in America. Woe betide anyone in the UK who used a landline phone to call their friend before 6pm when the evening rate kicked in.
Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.
There is value in being able to automate things, but there is far more value in being able to first to learn how to do stuff yourself.
Completely agree. One issue that I never hear mentioned is how disconnected parents become from their child's progress when there are no more paper books. It used to be that you'd progress from start to finish of a book over a term, and a parent could, at a glance, see what you should know and what you're about to learn. Now kids don't get books (which I think would surprise many parents and non-parents alike). Parents literally don't know what their child is learning at any point in time without asking them, and that is unreliable to say the least. Computers in school was supposed to be "an experiment" but everyone has decided, without proof, that it's great and therefore more screens in schools is great. Maybe in the 80's and 90's having computer knowledge was a valid shibboleth for "being smart" but it hasn't been true for 30 years. "Computer knowledge" has displaced "knowledge" in a zero-sum fashion, and it's getting worse.
My son is in the "gifted" program at his school which means they sit him down for 3 extra hours to play the Pokemon rip-off with trivia interspersed called "Prodigy". The public school system is in an unenviable state, being the fulcrum of vast societal forces and disagreements with the highest possible stakes. The districts are terrified of parents starting litigation against the school for any reason, which is why many of them have rules against ALL teacher physical contact with students, including holding the hand of pre-K, K and first graders, including stopping fights. They're supposed to tell the child no, and in the case of fights, distance themselves and call the police. In elementary school, there are no books, no teaching of handwriting, and 30 minutes of recess a day - if they're lucky. If they misbehave, taking away recess is the teacher's recourse.
Plus of course the schools are locked down like prisons, they have "code red" shooter drills once a month, every teacher has a panic button around their neck. No-one walks or rides their bike (at least not in elementary school). All of this is new, all of it is bad, and for some reason no-one seems to notice. I think it's in part that the kids don't know any different, so for them this all seems normal. Those of us having kids recently are shocked at all the changes, shocked that they've happened so quickly, and so silently.
In the schools here kids don't even get the marked up test results to take home any more. So they get some mark but they have no idea what they did wrong and I can't help them without making my own tests and seeing how they are doing.
It's maddening how all this digitization is just a way to collapse the complexity of running an education system into a black box that can not be inspected.
At least the school shooting angle isn't a real problem here.
> Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.
That'll do something, but making maximally-capable individuals probably ain't it. There's a balance to be struck here.
For sure, but let's be honest - if us adults struggle with how good Big Tech is at making the devices addictive, the young mushy brains have no change.
I don't agree with them but many people now say that in 10-20 years computers will become magical thinking machines that can do pretty nearly any cognitive task. At that point I wonder what the point of learning technology will be? Perhaps it would be best to learn about logic and how the world works so you can interact with these magical machines more effectively, and not learn much about how the machines actually work - you won't be tinkering with their insides anyway.
So yeah, if that comes to pass why not go back to paper. Have the kids study science, logic, history, etc and forget about technology, except for the few weird ones who just can't keep away from it.
This issue has been a staple of sci-fi forever, because it trends towards a somewhat predictable outcome. What happens when technology outpaces the competence and understanding of people behind it, and then runs into a problem?
What percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?
I do think there are subjects where tech is integral and needed, but yes we should go back to pen and paper as much as possible.
This only works if you can isolate your society from having to compete with others. Like American kids will have to compete with Chinese kids who are learning AI in middle school, and not just “I can write a prompt” AI. But then those kids are also starting to learn calculus while our middle schools claim algebra is too advanced for 8th graders. Sigh.
The kids with the pencil and paper will outcompete the kids taught with AI.
I don’t disagree, but I think you are confused about kids learning how to use AI vs kids being taught with AI?
Isn't learning to use AI just learning how to talk, read, and think coherently? Unless you mean learning to build AI or how it actually works?
All of it: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5683821/china-ai-school...
All tech out is too drastic but I agree it must be severely curtailed. There need to be computer labs and an emphasis on research which shouldn’t go back to asking the librarian for printed material in a library. Research online is supercharged and should not be done away with.
Other than that though, paper textbooks, paper notes, written on premises examinations should all be bought back.
Bring back the indestructible Apple ][e and put let the kids program in logo (turtle graphics) for 1 or 2 hours per week max. The will not hurt them while society takes a few years to figure out how the introduction of technology in education went so catastrophically bad.
You joke but I think there is value in ripping all tech out except for a computer lab where kids can learn something productive like programming, graphic design, etc.
