they are happy to spend money on technology and shiny new buildings.

they aren't spending money on teaching staff. teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.

the issue is the metricization of education. everything must be measured... and this creates a perverse system where everything is now about increasing the metrics, regardless of improving education.

not to mention the changing in parenting where ever parent things their child is a genius and it's the 'school system' that's failing their kid, instead of their kid being a dumbass jerk who refuses to learn or participate in their own education.

you did if you took calculus. but only 20% of students take calclus and only 40% take pre calc.

you don't need them for geo, tri, or algebra

you can learn to write fast and legibly.

that is not an inherent trait

the idea that people inherently good at things, or not, forever, is really stupid and destructive.

because in the USA we hate teachers. it's really that stupid and simple. and we hate poor people even more than we hate teachers... and most public teachers are automatically poor people due to horrible wages.

teachers are now viewed as professionals worth of respect. they are seen as losers who failed at life and deserve to be punished and hated for it. they are seen as inherently lazy for choosing it as a profession. teachers are public servants, and public servants are all leeches on society.

it was this way growing up for me, and it's even worse today. and all our public policies and funding around education reflect this.

our society loves to go on about education, but in practice is essentially anti-education.

the last time the USA made public investments in education was post ww2, because of the Soviets. Then we rapidly clawed it all back during the 1980s and it's been in decline for 50 years now. we did that because we had an existential threat and were in competition with the Soviets. Once we 'won' we no longer had any need to care about education and we essentially have a two-tier system of seduction, one for the rich that is the best in the world, and one for everyone else that is on par developing nations.

If you come here and got to spend a day in a rich school vs a poor school, your mind would be blown. One will be doing amateur rocketry, and the other can't even do basic arithmetic or reading.

Except student performance is falling across the world. What you said is the reason the US is like lower than most other western countries in outcomes. Its maybe less the reason that outcomes are getting worse across the board.

My gut says its just the reflection of a stratified global society. The billionaire and multimillionaire elites fund their schools very well while the rest struggle with collapsing budgets and parents that can't afford quality education. So countries with more cultural education values are weathering this crisis solely from extra public funding.

The way to validate this would be to see if recent drops in education correlate to funding.

teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.

They're not more credentialed than ever. The days of a teacher needing a master's degree, much less a PhD, are well behind us. Modern teachers - across both public and private sectors - can start working with as little as a GED and a state-issued teaching certificate. They don't need a bachelor's in their subject of expertise or in education as a degree. They don't need to undergo an apprenticeship under a more experienced professional. They don't need good references to land a job. All they need is a willingness to undercut existing (unionized) teaching staff and a clean criminal record.

Schools in low-budget districts onboard these green recruits in droves. Then they use the added manpower as an excuse to fire anyone on track for a pension or old enough to receive full benefits. Education has become the default job for drop-outs and victims of industry layoffs. It's the employer of last-resort, with enormous churn, as rebounds in the job market vacuum people out as fast as downturns dump them in.

the issue is the metricization of education

Metricization is used as an excuse to conduct these wholesale purges. HISD is ground zero for this experiment in privatization, as the state takes over local school boards, fires teachers by the dozen, and consolidates students into larger and large class sizes with fewer resources.

Standardized testing is used to justify the initial purges. Then rebounds in testing (as students are purged and private testing companies manipulate exam scores) are used to validate the decisions of newly installed administrators. Don't look at college placement or applied skills tests, just focus on Pearson's latest "Number go down / Number go up" announcements, as the state leaders funnel more and more money to the testing companies.

By the metrics these districts are degrading and collapsing. But through propaganda, school residents are brow-beaten into doubting their own eyeballs.

not to mention the changing in parenting

You can blame "parenting" for a single kid's mistakes.

Once you start blaming "parenting" in the aggregate, you're inevitably full of shit.

The common denominator in these school districts isn't "parents" and its absurd to pretend otherwise.

At first I was like "how do they know I have ADHD?" And then I was like, "oh wait, they're saying they have ADHD." My people! Also, I hear you and agree

Please point out where I wasn't civil or demonstrated a lack of conversational ability

Stopping the childern from using tech is not wise. As well stopping the children from using pen and paper is not a good idea. We live in this century, both is needed. By using paper and pen kids learn much more than just writing itself. Also the style of letters they write matters a lot. Most of the poeple can write just characters that look like from a printed book. You can check the studies to read what that does to your brain.

