Maybe, way worse than their screens though, is the fact that they run chrome BootlickerOS.

Teacher here: In my classroom I'm purposely moving towards pen and paper. Each middle schooler has a Chromebook and it has wrecked their brains (along with social media and phones that they are on outside of school.) You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them. Tech needs to be used, but right now it is killing any curiosity and stamina for learning that they have left.

I've recently taken to calling it GNU+Linux.

Not enough profit for the shareholders if the school is free.
Also, how can they pay for the biggest military in the wolrd if they keep funding needless items like school lunches and resources.

Maybe they're just sick of staring at screens, and the Chromebook screen was the thing they hated the most because of the activities associated with it. Plus if you're using it for most school work, a kid would be likely to be staring at that longer than their phone or other devices at home.

You leave them to do an assignment and they will be on a game in 10 seconds unless you keep on them.

Why even have games in them? If I am an entrepreneur, a school notepad or laptop without games is a good business idea...

Every one of these parents uses technology in their work, I'm betting. They're seeing their kids up to be under prepared for the future. These are probably the same parents who complain that they don't teach cursive in schools anymore.

The internet is full of games

It's also a BIG privacy issue.

School Chromebooks don't come with games, except for the "No Internet Game" which is baked into Chrome. The games being used are web games. Schools have blocking agents, but the websites mutate faster than the blocking software. (Looking at you .io domains)

My school eventually deployed software that only allows students on teacher approved sites, a "block all BUT..." rule and the little devils learned that if they opened more than 50 tabs that agent stopped filtering. I've also had students buy an identical Chromebook to their school issued one and use a hotspot to bypass all detection and filtering.

Not better at all, current trend is to buy whatever services microsoft or google offers.

Unfortunately even this will have to be another battle because there is a lot of monied interest in shoving all these shitty devices down schools throats.

If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it's because someone is making money off of it.

Brother, I became a software engineer and I didn't use a laptop for classes until college. Shoving Microsoft and Google products down school kids'* throats does nothing to "prepare them for the future".

And for those people who don't become engineers? What about those kids who don't have access to a computer outside of the phone in their pocket? If we want to increase computer literacy, it has to be in schools because it's definitely not going to be at home in the vast majority of cases.

We don't need kids going analog unless they choose a career path in a computer-related field. We need schools to be teaching proper computer and media literacy to prepare them not only for a work future, but a media future filled with AI slop and grifters. Not teaching them these valuable skills is how we get kids in their 20s right now getting their news from a fish on tiktok.

Kids are already coming out of school computer illiterate. They know how to use specific applications, but don't know things like directory hierarchy. Onboarding young people into working with general office productivity like SharePoint, or giving them a real grown up laptop instead of an ipad is like teaching boomers to open PDFs all over again. All the same old training and helpdesk calls.

the solution is the same as it was 30 years ago: computer class where they deep dive into how the things work, not just how Microsoft and Apple decide the things are used.

Ah, you don't understand nuance, I see.

Go back and reread my comment, then reply to me when you're ready to engage with what I actually said, and not a bunch of scary strawmen you've built.

We have a county near me that has just committed to doing away with Chromebook’s and going back to pen and paper. The reason being that literacy scores in that area have dropped rather significantly. I worry that whether it is literacy or technological competency students are doomed to fall in one direction or another.

Just like everything in life, uncooperation means the system is broken in some way. This is not about being assertive enough so that children, teenagers or adult students will have to live off the current tyrrany - but realising that this system is designed to encourage this.

The students no matter the age know best; and in this case their word, that AI has no place in their education, should be obeyed by the ones truly ignorant of the educational system.

I think at least one class a day for some sort of technology literacy is important. Maybe some typing courses or web development or coding courses or graphic design or even how to create chat bots...

But as much as I'm into tech I agree that kids shouldn't be staring at screens all day.

You have a point; however, it is important to balance out the skills which are technology enabled and those that are physical. In an educational system IT would be a subject dedicated for this kind of thing.

Children, teenagers and others should absolutely be prepared for the digital world. But that means having a balanced curriculum that enables the usage of devices if so desired. Of course, that also means they should be prepared for analog life as handwriting for example, is a translational skill that is essential.

Your special needs student using a calculator has pretty much no bearing on this conversation.

