14 ms·

Silicon Valley’s supposed obsession with tech-free private schools (2019)

86 points by williamsmj 5y ago

rektide 5y ago
im interested in the opposute, in not just teaching via technology, but in trying to create an empowered enriched relationship with technology. in my fantasy world classes are setting up & adminhing their own clusters, are playing with userscripts & social web protocols, are creating nodebots. im not really sure where to look, where the vanguard forces might be. huge respect to projects like the first robotics competiton but that still feels like a narrow course, one where the digital has some co-incident, but feels extra-curricular & dominated by other mechatronics concerns.
- jmathai 5y ago
  I used to think that until my kids got to be 9+ years old and the negative effects of technology became very real. Not all technology is bad but it is hard to draw a line between good and bad. Impossible, IMO.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    What negative effects, out of curiosity? My kids are a fair bit younger and I'm generally pretty positive on technology but am interested in what you've noticed.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      In general it’s very attractive to see the entertainment value in technology and succumb to babysitting your child by sitting them in front of an iPad for hours at a time.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Kids belong outside running around, setting up their own kickball games, building forts, skateboarding, etc. There's a picture of me outside as a boy wearing shorts, and my shins were bruised from ankle to knee. Obviously, I'd been out having fun :-)
      - copperx 5y ago
        Being the devil's advocate for a second: why? If they become adult white collar workers they will be indoors most of the time, interacting with technology. I loved being outside as a kid and teen, but is it really deleterious if the new generations don't get exposed to that?
        thesagan 5y ago
        If it's expected that children of today will spend most of their adult time indoors, then maybe it's a very good idea that children and teens get outside now before the opportunity to live outdoors passes!
        WalterBright 5y ago
        I use a screen all day as an adult, and am very glad I rarely watched TV as a kid, and of course had no computers. Lack of that didn't impair me in the least as an adult. I remember wanting badly to watch "Green Acres", but my parents put their foot down and said it was garbage and I couldn't watch it. When Netflix rolled around, I finally had an opportunity to watch it. About 10 minutes in, I concluded my parents were right and that was the end of that.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        rektide 5y ago
        Until the end of elementary school I was an unmoored, uncaring kid with no connection to the planet, the future, or the world. Yeah I'd play outside, but I felt no real identity, & longed to understand how I might begin to grow or to have purpose to engage myself in. I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me. Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves. Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us. Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible. [1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television-and-cognitive-surplusc https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...
    - nonrandomstring 5y ago
      Here is a good resource on the manifest harms of consumer digital communications technology (smartphones) on young people [1] [1] https://ledger.humanetech.com/ https://ledger.humanetech.com/
      - julianlam 5y ago
        Good lord! This makes me feel quite defeated. Nevermind the NEXT generation, even my generation is susceptible
- Tanjreeve 5y ago
  Learning to actually use technology "actively" and/or creatively isnt the same thing as the "passive" use that gets pushed on the public through the infinite scroll, constant surveillance and psychological manipulation that people worry about.
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    As a computer scientist and dad, I have this very simple maxim (see [1] for more) "We should teach our children about technology, not allow them to be taught _by_ technology." [1] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
    - yumiris 5y ago
      You are absolutely right! We expect all information to be given to us, instead of us seeking the specific information we need. The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent. Even the apps and websites which have been optimised for engagement can be valuable. The value is what we make of it, just like how the websites make value out of us. Advocating for quitting technology unfortunately becomes more and more of an impractical advice, as technology is further ingrained into our lifestyle. What matters the most is being mindful and honest with ourselves. The moment we lose sight of how we use something, it starts using us. It seems like your book focuses on a similar mindset. I've stumbled upon it before, but now I'll definitely be giving it a read! :)
      - rektide 5y ago
        > The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent. I agree strongly on logical, emotional, & spiritual levels with this assessment. Ursala Franklin's lectures on Holistic enabling technologies versus Prescriptive directing technologies[1], or her Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective to assess by, to view tech by. They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly, very sharply, & very smartly, & are essential readings for socio-technology today in my view. It is all very complicated right now. Technologies like Instagram or Tiktok are both highly creative & enabling, presenting a rich ability to craft, but extremely limiting & process/control oriented in terms of distribution/viewing/engagement, as fixed as can be. Understanding how walled & limited we are on some fronts while enabled on other fronts presents a serious challenge of understanding, and this challenge is far heightened by the severely limited alternatives and options we have in the world today. Even if someone can set up or gain access to a good PeerTube instance, they'll have less creative tools available & face a myriad of other distribution/engagement challenges. The tech may be less limiting, especially if they run their own instance, but at other great costs. Genuinely trying to create a technology which can be engaged in & learned of requires not just good teaching intent, but a software ecosystem which is learnable & explorable. We need technology which is capable of being engaged in. The web, here, is remarkably strong & powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions. There's a big-ball-of-mud/complexity under the covers, in a variety of different programming languages/libraries as we travel about, & almost none of it is designed for external use. I like to imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well. This idea of making the technology open & exposed & engageable is a precondition for a society capable of growing a healthy, non-poisonous, non-treacherous, resillient relationship with technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
