Most HS teachers aren’t world class debaters and may have been arguing from faulty premises, but that doesn’t mean the point stands that learning how to do X, Y

Most HS teachers aren’t world class debaters and may have been arguing from faulty premises, but that doesn’t mean the point stands that learning how to do X, Y, and Z without a phone can be a valuable skill. If you were to be overly reliant on phones for easy problem solving, or even medium problem solving (more and more enabled by LLMs), you’d not be building the underlying skills to deal with novel but simple problems that the internet/LLMs don’t know about. And you’d not build the foundation to help you with solving harder problems. Plus, while computers are great for allowing us to “know” much more information than before without actually knowing it, it is still a different kind of knowing. The things you know in your head you can internalize and use to build connections between ideas, a more accurate world view, quickly connect disparate ideas. You also, even if you don’t remember all the details, know the general gist. If you rely too much on the internet, you don’t know that some concepts even exist, and you can fail to internalize or truly understand something. I’ll give you one example: sometimes I look up programming stuff on the internet if I get stuck. If I immediately jumped to that every time I had a problem, I would not learn very much. Since I treat this as a last resort, I have learned a lot about programming from the process of figuring things out myself first by reading code. This has allowed me to build the skill of seeing an answer and thinking “oh, they got the general gist, but what they suggest is actually a bit over complicated” or “this is a good answer but for a different problem than the question/I am asking” - something noobs don’t discern as well.