4 ms·

I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard. How many people

I think it might be more subtle an issue. I don't know if having phones makes you dumber as much as it gives you an excuse to not try as hard. How many people in the old days said that maths was defunct now that we had calculators. No need to try, I'll just ask the calculator. Same thing with the high number of examples of "I home-schooled our kids and now they are clever" as an implication that schools are bad and kids will just learn anyway. The importance of learning is not just storing facts but exercising the grey-stuff to think laterally, to be creative, to experience non-instinctive solutions to problems that you simply would not work out by yourself (unless you are lucky). Also, helps you to know how to apply knowledge and problem-solving. So having phones, and the internet, feels like people are not learning how to apply stuff and going into the world of work thinking that everything is just about facts that you can lookup.

HPsquared 3y ago
That, or the curriculum is obsolete. If people live in a world of ubiquitous phones and internet access, maybe we should teach them how to live in such a world.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Both/and, not either/or. Yes, that's the world they now live in. They need to know how to communicate (both send and receive) in voice and video. But there's some good stuff in the highlights of what was produced over the last several thousand years. All of that stuff is written. Then need to be able to access that too. And, since a significant fraction of the more thought-oriented stuff is still in writing, they also need to be able to write.