The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents
Archived copies of the article:
https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z-less-cognitively-capable-parents-first-time-cellphone-bans-standardized-test-scores/Open linkView original on slrpnk.net990
Comments167
I'm sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It's almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are.... poorly educated?
Some one has PAID them to do this. They're a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they've even had the majority of the time... and they took just as much of a part in the "dismantling the public education system".
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They'll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
It's also happening in areas where education HASN'T been defended or dismantled. It's happening in areas that aren't Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can't be solved because whatever is happening isn't being caused by them.
Which locations weren't impacted by the first trump administration's education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There's basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
In this instance, I'd say it doesn't.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don't care as much about failing grades, and the "no child left behind" has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means "your kids going to the next grade, regardless"
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
No Deborah, the kids had a mandatory computer literacy class which helped them understand the fundamentals of computing.
Key word "had"
Back in the 00's when I was secondary school. My friends and I, would turn off the firewall, and bypass the website restrictions. This is just so we could download and play runescape, but I also played the halo combat evovled demo. It was only my group of friends who figured out how. We never shared the simple method with anyone, because we didn't want it getting patched.
So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It'd be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don't believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it's not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don't benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn't be going to Apple or Microsoft. You'd save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
This. And chromebooks are glorified tablets. Much less capable than a proper laptop, much less for a child to learn than a proper laptop. Google did MASSIVE pushing to get chromebooks into the classroom to get kids hooked on their platform as early as possible
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
In California most of my teachers were making 6 figures in my rural town, the problem is that kids don't care about learning, their parents especially do not care at all.
It's more than just lack of effort here though, it's systematic pollution they are allowing into our food and water with abandon.
into education too, into everything they can actually
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
Teachers are a cost-center
Technology is a profit-center
What are you, some kind of socialist? Your system will never work. We'll all run out of money!
The problem isn't the technology, but the implementation.
The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?
Having worked for three separate companies trying to do just that, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too expensive for individuals to purchase and school districts had a hard time getting contracts approved due to NCLB and constant budget cuts. Strange though that a company like Google could ink a huge deal with an entire state even though none of the shit did anything it promised.
Oh trust me I know. They make big promises, and sell these devices dirt cheap to state education systems, and frame it as an altruistic, benevolent act. Meanwhile you can’t install any other software on them and it’s entirely locked into using google’s “education” software
Also where are the “think of the children” folks that are putting in the age verification laws. Shouldn’t they be concerned that a marketing agency built to profile individuals is privy to everything your kids do at school?
Privacy is too woke
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks,, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
I'm just not convinced that the technology isn't part of the problem. All of these machines are designed to give a you an instant dopamine rush when you use them. I think they have a real and detrimental effect on attention span.
As someone in the classrooms (student teaching in fifth grade in Illinois), I don’t disagree that the tech provides this. However, I also see how it benefits the students with workflow and access to a diverse form on texts which is needed for a multitude of diverse learners whether they are multilingual, have a disability of some kind, are special education, or have IEPs or 504s.
The access to parents at home with instant ability to the same videos or resources as well as translation tools can mean more parental help for the kids.
What I see as the problem is that the way we measure students and their cognitive knowledge/capabilities hasn’t changed with how we teach. Everything is to the test and set up without any national standards. I see kids able to make some amazing inferences and see patterns with small prompting and the ability to deep think is there even with tech being a huge part of the classroom.
Public money gets funneled to the tech bros and the population gets dumber. It's a conservative win-win.
And the begining of civil distruction
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it's actively enraging.
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu'd windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
I came here to say something similar. It's not merely tech that's to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don't have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends' dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - "A hacker put a virus on there"), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
There are even people writing 'software' who don't know that.
I'm so fucking happy I'm not the only one who has noticed that.
jesus christ we're so fucked.
Wait I don't get it. How is this possible?
You know, it wasn't always like this
Not very long ago, just before your time
Right before the towers fell, circa '99
This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights waiting
For you, you, insatiable you
Mommy let you use her iPad, you were barely two
And it did all the things we designed it to do
Now, look at you, oh, ha, look at you
You, you, unstoppable, watchable
Your time is now, your inside's out, honey, how you grew
And if we stick together, who knows what we'll do?
It was always the plan
to put the world in your hand
~ Bo Burnham
Welcome to the Internet
Correlation
Causation
Hey, Computer, what's been happening to
Had it been?
