This 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.
> 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.
I 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.
I'm not that old. "Just ban phones" worked perfectly fine when I was in high school in 2010. "Just ban cigarettes" also worked, and no one was smoking in the classroom. It's not a hard problem; the administration just refuses to solve it.
> 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.
Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.
The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.
And on top of that, in many countries (not just the US) teachers, school and the students themselves don't have anywhere near the financial resources that they need.
Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.
And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.
We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)
> 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.
My kids have had Chromebooks for years at school, and their schools have had the devices pretty much fully unlocked. My eldest, who has struggled with ADHD and other mental health issues, was spending his entire day on YouTube and Discord. Accordingly, his grades were terrible. The school's IT said they don't lock it down because, more or less, "by this age, kids should be mature enough to make appropriate decisions about how to use technology." But they did concede that my son should have his account locked down.
Why on earth schools don't start from the perspective of whitelisting YouTube videos/channels, websites, etc., instead of allowing a wholly open web is mind-boggling to me.
I fully endorse making schools entirely phone-free. Get rid of Chromebooks altogether.
> 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.
Sure. Teachers would love to ban cellphones and punish kids who disobey. The problem is, the parents who sit on the school boards as trustees won't let them.
Adding parents to the school system has single-handedly destroyed the North American education system. Why is there no homework? Because parents complain that kids find it too hard or too much. Why is there no discipline? Because parents complain that discipline is making their kids miserable. Why is there so much emphasis on schools to teach practical skills? Because parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach these skills at home, where they belong.
Parents are no experts on education yet they get to decide what teachers do in the classrooms. The law of averages dictates that 50% were below average students themselves. Guess who sits on the school boards? It's not the over-achievers, those people are too busy being successful in their careers.
There's a global competition for talent and our children are falling behind. Now you know why.
People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.
My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.
>whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.
>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.
> you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier
No stats, but it’s extremely real.
I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.
The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.
">whiny parents who rage when their children are told they can't be playing video games in class
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier."
I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.
I think it might be more insightful to say "laptops in the hands of students are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers".
A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.
I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.
"--Whiny parents" is definitely a major thing and not an outlier.
For an older guy like me, I was shocked by the stories I've heard recently.
---Coworker's son is acting out in class and not following any instructions. He calls the school and says the teacher is not challenging the son enough and is son is super special.
---Friend retired and took a job as an elementary school classroom aide. When she instructs a fourth grader to go to class, he punches her in the stomach several times. School administration tells her to keep quiet about it as they don't want to anger the parents.
---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.
That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.
And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!
However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.
My wife is a teacher and I know several. All of the ones that have quiet have cited the worst part about teaching isn't the money or "bad" students. It's either the parents unrealistic demands or just dealing with them, or the same with the administration.
Teaching, kids or pay [although more is always better] was never the issue.
All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.
No teacher (or parent) has ever managed to lock down a computer that was in my possession to a level where I wouldn't get distracted by it. You could shut the power off, and I'd still be poking around the hardware. I spent hundreds of hours programming my calculator instead of paying attention in class. Informative? Yes. Distracting to myself and those around me? You bet.
I completely agree with your phone take. There is no level of administrative control that can remove the distraction from the device.
We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.
The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.
Classroom ‚management‘ and teens can not be observed at the same time and space.
The problem is that these terns have not had meaningful interactions with technology at home where there roughly a 1:1 relationship parent:kid. Now try to get meaningfulness into kids where the ratio is 1:20+ in a classroom.
And what CC item can you point to for that. Teachers often have to write the actual thing they are teaching as a CC item on the board. Want people to teach tech, go to meetings and make them.
it's actually extremely hard to ban websites unless all students can only use chrome book, middle and high schoolers know how to install tor and free vpn to bypass all those domain blacklists in a few minutes with their laptop or phone.
Whitelist sites instead of blacklisting? I'm also not sure how kids are getting admin rights to install a VPN in the first place. For the overwhelming majority of cases a kiosk like experience should suffice, which should virtually eliminate any jailbreaks.
You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?
I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.
There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.
If we're spouting off unsubstantiated claims. I'll add teachers unions and the mandatory spend of tax money on their near monopolies versus a voucher system that allows parents to choose the best education the money can buy. (To be clear I do think we should fund educating our children, I disagree with forcing the purchase to go to a specific solution / system)
If you are looking for reform, consider rethinking how much "education" the public should fund. Should we keep paying to have every student sit through Algebra and Geometry if less than 15% of them can pass the proficiency test afterward? Can we require people to pass proficiency tests before we fund their education past the 6th grade? 8th grade? Can we require a student to be able to read at a 3rd grade level before we enroll them in dual enrollment English Literature?
