Archived copies of the article:
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
Some one has PAID them to do this. They’re a tool used by the powerful (just like Ds), the mega-rich use BOTH parties, just like you would use a Phillips or a standard screwdriver.
Ds have been in power a huge amount of that time, depending on the time frame they’ve even had the majority of the time… and they took just as much of a part in the “dismantling the public education system”.
Look at the RESULTS instead of listening to what they SAY. They’ll say anything (they being all of them)
Yes, I know, bOtH pArTiEs and so forth, you got me, you win, etc.
It’s also happening in areas where education HASN’T been defended or dismantled. It’s happening in areas that aren’t Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can’t be solved because whatever is happening isn’t being caused by them.
Which locations weren’t impacted by the first trump administration’s education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There’s basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
In this instance, I’d say it doesn’t.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don’t care as much about failing grades, and the “no child left behind” has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means “your kids going to the next grade, regardless”
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
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
The problem isn’t the technology, but the implementation.
The USA should have had a national digital textbook initiative, where free textbooks are developed and digitally distributed to all schools of every educational level. Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
The biggest problem with such a program would be things like essays, culture, and history, since many bad actors would want to press their beliefs onto students. Still, things like dates, locations, and people involved with events can be standardized. Maybe teachers can rate educational modules, to help keep bad material from being adopted by most teachers?
Each textbook can have modules and problem generators, designed to make it easy for teachers to assemble a custom curriculum for their class, to assign problems, and to quickly have generic quizzes graded.
Having worked for three separate companies trying to do just that, it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that it’s too expensive for individuals to purchase and school districts had a hard time getting contracts approved due to NCLB and constant budget cuts. Strange though that a company like Google could ink a huge deal with an entire state even though none of the shit did anything it promised.
Google got exactly what they wanted out of it though. Get 'em young using and feeling comfortable with Google hardware and software, and trapped in the walled garden early. Most are not likely to change to another brand/OS later in life.
Oh trust me I know. They make big promises, and sell these devices dirt cheap to state education systems, and frame it as an altruistic, benevolent act. Meanwhile you can’t install any other software on them and it’s entirely locked into using google’s “education” software
Also where are the “think of the children” folks that are putting in the age verification laws. Shouldn’t they be concerned that a marketing agency built to profile individuals is privy to everything your kids do at school?
Privacy is too woke
The biggest problem to getting open source textbooks, is McGraw Hill and their ilk, the few companies that control the textbook Rackets.
I’m just not convinced that the technology isn’t part of the problem. All of these machines are designed to give a you an instant dopamine rush when you use them. I think they have a real and detrimental effect on attention span.
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.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
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
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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.
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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!
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.
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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
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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).
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
Also the underfunding of teachers and overall mismanagement in persuit of profits.
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I get your point bro, but it’s just half of the story. The real issue is not tech as a whole, but the conflict of interests of big evil corps. Tech is fantastic and can supercharge human learning, but the fact that most software is made with the sole purpose of maximizing engagement had led to those issues. The issue is the business model, not the tech itself
Lets be clear: the tech is fantastic, the application is not. We are handing children mind control feeds while they are still forming their identity. If we had these kids working in linux shells, learning the nitty gritty problem solving behind the tech, learning how to use it to build rather than shoehorning it into problems that absolutely dont need it then I think the story would be different
I think the problem with computers is when you make shit too easy.
Play a game. Tap on store. Tap on install. Play.
When I was growing up getting shit to run on my 286 was a challenge, Changing memory allocations, IRQ ports, a myriad of errors and work arounds, cfg files, memory editing, command lines, basic, and all that stuff meant you were forced to think.
The irony is script kiddies of the 90s would be viewed upon as hardcore hackers these days.
Indeed it warmed the cockles of my heart when my son got into Half Life and asked me to show him how to use the console.
I was like, awww you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it’s just US thing
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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
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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.
Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.
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
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
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.