But sure, also, they've replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
Don't forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
https://seatingchartmaker.app/articles/class-size-statistics/ USA seems stable for class size?
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/class-size
COVID exacerbated the situation over the last five years.
The situation of class sizes decreasing? The article you gave is from 2021 so im guessing its just methodology of oecd vs nces? the closest citation to that claim is from a 2013 NCES source though.
I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.
The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to fit their own cognitive circumstances, and one generation’s metric is at best an imperfect match for another—“cognitive capacity” can’t be objectively measured.
I get what you’re saying, but this isn’t a dig at Gen Z. For as long as we’ve been testing, which is like 50 years I think, the new generation has outperformed the previous one and that’s a good thing.
Having this generation underperform means that we have failed them and we need to figure out exactly how we fucked up. The evidence is really strong that technology in the classroom is a significant contributor.
in the classroom specifically though? did they control for screen time outside of the classroom in the study?
As a Gen z who managed to not be an idiot I'm unconvinced it's the technology when even in my elementary school years I was beginning to realize how shit the school system is. Technology probably doesn't make things better but it was failing me in elementary school when the best of the best was the massive brick of a computer Macs in the computer lab was all we had
I’m not an expert on this, but I have listened to people talk who are and claim that you can pretty clearly link cognitive decline with the introduction of technology effectively everywhere.
I’m sure it’s not as clear as “tech bad” but it does seem like screen time and deferring the manual parts of learning to computers is not great for us.
Personal anecdote here, so grain of salt.
But I was born in the mid90s. My dad is a tech geek, so we had a personal computer with Windows 95 and I was playing Adiboo on it at 2-3 years old. Also had a Gameboy with Pokemon. Played CS/HL/DOD in the early 2000s. All before we were going to the computer lab at my school.
So I've been entrenched in computers and tech my whole life. So I don't think screen time itself is bad, but we also did not have tech in the classroom (except for the old school throw projectors).
So it probably doesn't help that the classroom nowadays is all tech while also the kid's home is all tech. It's a balancing act.
It's closer to 100 years at this point.
See also Goodhart's law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", which may not be completely relevant here, but is likely a factor (probably a lesser one than the systematic underfunding and other political meddling in US schools).
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
As a Computer Scientist, I increasingly believe this tech might actually be poison for the human mind, and I'm not sure what to do about it.
I want to believe we can make it actually useful. But I don't know if that's possible or not.
I get your point bro, but it's just half of the story. The real issue is not tech as a whole, but the conflict of interests of big evil corps. Tech is fantastic and can supercharge human learning, but the fact that most software is made with the sole purpose of maximizing engagement had led to those issues. The issue is the business model, not the tech itself
Lets be clear: the tech is fantastic, the application is not. We are handing children mind control feeds while they are still forming their identity. If we had these kids working in linux shells, learning the nitty gritty problem solving behind the tech, learning how to use it to build rather than shoehorning it into problems that absolutely dont need it then I think the story would be different
I think the problem with computers is when you make shit too easy.
Play a game. Tap on store. Tap on install. Play.
When I was growing up getting shit to run on my 286 was a challenge, Changing memory allocations, IRQ ports, a myriad of errors and work arounds, cfg files, memory editing, command lines, basic, and all that stuff meant you were forced to think.
The irony is script kiddies of the 90s would be viewed upon as hardcore hackers these days.
Indeed it warmed the cockles of my heart when my son got into Half Life and asked me to show him how to use the console.
I was like, awww you've taken your first step into a larger world.
Don't forget that Google made big bucks on that deal.
Correction: They are still making big bucks on that deal.
Vendor lock in, and brand recognition is bigly important.
Selling Apples ?
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it's just US thing
No it isn’t. Finland did the same thing and now our schools are fucked up.
No, what's messed up education in Finland is that it's much, much harder now to fail and hold back a student. The semi-equivalent of the USA's No Child Left Behind policy.
Schools here in Finland still use plenty of books, and at least they still teach how to use computers, like typing lessons, unlike the USA.
Here in Masala they even started teaching classes about detecting AI use, it's usage in propaganda, and privacy on the internet plus usage of AdBlockers in elementary school. My wife gave the lessons - though she changed it up on the second one after seeing that kids don't really care about this stuff much unless framed differently, like "you can watch YouTube without ads" rather than "it's your legal right to not have ads as children" and "Linux has many many free games" for example.