frozenport 5y ago
>>> These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children. Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist. LOL, this didn't age well. See for example Facebook's attempt to suppress reports on how their technology is harmful to teen girls.
- vletal 5y ago
  Mark was on Lexes podcast counter arguing against that. Any link? I'm really interested in the source material.
  - emtel 5y ago
    Here’s a pretty good summary, with annotated versions of the Facebook slides. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagram-mental-health-research-pdfs-documents https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr...
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I think the idea that Facebook is "harmful to teen girls" is just media sensationalism. That's not an accurate representation of what Facebook's internal reports showed. The report had 12 measures of well-being and found that instagram had positive impact on 11/12 and negative impact on 1/12. The media, naturally, sums this up as "Facebook knows it harms girls and does it anyway!!!" https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-and-instagram/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a... In my view, it's quite positive that Facebook is studying the impact of their platform on teens. I don't think that's a standard that major media companies, e.g. The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, live up to. I also think it's commendable that Facebook internally confronts problems with their product in terms of impact on teens. I have some concerns that the media's hysterics will disincentivize companies from studying this kind of thing for fear that it will exploited by the media.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
WalterBright 5y ago
On the other hand, tech in the classroom has never been demonstrated to improve educational results at all, other than for various disabled kids, who have been helped by it.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  All of my programming classes have been helped tremendously by having access to a computer… In all seriousness I think we are still in the discovery process of what tech will help with and what it won’t.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    One of the best programming courses I took we only used pen and paper to write pseudo-code. Not having actual computers allowed us to focus on what we were learning, rather than wasting time with the arbitrary details of a particular language’s syntax.
    - krageon 5y ago
      > rather than wasting time with the arbitrary details of a particular language’s syntax. Learning strict syntax and semantics is the most difficult for students just starting out with programming. It's not wasting time at all. Programming on paper can work great, as long as the syntax is well-defined and graded for.
      - jtbayly 5y ago
        This was not a basic intro to programming course. It was an intermediate theory course.
        krageon 5y ago
        In an intermediate theory course asking to "not be bogged down by syntax" would be a big red flag for a student (to me). Perhaps we just have a different attitude to this, that is okay.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
it sounds like the author confronting their own inferiority complex.. "techies" are somehow the smartest people in the room, but also they actually aren't and are full of hubris. i dont get this weird journalist hate fest about "techies" as if average software engineers call the shots on what their employers do either. its such a well orchestrated distraction. the average engineers job is to execute, not to decide what to build. just like every other industry, a few people at the top call the shots on what to do, the rest of us are executing or making tiny decisions on how to do it. me and Mark Zuckerberg are both "techies"... no difference right?
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  I agree. Something about the tone of this article felt fundamentally dishonest (perhaps an edu-tech puff piece) and too keen to prove a point about a whole class of people using vague allusions. > "technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them" I do. And I have. Although I speak for only one technologist. > "These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children." Some of us do because we _design_ it, and under conditions of NDA. Only recently leaks of emails proved this precise point. Many more of us have "not-secret" wisdom as we proudly publish scientific papers about it. Moral judgements aside, we know what this stuff does. But the author attempts to insinuate the language of conspiracy. > "Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist." Then either the author has not been living, working and researching very well, or his confidence is misplaced.
  - elevaet 5y ago
    > I do. And I have. Although I speak for only one technologist. Same here. I'm a programmer, and my goal is to delay phones for my kids until the last possible hour. My kids spend time drawing, doing sports, reading books, swimming, playing with friends and animals. Phones and devices are like digital crack for kids, and they prefer to keep hitting that lever over any of these other activities when the option is there.
anothernewdude 5y ago