How did I miss the point? You said you didn't use a computer in school until college, and then you talked about shoving mainstream bloatware into kids eyes. I don't see how I missed those points. I'm also assuming when you went to college was a different point on time than it is right now. As you know, a lot has changed in the computer and online scene in the last 6 years, and exponentially moreso in the last 3.

I don't disagree at all. However, no kid can go tech free in school and be prepared for any sort of productive existence afterwards. Yes, that sucks. Yes, it also sucks that the majority of our experience is measured in productivity. But that's capitalism. I wish it weren't that way.

These parents certainly aren't going to prepare to prepare their kids for a digital future. Heck, they're probably falling for the same AI garbage their kids are going to fall victim to. Just like everything else, literacy needs to be part of the school curriculum.

I really don't know why a bunch of people savvy enough to be on a federated social platform are so against this. It's bonkers to me.

Interesting thought.

I don't know that technical comp is going to be a problem, they're going to likely have access to a phone or tablet from a very young age. There's nothing they need for the most part that exceeds google docs and a website that they can likely pick up quickly.

I wonder if the technical needs will slowly change over time. Companies are still full of pc's when a keyboarded tablet would probably be fine for 9/10 of the job needs in white collar land.

I don't disagree. We need better computer literacy programs in school. But removing technology from learning 100% isn't the alternative. Those parents are still probably going to stick an unregulated, fully accessible iPhone in their kids hands where they're going on Instagram and tiktok with no media literacy skills. How is that any better?

Get Google out of our schools

Computers have nothing to do with it. It's everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing. Other countries like China, Taiwan, and Finland have been able to adopt technology with no loss in reading literacy. It's because they have focused, thought out integration and not just slapdash by whatever corporation gives them the best deal.

I totally agree though. It seems like right now either kids are stuck in front of a computer with no prep or any other supplemental education, or they're completely unplugged and unprepared for interacting with technology outside of an iPhone.

Damn that sounds rough. I've got some dyslexic family members and I can't imagine combining their struggles with auditory processing disorder.

That plasma giving everyone headaches now

It’s everything to do with curriculum requirements and the lack of explorative reading thanks to standardized testing.

The Pineapple And The Hare: Can You Answer Two Bizarre State Exam Questions?

1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

Alright I'll spell it out for you. For some context, the article in the post (which you probably didn't read) describes how schools are sending tablets and laptops home with elementary and middle school children. I specifically stated that I didn't use a laptop for school until I was in college, and implied that my technology literacy did not suffer despite such "late exposure".

I did not say that I didn't use a computer until college. You made that up. I'm not advocating to remove all technology from school. That's a strawman you've built to argue against. I used computers all throughout my time in school, starting in like 2nd grade. We had these things called computer labs, where a teacher that specialized in technology would teach us the ins and outs of using a computer, how to be safe on the internet, and provide adult supervision and guidance. In middle school, we had designated computer lab time to work on book reports, lab reports, research projects, etc. I carried a usb stick around with me to save things onto, which I would then take home, where I could continue working on my assignments on our family computer. My parents established rules and boundaries for using the home computer, and were another resource I could go to for help and guidance.

But we also wrote stuff down. Like with pencils, on paper. And had teachers up at the front of the room giving lectures, helping us through example problems, teaching. That was the primary way we learned. We weren't sent home with an iPad and some edutainment games and told "good luck!" like the kids described in the posted article.

I'll say it again, but I'll reword it in more plain language so there's less chance of misunderstanding: sending school children home with corpoware-riddled tablets and laptops with little to no guidance and expecting them to use that for the bulk of their schoolwork (the thing described in the article) is not a good way to foster technology literacy.

It feels like fiddling with the aesthetics of schooling rather than addressing the fundamentals. The idea that a computer terminal is bad for literacy doesn't seem to match out with empirical evidence.

To Wit

Exploring the relationship between children's knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes

If something is clearly doing harm but no one is stopping it, then it’s because someone is making money off of it.

People make money coming and they make money going. I don't think it is reasonable to say "profit exists, therefore problems", as a lot of these prescriptions and changes are non-scientific and populist-driven at the outset. Whether they work or not isn't really the goal. Political outsiders simply need to establish a scapegoat to pin on their incumbent opponents in order to sell their own ascendancy to office.