Source?
Unfortunately I don’t find that source from YLE’s site. I will try to find it somewhere though.
Why do you think other countries did it right? Does the article say that kids in other countries are smarter?
No, common sense says that.
Common sense isn't real, it's knowledge we take for granted ... when it happens to be correct, which often enough it isn't.
Norway did the same thing, and have now swapped back to books. I don't think any other country did it right.
Nope this conclusion is general everywhere. Replacing textbooks and pen and paper for tablets and digital technology has damaging effects on the learning process. We as a species are not built to learn by clicking and swiping on screens. We learn by touching, feeling and writing on coarse paper. Learning is an incredibly complex process and attempting to simplify it only leads to superficial gains as opposed to real knowledge.
Now when learning 3d geometry for example, people think that buying a bunch of 3d shapes they can touch and bend and visualize easier is better. But what they don't realize is the effort to visualize the shape with ones mind's eye is far better for the learning process even if it takes practice and it is slower.
This race for immediate results in everything created the impression that learning a few things quickly and applying them without actually understanding their depth is better than slowing things down and building knowledge. But the curve must go up up at all costs!
What a silly naturalist falacy. Were not built by anyone and evolutionary speaking pen writing is not any more special than writing on a digital screen. All of the science here is unconvincing at best and fake bullshit at worst.
It's entirely a skill issue.
It could be a skill issue but if that's the case I'd argue that introducing digital learning should have been a slower process. Anyway there are countless studies showing the differences between typing and handwriting (like this one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/) but I also have a story. Years ago I had a friend who was doing different neurological studies and she measured once the difference in the brain when writing vs typing. She said it was night and day. When writing the brain lit up almost completely, because handwriting engages so many centers for so many motions and memory recall etc. Typing she said looked almost the same as pressing a single button over and over. There wasn't much engaging of other motions. I found it very interesting. This was years ago before social media, I don't think smartphones were a thing yet much less tablets.
I am not saying that there is no place in learning for digital technology. It would be stupid to ignore them. But some things are better learned with pen and paper.
I feel like that's still an implementation issue not the fact of that "digital is worse" and yeah you're probably right - the roll out should be better. Using proprietary apple devices and shit by multi trillion budget enterprises (countries) is stupid. The government should task entire governed system with years of preparation and diligent implementation with optimized ebook software and curriculum distribution.
This is entirely a skill issue not a technology / medium issue.
Digital is clearly here to stay and superior form of information exchange - it's literally called IT. To say that we should go back to pen, paper and text books is just pure incompetence. I speak from experience myself as I am a published author but I'm never writing an educational book again when websites exists - physical textbooks are incredibly archaic and should be abandoned entirely and I'll die on this hill.
I think that the belief of pen and paper being "natural", is a weird idea. We have less than 7,000 years of history with pen and paper, closer to 50,000 if we include cave paintings. Far as evolution is concerned, that is a pretty darn short. Our understanding of writing - and computers - arises from an incidental application of our intelligence, not the other way around.
I am a scientist myself and I cannot see how you can solve maths and physics problems on a tablet. Maybe I am incompetent and lack the imagination but the physical limitations of these devices just make them cumbersome at best. Again I am not arguing against tablets computers etc. Just that some things are better learned with pen and paper. There are far fewer distractions and you get a much better picture when you have 3 pieces of paper in front of you with all the steps you took to get to where you are now in your solution than swiping back on the tablet. I am obviously biased but it just makes more sense to me.
Writing an article absolutely digital I would never argue against it. But actual learning is better analogue in my opinion.
And then there are the issues you mention about forcing people to use a certain brand for their education. Pen and paper is for everyone. Easily available and ready to use. I can see your argument for textbooks and here it is where a tablet could be useful (provided is distraction free). Load it up with textbooks and go. But even then my bias makes me skeptical. There are mental mechanisms to remember information from books. One can remember the placement on a page, the place in the book. In a digital version that constantly changes depending on how you read that.
Why does it have to be a tablet? Most physics and math probles are already solved in ipython notebooks. Seeing immediate rich features is crazy good for learning.
As for book unique benefits - yes but that can be replicated with software very well if not better. For example having an infinite board is incredible for mind mapping and just as an efficient work space.
