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$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents
- nillkiggers1488 8mo ago[dead]
- selectively 8mo agoUnrelated to the laptops. Also, please don't link low quality sources (Yahoo) on HN.
- walterbell 8mo ago> Unrelated to the laptops From the article: In written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology.. Horvath blamed.. tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. > low quality sources Fortune Magazine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine) The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles.
- bob001 8mo agoWhich is all fluff until someone links to a peer reviewed study.
- walterbell 8mo agohttps://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum... Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.
- bob001 8mo agoLet's see what this study actually says, shall we? > Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in mathematics than students who spent no time, even after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, and this positive relationship is observed in over half (45 countries and economies) of all systems with available data. That sounds like school laptops to me.
- qsera 8mo ago>peer reviewed study.. So you trust the peer, but not the author? How come?
- bob001 8mo agoThe peer review process provides a minimal level of verification, and the paper provides details that can be directly looked at.
- qsera 8mo ago>The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author. Because both the author and the peer are not accountable to you or to mostly none. So "peer review", without any other qualification is as good as shit. Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.
- bob001 8mo ago> But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy. Not one. Not the other. The failure mode is that BOTH are untrustworthy and not that EITHER is untrustworthy on their own. This is different from no peer review where the author is a single point of failure. There is furthermore the overall system of peer review with some level of checks within it if a peer or author end up being visibly untrustworthy. Not perfect however the same can be said for every single part of human society. > Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle. And I sort of chuckle at people like you who don't realize that all of human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework. It's not about absolutes but about levels of trustworthiness and system level checks. Edit: In this case, for example, the quote is based on a study that the speaker did not publish. The study actually says the exact opposite. So now there's THREE levels of trust that can cross verify. The speaker, the original study authors and the peer reviews. In this case the speaker clearly is not trustworthy as their own source material disagrees with them. Had I simply blindly trusted the speaker this would not have been evident but due to having a study I can verify.
- juggerl6 8mo ago[dead]
- magicalhippo 8mo agoOriginal source is https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z-less-cognitively-capable-parents-first-time-cellphone-bans-standardized-test-scores/ https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
- selectively 8mo agoAlso a low quality source.
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoYahoo is a common, accepted source: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com
- snayan 8mo agolaptops are to cognitive capabilities as syringes are to heroin overdoses. It's just one of the many delivery mechanisms for brainrot in the 21st century.
- NateEag 8mo agoThere are two you can take with you into a classroom: * laptop * smartphone
- selectively 8mo agoSomething very wrong with you.
- yieldcrv 8mo agobrainrot, they know
- telman17 8mo agoThis article tries to put the blame on laptops when the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class, whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class, and teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching. Ban phones from class. For real. Lock down websites that are irrelevant to the subjects being taught. These are all technically possible with the tools schools have. Even Youtube. If something is important enough to show the class, the teacher can show it on their larger screen. Half these issues can be solved by teaching kids how to use technology meaningfully instead of using it as a babysitter.
- japhyr 8mo ago> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands. I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
- telman17 8mo agoI can definitely see the push for using technology in schools - what you're saying makes sense. It's not the individual teachers I blame. I come from a family of educators and a lot of the crappy enforcement falls to the district level, who just want to make the parents happy. There is literally no reason a child needs a cell phone in class. Computers are great. Lock them down. There is nothing unreasonable about this.
- xethos 8mo agoAre we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?
- hnburnsy 8mo agoDidn't OLPC spend 40 to 80 million in R&D, and then governments spent $1B+ deploying them? How did that work out?
- Herring 8mo agoArticle didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time, so we really get to understand/mirror/like/support each other. Anyone who has tried Duolingo gets this. Drop me in China with Chinese friends and I'll learn 100x faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
- ghaff 8mo agoI'm not sure anybody disputes that immersive language learning is the best path to picking up a language. It just isn't very practical for most people.
- don-bright 8mo agoEven bird watching. I try these apps and nothing sticks. Books ok. But I go for a hour walk with experts talking and I can remember the entire scene of the bird, what it was perched on, its sound, its name, its appearance, its behavior.
- bonsai_spool 8mo ago> Article didn't explain why tech doesn't work in education. It's biological. We evolved to learn from and interact with other humans, preferably the same group over a long time All of this is so far from anything evolution would have selected for that we can pick our favorite argument: 'well humans are unique in our tool use, so we should be encouraging kids to learn new tools instead of explicit teaching (like montessori)' or 'well humans never learned to read until about 100 years ago and computers can read for us so don't teach this new-fangled reading stuff' It's not a helpful frame. The language thing is totally distinct—that really is an innate human thing among children. So again we can't make useful evolution-based claims about adult language education.
