11 ms·

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What Was Expected

67 points by tysone 8y ago

programminggeek 8y ago
Screens are designed to distract, not educate. A screen is a great place to learn if you are not in a classroom or if you are trying to avoid class. It's a terrible way to be "in class". I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.
- y4mi 8y ago
  So, you learned it before moocs were invented? The internet was a very different place 15 yrs ago. I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays. It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available. Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    Agreed. The difficulty is in the details here. Arguably TV was largely, almost entirely entertainment in days of old. Yet, the internet screens are a step back from that, offering both more entertainment potential and far more education potential. It's a dangerous and powerful tool, but one that we need a certain resolve to use productively. I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals. Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
  - greggyb 8y ago
    > Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement. I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
    - y4mi 8y ago
      i notice better retention when i add content to an Anki[0] deck as cloze type question and actually repeat the content a few times. just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you. [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html
  - twtw 8y ago
    I would advise standing in the back of a university lecture hall so you can learn just how rare your "not everyone" is.
  - friday99 8y ago
    Note-taking is a learned skill. When I was in school, they actually taught us several different techniques for taking notes and I am not sure that is a universal part of education. They told us that studies showed people typing notes just write down verbatim what was being said because they can type so fast, which then is useless information as far as later reference is concerned. Writing notes properly actually forces one to distill the important information and take note of particularly confusing parts so that when you come back to the notes they are a helpful recall mechanism for important information.
alphabettsy 8y ago
I find this to be true when observing how friends with children raise their kids. People with more education seem to have severe limits on screens and lower education folks seem to let screens entertain their kids all day everyday.
- thrower123 8y ago
  This strikes me as some weird virtue signaling, as part of the package of well-to-do enlightened whiteness. Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad; you have to think about what content you're delivering. I spent most days watching old-school History Channel while playing with Legos or army men. Likewise, almost all of my knowledge of geography and a significant chunk of history comes from playing strategy games on the PC. If I was watching the Disney Channel and playing Fortnite, then that would be less productively used time, I suppose.
  - eropple 8y ago
    I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      How is Fortnite different from any other FPS we had twenty years ago, like Tribes?
      - eropple 8y ago
        Loot boxes, mostly. Gacha games and the like pioneered it and now it's in everything. The slot-machine pull does something to people, and I'm more worried about what it does to brains that haven't completely set yet.
jfim 8y ago
> Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her. Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Throwing an anecdote into the bucket: my 2.5 year old gets _very_ cranky when it's time to turn off Masha and the Bear, and it seems to be - without running any objective numbers - that she's crankier in general and less willing to be patient and wait if she watches too much of it on any given day or weekend. We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
  - learc83 8y ago
    >daycare Is the daycare cooperating with your desire for near-zero screen time?
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      Yup; I know they've shown them a few Youtube videos, mostly a few funny songs. I'm fine with that; she's very happy to try and sing along, and they don't just plop them down in front of a TV for hours at a time.
    - YinglingLight 8y ago
      My gf worked at a day-care, said the number of daycare workers who spend more time on the phone than with the kids is staggering.
  - sigi45 8y ago
    2.5? Few hours on weekends? 45 minutes after daycare? I think that is too much. What did parents do before that when they need to cook dinner?
jhallenworld 8y ago
My kids get school supplied iPads. They get some real life experience from this: how to deal with terrible school mandated applications. This mirrors my experience working at IBM. For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done. Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  > the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it They should start using archaic and foreign curses.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Or start putting curse words in every single email.
    - AWildC182 8y ago
      Figure out what interface they use when reading the emails and if it's HTML compatible, put an email signature in every message that has a random set of curse words in white.
      - organsnyder 8y ago
        Perhaps test it for XSS vulnerabilities, as well? (nothing too malicious, of course...)
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    Or, alternatively, they should make a group project to write an essay about the town of Scunthorpe, its railroad to Essex, and a local grower of shitake mushrooms; and make sure to diligently discuss its contents in email.
forgotAgain 8y ago
A child learns first from their parents. I feel sad for kids when I see parents involved with phones while walking a baby carriage or attending a soccer game. Parents show by their actions which is more important, people or tech.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Would you feel better if the parent were deeply involved in a newspaper or book? How about if the parent was constantly screaming obscenities at the referee? Parents aren't honor or duty bound to pay rapt attention to every second of their child's life. It's one human caring for another, and few humans have identical interests.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    Thank you for saying this. The amount of moral judgment wrapped up in technology use reveals more about the judges than the judges.
