4 ms·

We didn't have any tech in school and yet we've turned out just fine, now sitting here and typing this on HN. I'm all for banning tech from schools. Allowing Go

We didn't have any tech in school and yet we've turned out just fine, now sitting here and typing this on HN. I'm all for banning tech from schools. Allowing Google to enter the school system has been a crime against our children.

lakpan 3y ago
> crime against our children. Sounds a bit hyperbolic. How are kids being hurt by Google specifically?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blackhaz 3y ago
  Take a read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4 Not specifically related to Google, but we are making our kids write less, which literally dumbs them down: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriting_in_early_childhood_education_Current_research_and_future_implications https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriti... (You can find lots of research on this, there's no controversy here.) Somewhat less of a profound problem is the extreme amount of pollution: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highlights-problems-of-short-lived-laptops-in-schools/ https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-hi... My kid has brought his third Chromebook in just a few years from school. We are all going to pay for all this, while the big tech generates billions of profits and the whole planet is marching towards tech feudalism.
  - jfoster 3y ago
    This case isn't about whether kids use keyboards or not. It's about whether they use Chromebooks.
throwaway71271 3y ago
We are very much responsible for being on the wrong side in the war against general purpose computing. The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop". She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to some One Drive permission thing, then she uploads it to her teacher in Teams, and it gets automatically converted from docx to odt or something else, so what she sees is not what the teacher sees, and of course there were subtle differences in the order of the images and etc, so it affects her grade. She got quite stressed until I just told her to make a pdf and upload it, but she was smart to double check and download the uploaded file and figure out its not right. I just dont understand how did we end up here, but more importantly, I dont understand what to do to make it better, so I am just withdrawing, going into a world of riscv and 1.44 floppy drives and just live in a parallel tech universe.
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  > I just dont understand how did we end up here The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple. So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over. > we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America. Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple
  - op00to 3y ago
    Without those Apple 2 donations, I would not be providing for my family in the way I am now.
op00to 3y ago
I did have tech in school in the 80s. I also did fine. Maybe it’s the school district and the parents and the community not a single tool.

lakpan 3y ago

> crime against our children. Sounds a bit hyperbolic. How are kids being hurt by Google specifically?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blackhaz 3y ago
Take a read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-021-00599-4 Not specifically related to Google, but we are making our kids write less, which literally dumbs them down: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriting_in_early_childhood_education_Current_research_and_future_implications https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264763007_Handwriti... (You can find lots of research on this, there's no controversy here.) Somewhat less of a profound problem is the extreme amount of pollution: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-highlights-problems-of-short-lived-laptops-in-schools/ https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/chromebook-churn-report-hi... My kid has brought his third Chromebook in just a few years from school. We are all going to pay for all this, while the big tech generates billions of profits and the whole planet is marching towards tech feudalism.
- jfoster 3y ago
  This case isn't about whether kids use keyboards or not. It's about whether they use Chromebooks.

throwaway71271 3y ago

We are very much responsible for being on the wrong side in the war against general purpose computing. The "user" not being able to change or understand any single program they use, being driven further and further away form the technology, in an almost comical way, that we have arrived to the point of "I dont know if i can plug a keyboard in my laptop". She tried to save a file, which of course did not work due to some One Drive permission thing, then she uploads it to her teacher in Teams, and it gets automatically converted from docx to odt or something else, so what she sees is not what the teacher sees, and of course there were subtle differences in the order of the images and etc, so it affects her grade. She got quite stressed until I just told her to make a pdf and upload it, but she was smart to double check and download the uploaded file and figure out its not right. I just dont understand how did we end up here, but more importantly, I dont understand what to do to make it better, so I am just withdrawing, going into a world of riscv and 1.44 floppy drives and just live in a parallel tech universe.

ants_everywhere 3y ago
> I just dont understand how did we end up here The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple. So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over. > we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America. Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple
- op00to 3y ago
  Without those Apple 2 donations, I would not be providing for my family in the way I am now.

op00to 3y ago

I did have tech in school in the 80s. I also did fine. Maybe it’s the school district and the parents and the community not a single tool.