We could argue day and night about benefits and capabilities of each form but reality is that software is incredibly important in our society today and yet people are still mostly software illiterate. Even if tablets and computers were worse than pens and textbooks it would still be more valuable to use them to expand general computer use skills.
Why is this getting down voted? This whole thread is fully of techno nerds who seem to be under 30 and grew up in the generation this article is talking about and smoking copium to make themselves feel better for being part of the less capable generation.
"But kids dumb" says the lead-brained
Bro, I’ve been around quite a few Gen Z adults. A few are solid, but the average, has way more anxiety, struggles to stay off their phone, has difficulty understanding many basic concepts.
Not saying the generation is lost, but damn are they starting further behind. This is a fairly broad sampling, both high school educated through people with graduate degrees.
Everyone knows the real problem was moving from clay tablets to papyrus. So unnatural.
It is not the same thing and you know it but you do you!
It’s so sad that we love shitting in younger generations and we love making things harder for them. This isn’t a new concept btw. Americas been doing that for generations
Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.
lol, I mostly ditched textbooks in high school not to support technology, but because I was tired of carrying around huge books in my backpack, the bulk of which I wouldn't even need on a daily basis. Lo and behold, even 14 years ago, I could find pdf versions of most of my textbooks, some of which were offered officially from the publisher for free via the school.
The problems are the enshittification of the internet, the attention economy and the superb lack of American educational system, not technology itself. Almost every university in the world is filled with the sounds of clacking keys from laptops, this isn't 1984.
Technology is part of it. For example, handwriting notes is proven to be better for information retention compared to typing.
Comparing learning methods and then associating their benefits with the technology feels… fallacious.
For this reason I actually recommend a cheap Android tablet for digital note taking since it is well worth the price. I used to carry paper with me, but having the ability to quickly review notes across several classes (lectures and books) is a game changer. Need to know what was discussed last week? What you took on a topic? It’s very cumbersome with paper.
I feel like ‘technology’ is different when you actually own the tech you’re given. When you can do things with it. Not when it’s a digital casino in your pocket controlled by big corporations.
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn't changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
I have a few college "textbooks" from the 1930's. They're small
I don't think it's necessarily the text books that are the issue but rather the physical act of writing your own notes.
I think it's that now people type all their notes into a laptop rather than write it down.
Yeah, makes sense. I "solved" that issue by still doing handwritten notes but then scanning them and converting them to digital notes afterwards.
That being said, I grew up in the 90s so I was never deprived of the skill of handwriting as a kid. It wasn't until apple made touchscreens popular that shit kinda went downhill
Did you not have a locker?
Not OP, but when I hear this argument, a lot of schools wouldn't let you go to your locker between all classes. That, or your classes were so far apart, you didn't have time to go even get to your locker between them. There were some days I could only get to my locker once.
Yeah. I had a locker next to the school’s music room in the farthest corner once. Fun year.
Well that's why I ask, we had lockers, that were easy to access between classes with minimal planning. It just blows my mind how many people didn't have a locker.. My locker at work was even easy to access. I'm sorry y'all didn't have a locker
My highschool, which I graduated mid 2010s, didn't have lockers.
We had gym lockers, which was just to put our stuff for that one gym period, it wasn't "our own".
So, no. Not all highschools have lockers.
My high school didn't have lockers. I assume mine isn't the only one.
My high school, among other interesting design decisions, didn't have any lockers in the academic areas. So you had a locker that was way over by the gyms, or out by the shop classes, or if you were lucky in the cafeteria (because then you could at least stash your lunch in it).
The administration also seemed to be completely mystified as to why everyone carried around huge backpacks.
From the article: "While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.
Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be."
The technology encourages task switching, which is detrimental in situations where one is supposed to focus on a single challenging task in order to optimize learning. So in this case, I'd say it's the technology itself that is unsuitable for the task at hand. Clacking keys is fine, I went to university in the late nineties and computers were already an important part of my education. But I didn't have access to the internet on a powerful pocketable device during lectures. The computers were in the computer rooms.
The mistake was a bunch of people who learned how to use computers as adults thinking that the only way to learn how to use a computer is to do so from a young age, in non-vocational ways.
Doesn’t make sense, does it?
It's all part of the plan, create technological dependency. Why is Google so laser focused on making sure these school PCs are always Chromebooks?
Raise an entire generation that can't write, research, calculate, synthesize, without a Chromebook. If it breaks, they buy a new one, when they grow up they rely on always having one, and so on.