- NooneAtAll3 8mo ago"we evolved to talk not to write and read" "we evolved to remember what happened to us, not to learn history of countries on the opposite side of the planet" this argument doesn't work. if you want to claim harm - talk about the harm directly. stop hiding behind "evolution" and "biological"
- nsainsbury 8mo agoJust wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it. eg. See [1] which finds: "The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class." and "high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation." There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-san-diego-finds-one-in-eight-freshmen-lack-high-school-math-skills/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...
- Morromist 8mo agoTotally. We can't really measure the effect on people graduating from college right now but I'm pretty sure the value of the average college education is down since the advent of AI due to mass cheating and professors having to tailor their classes away from things AI can take advantage of. The students who love to learn will still be doing just fine, but the others - I doubt it.
- hedora 8mo agoI’m not convinced laptops were as big an issue as intentionally sabotaging the US educational system with things like No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
- tzone 8mo agoTrend is pretty clear pretty much across all western countries. Even among ones that have supposedly highest quality public education like Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc... People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.
- juggerl6 8mo ago[dead]
- piggerl 8mo ago[flagged]
- clipsy 8mo agoIf you aren't going to tell us what the elephant in the room is, aren't you part of the problem?
- piggerl 8mo ago[dead]
- nillkiggers1488 8mo ago[dead]
- austin-cheney 8mo agoThose are bad but they do not penalize the more competent half of students. Use of laptops as an educational tool penalize everyone equally.
- zekenie 8mo agoIt’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect
- jimbokun 8mo agoPersonally I’m in favor of empiricism when it comes to deciding how to educate our young people, not some vague feeling of “belief”.
- ihsw 8mo ago[dead]
- montroser 8mo agoWe have no way of knowing the laptops' effect on isolation, so this is just clickbait. For all we know, the generation would have been even less cognitively capable, but for the laptops...
- maerF0x0 8mo agoAlso we do not know if those kids are better at skills that are more relevant today -- coding, social media marketing, deciding between health insurance and bread.
- wasntitlower 8mo agoI thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I might be wrong, and I don't want to necessarily google "is X happening" because that looks like it yields articles that affirm it, and I don't know what a trustworthy source would be. Either way, I don't live in a place where laptops were pushed to teens, but I do know uni teachers who told me some horrifying tales about freshmen, like ones who could not understand how to submit a doc on moodle, as in they would write it on google docs, take a photo on the phone and submit that.
- sapphicsnail 8mo ago> I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn. I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
- DauntingPear7 8mo agoThere was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
- npunt 8mo agoEh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them. And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
- jacquesm 8mo agoPretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper. There is value in being able to automate things, but there is far more value in being able to first to learn how to do stuff yourself.
- dzdt 8mo agoWhat percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?
- beej71 8mo ago> Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper. That'll do something, but making maximally-capable individuals probably ain't it. There's a balance to be struck here.
- renegade-otter 8mo agoFor sure, but let's be honest - if us adults struggle with how good Big Tech is at making the devices addictive, the young mushy brains have no change.
- Morromist 8mo agoI don't agree with them but many people now say that in 10-20 years computers will become magical thinking machines that can do pretty nearly any cognitive task. At that point I wonder what the point of learning technology will be? Perhaps it would be best to learn about logic and how the world works so you can interact with these magical machines more effectively, and not learn much about how the machines actually work - you won't be tinkering with their insides anyway. So yeah, if that comes to pass why not go back to paper. Have the kids study science, logic, history, etc and forget about technology, except for the few weird ones who just can't keep away from it.
- somenameforme 8mo agoThis issue has been a staple of sci-fi forever, because it trends towards a somewhat predictable outcome. What happens when technology outpaces the competence and understanding of people behind it, and then runs into a problem?
- with 8mo agothe article blames the laptops but conveniently ignores that the same generation was also raised by parents who handed them iPhones at age 3. isn't school screen time a rounding error compared to the 6+ hours of daily personal screen time happening at home?
- srean 8mo agohttps://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm". The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
- exabrial 8mo agoBut it did make a lot of rich guys richer.
- colbyn 8mo agoFor context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.
- eucyclos 8mo agoI am fascinated by the reverse Flynn effect - do you have a favorite theory to explain it?
- rvrsflnane 8mo agoThe "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription. But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions. The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/06/article-out-first-names-cognitive-ability-and-social-status-in-denmark/ https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/06/article-out-first-names...