  - friday99 8y ago
    Or they could just be present in the actual social situation they were attending. All of the options you suggest seem preferable to staring at a random glowing magic square in their hands.
  - wffurr 8y ago
    No, in either of those cases. Those are also awful things for a parent to do at a child's soccer game. The issue with screens is due to the addictive quality of experiences on screens (tuned by highly paid experts to increase "engagement"!) causes more people to turn to their screens than would otherwise be distracted by other things, such as newspapers. So instead of tolerating your child's soccer game because bringing and reading a newspaper would be a hassle, seem antisocial, and not be that much more interesting, one can just whip out their pocket computer and have some bright colorful beep-boop gamified but ultimately meaningless experiences much more engaging than the game.
    - 8y ago
brootstrap 8y ago
Just had a baby girl and my wife and I are planning on how to manage this... When we go out we see families where every kid is loaded up on an iphone, including the adult kids. Lets go out to eat and every go on the phone, very nice. I'm speaking from an odd spot, i grew up playing a shit load of computer/video games. However I also enjoyed running around outside with my neighborhood friends doing whatever , playing sports and all of that good stuff. Curious to find what the future holds and I think my own screen time will be limited as the baby gets older. OR i'll say your only screen time is dark souls, better get started young
holdenc 8y ago
Screens are fine. But wasting time is not. My middle schooler is allowed unlimited screen time for ebooks, video editing, photoshop, and writing (other than messaging). youtube and social media is rationed.
- mantas 8y ago
  Network filter or some other solution? How about youtube for science/educational videos?
- doubt_me 8y ago
  I've had to go as far as completely router blocking twitter, Snapchat, certain websites, discord, certain Google pages to block new accounts from being created, locking a phone with parental controls so I can disable the camera and only apps that work are texting and calls, bios locking a laptop so I'm able to control usage, disable the camera and plenty of other apps, using my personal email as a recovery option for all the old social media (because you can log right back in within 90 days and it's all back). If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Same question here - how do you ration this? I am looking to swap to ubiquity network router just to get some control back. Being able to create such fine grained control on ios seems ... unlikely
  - holdenc 8y ago
    My solution is pretty low tech. I have a second desk in my office for my daughter's constructive computer time. So, I can look over her shoulder. All time spent on mobile devices is assumed to be youtube and social media. Limiting this sometimes means taking the device.
    - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
      Thank you
wccrawford 8y ago
>Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her. And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?
r_klancer 8y ago
This is actually why I want to get my 6yo a real, old-fashioned boot-to-BASIC computer. We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing. My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long. Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction. Relevant HN discussion about boot-to-BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740
mynegation 8y ago
It is a food story all over again. Few hundred years ago additional body weight was a sign of riches, as they could afford excess food. These days with the prevalence of sugary and processed food tables have turned. Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)
casper345 8y ago
Technology in schools always takes a lot of adjustment to enhance learning than make another distraction. Technology should be seen as just the medium, not the ends to education
gumby 8y ago
A few years ago my son's (private) high school introduced ipads. The class that had spent a year piloting them was mostly unhappy with them. He led a movement against their introduction. Finally the principal took him aside and told him, "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." Which reminded me of my time on a school board -- the parents wanted all sorts of things that the actual teachers/educational experts thought wouldn't help. Each time I looked into these suggestions the obvious excuses of teacher laziness/dogmatism didn't appear to be the case; it was mostly parents who'd talked to someone or seen some article or simply "just knew".
- LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
  >> "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." In a previous life, I worked at quite a few schools (public and private) as a consultant. How the parents would react and what they thought was always priority number 1. The second priority was how the students would react, because if they reacted negatively, then the parents would inevitably get involved. I've seen this from K-12 from all over the US. I also have had a lot of teachers and administration say that their biggest issue was making sure the parents were happy with everything. A few even said that it didn't matter what the kids thought, as long as their parents thought one way or the other. /not every school is like this so ymmv, but a depressingly large amount was. This was 5 years ago, but I really doubt anything has changed.
- yhoneycomb 8y ago
  > "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." As a med student, this reminds me of how medical practices will chase patient satisfaction at the expense of all else
mmagin 8y ago
I think the real way to see this is as "who is being taught how to think and who is being taught how to do mindless busywork in minimum-wage jobs?"
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Digital piracy bridges the divide. Movies, software, music, books: available to all regardless of financial status or what country you live in.
thowthisaway 8y ago
How are you suppose to curve the kids off screen when adults aren't able to to that themselves? Monkey see, monkey do