Yes, businesses want children indoctrinated into the products that make them money.
Also, businesses want job training to be done in schools at the expense of education. I’ve talked to many people that seriously think that college is supposed to be entry-level job training. That kind of thing was always part of what new hires learn in entry-level jobs.
I was once told "we're not going to teach you what you need to know, just what employers want you to know". Lost all respect for that "teacher" in that moment, as well as the school.
This was not recently either, that kind of dumbification has been going on for decades.
That’s more worthy of respect than someone who doesn’t admit that capitalism affects our education system
I mean, are they wrong? Why else do people go into student loan debt if not to get a job?
It’s called education. People become educated to be better and more productive workers with a strong understanding of research, critical thinking, individual vs team work, languages, cultural differences, etcetera.
Every job is very specific. The job training itself is supposed to happen at that job in some way. Doctors have residency. Lawyers do time as a clerk. Electricians have apprenticeships. Cops have 5 week training.
Another aspect is drive and motivation. You work to achieve in your life, and future, however that’s slipping so we are seeing more people say what’s the point? It’s a vicious circle.
The edu system has been sliding towards workforce requirements for a long time. Most people cannot distinguish the difference between learning, education and training.
Problem is you need a degree to get hired
The laptops should be a tool, in addition to other tools. Being well rounded is the best thing you can be.
Yeah, my 8-year-old has the chrome book, but also gets physical homework, paper and pencil. Dunno how it'll be as she gets older, but I like how it is so far.
I was thinking about trying to find Mavis Beacon and somehow getting it to function on Windows 11. No idea if there's compatible versions. But I used Mavis Beacon all the time growing up and enjoyed the games, made learning to type (properly) fun.
It's weird that we don't consider the mass production of cheap paper and quality pens/pencils a technology.
I'm not going to become an Evangelical for Ctrl+F because I don't think it's worth the fight.
But I will say an analog classroom with 8 students taught by a professional teacher five days a week is vastly superior to an analog classroom with 40 students taught by a TA three days a week.
Do with that what you will.
Tech Is Amazing for learning, but the unfortunate truth is that companies got a conflict of interests when it comes to education. The same companies who are pushing the most braindead brainrot and designing apps to be as addictive as humanly possible are then the same ones who sell school learning applications
Ask yourself, What Would Black Hat do?
No idea
The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.
I'm sure the switch was a profit driven enterprise evey step of the way, so it worked perfectly, and additionally created more malleable servants.
They really need to ban phones for students in grade school.
"But, they need them for safety!"
How the hell did we ever get along without every kid having an internet connected computer in their pocket since forever before they were invented? No, they don't need them for "safety".
In the US at least, you might not convince people. I think every parent thinking about it imagines their child calling them during a school shooting to say I love you one last time.
Even people who experienced that world firsthand when they were in school can't imagine going back to that. You'll never convince people who don't remember those times.
Lots of school districts are beginning to ban phones. The one I live in has, and it’s had great results.
Probubbly cuz you gave the tools and didn't begin the process of using it for schools, dumbasses.
Right? I've seen plenty of people who don't know how to swing a hammer.
It angers me when people use the US as an example to aspire to. The US are so broken and fucked up, if they're doing something the default reaction should be to not do it because it's most likely some idiotic, fucked up thing. They are a negative example.
The country has one of the highest QoL in the world, how it got their and the system that maintains it has plenty about to critique and deserves to be destroyed, but saying theirs nothing about this country someone would aspire seems weird.
Capable of what though? We have all the evidence we need that our parents and their parents are brain damaged. Maybe that kind of cognitive capability is bad and there's a goldilocks zone to go back to.
They weren't brain damaged by books. It was lead.
Lead is innocent it was Fox News
So the plan worked
Yeah, the only thing missing from this article is that the title doesn't end with ", as intended."
That’s what the parasite pedofile class wants they want ignorant feudal serfs
It's a scam, y'all.
it's not an accident. they didnt forget how to teach people. the people at the top got their and trashed the place on the way out. its by design.
I've been hearing about this. And the software isn't great, I hear stories of kids taking tests online and software glitches keep them from completing the tests. I love computers, but you know what always works? Pencil and paper.
Idk… I’ve had a few pretty shitty pencils.
There are studies that show the tactile nature of books and hand written notes improves retention and encourages more thought, so it would seem likely that going more digital would have negative impacts on education.