I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?
What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.
That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.
I'm glad you recognize that you're participating in unsubstantiated claims, because that is most of the literature in support of vouchers.
Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).
Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.
Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.
As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.
Ah, the teachers union, famous for the $30-$50/yr it costs the average tax payer. If we abolished the union and rolled back everything they fought for, we could almost pay for a $10B privacy suit after a year of saving.
The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.
Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.
Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.
We should treat phones on kids the same we treat alchohol. "What the fuck, is that a phone? Give me that!" The only other solution involves evaporating our privacy. Fuk 'em kids. I guess they don't get to use phones, we survived, why can't they?
In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.
Completely agree. One issue that I never hear mentioned is how disconnected parents become from their child's progress when there are no more paper books. It used to be that you'd progress from start to finish of a book over a term, and a parent could, at a glance, see what you should know and what you're about to learn. Now kids don't get books (which I think would surprise many parents and non-parents alike). Parents literally don't know what their child is learning at any point in time without asking them, and that is unreliable to say the least. Computers in school was supposed to be "an experiment" but everyone has decided, without proof, that it's great and therefore more screens in schools is great. Maybe in the 80's and 90's having computer knowledge was a valid shibboleth for "being smart" but it hasn't been true for 30 years. "Computer knowledge" has displaced "knowledge" in a zero-sum fashion, and it's getting worse.
My son is in the "gifted" program at his school which means they sit him down for 3 extra hours to play the Pokemon rip-off with trivia interspersed called "Prodigy". The public school system is in an unenviable state, being the fulcrum of vast societal forces and disagreements with the highest possible stakes. The districts are terrified of parents starting litigation against the school for any reason, which is why many of them have rules against ALL teacher physical contact with students, including holding the hand of pre-K, K and first graders, including stopping fights. They're supposed to tell the child no, and in the case of fights, distance themselves and call the police. In elementary school, there are no books, no teaching of handwriting, and 30 minutes of recess a day - if they're lucky. If they misbehave, taking away recess is the teacher's recourse.
Plus of course the schools are locked down like prisons, they have "code red" shooter drills once a month, every teacher has a panic button around their neck. No-one walks or rides their bike (at least not in elementary school). All of this is new, all of it is bad, and for some reason no-one seems to notice. I think it's in part that the kids don't know any different, so for them this all seems normal. Those of us having kids recently are shocked at all the changes, shocked that they've happened so quickly, and so silently.
In the schools here kids don't even get the marked up test results to take home any more. So they get some mark but they have no idea what they did wrong and I can't help them without making my own tests and seeing how they are doing.
It's maddening how all this digitization is just a way to collapse the complexity of running an education system into a black box that can not be inspected.
At least the school shooting angle isn't a real problem here.
For 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.
I 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.
This 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?
All tech out is too drastic but I agree it must be severely curtailed. There need to be computer labs and an emphasis on research which shouldn’t go back to asking the librarian for printed material in a library. Research online is supercharged and should not be done away with.
Other than that though, paper textbooks, paper notes, written on premises examinations should all be bought back.
This only works if you can isolate your society from having to compete with others. Like American kids will have to compete with Chinese kids who are learning AI in middle school, and not just “I can write a prompt” AI. But then those kids are also starting to learn calculus while our middle schools claim algebra is too advanced for 8th graders. Sigh.
Bring 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.
You 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.
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, 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.
> 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.
I'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.
Even 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.
I’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?
Common core was a thing when my kids were in school, so I “did my research.” A number of states had published their CC standards online, so it was easy to figure out.
The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.
On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.
Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.
Any recommendations for how to approach K-12 math teaching? Got some (very) little ones and doing our best but both parents are definitely more humanities-brained
> is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.
The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".
Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.
Trend 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.
What specifically is wrong with Common Core math? I've seen a lot of vague complaints about it but the materials my children brought home seem fine. It's different from the way I learned but I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's worse.
Yep. From what I recall from my time in education about a decade ago, Common Core standards were generally considered excellent. The rollout of Common Core tests wasn't that great, but that should have been a one-time adaptation period, but everything got mired in politics and bit by bit got torn apart as states all went their own way.
I 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.
I 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.