If you can campaign on undoing harm, cool. You'll do it. But if you just need to throw darts and hope you hit something, blaming "the kids today and their computers" is as good a vector for attack as anything.

Not as though selling kids school supplies, hard cover textbooks, and other more traditional school trappings wasn't profitable enough forty years ago.

Right tool for the job. Teach the kids how to use technology to their advantage and when not to go for a laptop.

That said pen and paper is a relatively recent invention too.

Because at some point you feel alone vs the system and you either burn out or decide to move with the flow and pass the problem to the next person in line which is.... the system.

In my school it feels like half of the parents are overprotective and if you mention anything negative towards their kid, they take it personally so you have to ask the question.. is it worth the trouble for the money you are given.

Personal experience: teaching in most elite school in my area and everything looks bleak. So I just focus on the few willing to learn and rest can go kick rocks for all I care as long as they know how to behave.. and even that is a tall order in some cases. Every time I kick a student from class for being disruptive in class I expect a call from angry parent how wrong I am and how much of an angel their kid is.

I mean, as a 90s-kid, we used to install video games and other entertainment gimmicks on our graphing calculators. That's when kids weren't coming to school with gameboys and walkmens, already.

I gave my high school teachers fits because I'd sit in the back of the class and read my dad's old fantasy paperbacks - Game of Thrones, LotR, Dragonriders of Pern. They'd be annoyed to see I wasn't grinding my way through "Crime and Punishment" or "Great Expectations", but reluctant to object given that I was technically reading books above my grade level.

Similarly, kids in math class fucking around with Sudoku puzzles or Rubix Cubes or other math-adjacent gimmicks tend to turn teachers sideways. Especially when they're getting middling grades on the actual material, but obviously smart enough to practice and improve.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

From my perspective, the three things that have fucked schools most over time have been

• Larger class sizes
• Teachers with less education / professional experience
• Shorter school days / school years and bigger gaps in continuous education caused by the need to start work sooner

Going back to the 1970s, professional academics have known that these are the hallmarks of a bad education system. But fixing all of them costs money. And if there's one thing a school district hates to do, its spending money to improve education.

That story feels like someone was enraged by 'The Tortoise and the Hare' while writing it.

Without reading the article(and therefore knowing the desired answer):

No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple. I would say that they wouldn’t have eaten the pineapple due to their amusement, but “annoyed” can be inferred, “hungry” is possible since it’s been a few hours, and “they wanted to” is fine.

As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl(“the” implying that the owl is real, in my interpretation, because I want it to mean that) is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event which wasted everyone else’s time. The hare raced a fruit, the crow had a decent idea but was foolish to claim it so decisively, and the moose couldn’t understand the intention behind a common saying. Of course, the question is about who is the most wise, not about who is wise, so foregoing the owl idea it’s a whole other thing.

Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol

You know what apparently you didn't work on during school? Basic discussion techniques and the ability to be civil.

Again, I don't disagree. That's yet another reason why cutting technology out of the learning experience will only hinder development.

We didn't have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

No one actually explained why they ate the pineapple.

This is why I look sideways at the "Americans only read at a 6th grade level" statistics. Because technically speaking you should be able to derive this answer from the content of the story without having it explicitly laid out. Only, the standardized question adds so much incoherent fluff to the narrative as to make deriving the answer ambiguous at best.

As for wisdom, I would argue that the owl is the wisest for not having attended this foolish event

This still feels like a trick answer, because "owls are wise" is a cultural trope not included in the story itself in any meaningful way.

You could argue the crow is the wisest for discerning the possibility of a trick. And then you could argue that wisdom is not synonymous with correctness to justify why the crow was savvy but still wrong.

You might argue that the moose is the wisest, because it was able to identify the moral of the story in advance.

You might argue the hare is the wisest, because it knew it could win a race against a pineapple.

But all of this would need to be laid out in an actual fully-written argument. It's not the sort of answer you can pick out of a multiple choice exam. It's the a debate you can have between peers where the analysis of the work is more valuable than the final selection.

Just gotta read the article now and figure out if I’m supposed to be dumb for even trying or whatever lol

The story is highlighted precisely because it is nebulous and confusing. I suspect the authors of the question intended it to create the illusion of a weed out question by guaranteeing a low success rate at selecting the answer.