It's obvious to anyone that bringing screens is just bringing in distraction. And even in the fields where they may be of some benefit (maths for example) the benefits are so minor as to be pointless.
- KyeRussell 5y ago
  “it’s obvious to anyone” is not a substitution for proof and that statement makes it obvious that you’re just speaking from intuition. Screens are not inherently…anything.
  - elevaet 5y ago
    Yes, screens aren't inherently anything, but I think they're using "screens" as shorthand for the phone/social media/apps ecosystem that does have addictive qualities and is fairly well studied. Tons of good references in here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240116/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240116/ OTOH I think it's fair to say that something like an e-reader or a dumb watch has low-addictive qualities, and have screens.
    - baash05 5y ago
      My kids e-reader is super addictive. My kids can spend hours and hours glued to it. And god help me I'm so over the moon happy. Both my kids have old school Casio's, and kindle e-readers. Totally agree with ya.
      - elevaet 5y ago
        Yeah if that's an addiction, it's the best kind.
  - trgn 5y ago
    I find that a copout answer. Screens are inherently distracting. They literally flash and flicker. The devices that those screens are attached too have buttons and little jiggery bits. There's a ton of distracting software on those devices, browsers, games. The supposed learning software is all about gamification and slidey swoopy menus and other completely distracting BS. So yes, "screens" as a pars pro toto for digital learning is inherently distracting. It's only when you reduce it so far as to be meaningless, - "a screen is just some LED-lights organized in a square, how's that different from paper," - that you can say they're not.
thenerdhead 5y ago
Here's some notable examples of no-or-low-tech households of high-tech individuals: Steve Jobs, Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Alexis Ohanian, Mark Cuban, and Evan Spiegel to name a few. What I don't personally understand is that this isn't news per-say. Many of the "tech elite" don't get high on their own supply. It's not hard to see why. Tech is addictive. Even the WHO declared screentime for kids under 4 shouldn't exceed an hour right before the pandemic...Montessori schools definitely have been on the rise for awhile too. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311664 https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311664
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I bet you will see the same with fast food or tobacco execs. I would be surprised if the families of MacDonalds top management ate a lot of fast food.
  - pempem 5y ago
    The CEO famously does not.
- vkou 5y ago
  Montessori schools have been on the rise for a while because traditional schooling is dehumanizing and authoritarian, not because traditional schooling has too many electronic devices. I don't know enough to comment on whether or not their educational outcomes are 'better', or what definition of 'better' we should use.
  - pempem 5y ago
    Can it be both? There are schools using facial recognition - not just electronic learning devices (1) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20843076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20843076 I'm not sure the frustration is any different than when my teachers would pop in a movie rather than teaching me about a subject
  - AniseAbyss 5y ago
    Montessori schools attract rich families. It really helps if you're not schooling kids from the ghetto and have a nice budget to hire extra teachers.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
black_13 5y ago
taurusnoises 5y ago
> "The more important point here is that believing techie parents have secret insider knowledge about the harmful effects of children’s technology usage reinforces the dangerous myth that techies are always the smartest people in the room — and that the more technical they are, the more wide-ranging their expertise." This is a strawman argument. The point is that the people closest to the genesis, application, development, and conversations around tech, are in a particularly unique position to understand its effects (the very effects that were designed to happen). It's not that we think developers are superhuman and have secret knowledge. It's that the ones in question have designed platforms to specifically addict its users, and if these same people are not allowing their kids to use the technology, that speaks volumes.
licebmi__at__ 5y ago
Wow, so reading the comments it seems like HN is now one of these sites where people just comment on the headline without reading the article. The article spends about a third of length on the topic if tech might be good for kids or not, the rest (and the meat) is an argument against "the techies as thought leaders because we live in a tech world", and the idea that tech people are uniquely able to understand the consequences of tech on society just because they built it. Actually when reflecting to that, it's even more ironic that the comments in this tech forum fail to address the point and even the top comment talks about the author "inferiority complex".
- ryder9 5y ago
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Well, I'd argue tech people have a unique perspective on tech: we've used it the longest and understand it better than most people. I for one have a fundamental creed from using the internet since the 1980s and computers since the 1970s: 99% of a all problems best solved without technology and if your first go-to is a technology solution, you are an idiot, a shitty engineer and questionable as a solution creator. Why? Because I've seen technologies come and go all bleating the same promises that are never kept. And if you truly examine the problems they are trying to address, you see most of the time that the question is wrong or the answer is ill-posed. Most peoples are solvable by communication between humans in a negotiated fashion. These are also the cheapest and fastest solutions. The details of what negotiation means are pretty wide open, but still technology should NEVER be your first, second, third or fifth solution proposal!
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > but still technology should NEVER be your first, second, third or fifth solution proposal! So always the fourth, then?