Even that grifter Sam Altman was talking about how he takes notes a while back.
Our government is useless
Our government is useless (for the poor)
I suppose what’s needed is to look at data from other countries and see if the data is similar. They’ve found a correlation but, as anybody remotely versed in science should know, correlation does not imply causation
Once I have read the same complaint in a source from 120 years ago, and there they even stated that every generation has thought that about their youth since very long ago....
Every generation worries about the new one, but they haven’t actually had cause in the past.
Ok but I really meant serious complaint, not worries.
by design, and when you combine that with AI and generations of people with low attention spans, you get something bad I'm guessing
The US public school was always about training you how to behave in a post industrial world. When you disguise a lying machine as an equal or even a divine source of knowledge, nobody will question when it says "there is nothing more to learn about the civil rights movement" or anything else the ruling class doesn't want you to learn.
More public money syphoned off to the parasitic corporations and dumber, easier to exploit proles.
Seems like a massive win for capitalism, really.
Until it all blows up on our faces, obviously, but when has capitalism ever cared about anything beyond the next quarter?
"By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops..." oh I see the problem here...
This, and not even ironically.
Something broken on the laptop? It's so locked down nobody can do a damn thing about it, and even if I could I can't spend 15 minutes of class time troubleshooting while the others are waiting, so I guess you're just not participating today, Billy.
I meana, sure. There's a cognitive decline when they get gunned down in their classrooms, or even just the perpetual stress of having to live with that threat on a daily basis.
...
Nah, don't buy it. Paper does not produce smart people via some magic, screen does not produce dumb people via some magic. This works in a different, but fairly simple way
My theory is that it's because of everything else what's on the screen. Kids get laptops for school, get unrestricted access to internet because "it's for school", Youtube and Instragram do the rest.
That (Youtube and Instagram etc. ) contributes, no doubt, but not a deciding factor. Way to check: is it possible to produce smart people from kids using electronic educational media without restrictions? May answer is "Yes, there is a way to do that" as in "no law of nature prevents this from happening"
But education is veery fucked. Not just in US. For many decades, in many ways. And this is not going to be fixed with changing print books to laptops, vice versa or with any other superficial way of pretending to care. I wish enough people understood this (edit: this does not refer to you, but to people in general. Many don't even burden themselves with the matter)
Problem is its a balance. kids need to learn without technology but they also have to learn to responsibly use technology. In addition they need to be prepared to learn remotely. I actually think that at least by high school but as early as possible it would be good for every student to learn from home once a week. They will then be prepared for something like another covid as well as the modern work world.
An entry level laptop pays for itself if you use it to get textbooks for free after a certain amount of time. The question is can you do it legally? Probably not. So where is the cost savings supposed to be?
most schools offer textbooks digitally anyways. I never once was reprimanded for using pirated textbooks. If anything, teachers are just happy to know a student cares enough to learn. It's really the crooked publishers that are far to greedy to serve any educational purpose that profit from copyright enforcement.
People in my school literally failed PE, all you had to do was literally change your clothes. This is just people boogy manning tech so they feel smart. Fact is these kids will not be held back no matter what, and even if you hold them back they don't care. They don't see why they should bother learning in school, their parents don't care about how they are doing in school. Passing American K-12 is essentially putting 4 brain cells of effort. We spend more money on education per capita then the rest of the world. Talk about class sizes, text books blah blah blah dosen't matter when you have kids bullying teachers out of their jobs
Congrats? That is what Republicans want, right? An even dumber populace?
Schools are meant to teach kids how to think critically, along with basic facts.
Giving them laptops doesn’t teach that part unless you go out of your way for it.
First generation not better, brighter, more adaptable than the prior generation. Fitting, given everything else.
Well hopefully those planning curriculums learn from this. Until then, computers at school and books at home. Turning luddite home schooling is not gonna help
You provided links to the Web Archive and to GhostArchive, but not to archive.today
I am curious: is this after you have learned of Wikipedia's decision to ditch it, since it's been proven to alter the content of the archived pages?
It's ddossing a website, why would you want to use it...
Looks like we need to switch back to text books
Surely more blame for dumber kids falls on the Republican push to remove actual science from textbooks, than the format in which they are delivered.
<By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools.>
There's your problem right there, you bought computers which basically have no programs written for them.