67 points by tysone 8y ago

Screens are designed to distract, not educate. A screen is a great place to learn if you are not in a classroom or if you are trying to avoid class. It's a terrible way to be "in class". I learned this in college back when laptops were expensive and relatively rare.

y4mi 8y ago
So, you learned it before moocs were invented? The internet was a very different place 15 yrs ago. I admit that it's easy to just use screen time for distractions. But not everyone does and there is an increasing quantity of learning material available nowadays. It's actually become hard to find quality material because of the quantity available. Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Agreed. The difficulty is in the details here. Arguably TV was largely, almost entirely entertainment in days of old. Yet, the internet screens are a step back from that, offering both more entertainment potential and far more education potential. It's a dangerous and powerful tool, but one that we need a certain resolve to use productively. I still hope one day we can find a way to tie productivity into the addictive brain centers of the brain. Ideally customizable such that whatever you want to be productive on, be it work, exercise, study, etc, we can use that system to achieve our goals. Our brains do not seem designed for this age of entertainment overload. We need help, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I hope we can hack our brains to do good, because largely our efforts seem to be going to "bad".
- greggyb 8y ago
  > Also: taking notes with a pen takes ages. typing is quicker and needs less attention Unsure if this is in praise of writing or of typing, or if it is a neutral statement. I much prefer paper note-taking, except for its inconvenience. I notice better retention when I use pen and paper. When I take notes on a computer, I'm taking dictation, rather than processing what I hear.
  - y4mi 8y ago
    i notice better retention when i add content to an Anki[0] deck as cloze type question and actually repeat the content a few times. just writing it down was pretty much useless for me. but everyone has their own way of remembering, i'm sure just writing it down with a pen works for you. [0] https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html https://apps.ankiweb.net/index.html
- twtw 8y ago
  I would advise standing in the back of a university lecture hall so you can learn just how rare your "not everyone" is.
- friday99 8y ago
  Note-taking is a learned skill. When I was in school, they actually taught us several different techniques for taking notes and I am not sure that is a universal part of education. They told us that studies showed people typing notes just write down verbatim what was being said because they can type so fast, which then is useless information as far as later reference is concerned. Writing notes properly actually forces one to distill the important information and take note of particularly confusing parts so that when you come back to the notes they are a helpful recall mechanism for important information.

alphabettsy 8y ago

I find this to be true when observing how friends with children raise their kids. People with more education seem to have severe limits on screens and lower education folks seem to let screens entertain their kids all day everyday.

thrower123 8y ago
This strikes me as some weird virtue signaling, as part of the package of well-to-do enlightened whiteness. Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad; you have to think about what content you're delivering. I spent most days watching old-school History Channel while playing with Legos or army men. Likewise, almost all of my knowledge of geography and a significant chunk of history comes from playing strategy games on the PC. If I was watching the Disney Channel and playing Fortnite, then that would be less productively used time, I suppose.
- eropple 8y ago
  I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    How is Fortnite different from any other FPS we had twenty years ago, like Tribes?
    - eropple 8y ago
      Loot boxes, mostly. Gacha games and the like pioneered it and now it's in everything. The slot-machine pull does something to people, and I'm more worried about what it does to brains that haven't completely set yet.