This is from 2012. You can't even pin this on LLM hallucinations.

While I agree with you, I'm not sure Chromebooks should count as "using tech" for the sake of learning. If you really want to give a younger generation experience with technology there are far better systems for them to learn on.

Even for students without disabilities, a calculator removes the cognitive demand of the arithmetic. If I am teaching algebra, I want most of their cognition to be taken up by the algebra, not the arithmetic.

Yea, after read the original story shown in the article there was certainly better writing. Like the moral that you shouldn’t back someone just because you think they must be smarter than to challenge a runner to a foot race while having nary a leg in sight. Oh, and I went right by, on purpose, the wise owl trope. But yes, it’s likely there as an answer for that reason.

The whole situation’s a mess. I often get in trouble, even at 30 years old, for “asking too many questions” or wanting more detail. Even in French class yesterday the teacher was asking us to form opinions on headlines and I was arguing because I cannot form an opinion based on a headline. I understand the exercise was a language one, but it still matters.

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to "learn to use a computer and the internet." It's a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don't even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We're living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.

I don’t think it is reasonable to say “profit exists, therefore problems”

Good thing nobody said that then.

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

blah blah blah "text book industry gets to extort students then it's fine for the tech bros to do it now too."

Nope. It's not okay.

No, they don't. I love technology for its entertainment and educational benefits, but it's horrible that this kid is so familiar with screens that they don't understand you can't zoom a book. Screens don't allow one to feel textures, see depth, or manipulate objects in space, among other vital educational activities. Young brains need to be stimulated by real-world phenomena in order to develop properly. Our children deserve better.

text book industry gets to extort students then it’s fine for the tech bros to do it now too.

Good thing nobody said that then.

The opening of every comment you've made. Each one was sprinkled with belittling phrases. Saying I don't understand nuance, or "spelling it out for me." Perhaps if you didn't go complete aggressor and wanted to participate in a discussion, you would realize our viewpoints aren't that different. But that's not how you wanted to handle this.

Perhaps that's how you've been talked to, or always talked to people, or you're just used to immature internet commenting, so you don't realize how inappropriate or immature it is. In any case, I'm no longer going to continue this conversation. Have a good day.

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can't even do basic shit like this. Like, I've genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they're a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I've personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I'm left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

Absolutely. My spouse is a teacher and I have many friends who are, too. I see it every day. The "good" teachers use technology to the benefit of themselves and the students, using it when appropriate and when best applicable. No doubt there are teachers and students out there who use it as a crutch. Like you said though, we need to be able to switch between analog and digital, figuring out when either is better suited.

I play RPGs. I do all of my characters and planning and stuff with pencil and paper. I do a lot of my GM work digitally. You need to be able to do both today, or else you're not going to be prepared for adulthood.

Thank you for your service. That's not surprising, but still disappointing. Do they install DNS filters locally on the machines at all? My work computers do that.

I'm sorry you can't handle me speaking plainly and truthfully. I didn't intend to be belittling, and I don't think I was aggressive. You immediately came out on the defensive* after my first comment because you mistook what I said for contrarianism/argumentation instead of clarification.

It's not that there are games on them. It's that they can find games online to play.

I think the trouble young people have with using desktop computers is overstated. It's a bit of a satanic panic situation. You can learn it pretty quickly. A common complaint is that "they don't know hierarchical file systems" because the mobile devices have only flat file systems presented to the user or something. A tree structure is not a challenging concept and the basic things you can do in a file system you can count on 2 hands. Open a file, save a file, rename a file, delete a file, move a file, copy a file, create a directory, enter a directory, move up a directory. The physical interface is the mouse with 2 buttons, a primary and a secondary for opening context menus; and the keyboard which has the characters printed on them. There's a bit more to it, but it can be explained in, like, a page of text. And the rest you can learn through experimentation. Touch typing is another thing entirely, though. That takes dedicated time to learn.