Tech is ubiquitous now, there is no reason to need exposure to it in school (anymore). We should be doing what maximizes learning - which we now know is not tech.
I do miss the days before wireless and mobile when the Internet was a place in your home or school that you sat at.
Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time
All of this is so far from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff'
It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing among children. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
I'm not sure anybody disputes that immersive language learning is the best path to picking up a language. It just isn't very practical for most people.
Even bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
"we evolved to talk not to write and read"
"we evolved to remember what happened to us, not to learn history of countries on the opposite side of the planet"
this argument doesn't work. if you want to claim harm - talk about the harm directly. stop hiding behind "evolution" and "biological"
So you are saying we should double down at this for the next dozen generations until our human DNA become tuned for computers/GenAI?
I’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core.
Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Common core was a thing when my kids were in school, so I “did my research.” A number of states had published their CC standards online, so it was easy to figure out.
The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.
On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.
Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.
Disclosure: College math major.
Any recommendations for how to approach K-12 math teaching? Got some (very) little ones and doing our best but both parents are definitely more humanities-brained
I think it helps to think in terms of keeping up with the demands of school without crushing their curiosity and interest. In my generation, at least where I grew up, school was less competitive and college admissions more laid back. We were at the tail end of when the people who worked on the line at Ford’s earned more than many college graduates. We had no idea what would happen next.
Today parents are freaked out because math scores are a sorting hat for college admissions and lucrative careers. Yet they don’t use math in their own careers, and many of them hate it.
My neighbor, who is a retired high school math teacher, told me that the kids who shine in advanced math are not the ones whose parents treated math as a series of competitive milestones. I started out “slow” in math, and my K-12 math grades were highly variable (to put it kindly), but eventually graduated cum laude as a math major while also becoming a fairly competent jazz musician.
My parents were both scientists, but loved the humanities. I think you can show your own interest and curiosity when talking to your kids about math, or helping them with their lessons. Rather than suggesting that you’re not “math people”, admit that it’s being taught in a new way and that you’re going to re-learn it along with them because it’s fun.
I would restructure school math if it were up to me, though I’m cautious about wholesale introduction of computers for the many reasons discussed in this thread. One idea for your kids is to explore some non-school math topics as they show an interest, such as pure logic, proofs, and computation.
> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.
The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".
Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69...
Trend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc...
People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.
What specifically is wrong with Common Core math? I've seen a lot of vague complaints about it but the materials my children brought home seem fine. It's different from the way I learned but I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's worse.
Yep. From what I recall from my time in education about a decade ago, Common Core standards were generally considered excellent. The rollout of Common Core tests wasn't that great, but that should have been a one-time adaptation period, but everything got mired in politics and bit by bit got torn apart as states all went their own way.
Doing multiplication without laboriously writing one number over the other with an x next to the bottom one considered deeply suspicious...
Those are bad but they do not penalize the more competent half of students. Use of laptops as an educational tool penalize everyone equally.
People are graduating from high school functionally illiterate so yeah definitely not just the US.
Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.
I guess my buddies using laptops in electrical engineering 10 years ago also got dumber? Ought to have done programming and CAD with pen and paper.
I wish I had a laptop earlier - or even better, a tablet with a good pen and attachable keyboard. I’m struggling to think of a disadvantage vs dead tree [note]books. Doodle right on the pdf textbook, dump things to remember into some flashcards app, have notes as searchable files / the ability to share them with everybody, or just a calendar of what’s happening when so you’re not surprised by a test that was announced when you blew off school for a day to do stupid teenager things.
The only actual issue is that computers are excellent slaves but terrible masters, and it’s a lot easier to get distracted by doom or tiktok when you got a computer you’re actively using. Yet surely this is solvable? Given how annoyingly locked down the average company-given dev machine is, surely it’s possible to restrict it for students during school time? It should certainly be much easier than to control private smartphones.
When I first started learning C in uni many years ago, we were forced to use vi and command line, despite there being functional IDEs.
The argument then was IDEs cause cognitive offloading and you don't actually learn to the fullest extent. By forcing us to do everything manually helped us understand how the compiler works, how to debug errors, etc.
This is what current systems are doing. There is a good article that explains it much better
https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Memory%20Paradox_%20Why%20O...
> Oakley, B., Johnston, M., Chen, K.-Z., Jung, E., & Sejnowski, T. (2025).
> “The Memory Paradox:
> Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI.” In The Artificial Intelligence Revolution:
> Challenges and Opportunities (Springer Nature, forthcoming).
I thought at first that you said its easier to get distract by Doom as a comment to how this problem is quite old
Did you read the article?
I think he might have gotten too distracted.