jfim 8y ago

> Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her. Completely anecdotal, but I was chatting with a teacher a couple of months ago, and she said it's actually a common thing with young children that have been raised on screens. They are addicted to their devices and have poor socialization skills, so they tend to throw tantrums when asked to put the devices away to focus on the class itself.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
Throwing an anecdote into the bucket: my 2.5 year old gets _very_ cranky when it's time to turn off Masha and the Bear, and it seems to be - without running any objective numbers - that she's crankier in general and less willing to be patient and wait if she watches too much of it on any given day or weekend. We actually told her that Masha went on vacation, and are going to be trying to crank down her screen time down to near-zero (from a few hours on the weekends, and occasionally 45 minutes after daycare if only one parent is home and e.g. dinner needs to be cooked)
- learc83 8y ago
  >daycare Is the daycare cooperating with your desire for near-zero screen time?
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Yup; I know they've shown them a few Youtube videos, mostly a few funny songs. I'm fine with that; she's very happy to try and sing along, and they don't just plop them down in front of a TV for hours at a time.
  - YinglingLight 8y ago
    My gf worked at a day-care, said the number of daycare workers who spend more time on the phone than with the kids is staggering.
- sigi45 8y ago
  2.5? Few hours on weekends? 45 minutes after daycare? I think that is too much. What did parents do before that when they need to cook dinner?

jhallenworld 8y ago

My kids get school supplied iPads. They get some real life experience from this: how to deal with terrible school mandated applications. This mirrors my experience working at IBM. For example, in one app they have to enter answers to homework, but the app does not allow you to edit the answers once entered. So, my kids have learned to write their answers in a google docs, and then cut / paste when they are really done. Oh, they also learn that the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it. Also there is a perennial question of whether the iPad spys on our home network when they are home..

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
> the school IT guy reads their email if they use naughty words in it They should start using archaic and foreign curses.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Or start putting curse words in every single email.
  - AWildC182 8y ago
    Figure out what interface they use when reading the emails and if it's HTML compatible, put an email signature in every message that has a random set of curse words in white.
    - organsnyder 8y ago
      Perhaps test it for XSS vulnerabilities, as well? (nothing too malicious, of course...)
- PeterisP 8y ago
  Or, alternatively, they should make a group project to write an essay about the town of Scunthorpe, its railroad to Essex, and a local grower of shitake mushrooms; and make sure to diligently discuss its contents in email.

forgotAgain 8y ago

A child learns first from their parents. I feel sad for kids when I see parents involved with phones while walking a baby carriage or attending a soccer game. Parents show by their actions which is more important, people or tech.

stephengillie 8y ago
Would you feel better if the parent were deeply involved in a newspaper or book? How about if the parent was constantly screaming obscenities at the referee? Parents aren't honor or duty bound to pay rapt attention to every second of their child's life. It's one human caring for another, and few humans have identical interests.
- someguydave 8y ago
  Thank you for saying this. The amount of moral judgment wrapped up in technology use reveals more about the judges than the judges.
- friday99 8y ago
  Or they could just be present in the actual social situation they were attending. All of the options you suggest seem preferable to staring at a random glowing magic square in their hands.
- wffurr 8y ago
  No, in either of those cases. Those are also awful things for a parent to do at a child's soccer game. The issue with screens is due to the addictive quality of experiences on screens (tuned by highly paid experts to increase "engagement"!) causes more people to turn to their screens than would otherwise be distracted by other things, such as newspapers. So instead of tolerating your child's soccer game because bringing and reading a newspaper would be a hassle, seem antisocial, and not be that much more interesting, one can just whip out their pocket computer and have some bright colorful beep-boop gamified but ultimately meaningless experiences much more engaging than the game.
  - 8y ago

brootstrap 8y ago

Just had a baby girl and my wife and I are planning on how to manage this... When we go out we see families where every kid is loaded up on an iphone, including the adult kids. Lets go out to eat and every go on the phone, very nice. I'm speaking from an odd spot, i grew up playing a shit load of computer/video games. However I also enjoyed running around outside with my neighborhood friends doing whatever , playing sports and all of that good stuff. Curious to find what the future holds and I think my own screen time will be limited as the baby gets older. OR i'll say your only screen time is dark souls, better get started young

holdenc 8y ago

Screens are fine. But wasting time is not. My middle schooler is allowed unlimited screen time for ebooks, video editing, photoshop, and writing (other than messaging). youtube and social media is rationed.