86 points by williamsmj 5y ago

im interested in the opposute, in not just teaching via technology, but in trying to create an empowered enriched relationship with technology. in my fantasy world classes are setting up & adminhing their own clusters, are playing with userscripts & social web protocols, are creating nodebots. im not really sure where to look, where the vanguard forces might be. huge respect to projects like the first robotics competiton but that still feels like a narrow course, one where the digital has some co-incident, but feels extra-curricular & dominated by other mechatronics concerns.

jmathai 5y ago
I used to think that until my kids got to be 9+ years old and the negative effects of technology became very real. Not all technology is bad but it is hard to draw a line between good and bad. Impossible, IMO.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  What negative effects, out of curiosity? My kids are a fair bit younger and I'm generally pretty positive on technology but am interested in what you've noticed.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    In general it’s very attractive to see the entertainment value in technology and succumb to babysitting your child by sitting them in front of an iPad for hours at a time.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Kids belong outside running around, setting up their own kickball games, building forts, skateboarding, etc. There's a picture of me outside as a boy wearing shorts, and my shins were bruised from ankle to knee. Obviously, I'd been out having fun :-)
    - copperx 5y ago
      Being the devil's advocate for a second: why? If they become adult white collar workers they will be indoors most of the time, interacting with technology. I loved being outside as a kid and teen, but is it really deleterious if the new generations don't get exposed to that?
      - thesagan 5y ago
        If it's expected that children of today will spend most of their adult time indoors, then maybe it's a very good idea that children and teens get outside now before the opportunity to live outdoors passes!
        WalterBright 5y ago
        I use a screen all day as an adult, and am very glad I rarely watched TV as a kid, and of course had no computers. Lack of that didn't impair me in the least as an adult. I remember wanting badly to watch "Green Acres", but my parents put their foot down and said it was garbage and I couldn't watch it. When Netflix rolled around, I finally had an opportunity to watch it. About 10 minutes in, I concluded my parents were right and that was the end of that.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        rektide 5y ago
        Until the end of elementary school I was an unmoored, uncaring kid with no connection to the planet, the future, or the world. Yeah I'd play outside, but I felt no real identity, & longed to understand how I might begin to grow or to have purpose to engage myself in. I had a public school teacher who went way above & beyond, introduced us to technology & computing (bringing his own PC's into the class room, which we only used very occasionally) & ham radio (although the planned club never really materialized). This gave me a much stronger relationship to the world I'd face, & began a genuine interest in the world in me. Kids are blank slates- tabula rasa- & they need models of engagement & things to grow interested in over time. Simply expecting play & fun time, without specific encouragement to go deeper, without examples of others about them who are interested & are going deep into things- is an extreme danger. It's been so hard seeing so many so adrift, wishing so badly these people had had more exposure to different things in the world where they might moor themselves. Technology is fantastically difficult to root into in todays world, is oppressively technocratically nightmarishly resilient to exploration & playing with at any genuinely technical level. But it's still more accessible, a bigger open field, with so vastly much wider open potential (in part because this rotten technocratically driven core is so low-nutrient & exploitative & unwilling to do anything but suck down our life energies, not contributing value) than so so so much else in the world that I yearn so much to see some of the near breakthroughs that could happen anytime. I have deep reverence for biology, medicine, chemistry, material science, design, ux, for so music & culture & art, but wow, so many of these require so much more dedication & luck to break through in, to run the gauntlet of. Computers still seem so rife with potential as a place I'd want people to seek engagement, in spite of their sad hulky rebuffing outer shell of "user interface" that lies & betrays, that is Plato's Cave's Marionette scene, endlessly lying to us. Kids have so much cognitive surplus. They have so much potential. Pretending that you know better, denying them mediums of thought they might explore & forcing them into simplicity, prolonging their childhood forcibly, is not something I am sympathetic to. Clay Shirky had a 2008 conference talk that electrified the world, on cognitive surplus, contrasting Watching Gilligan's Island versus Editing Wikipedia[1]. These words weren't used but it was a contrast of inert, useless, goes-no-where activity versus the chance to engage in something, in starting the ability to find your own meaning. This process should not be force-started upon kids, and there is a lot of inert, dead end uses of technology they'll hook themselves on & click endlessly. But to deny the whole project, to opt them out of exploring the deeper angles of the world- that's a bad mistake I'd wish on no one. Tech, in spite of all the bad I've said, still has the lions share of open & explorable angles. There's a huge question about how we open the real explorable, interesting angles, versus letting ourselves be sucked in to inert activities, but imo the risk of denial is worse than the risk of what is possible. [1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television-and-cognitive-surplusc https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-gin-television...
