THIS. PREACH. I couldn't say it better myself. Abso-friggin-lutely.

"Technology" is SUCH an abused word by these absolute simpletons. "Technology" didn't cause this. They did what they always do: They thoughtlessly expect their false god, The Market, to somehow organically solve the problem of education and human betterment, if only we sacrifice enough money to it.

Giving kids laptops? MAYBE, right? Huge MAYBE. Ask any generation if elementary schoolers on unsupervised internet connections was a good friggin idea.

But tablets and Chromebooks?! GTFO. Right out. Those things are barely "technology." They're consumption devices optimized primarily to make ongoing profit from their users.

In 95% of cases, I'll wager, nobody's getting hands-on learning from a friggin iPad or Chromebook. Trying to "replace" standard desktops with those things collectively killed a huge chunk of our cognitive abilities as a society.

we let tech-bro-oligarchs decide EVERYTHING related to tech for two entire fucking decades and are just SHOCKED they did the thing that was best for profits, not the children (whose lives it was actively ruining for profit).

ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.

So many usability decisions and standards were coming from public univerisities and publicly transparent nonprofits. (Why we have an Internet that's open source at its core, for instance. But I have a lot to research...) Even privately, standards were about the benefit of the users, rather than

"Let's copy every decision Apple makes because look at their stonk price and slavishly drooling fanbase."

My mom used to be awesome with our Windows 95 Packard Bell. She used internet forums, she figured out eBay when it was brand new, she ran DXDiag when games weren't working. She knew how to freaking DEFRAG the thing.

Now she struggles and panics to do the most basic thing if it's not 1-step on her iPhone. It's tragic. Heartbreaking. And I hate them for it.

We let the filthy marketers from packaged goods and casino industries run amok in tech, and that's how we got here : Tech is largely not the incredible new tools we dreamed of to live better lives, instead its often closer to smoking and gambling .

If you let marketers take over anything , unregulated, it inevitably takes the form of toxic vice, because our poorest choices make them the richest.

Mainstream technology doesn't connect us, it isolates us. It doesn't educate us, it actively endeavors to make us stupid . Every freaking bit of bandwidth reaching our eyeballs on the mainstream net is dedicated to reducing "friction" to rob our wallets and personal data.

I'm INFURIATED that most people can't even handle organizing a file system anymore. Only private schools seem to teach actual computer education, and they all bought into this stupid lie that the "future" is cloud subscriptions served on brainrot e-waste.

I feel like we need to start "desktop computer clubs" or something. Seeing this crap like they're trying to extinguish the personal computer is basically a declaration of war in my book...

moreover, I'm convinced the entire reason my generation (millennials) turned out to be tech-savvy was because adults didn't understand it, were trying to control and curtail our usage, and we were mostly focused on finding ways to circumvent boomer and gen-x meddling in our usage.

Nailed it. This is equally true for many countries beyond the US.

ive seen parents give phones to toddlers watching on the phones, ipads just to shut them up. defunding is mostly done by republicans, underfunding is pretty everywhere else, even in pretty decent blue areas. the money goes to admin/bureaucracy and redtaping teachers. the books, i recently saw students at my former hs, from 10+years ago sitll using the same kind of book( the blue book for chemistry edition), but they need to use newer books with updated info.

Giving kids laptops was a great idea. Letting corporations use those laptops to brainwash our children was probably not.

Correct, and an actual study can isolate variables and when you do that, tech is usually a boon. It's especially easy to do with tech, but long term studies are still difficult because of history effects and imperfect control groups.

I can believe Gen Z is doing worse, but almost every study I've been around in education has found Socioeconomic Status to be the strongest factor (by far) and given Gen Z and Alpha are raised by the first generations to have economic decline, it stands to reason that's probably the main factor here.

School interventions do help to some degree to mitigate SES, it's just hard when it's this bad for this long. We're talking decades of decline.

It would have been a longer and more complex article requiring a lot of research if they tried to go through all the issues that could be contributing. Hell, it'd be a book.

THANK YOU. As a teacher, this guy made me rage hard. And even harder when older teachers who already hate technology latched on to it as an excuse. Show me evidence for fucks sake when middle school teachers are ALSO now teaching multiple subject areas, have way less prep time, the school has less money, are also responsible for live online grading and access to assignments.

Also, I love fediverse. Rational mind heaven

That is brought up near the end of the article.

While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.

Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.

“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”

Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.

“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”

Then it'll make the wealthy stupider.

it's like blaming the obesity epidemic on plates....

Give the kids a blank laptop that they must erase weekly, and a thumb drive with the basic Gentoo installer.