- eucyclos 8mo agoFascinating. I'm reminded of the 'conservation of ninjutsu' trope. We've known for a while that birth rates fall as education rates increase, but this almost suggests there's a 'conservation of iq' principle at a population level- you can have growing population or iq, but not both!
- ceramati 8mo agoSounds like it depends how the population is growing.
- colbyn 8mo agoNope. For all I know it’s due to the sins of the people. The reckoning of heaven.
- austin-cheney 8mo agoThe best example of this are drivers who stop in traffic circles to check a map in their phone.
- marcus_holmes 8mo agoUtter rubbish, designed as clickbait for older folks. Every generations dunks on the next one, right up until it's time to change the clock on the VCR and only the kids can do that. Kids are growing up in a different world than we did. They need different skills, and probably a different cognition. Teaching them to deal with rapid attention shifts is probably going to equip them better for their actual lives than trying to make them focus on one subject for hours.
- hereme888 8mo agoCompletely agree. Pit those retiring baby boomers against the efficiency and capabilities of the new generations.
- hirvi74 8mo agoI don’t know anyone in my life who, given enough time, could recite entire epics like Homer’s The Odyssey the way some of the Ancient Greeks could. But I wouldn’t say modern people are cognitively “less capable” than those Ancient Greeks. Organisms adapt to their environments or perish -- the mind is no different. Given the current technological landscape, I think we may eventually have to admit that Gen Z and the ones after have adapted to their environments, too. Maybe retaining information is simply less valuable as a skill (like memorizing entire epics) when easy access to a modern Library of Alexandria is right at our fingertips? Yes, it's painful to think about and uncomfortable on some level. It's probably like how Socrates felt about reading and writing when he described it as, "an elixir not of memory, but of reminding" and that reliance on it will "produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it." Though, one caveat that is important to mention is that education is not valued on a mass cultural level in this country, comparatively speaking. But that is a discussion for a different time.
- PearlRiver 8mo agoComputers have gotten too good. In my time they broke all the time (sometimes your own fault for downloading those sketchy videogames) and they never did what you wanted them too. You had to actually learn stuff- including highly technical English.
- gdelfino01 8mo agoBring back the indestructible Apple ][e and put let the kids program in logo (turtle graphics) for 1 or 2 hours per week max. The will not hurt them while society takes a few years to figure out how the introduction of technology in education went so catastrophically bad.
- crims0n 8mo agoYou joke but I think there is value in ripping all tech out except for a computer lab where kids can learn something productive like programming, graphic design, etc. Tech is ubiquitous now, there is no reason to need exposure to it in school (anymore). We should be doing what maximizes learning - which we now know is not tech.
- bandrami 8mo agoI do miss the days before wireless and mobile when the Internet was a place in your home or school that you sat at.
- ArchieScrivener 8mo agoMany many many people warned against this step, the same people that told you not to let the gov. into healthcare, but the same people didn't listen and we are left with degrading outcomes. Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
- Ifkaluva 8mo agoI lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoRelated: Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424
- slicktux 8mo agoI went to schools that had the latest tech for computer labs. Apple Macintosh computers…the colorful ones. Anyway, we had the latest but I did not learn what I wanted to; which was how a computer works. Instead class was just about browsing within the walled garden of the operating system and making videos and typing. Just because one has the latest tech dos not mean they’ll learn. I learned more on my own with used computers then I did in school. I was able to break things and fix them.
- mwkaufma 8mo agoAnecdotal evidence of specious claim.
- htunnicliff 8mo agoCanonical article source: (paywalled) https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z-less-cognitively-capable-parents-first-time-cellphone-bans-standardized-test-scores/ https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/laptops-tablets-schools-gen-z...
- gnabgib 8mo agoYou're 2 hours late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117183
- dlev_pika 8mo agoYeah, totally the laptops, not the immense bullshit we surround ourselves with
- bentt 8mo agoLaptops didnt cause US schools to abandon traditional methods of teaching reading and writing. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ Laptops also didn’t integrate special ed in mainstream classrooms. While it’s the right thing to do for other reasons, the net effect hasn’t been to make all kids experiences or learning better.