  - nonrandomstring 5y ago
    Here is a good resource on the manifest harms of consumer digital communications technology (smartphones) on young people [1] [1] https://ledger.humanetech.com/ https://ledger.humanetech.com/
    - julianlam 5y ago
      Good lord! This makes me feel quite defeated. Nevermind the NEXT generation, even my generation is susceptible
Tanjreeve 5y ago
Learning to actually use technology "actively" and/or creatively isnt the same thing as the "passive" use that gets pushed on the public through the infinite scroll, constant surveillance and psychological manipulation that people worry about.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  As a computer scientist and dad, I have this very simple maxim (see [1] for more) "We should teach our children about technology, not allow them to be taught _by_ technology." [1] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
  - yumiris 5y ago
    You are absolutely right! We expect all information to be given to us, instead of us seeking the specific information we need. The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent. Even the apps and websites which have been optimised for engagement can be valuable. The value is what we make of it, just like how the websites make value out of us. Advocating for quitting technology unfortunately becomes more and more of an impractical advice, as technology is further ingrained into our lifestyle. What matters the most is being mindful and honest with ourselves. The moment we lose sight of how we use something, it starts using us. It seems like your book focuses on a similar mindset. I've stumbled upon it before, but now I'll definitely be giving it a read! :)
    - rektide 5y ago
      > The solution is to - like your maxim implies - reverse the paradigm, by treating technology like it was initially designed: a tool for us to use with intent. I agree strongly on logical, emotional, & spiritual levels with this assessment. Ursala Franklin's lectures on Holistic enabling technologies versus Prescriptive directing technologies[1], or her Work versus Control technologies distinctions, is a good perspective to assess by, to view tech by. They define this struggle for what lets us work with intent, versus what molds it's intent upon us very strongly, very sharply, & very smartly, & are essential readings for socio-technology today in my view. It is all very complicated right now. Technologies like Instagram or Tiktok are both highly creative & enabling, presenting a rich ability to craft, but extremely limiting & process/control oriented in terms of distribution/viewing/engagement, as fixed as can be. Understanding how walled & limited we are on some fronts while enabled on other fronts presents a serious challenge of understanding, and this challenge is far heightened by the severely limited alternatives and options we have in the world today. Even if someone can set up or gain access to a good PeerTube instance, they'll have less creative tools available & face a myriad of other distribution/engagement challenges. The tech may be less limiting, especially if they run their own instance, but at other great costs. Genuinely trying to create a technology which can be engaged in & learned of requires not just good teaching intent, but a software ecosystem which is learnable & explorable. We need technology which is capable of being engaged in. The web, here, is remarkably strong & powerful, with userscripts being a powerful demonstration of how some small tidbits of common knowledge can give us wideranging power over most every corporate/institutional property on the planet. There's nothing like it! It's purely incidental though- few web sites are specifically implemented to enhance understanding of how the site itself functions. There's a big-ball-of-mud/complexity under the covers, in a variety of different programming languages/libraries as we travel about, & almost none of it is designed for external use. I like to imagine a web where components could more clearly state their intent, be poked & prodded & understood by outsiders using common devtools. To me, this is one of the latent & most inspiring hopes of could-be web platform systems like WebComponents, that they could help make the web more broadly understandable & explorable for everyone, that it could make the hypermedium itself rich not just in what it expresses, but internally as well. This idea of making the technology open & exposed & engageable is a precondition for a society capable of growing a healthy, non-poisonous, non-treacherous, resillient relationship with technology. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_prescriptive_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

frozenport 5y ago

>>> These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children. Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist. LOL, this didn't age well. See for example Facebook's attempt to suppress reports on how their technology is harmful to teen girls.

