Archived copies of the article:
“The kids are so smart they figured out this computer stuff I could never” - 75 yo Deborah, School District Superintendent
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.
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.
We should be investing in teachers not technology.
Teachers are paid a pittance in the US. Shows our values as a society. They’re educating the next generations, but that doesn’t make number go up right this second, so they are compensated accordingly.
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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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
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!
Yeah, the systemic tearing down of public education definitely had an effect as well.
-
Correlation
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Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
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?
The typical class size in US public schools is 16-23 students. In the academic year 2020-2021, the mean class size was 18.3 students, a slight decrease from the 2017-2018 average of 19.6 students. These figures represent the mean across both primary and secondary education.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/class-size
In the United States, average class sizes vary widely, with national averages indicating 21.2 students in elementary schools and up to 26.8 in secondary schools.
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.
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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
Kind of hard to take the article seriously when it ends with:
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Corporate bullshit like that used to just be mildly amusing, now it’s actively enraging.
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
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 ?
I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper, and i hate having to do online tests too. I like my printed documents and physical books. Many students will say the same, and i also tend to dislike the trend to digitise every and each aspect of learning. The truth out there is that analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole, but many of you are not ready to hear that. Technology is also the problem.
The laptops should be a tool, in addition to other tools. Being well rounded is the best thing you can be.
Ideally they should allow and use both, physical media and notes and digital access to all media. And allow self management. That way they will learn the limits.
But currently they are just forcing digital interfaces on students who did not fully develop yet. Ironicaly, for how much tech they must use, the use of a computer is still sub optimal. Typing skills, for instance, are better trained on a word document with a spell check active. One of the many instances where old tech is still perfectly fit.
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.
I used a mavis beacon like program on my computer for english, really basic stuff but the little thing came in a cd-rom included in my school textbook, and the program covers everything up to b1 levels, and it’s seriously impressive for how small it is. By far the worst software for that type of stuff is the kind of gamified environment we have today. Edutaiment was a trend between the late 90’s and the 2000’s. Gamification is the evil twin of edutainment.
I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper
It’s weird that we don’t consider the mass production of cheap paper and quality pens/pencils a technology.
analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole
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.
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.
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
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The problem isn’t keyboards it’s the policies and reasoning.
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.
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.
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