I wonder if ineptitude with tech shared between the young and old are different kinds. Maybe the old are just completely inept, but, for the young, it's just temporary. It's a shock when we find out they don't know something, but, after explaining it, they're productive within minutes. A 20-year-old still has plenty of mental plasticity. Having to teach somebody the desktop metaphors isn't a huge bottleneck.

I'll end by contending that I don't think schools should not be teaching computers. Rather, they should be teaching computers in more depth. Teach students basic programming and they will have to learn the desktop metaphors along that journey anyway. Computers are way too important to leave the future stewards of the Earth in the dark about how they work. I had to learn how the energy of a photon relates to its wavelength and I had to read and analyze the Canterbury Tales. Not entirely useful. But it's at least a little interesting. Kids are very capable. They won't all be programmers. They should learn it all anyway. Don't let Silicon Valley have it all to themselves.

Well, I unfortunately failed.

Do they install DNS filters locally on the machines at all?

No, the kids are allowed to bring their own laptops, because some rich parents insisted on their kids using MacBooks. I tried pushing Linux for the kiddo, but turns out whatever CISCO wifi system the school is using actively blocks Linux (including, for some reason, black listing the arch repos). A lot of stuff is blocked — though easily bypassed by VPNs or the wireguard router proxy I set up — by wifi black lists, including random stuff like duckduckgo and dict.cc

Actually, I did get an ad for a vibrator on dict.cc once, so maybe that makes sense after all. I, a man. Not sure what I'd use it for.

I'm unfortunately not a parent, just a relative, so there is only so much I can do to harass the school about it. I also live abroad, so 🤷 — I try though.

There it is again. Have a day.

Does the pen and paper include a cursive handwriting course?

" Luddite unite!" - These parents while shaking a fist at clouds.

There what is?

Well at least they had it questioned and now they know some parents might actually care about this shit.

Not allowing specific OSs? Fuck dat. If I want to use Kali, I should be able to use Kali. I actually didn't know that was possible with DHCP. Gross.

Ludd was right. But the issue here is google putting out shitty products, not workers being replaced by machines the owner class has unrestricted access to... actually, if the purpose of those chatbots was to replace the critical thinking of students, maybe this is an issue the General would smash up.

You're taking what they said a fair bit further than they actually said. They said a class a day for technology literacy, and you reacted like they advocated for nothing except advanced computing.

Teaching tech literacy is part of the basics.
You can say it should be learned on their own time, but why not say that of drawing and color theory? Math, history, civics?
Some parts of primary and secondary education are about teaching you how to live in the society you'll be living in. Technology is part of that.

Parents make some good points. AI chatbot integration is too much. Its something that can actively stall learning. You need to learn the skills at school yourself to better use tools like AI. We also should avoid over exposure from screens too. Useful skill for our world، but some pen and paper can help eye strain or over stimulation.

Oh yeah, mate, that's gonna fix it.

it fucking better.

if it wasn't for cursive, my penmanship would be illegible.

I'm a Millennial. And a software engineer.

I hacked computers at school for fun. Haha. I'm not a boomer.

And yet here you are, acting like one. "Phones bad. Kids dumb. My generation's better."

Daily reminder that Luddites were not against the machines/technology, they were against unregulated industry.

As a teacher, I already have to teach half the kids how to even use a computer because they only ever used phones and tablets. And I am not going to be able to teach them programming without laptops.

During school I would always type up my notes during class so I could get them down quickly but then during study after I would hand write the notes into my notebooks so that I could take the time to keep them organized and make sure it made sense.

they don't. some of the worst schools are the best funded.

it's about culture. poor kids do great at school if they have parents who value education, or value education themselves. people who don't value education... do poorly at school.

it's just that rich kids/parents who don't value it... get propped up by a community that does. it's better to be a dumb kid in a rich school district than a smart kid in a poor district.

I think it's fair to expect students to use computers in a programming class. I don't know if there's a need for students to be using computers for the entire school day

Nah, just a TI-84 and teach them programming in BASIC

Now you are the one that sounds like a kid.

Start the little devils running boxes of punch cards, then make them sneak into the lab at night to write their own punch card software for games and secret messages. How else are we going to get them ready for the real world?

I say: If they can earn a good grade with a phone, then fine. If that's not supposed to be able to happen, then there's probably something wrong with the course.

It's uncanny.