But you could achieve the same results by asking "What side will a coin land on if I flip it?" a. Heads, b. Tails, c. The Edge, d. The Coin will not land

Since there's no explicitly correct answer, you are - at best - going to get a roughly even distribution of answers between a. and b. Then you get to report up to your bosses that you're filtering out a certain number of students as "failures" without interrogating why they failed or what you're even testing them to do.

Nah, I managed surprisingly well. In third grade I did really intense dyslexic-specific tutoring (9h a week), and it helped massively. I actually ended up scoring the highest reading comprehension score in my random regional school's class in 5th grade, I think because of it. There were struggles, but nothing I couldn't live with. One of my best friends was trans (not publicly back then, ofc), and trust me their school experience was far, far more difficult. I just felt some camaraderie, finding someone else with a audio processing disorder; I didn't mean to fish for sympathy or anything like that.

To be fair, school lunches aren't free in Germany.

Technically they could be considered free if you factor in monthly child benefits (currently at 259€ per child) or parents further qualify for social assistance.

It does feel like there are already countries doing this effectively and thoughtfully, its just the vast majority of them are not.

Yeah, our struggles definitely pale in comparison to marginalized groups. And no worries! I didn't think you were, I just know how much my brother-in-law struggled with dyslexia, though he didn't have a very supportive family so he didn't even get diagnosed until he was an adult.

They think my nephew is showing early signs of it too, but hopefully his experience will be closer to yours since he'll get support early on.

Auditory processing disorder is such a weird one. In a lot of contexts I actually like it, it's like having earmuffs without wearing anything. I just wish I could turn it on and off intentionally. Sometimes I need it because the unfiltered background noise is too much but it won't turn on. Sometimes I'm trying to take in audio and don't realize it's turned on and I missed a bunch.

I've also realized that I actually read lips a lot to compensate for background noise, so I've been trying to hone that skill more intentionally. Another thing that's maybe a benefit of the disorder.

I have a few family members that are teachers or work in education at some capacity and would absolutely agree the curriculum requirements and standardized testing have become a barrier. Though I am not an expert in education I was a student and can attest to the fact that these things stand in the way of educators being able to reach all students. These education programs are not designed to reach students that learn differently from the vast majority of students. When it comes to reducing exposure to technology in schools it would be foolhardy to double down on either direction. Technology and literacy should coincide and neither should replace the other. A little bit of moderation and balance goes a long way. Today’s society and politics focus on a nose to the grindstone, devil may care rate of progress which though fast and traditionally the American way is unfortunately full of holes and mistakes that are only noticed in hindsight.

the problem with American education is cultural. other countries have stronger cultures around education.

and certain groups in America have very strong cultures around education, mostly Asians and wealthier people, but those are minorities in the broader culture which basically sees education as annoying and stupid crap they have to do to get a job, that they want to do in the cheapest way possible.

if being a teacher started at a salary of 80-100K, things would be a lot different. But it takes a decade or more of teaching to get that level of pay. The only people paid well in education are administrators, who are the ones who give themselves raises and stagnant teacher pay to their own benefit.

and it's the same at all levels of education, because American culture says 'be a greedy shitty person on top who enriches yourself at the expense of everyone else'. and we see the classroom as place to wage a culture war first and foremost, and education is much lower on the priority list.

I empathize with your curiosity. I frequently have symptoms of ADHD and my mind goes places and comes back without ever telling me where it's been. It's a chaotic place and I don't always know either. Reading the context, I suspect what I was probably considering saying was suggesting the alternative is focusing on promoting homeschooling and auto-didactic learning as much as possible, until I realized that's not really a scalable or suitable solution to the concern I was starting with. So the thought got axed.

or maybe kids should learn to do that on their own free time as it interests them and focus on more basic skillsets.

you can't code if you can't read or do math. you can't do graphic design if you don't know how to draw and the basics of color theory and all that.

one of the greatest mistakes in modern usa education is forgetting the idea that skills build on one another and you can't do more advanced things without mastering the basics first. but today we shove kids forward no matter their level of competency because we are not allowed to punish or poorly grade those who fail to learn new skills. we punish the teachers for holding the students accountable to standards, and we reward the teachers/schools who shove kids through the system and 'innovate' new ways for them to inflate test scores.