When 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
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
Hey, you only have a >$13 _trillion_ dollar modern tobacco industry behemoth up against you, including 90% of this very message board. Just, you know, stand up to it, duh.
The $13 trillion is only Meta/Apple/Google/Microsoft, so it doesn't even include all the gambling, crypto, gacha games and so on whose sole aim is to enslave the kids you're teaching.
Good luck!
Schools are (literally) falling apart, here in Germany it became apparent during Covid that a ton of schools had windows that rotted so far they couldn't be opened, in the US there are states that introduced 4 day school weeks due to budget constraints [1], way too many school children live in utter poverty meaning they get their only warm meal at school [2], with that meal sometimes being of even lower quality than prison food to the tune it was a recurring joke in The Simpsons, class sizes are too huge, teaching material is outdated or censored to the point of being useless [3], students are too poor to afford basic supplies meaning teachers step in [4], teachers lack the time and budget to actually educate themselves and keep up with modern development, teachers lack the budget, room and/or political backing from their superiors to actually use what they learned in university or in after-graduation continuous training in practice, students lack the privacy at home (and often enough: a safe home or EVEN A HOME AT ALL [5]) to learn in peace and safety.
And on top of that comes the deluge of ChatGPT slop, sexual abuse both domestic and amongst students, bullying, domestic violence, "parents" using their kids as weapons to hurt their ex partners, stalking, gang violence, in Europe you got traumatized kids coming from war torn countries with zero support structure, in the US you got kids scared to hell and beyond about ICE.
Honestly, I'm not surprised that both students and teachers are checking out into the dream world of their phones.
We are failing our children, but hey, the stonk number goes brr!!! And taxes are lower!!!!!! (Education budgets is usually the first thing that gets slashed because it takes about 10-20 years to show a noticeable negative effect)
[1] https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/amid-budget-and-staff...
[2] https://thecounter.org/summer-hunger-new-york-city/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_banning_in_the_United_Sta...
[4] https://19thnews.org/2025/08/teachers-spending-school-suppli...
[5] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2025/12/28/numb...
My kids have had Chromebooks for years at school, and their schools have had the devices pretty much fully unlocked. My eldest, who has struggled with ADHD and other mental health issues, was spending his entire day on YouTube and Discord. Accordingly, his grades were terrible. The school's IT said they don't lock it down because, more or less, "by this age, kids should be mature enough to make appropriate decisions about how to use technology." But they did concede that my son should have his account locked down.
Why on earth schools don't start from the perspective of whitelisting YouTube videos/channels, websites, etc., instead of allowing a wholly open web is mind-boggling to me.
I fully endorse making schools entirely phone-free. Get rid of Chromebooks altogether.
Sure. Teachers would love to ban cellphones and punish kids who disobey. The problem is, the parents who sit on the school boards as trustees won't let them.
Adding parents to the school system has single-handedly destroyed the North American education system. Why is there no homework? Because parents complain that kids find it too hard or too much. Why is there no discipline? Because parents complain that discipline is making their kids miserable. Why is there so much emphasis on schools to teach practical skills? Because parents have abdicated their responsibility to teach these skills at home, where they belong.
Parents are no experts on education yet they get to decide what teachers do in the classrooms. The law of averages dictates that 50% were below average students themselves. Guess who sits on the school boards? It's not the over-achievers, those people are too busy being successful in their careers.
There's a global competition for talent and our children are falling behind. Now you know why.
People who get elected to sit on the school boards? I think you're actually just complaining about democracy.
My local school district has banned phones during school time (enforced by an auto-locking pouch gadget that releases the phone when school ends), and parents overwhelmingly support it.
you have stats on that? It seems like an outlier.
>teachers who are using computer programs to teach the kids instead of actually teaching.
before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
if after laptops there is a worse result then it seems to argue that laptops in the hands of bad teachers are worse than books in the hands of bad teachers, at least.
No stats, but it’s extremely real.
I know lots of teachers. Parents who flip shit if their kids can’t answer their texts while in class are common. Parents who call their kids in class just to chat are less common, but not as one-in-a-million as you’d think.
The attitude you (I’m assuming) and I were raised with, when it comes to school, is less universal than you perhaps believed. And I mean among adults.
I know several teachers who retired because over the last decades student discipline has declined and teachers don't get support from either parents or principals. Basically teachers have no tools for discipling students while on the other hand parents demand all kinds of things from teachers but demand nothing from their kids. And principals almost always side with the parents against the teacher. It seems teaching has become an impossible task.