vletal 5y ago
Mark was on Lexes podcast counter arguing against that. Any link? I'm really interested in the source material.
- emtel 5y ago
  Here’s a pretty good summary, with annotated versions of the Facebook slides. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagram-mental-health-research-pdfs-documents https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22701445/facebook-instagr...
ALittleLight 5y ago
I think the idea that Facebook is "harmful to teen girls" is just media sensationalism. That's not an accurate representation of what Facebook's internal reports showed. The report had 12 measures of well-being and found that instagram had positive impact on 11/12 and negative impact on 1/12. The media, naturally, sums this up as "Facebook knows it harms girls and does it anyway!!!" https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-and-instagram/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a... In my view, it's quite positive that Facebook is studying the impact of their platform on teens. I don't think that's a standard that major media companies, e.g. The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, live up to. I also think it's commendable that Facebook internally confronts problems with their product in terms of impact on teens. I have some concerns that the media's hysterics will disincentivize companies from studying this kind of thing for fear that it will exploited by the media.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago

On the other hand, tech in the classroom has never been demonstrated to improve educational results at all, other than for various disabled kids, who have been helped by it.

dghlsakjg 5y ago
All of my programming classes have been helped tremendously by having access to a computer… In all seriousness I think we are still in the discovery process of what tech will help with and what it won’t.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  One of the best programming courses I took we only used pen and paper to write pseudo-code. Not having actual computers allowed us to focus on what we were learning, rather than wasting time with the arbitrary details of a particular language’s syntax.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > rather than wasting time with the arbitrary details of a particular language’s syntax. Learning strict syntax and semantics is the most difficult for students just starting out with programming. It's not wasting time at all. Programming on paper can work great, as long as the syntax is well-defined and graded for.
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      This was not a basic intro to programming course. It was an intermediate theory course.
      - krageon 5y ago
        In an intermediate theory course asking to "not be bogged down by syntax" would be a big red flag for a student (to me). Perhaps we just have a different attitude to this, that is okay.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

it sounds like the author confronting their own inferiority complex.. "techies" are somehow the smartest people in the room, but also they actually aren't and are full of hubris. i dont get this weird journalist hate fest about "techies" as if average software engineers call the shots on what their employers do either. its such a well orchestrated distraction. the average engineers job is to execute, not to decide what to build. just like every other industry, a few people at the top call the shots on what to do, the rest of us are executing or making tiny decisions on how to do it. me and Mark Zuckerberg are both "techies"... no difference right?

nonrandomstring 5y ago
I agree. Something about the tone of this article felt fundamentally dishonest (perhaps an edu-tech puff piece) and too keen to prove a point about a whole class of people using vague allusions. > "technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them" I do. And I have. Although I speak for only one technologist. > "These articles assume that techies have access to secret wisdom about the harmful effects of technology on children." Some of us do because we _design_ it, and under conditions of NDA. Only recently leaks of emails proved this precise point. Many more of us have "not-secret" wisdom as we proudly publish scientific papers about it. Moral judgements aside, we know what this stuff does. But the author attempts to insinuate the language of conspiracy. > "Based on two decades of living among, working with, and researching Silicon Valley technology employees, I can confidently assert that this secret knowledge does not exist." Then either the author has not been living, working and researching very well, or his confidence is misplaced.
- elevaet 5y ago
  > I do. And I have. Although I speak for only one technologist. Same here. I'm a programmer, and my goal is to delay phones for my kids until the last possible hour. My kids spend time drawing, doing sports, reading books, swimming, playing with friends and animals. Phones and devices are like digital crack for kids, and they prefer to keep hitting that lever over any of these other activities when the option is there.

anothernewdude 5y ago

It's obvious to anyone that bringing screens is just bringing in distraction. And even in the fields where they may be of some benefit (maths for example) the benefits are so minor as to be pointless.