mantas 8y ago
Network filter or some other solution? How about youtube for science/educational videos?
doubt_me 8y ago
I've had to go as far as completely router blocking twitter, Snapchat, certain websites, discord, certain Google pages to block new accounts from being created, locking a phone with parental controls so I can disable the camera and only apps that work are texting and calls, bios locking a laptop so I'm able to control usage, disable the camera and plenty of other apps, using my personal email as a recovery option for all the old social media (because you can log right back in within 90 days and it's all back). If that's what it takes then so be it. I don't have time to be watching every last move so I just nuked it all at once. Oh well.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Same question here - how do you ration this? I am looking to swap to ubiquity network router just to get some control back. Being able to create such fine grained control on ios seems ... unlikely
- holdenc 8y ago
  My solution is pretty low tech. I have a second desk in my office for my daughter's constructive computer time. So, I can look over her shoulder. All time spent on mobile devices is assumed to be youtube and social media. Limiting this sometimes means taking the device.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Thank you

wccrawford 8y ago

>Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her. And the solution was to take away the thing he liked most? Did this actually help anything for him, or do they just not have to deal with him having a fit now?

r_klancer 8y ago

This is actually why I want to get my 6yo a real, old-fashioned boot-to-BASIC computer. We've minimized her screen time (she gets ~1hr TV per week and no phone/tablet/computer time outside school) and the result is she knows how to entertain herself with drawing, writing, reading, or just playing. My kid is still entertained by typing words and sentences onto my computer (the one computer activity I've occasionally let her do). It feels like the window for her to be entertained by typing in commands and seeing them do something is still open ... but maybe not for long. Unfortunately, many of the "hackable computer for kids" products like Kano assume a full UI, Internet access, etc. Which seem like a counterproductive distraction. Relevant HN discussion about boot-to-BASIC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228740

mynegation 8y ago

It is a food story all over again. Few hundred years ago additional body weight was a sign of riches, as they could afford excess food. These days with the prevalence of sugary and processed food tables have turned. Same with screen time - staring at cute animal videos and other junk is not the same as using the screen for a quality education. Quality education (still) needs a lot of human guidance which is getting increasingly more expensive (at least relative to an abundant screen time)

casper345 8y ago

Technology in schools always takes a lot of adjustment to enhance learning than make another distraction. Technology should be seen as just the medium, not the ends to education

gumby 8y ago

A few years ago my son's (private) high school introduced ipads. The class that had spent a year piloting them was mostly unhappy with them. He led a movement against their introduction. Finally the principal took him aside and told him, "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." Which reminded me of my time on a school board -- the parents wanted all sorts of things that the actual teachers/educational experts thought wouldn't help. Each time I looked into these suggestions the obvious excuses of teacher laziness/dogmatism didn't appear to be the case; it was mostly parents who'd talked to someone or seen some article or simply "just knew".

LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
>> "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." In a previous life, I worked at quite a few schools (public and private) as a consultant. How the parents would react and what they thought was always priority number 1. The second priority was how the students would react, because if they reacted negatively, then the parents would inevitably get involved. I've seen this from K-12 from all over the US. I also have had a lot of teachers and administration say that their biggest issue was making sure the parents were happy with everything. A few even said that it didn't matter what the kids thought, as long as their parents thought one way or the other. /not every school is like this so ymmv, but a depressingly large amount was. This was 5 years ago, but I really doubt anything has changed.
yhoneycomb 8y ago
> "Regardless, if we don't have them parents will think we're behind the times and the reputation and parent satisfaction will fall." As a med student, this reminds me of how medical practices will chase patient satisfaction at the expense of all else

mmagin 8y ago

I think the real way to see this is as "who is being taught how to think and who is being taught how to do mindless busywork in minimum-wage jobs?"

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Digital piracy bridges the divide. Movies, software, music, books: available to all regardless of financial status or what country you live in.

thowthisaway 8y ago

How are you suppose to curve the kids off screen when adults aren't able to to that themselves? Monkey see, monkey do