Yeah, in an academic setting, in higher education, it might make sense like he mentioned. Still a personal preference. for me a laptop will never beat taking notes by hand on paper.
I have a 17 year old High School Junior, so I'm in the depths of the modern education system. Plus I had a brother that was a Professor of Education Technology. Plus, shocking on HN, I'm deep in tech myself.
I have mixed feelings on all this. The education system largely seems a bit better than when I was in school, however the impetus to learn has to be entirely provided by the parent (or innately by the rare student). Socially, it is a big problem because of phones, kids don't interact face-to-face nearly as much, as they can easily escape into the phone world.
But laptops? They seem fine, largely a positive, probably worth the cost? I'm undoubtedly far more aware of what and how my son does in school than my parents were. Teachers seem to use whatever works best, and there are lazy teacher and great teachers. The great ones use tech to great effect. One of my son's worst teachers didn't let them use laptops and did everything with paper, and she was terrible. Tech isn't a magic cure, but neither is paper!
I know my son is a better thinker, more informed, knows much more about life, history and science then I did at his age. If he wants to know something he can dig into it and learn what he wants. I had to bike up to the library and pray they had a decent book on the subject (they rarely did).
All that being said, AI is a big threat, but again, it will be a big differentiator. Those that want to learn we'll accelerate away from those that don't.
In many ways I feel like my son is on the proverbial last chopper out of 'Nam, when it comes to the public school system.
Of course, it also feels like going from the frying pan into the fire with the state of the world, but that's another topic.
https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv
Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".
The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
It being the first time a generation scored worse surprises me because it has been pretty obvious in the UK at least that the syllabus for children has been systematically and progressively dumbed down for at least the last 30 years.
One concrete example I remember is in sixth form in the UK when I was there, in order to address poor example results in maths, they replaced Core Maths 1-6 with Pure Maths 1-6, the 6 modules of the latter only containing the material from the first 4 modules of the former
1. Parents whine and bitch every time their precious little baby is expected to do any actual work.
2. Governments dumb down education programs. Some do it to massage the statistics and make education look good, others do it because they honestly think that's how you help teachers give more attention to low-performing students.
The effect is the widening "education gap" - the difference between kids whose parents sign them up for extracurricular activities, and the ipad kids.
I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that the media/content is very visually biased these days, so when our children are exposed to it, they don't use the same parts of the brain that their parents used to use when reading and handwriting text. Visual content is more emotional than written content and doesn't process the same in the brain. If they would still keep laptops but bias it towards text content and still require handwriting and deliberate processes. Maybe it would help a bit. Throwing out technology is not an answer in an advancing world. Smells like "a handmaid's tale" to me.
We have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...
Also we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be.
Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
> I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn.
I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
There was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them.
And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol:
As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.
Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction.
Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.
they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools
these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
Yeah, it seems really odd to be blaming laptops.
Just wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it.
eg. See [1] which finds: "The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class."
and
"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."
There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...
Totally. We can't really measure the effect on people graduating from college right now but I'm pretty sure the value of the average college education is down since the advent of AI due to mass cheating and professors having to tailor their classes away from things AI can take advantage of. The students who love to learn will still be doing just fine, but the others - I doubt it.
Computers are a distraction.
Unless they are specifically needed, they should not be used for basic education.
Don't force kids to wade through a thousand layers of abstraction just to write down a word or to draw a circle.
I doubt it's the laptops. The problem is they removed the physical books. I have a hard time teaching my kids using their laptops. Before, you could just crack open their textbooks and follow along.
By the time I was in high school, we had laptop carts that were rolled out for a few classes (as in a handful of times per year). This was 2004+. We also had computer labs since elementary school. Iirc laptops were used when labs were booked up.
I recall the experience being distracting. Computers are more fun than classes. No matter how much you lock down the machine, a kid will figure a way to make it more interesting than class. Computers can do so much. Children are curious.
I remember sneaking in flash games, ms paint/kidpix, browsing the web and whatever.
Anecdotal.. but i certainly wasn’t the only kid fooling around.
I don’t know what the “right amount” is, but I turned out ok. Though the iPhone was introduced after I graduated high school
Cognitive weakness, at least in the West, go in parallel with other social phenomena: diminishing fertility, finacial deterioration (then one job fed 6, now two are not enough for 3), smart devices that make people dumb, trendy wars, stress/depression pandemia etc
Some are causes and the rest results but nobody knows which ones: the egg made the chicken or the chicken the egg?