KyeRussell 5y ago
“it’s obvious to anyone” is not a substitution for proof and that statement makes it obvious that you’re just speaking from intuition. Screens are not inherently…anything.
- elevaet 5y ago
  Yes, screens aren't inherently anything, but I think they're using "screens" as shorthand for the phone/social media/apps ecosystem that does have addictive qualities and is fairly well studied. Tons of good references in here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240116/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240116/ OTOH I think it's fair to say that something like an e-reader or a dumb watch has low-addictive qualities, and have screens.
  - baash05 5y ago
    My kids e-reader is super addictive. My kids can spend hours and hours glued to it. And god help me I'm so over the moon happy. Both my kids have old school Casio's, and kindle e-readers. Totally agree with ya.
    - elevaet 5y ago
      Yeah if that's an addiction, it's the best kind.
- trgn 5y ago
  I find that a copout answer. Screens are inherently distracting. They literally flash and flicker. The devices that those screens are attached too have buttons and little jiggery bits. There's a ton of distracting software on those devices, browsers, games. The supposed learning software is all about gamification and slidey swoopy menus and other completely distracting BS. So yes, "screens" as a pars pro toto for digital learning is inherently distracting. It's only when you reduce it so far as to be meaningless, - "a screen is just some LED-lights organized in a square, how's that different from paper," - that you can say they're not.

thenerdhead 5y ago

Here's some notable examples of no-or-low-tech households of high-tech individuals: Steve Jobs, Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Alexis Ohanian, Mark Cuban, and Evan Spiegel to name a few. What I don't personally understand is that this isn't news per-say. Many of the "tech elite" don't get high on their own supply. It's not hard to see why. Tech is addictive. Even the WHO declared screentime for kids under 4 shouldn't exceed an hour right before the pandemic...Montessori schools definitely have been on the rise for awhile too. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311664 https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311664

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I bet you will see the same with fast food or tobacco execs. I would be surprised if the families of MacDonalds top management ate a lot of fast food.
- pempem 5y ago
  The CEO famously does not.
vkou 5y ago
Montessori schools have been on the rise for a while because traditional schooling is dehumanizing and authoritarian, not because traditional schooling has too many electronic devices. I don't know enough to comment on whether or not their educational outcomes are 'better', or what definition of 'better' we should use.
- pempem 5y ago
  Can it be both? There are schools using facial recognition - not just electronic learning devices (1) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20843076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20843076 I'm not sure the frustration is any different than when my teachers would pop in a movie rather than teaching me about a subject
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Montessori schools attract rich families. It really helps if you're not schooling kids from the ghetto and have a nice budget to hire extra teachers.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

black_13 5y ago

taurusnoises 5y ago

> "The more important point here is that believing techie parents have secret insider knowledge about the harmful effects of children’s technology usage reinforces the dangerous myth that techies are always the smartest people in the room — and that the more technical they are, the more wide-ranging their expertise." This is a strawman argument. The point is that the people closest to the genesis, application, development, and conversations around tech, are in a particularly unique position to understand its effects (the very effects that were designed to happen). It's not that we think developers are superhuman and have secret knowledge. It's that the ones in question have designed platforms to specifically addict its users, and if these same people are not allowing their kids to use the technology, that speaks volumes.

licebmi__at__ 5y ago

Wow, so reading the comments it seems like HN is now one of these sites where people just comment on the headline without reading the article. The article spends about a third of length on the topic if tech might be good for kids or not, the rest (and the meat) is an argument against "the techies as thought leaders because we live in a tech world", and the idea that tech people are uniquely able to understand the consequences of tech on society just because they built it. Actually when reflecting to that, it's even more ironic that the comments in this tech forum fail to address the point and even the top comment talks about the author "inferiority complex".

ryder9 5y ago
xyzzy21 5y ago
Well, I'd argue tech people have a unique perspective on tech: we've used it the longest and understand it better than most people. I for one have a fundamental creed from using the internet since the 1980s and computers since the 1970s: 99% of a all problems best solved without technology and if your first go-to is a technology solution, you are an idiot, a shitty engineer and questionable as a solution creator. Why? Because I've seen technologies come and go all bleating the same promises that are never kept. And if you truly examine the problems they are trying to address, you see most of the time that the question is wrong or the answer is ill-posed. Most peoples are solvable by communication between humans in a negotiated fashion. These are also the cheapest and fastest solutions. The details of what negotiation means are pretty wide open, but still technology should NEVER be your first, second, third or fifth solution proposal!
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > but still technology should NEVER be your first, second, third or fifth solution proposal! So always the fourth, then?