- blackqueeriroh 8mo agoThis guy is a hack
- YesBox 8mo agoBy the time I was in high school, we had laptop carts that were rolled out for a few classes (as in a handful of times per year). This was 2004+. We also had computer labs since elementary school. Iirc laptops were used when labs were booked up. I recall the experience being distracting. Computers are more fun than classes. No matter how much you lock down the machine, a kid will figure a way to make it more interesting than class. Computers can do so much. Children are curious. I remember sneaking in flash games, ms paint/kidpix, browsing the web and whatever. Anecdotal.. but i certainly wasn’t the only kid fooling around. I don’t know what the “right amount” is, but I turned out ok. Though the iPhone was introduced after I graduated high school
- mrwh 8mo agoI went to school at what I realise was an unusual interregnum between computerisation. Too young for the BBC micro (there was one, in the library, at my secondary school, that was never turned on), too old for PCs or Archimedes or whatever came later in the 90s. In retrospect, not a bad thing.
- revolvingthrow 8mo agoI guess my buddies using laptops in electrical engineering 10 years ago also got dumber? Ought to have done programming and CAD with pen and paper. I wish I had a laptop earlier - or even better, a tablet with a good pen and attachable keyboard. I’m struggling to think of a disadvantage vs dead tree [note]books. Doodle right on the pdf textbook, dump things to remember into some flashcards app, have notes as searchable files / the ability to share them with everybody, or just a calendar of what’s happening when so you’re not surprised by a test that was announced when you blew off school for a day to do stupid teenager things. The only actual issue is that computers are excellent slaves but terrible masters, and it’s a lot easier to get distracted by doom or tiktok when you got a computer you’re actively using. Yet surely this is solvable? Given how annoyingly locked down the average company-given dev machine is, surely it’s possible to restrict it for students during school time? It should certainly be much easier than to control private smartphones.
- pertymcpert 8mo agoDid you read the article?
- spaqin 8mo agoI think he might have gotten too distracted. Yeah, in an academic setting, in higher education, it might make sense like he mentioned. Still a personal preference. for me a laptop will never beat taking notes by hand on paper.
- EagnaIonat 8mo agoWhen I first started learning C in uni many years ago, we were forced to use vi and command line, despite there being functional IDEs. The argument then was IDEs cause cognitive offloading and you don't actually learn to the fullest extent. By forcing us to do everything manually helped us understand how the compiler works, how to debug errors, etc. This is what current systems are doing. There is a good article that explains it much better https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Memory%20Paradox_%20Why%20Our%20Brains%20Need%20Knowledge%20in%20an%20Age%20of%20AI%202025-4676.pdf https://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Memory%20Paradox_%20Why%20O... > Oakley, B., Johnston, M., Chen, K.-Z., Jung, E., & Sejnowski, T. (2025). > “The Memory Paradox: > Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI.” In The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: > Challenges and Opportunities (Springer Nature, forthcoming).
- moi2388 8mo agoWith the possibility of unintentionally sounding racist.. “ Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one” The percentage of immigrants or non-native English speakers is also increasing in the US (and in the EU). Since these groups historically also scored lower, one would expect the general scores at least partially lowered due to this. Also add in Covid with two years of interrupted lessons and work-from-home, I wouldn’t be so quick to blame this solely on laptops.
- servo_sausage 8mo agoEvery study like this needs to adjust for common compounding factors; demographics, income, teaching methods, covid... Otherwise it's junk data, we have have no idea if lower performance is due to more migrants, more computers, less sugar in cereal or whatever.
- moi2388 8mo agoYes. And follow them as cohort. Do they start behind? Or gradually got worse? Or actually improved more than the previous generations?
- ben5 8mo ago[dead]
- ivanstepanovftw 8mo agoThis is probably misleading information. Kids and their parents aren't responsible for their math performance. Teachers are. Especially the ones that demotivate their students.
- Aurornis 8mo agoThis isn’t a simple topic where all but one involved part gets completely excused. Parental involvement is highly correlated with childhood educational success. Parents can’t hand off the entirety of the responsibly for their children’s educations to teachers.
- black_13 8mo ago[dead]
- dwedge 8mo agoIt being the first time a generation scored worse surprises me because it has been pretty obvious in the UK at least that the syllabus for children has been systematically and progressively dumbed down for at least the last 30 years. One concrete example I remember is in sixth form in the UK when I was there, in order to address poor example results in maths, they replaced Core Maths 1-6 with Pure Maths 1-6, the 6 modules of the latter only containing the material from the first 4 modules of the former
- anal_reactor 8mo ago1. Parents whine and bitch every time their precious little baby is expected to do any actual work. 2. Governments dumb down education programs. Some do it to massage the statistics and make education look good, others do it because they honestly think that's how you help teachers give more attention to low-performing students. The effect is the widening "education gap" - the difference between kids whose parents sign them up for extracurricular activities, and the ipad kids.
