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A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The ov

• Gigachad 6mo ago
  As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.
  • BostonFern 6mo ago
    That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.
    • arafeq 6mo ago
      [flagged]
    • Gigachad 6mo ago
      You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.
      • cindyllm 6mo ago
        [dead]
      • BostonFern 6mo ago
        Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children? My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age). Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies. It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success. To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
  • lmm 6mo ago
    > Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience Are you sure it isn't both? Learning how to bypass the school's internet filtering so that I could get to flash games and reddit probably taught me more than anything in the lessons.
• gritspants 6mo ago
  I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.
  • Gigachad 6mo ago
    I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers. No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
    • brobdingnagians 6mo ago
      Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at using computers: http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co... It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
      • Gigachad 6mo ago
        I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response. It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
        • Ekaros 6mo ago
          I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating such exercise would take and what should be the tools or sources to verify the output but that might be helpful excersise.
• kzrdude 6mo ago
  About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age actually.
  • SiempreViernes 6mo ago
    Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.
    • brabel 6mo ago
      Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.
    • tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
      Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to go for most.
• supersaw 6mo ago
  The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-for-de-yngste/id3152323/ https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
• graemep 6mo ago
  "screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online. The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing. Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children. I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
  • teekert 6mo ago
    Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.
    • jasonmp85 6mo ago
      This is written with what feels like the peak understanding of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!" An allowlist might be a good place to start.
      • kbelder 6mo ago
        That might slow them down. Could any of the IT professionals, here, think of a way around it? Then likely the kids could.
        • ziml77 6mo ago
          They don't even have to think of a way around any of it. They just need to search online to find someone who has found a way around it. Or prompt AI to come up with a solution. And even if someone is so dull that they don't think about that, it will probably make it to them as the info spreads by word of mouth.
• mentalgear 6mo ago
  ~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
  • gambiting 6mo ago
    But think of all the shareholder value that was created, surely that makes it worth it /s
  • zigman1 6mo ago
    That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation. I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
• rimliu 6mo ago
  if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.
  • lucb1e 6mo ago
    Could say the same about language, driving, and writing systems? Steve Jobs popularized among startup/HN audiences that intuitive interfaces are the best interfaces, but I have yet to see evidence for that. Are systems that work without education truly better than those where you might be a lot more effective with some amount of study? Probably there's an optimal point, like a year of full-time education to use your OS won't pay off at median longevity, but whether <5 minutes of learning is the optimum... It's great for onboarding people to your tech product, though. Incentives may be misaligned between what's best for the users and what's best for the cashflow
• KurSix 6mo ago
  It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time
• szmarczak 6mo ago
  > The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature. The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
  • SSLy 6mo ago
    remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)
    • szmarczak 6mo ago
      Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)
  • darkwater 6mo ago
    It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.
  • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
    See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading. Lots to think about there. https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scrolling-did-to-reading https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
  • tzs 6mo ago
    I have personally found it is often easier to find things in a physical book. Say I want to look up an equation that I remember learning about from a particular book. If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation. I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot. With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book. I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.
• duskdozer 6mo ago
  >Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
• something765478 6mo ago
  Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.
  • ziml77 6mo ago
    That was my experience as well. I did best in the classes where I didn't have a laptop out. I had no temptations to be distracted and simply writing down the notes by hand was a huge benefit. I suspect the people I see saying they were able to not get distracted when using a laptop in class are either outliers or liars.
• eviks 6mo ago
  > You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!
  • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
    Even with books, stuff happens, you can skip ahead a chapter, consult the index, follow a footnote... or put another book on the table.
• luqtas 6mo ago
  there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
  • FarmerPotato 6mo ago
    You assert a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials: Screen readers take longer. Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source... Another https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut... Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.987964/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here: https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scrolling-did-to-reading https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
    • luqtas 6mo ago
      you managed to gather with all the research you cited minus the blog post, less than 100 participants. if you think this is enough to conclude anything i may warn you are tripping balls i suggest you do some read, specially of effect sizes found in many studies showing "better performance" (minuscule effect size). there's a plethora of political things you'll ignore by thinking books are better. i gathered you some stuff (there are more than 200,000 people studied on the links i'm sending to you) and i truly hope you don't try to counter-argument by pointing some meta-analysis i linked concluding the analog is better. they admit the effect is minimal to negligent and if you actually consider studies done on text that user doesn't have to "scroll" but rather advance the page with a tap/pgDN and the user don't have their social media hooked on their device (muted or absent), there literally NO EVEDIENCE of any difference between paper and digital learning [0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001 [1] https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0-S1747938X18300101-main.pdf https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/ [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8 [4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772503024000288 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277250302...
• hk__2 6mo ago
  > Source: I have 10 Finnish kids Wait what?
  • Izikiel43 6mo ago
    This guy alone is trying to raise Finland's birth rate.
• postscapes1 6mo ago
  That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad of 3
• mlsu 6mo ago
  At what point do we stop and admit that paper books are superior in all cases. It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.
• thatwasunusual 6mo ago
  > A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)
• oschvr 6mo ago
  Wait you have 10 kids !!?!? Much respect