I went to schools that had the latest tech for computer labs. Apple Macintosh computers…the colorful ones. Anyway, we had the latest but I did not learn what I wanted to; which was how a computer works. Instead class was just about browsing within the walled garden of the operating system and making videos and typing.
Just because one has the latest tech dos not mean they’ll learn. I learned more on my own with used computers then I did in school. I was able to break things and fix them.
Laptops didnt cause US schools to abandon traditional methods of teaching reading and writing. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Laptops also didn’t integrate special ed in mainstream classrooms. While it’s the right thing to do for other reasons, the net effect hasn’t been to make all kids experiences or learning better.
I went to school at what I realise was an unusual interregnum between computerisation. Too young for the BBC micro (there was one, in the library, at my secondary school, that was never turned on), too old for PCs or Archimedes or whatever came later in the 90s. In retrospect, not a bad thing.
Many many many people warned against this step, the same people that told you not to let the gov. into healthcare, but the same people didn't listen and we are left with degrading outcomes.
Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
I lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.
the article blames the laptops but conveniently ignores that the same generation was also raised by parents who handed them iPhones at age 3. isn't school screen time a rounding error compared to the 6+ hours of daily personal screen time happening at home?
It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
Personally I’m in favor of empiricism when it comes to deciding how to educate our young people, not some vague feeling of “belief”.
The best example of this are drivers who stop in traffic circles to check a map in their phone.
For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
I am fascinated by the reverse Flynn effect - do you have a favorite theory to explain it?
The "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription.
But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions. The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/06/article-out-first-names...
Fascinating. I'm reminded of the 'conservation of ninjutsu' trope. We've known for a while that birth rates fall as education rates increase, but this almost suggests there's a 'conservation of iq' principle at a population level- you can have growing population or iq, but not both!
Sounds like it depends how the population is growing.
You didn’t ask me, but (aside from the effects of tech and social media) my #1 hypothesis is the rise in single parenthood. Parenting is so hard that I doubt pretty much everyone’s ability to do it well on their own.
Nope. For all I know it’s due to the sins of the people. The reckoning of heaven.
Utter rubbish, designed as clickbait for older folks. Every generations dunks on the next one, right up until it's time to change the clock on the VCR and only the kids can do that.
Kids are growing up in a different world than we did. They need different skills, and probably a different cognition. Teaching them to deal with rapid attention shifts is probably going to equip them better for their actual lives than trying to make them focus on one subject for hours.
Completely agree. Pit those retiring baby boomers against the efficiency and capabilities of the new generations.
This is probably misleading information. Kids and their parents aren't responsible for their math performance. Teachers are. Especially the ones that demotivate their students.
This isn’t a simple topic where all but one involved part gets completely excused.
Parental involvement is highly correlated with childhood educational success.
Parents can’t hand off the entirety of the responsibly for their children’s educations to teachers.
This guy is a hack
But it did make a lot of rich guys richer.
Anecdotal evidence of specious claim.
The issue isn't the laptops, but the proprietary software and the fact that teachers don't know how to use even a desktop on average, so they're even less capable of teaching it.
IF you teach how to use a FLOSS desktop, you're providing what's actually needed in the modern world; if you do Big Tech a favor by using their services in schools, you get a collapse in cognitive ability, which is exactly what happened. People just need to understand this and actually have the will to understand it.
If not for my job, I would never have a need to type a single line in a Linux terminal. I don't know what does that have to do with modern world.
That's because you haven't seen IT in action outside of your job yet, I'm talking about its true potential. It's not about the terminal or Emacs (the 2D shell), it's about the paradigm.
If you teach free software, you're teaching people how to know, not just how to follow the tracks someone else laid down. You're teaching them how to tell if a news is fake or not, how to use a feed reader to follow various sources instead of relying on whatever aggregator is popular at the moment, and how to communicate from their own home without depending on third parties, and so on. You're creating a population that understands the meaning of digital ownership/property and knows how to manage it, so they aren't slaves to the tech giants and instead have a hunger for knowledge. In other words, you're putting the gnoseological tools of the present into the hands of the masses.
With the GAFAM model, which is basically just mainframes made worse and expanded, you're creating dependency instead. You're creating slaves, not citizens; people who just comment under articles provided by some PR hack, who don't know how to start a thread on their own topic or write their own piece, people who don't have a domain name as their home address IRL, and so on. People who own nothing and, as such, not Citizens, but subjects of the few who do own everything.
Didn't OLPC spend 40 to 80 million in R&D, and then governments spent $1B+ deploying them? How did that work out?