- siliconpotato 8mo agoImagine what it will be like for the generation who are currently using chatgpt to do their homework only for the teacher to use AI to mark it
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kkfx 8mo agoThe issue isn't the laptops, but the proprietary software and the fact that teachers don't know how to use even a desktop on average, so they're even less capable of teaching it. IF you teach how to use a FLOSS desktop, you're providing what's actually needed in the modern world; if you do Big Tech a favor by using their services in schools, you get a collapse in cognitive ability, which is exactly what happened. People just need to understand this and actually have the will to understand it.
- spaqin 8mo agoIf not for my job, I would never have a need to type a single line in a Linux terminal. I don't know what does that have to do with modern world.
- kkfx 8mo agoThat's because you haven't seen IT in action outside of your job yet, I'm talking about its true potential. It's not about the terminal or Emacs (the 2D shell), it's about the paradigm. If you teach free software, you're teaching people how to know, not just how to follow the tracks someone else laid down. You're teaching them how to tell if a news is fake or not, how to use a feed reader to follow various sources instead of relying on whatever aggregator is popular at the moment, and how to communicate from their own home without depending on third parties, and so on. You're creating a population that understands the meaning of digital ownership/property and knows how to manage it, so they aren't slaves to the tech giants and instead have a hunger for knowledge. In other words, you're putting the gnoseological tools of the present into the hands of the masses. With the GAFAM model, which is basically just mainframes made worse and expanded, you're creating dependency instead. You're creating slaves, not citizens; people who just comment under articles provided by some PR hack, who don't know how to start a thread on their own topic or write their own piece, people who don't have a domain name as their home address IRL, and so on. People who own nothing and, as such, not Citizens, but subjects of the few who do own everything.
- grim_io 8mo agoComputers are a distraction. Unless they are specifically needed, they should not be used for basic education. Don't force kids to wade through a thousand layers of abstraction just to write down a word or to draw a circle.
- insane_dreamer 8mo agoI think the pandemic made it clear that in-person teaching by teachers is the most important component for educational success, not "edtech".
- tsoukase 8mo agoCognitive weakness, at least in the West, go in parallel with other social phenomena: diminishing fertility, finacial deterioration (then one job fed 6, now two are not enough for 3), smart devices that make people dumb, trendy wars, stress/depression pandemia etc Some are causes and the rest results but nobody knows which ones: the egg made the chicken or the chicken the egg?
- gilbetron 8mo agoI have a 17 year old High School Junior, so I'm in the depths of the modern education system. Plus I had a brother that was a Professor of Education Technology. Plus, shocking on HN, I'm deep in tech myself. I have mixed feelings on all this. The education system largely seems a bit better than when I was in school, however the impetus to learn has to be entirely provided by the parent (or innately by the rare student). Socially, it is a big problem because of phones, kids don't interact face-to-face nearly as much, as they can easily escape into the phone world. But laptops? They seem fine, largely a positive, probably worth the cost? I'm undoubtedly far more aware of what and how my son does in school than my parents were. Teachers seem to use whatever works best, and there are lazy teacher and great teachers. The great ones use tech to great effect. One of my son's worst teachers didn't let them use laptops and did everything with paper, and she was terrible. Tech isn't a magic cure, but neither is paper! I know my son is a better thinker, more informed, knows much more about life, history and science then I did at his age. If he wants to know something he can dig into it and learn what he wants. I had to bike up to the library and pray they had a decent book on the subject (they rarely did). All that being said, AI is a big threat, but again, it will be a big differentiator. Those that want to learn we'll accelerate away from those that don't. In many ways I feel like my son is on the proverbial last chopper out of 'Nam, when it comes to the public school system. Of course, it also feels like going from the frying pan into the fire with the state of the world, but that's another topic.
- auntlydiahere 8mo agoI think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that the media/content is very visually biased these days, so when our children are exposed to it, they don't use the same parts of the brain that their parents used to use when reading and handwriting text. Visual content is more emotional than written content and doesn't process the same in the brain. If they would still keep laptops but bias it towards text content and still require handwriting and deliberate processes. Maybe it would help a bit. Throwing out technology is not an answer in an advancing world. Smells like "a handmaid's tale" to me.
- jmpman 8mo agoI doubt it's the laptops. The problem is they removed the physical books. I have a hard time teaching my kids using their laptops. Before, you could just crack open their textbooks and follow along.
- tim-tday 8mo agoAnd covid And AI And social media And smartphones And constant fear of school shootings But sure, maybe it was laptops
- throwawaypath 8mo agoImport the third world, get third world results.