I also think schools are not evolving to the reality. There's little incentive to memorize facts in a world where they are so easily acceptable. So we shouldn't teach the memorization of facts.

We should teach people how to use information, how to criticize it, how to synthesize it, how to apply it. If these pursuits are taken seriously students will retain the information.

This issue is that's much more difficult to test for than the memorization of facts.

Right, like I've seen parents shove a tablet or a phone in their toddlers hands before they learn how to walk properly, and they keep scrolling mind numbing short form slop on it, and they want to talk about school laptops lol

Exactly.

As if, what, are kids gonna be making their own websites with HTML by just handing them some content-consumption appliance? Yeah, right!

I know some kids who are actually using technology well, and learning valuable skills, building their own gaming machines and stuff.

They're usually in private school or educated households though. As usual, everybody else "fell through."

We need to bring proper computing education back, but Techbro Valley hijacked our schools to train future dependent idiot consumers. Kids have been getting robbed.

It breaks my heart. I had to work in a public library for a long time as a computer lab assistant, and it was soul-sucking how many people of ANY generation were just absolutely clueless. Functionally illiterate. Zero problem solving neural pathways.

It didn't have to be like this. I'm very passionate about this subject, apparently lol, but I have no idea what to actually do about it...

The market is full of things like raspberry PIs (too expensive to start up right now), arduinos, ESP32, and so on. Python only gets easier to learn. Are these things truly not in use anywhere, or are the successes not being reported on?

I guess I read here about a case where a company was blowing through LLM tokens because people were using them to convert PDFs, so maybe it's just not sticking.

YES. The only piece of technology ever thaught by schools are a fixed set of google & microsoft products.

It would've been so great if for at least once say "We don't have microsoft word tasks today, we don't have google docs tasks today, follow the pdf guide in kstars to chart these heavenly bodies and learn some astronomy instead."

I'm 23 and got a CS degree last year. When I was in highschool my CS teacher had us writing Java on paper with pencil. At the time I thought it was the stupidest thing but in hindsight there definitely are certain benefits to it. The best CS professor I had in college was also having us do certain things with pencil and paper and he strictly forbid it being done any other way.

Educational studies have backed this up. You learn more when writing than typing and by reading print media than digital. The digital tools should still exist but you also need to use the analog ones.

That's just not true. People don't learn with pencil or computer better - a single tool does not shape the learning experience. Sure pencil has positive effects stimulating muscles while learning but it has a billion of negative effects too.

Problem: we're not spending enough on educators to teach kids

News Articles: we paid apple 10 billion dollars but the laptops made these kids dumber.

I learned a lot because there was friction in the tools. There’s a point where „accessible“ software (and I don’t mean accessible in the sense of making it usable with screen readers and other disability support) becomes detrimental. Like the complete abstraction that mobile devices have from a filesystem now - many younger people can’t use a hierarchical file explorer as a result.

Blame the parents that have abdicated their responsibility to raise their children and outsource that to screens.

My kids have grown up with screens since birth, but our going-into-fourth-grader has a 12th grade reading level and our going-into-second-grader has an 11th grade reading level because we make teaching them at home a priority.

They both score way above grade level in math and science as well. Their teachers constantly say they can tell which parents actually make their kids education a priority and which parents don’t give a shit and expect the teachers to do it all.

I’m guessing from her vacant stare that she probably doesn’t think much of it mate. Jk

Not USAian so can't comment on 1 and 5.

4. And 2. I believe are too recent for this. That's more of a gen alpha thing, gen z already went through most of school before 2020/2022.

5. Directly causes 6.

I believe 3. Is the root of all evil. And no, 5. Does not cause 3., since I went to a public university. In my case, 3. Was influenced by something similar to 5.: the political party in power encouraging their side of culture instead of focusing on education.

3. Is not easy to fix though. Low standards create bad students, which lowers the standards even more. Creating a downward spiral that is at a pretty low point now. So low in fact that 4. Happened. If the standards were higher, AI wouldn't meet the standards, and only students that genuinely put in the effort would pass.

This is not in isolation though. The reason standards started to fall is because higher education became a NEED. As portrayed by the media, if you don't go for higher education, you will end up in a stagnant job that pays minimum wage. So everyone needed to get higher education, so there was a lot of pressure to let all these new students pass.

Fortune:

Making old people with money feel vindicated, justified in their ageism, and superior...after they sabotaged the next several generations for their own short-term gain.

Up next: "These top megacorps will bring back slave child labor. Could that bump up your portfolio a few points?"

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