Canonical article source: (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
You're 2 hours late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117183
I don’t know anyone in my life who, given enough time, could recite entire epics like Homer’s The Odyssey the way some of the Ancient Greeks could. But I wouldn’t say modern people are cognitively “less capable” than those Ancient Greeks. Organisms adapt to their environments or perish -- the mind is no different.
Given the current technological landscape, I think we may eventually have to admit that Gen Z and the ones after have adapted to their environments, too. Maybe retaining information is simply less valuable as a skill (like memorizing entire epics) when easy access to a modern Library of Alexandria is right at our fingertips? Yes, it's painful to think about and uncomfortable on some level. It's probably like how Socrates felt about reading and writing when he described it as, "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding" and that reliance on it will "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it."
Though, one caveat that is important to mention is that education is not valued on a mass cultural level in this country, comparatively speaking. But that is a discussion for a different time.
I think the pandemic made it clear that in-person teaching by teachers is the most important component for educational success, not "edtech".
With the possibility of unintentionally sounding racist..
“ Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one”
The percentage of immigrants or non-native English speakers is also increasing in the US (and in the EU).
Since these groups historically also scored lower, one would expect the general scores at least partially lowered due to this.
Also add in Covid with two years of interrupted lessons and work-from-home, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame this solely on laptops.
Every study like this needs to adjust for common compounding factors; demographics, income, teaching methods, covid...
Otherwise it's junk data, we have have no idea if lower performance is due to more migrants, more computers, less sugar in cereal or whatever.
Yes. And follow them as cohort. Do they start behind? Or gradually got worse? Or actually improved more than the previous generations?
Imagine what it will be like for the generation who are currently using chatgpt to do their homework only for the teacher to use AI to mark it
Related:
Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424
Computers have gotten too good. In my time they broke all the time (sometimes your own fault for downloading those sketchy videogames) and they never did what you wanted them too. You had to actually learn stuff- including highly technical English.
Yeah, totally the laptops, not the immense bullshit we surround ourselves with
brainrot, they know
So was writing and yet here you are doing just that.
consensus is out of touch on this topic to see why my comment was substantive, that's consistent but I always forget how old the population is on HN
Unrelated to the laptops. Also, please don't link low quality sources (Yahoo) on HN.
> Unrelated to the laptops
From the article:
> low quality sourcesFortune Magazine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)
Which is all fluff until someone links to a peer reviewed study.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...
Let's see what this study actually says, shall we?
> Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in mathematics than students who spent no time, even after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, and this positive relationship is observed in over half (45 countries and economies) of all systems with available data.
That sounds like school laptops to me.
>peer reviewed study..
So you trust the peer, but not the author? How come?
The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification, and the paper provides details that can be directly looked at.
>The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification
But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author. Because both the author and the peer are not accountable to you or to mostly none.
So "peer review", without any other qualification is as good as shit.
Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.
> But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author
Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy. Not one. Not the other. The failure mode is that BOTH are untrustworthy and not that EITHER is untrustworthy on their own. This is different from no peer review where the author is a single point of failure. There is furthermore the overall system of peer review with some level of checks within it if a peer or author end up being visibly untrustworthy. Not perfect however the same can be said for every single part of human society.
> Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.
And I sort of chuckle at people like you who don't realize that all of human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework. It's not about absolutes but about levels of trustworthiness and system level checks.
Edit: In this case, for example, the quote is based on a study that the speaker did not publish. The study actually says the exact opposite. So now there's THREE levels of trust that can cross verify. The speaker, the original study authors and the peer reviews. In this case the speaker clearly is not trustworthy as their own source material disagrees with them. Had I simply blindly trusted the speaker this would not have been evident but due to having a study I can verify.
>Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy.
The point is that trusting two is not better than trusting one when both of them have equal chance to be malicious.
> human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework.
May be, but we can try to call a spade a spade and not pretend that something is more trustworthy than it is.
> have equal chance to be malicious.
Is A has a p chance of being malicious and B has a q chance of being malicious then the chance of them both being malicious is pq. pq <= p and p*q <= q.
I'm honestly not sure why its so hard for you to understand that TWO people being malicious at the same time is less likely than either being mailicous on their own.
This is why "scientists" cannot be trusted. They "thinking" is disconnected from real world dynamics.
> both being malicious is pq.
Not if p -> q. If p is malicious, a malicious q is most probably maliciously picked by p to review this study.
Original source is https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
laptops are to cognitive capabilities as syringes are to heroin overdoses.
It's just one of the many delivery mechanisms for brainrot in the 21st century.
There are two you can take with you into a classroom:
* laptop
* smartphone
Yahoo is a common, accepted source: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com