A bad teacher can say "read chapter 7, there will be a test!" and the student can ignore the book, or vandalize the book or whatever. But when the student has a computer with an internet connection, they can vandalize the computer, ignore the website, or jump on an unrelated website.
I'm tempted to think that the laptop makes the situation worse. Some student who might have read part of the chapter out of pure boredom during classtime is now driven by dopamine to jump on the distraction.
The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.
Yeah, but when a kid opens a textbook there aren't a bunch of distractions designed by professional scientists to manipulate the user into more engagement.
That, alone, is enough for me to wish that study devices (laptops, tablets, whatever) were locked down with only a few whitelisted sites for material and research.
And even then, that may not be enough. I rarely go to wikipedia (or tvtropes) anymore because what happens is I look something up, then 3 hours of fascinated clicks later, I realise I just burned my whole evening!
However as I say in another comment, most of my family are educators so these experiences represent what they've been dealing with for the past 20+ years.
> before laptops there were bad teachers who used books to teach the kids instead of actually teaching - as in: "read chapter 7, there will be a test!"
I think both could be true and I'm not excluding either. The issues I've heard almost always come down to entitled parents who don't want to raise their own kids but have the schools do it for them, then complain when their kid brings home a disciplinary document for not being able to follow simple conduct rules in class.
Teaching, kids or pay [although more is always better] was never the issue.
I completely agree with your phone take. There is no level of administrative control that can remove the distraction from the device.
Why would you think laptops are different?
We have overwhelming evidence on how addictive and distracting electronic devices are and zero evidence for wide spread use of electronic devices improving educational outcomes.
The experiments have been done and the results are in and computers in education are a failed experiment.
The problem is that these terns have not had meaningful interactions with technology at home where there roughly a 1:1 relationship parent:kid. Now try to get meaningfulness into kids where the ratio is 1:20+ in a classroom.
You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?
I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.
There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.
I understand the arguments for an educated population being a public benefit worth paying for. But we are spending enormous funds to produce an uneducated population. Some states now offer two high school diplomas. The traditional diploma doesn't mean anything anymore so now they have a "Career and College Ready Diploma" that is supposed to mean something. Why do we pay to fund a diploma that is meaningless?
What if we fund unlimited tries at K-6, and we fund 7-9 then 10-12 for people who earn the privilege with good marks? Then we can talk about funding 13-16 for people who keep earning the privilege. People who don't earn the privilege to advance can retake classes. Or they can move on with life as an uneducated person. We just skip the pretense of secondary education for them. Private schools can take up the challenge if they want to take a swing at people who haven't earned public funding.
That all seems radical and harsh. I just put it out there to spur your thoughts on reform.
Vouchers sound good if you don't think about it with any real veracity or intellectually serious rigor, but (in America) are basically a shitty partisan scam. They're basically universally used as a method to divert tax funds to schools that would otherwise be unfundable via taxes (eg. religious or discriminatory).
Why do we think parents are actually capable of choosing the "best" option, and why wouldn't 100% of parents choose that option? Parents are famously bad at making decisions, as illustrated by home schooling, religious dogmatism in private schools, parents trying to opt-out their students from scientific and health education, and the general history of parental intervention in public schools.
Why would some schools take $X per student and generate better outcomes than others? They won't and the secret is that private schools will charge more than the voucher price to produce better outcomes, but then you've essentially drained the funding of a public good to subsidize a private school that some students won't be able to attend.
As a thought experiment, can we use a voucher system to fund alternative fire or police departments? Can I apply my voucher to an FDA with a properly credentialed head? Or are schools the only "monopoly" run by the government we should break up.
The public school system mostly sucks in most states (pending any nonsense with ICE hopefully resolving itself eventually, if you have to send your kids to public school the Minneapolis suburbs are excellent), but private alternatives with similar costs per student also mostly aren't better. One sticks out in my mind from recent history (somewhere near Redwood City) with a habit of hiring subs all year to reduce costs, literally not teaching the kids anything, and firing teachers who tried to fail students. The effect is, somewhat predictably, even students who try don't learn anything, and the ones who don't try know that they can get away with anything that won't put them in prison.
Regarding a voucher system, I'm not sure I care one way or another (I care a little -- it'll mean more money going to con artists masquerading as schools without improving education for basically anyone), but it's just putting lipstick on a pig. If you have the means and ability then homeschool and hire PhDs and other professionals to fill in the gaps. If you don't, for the price we pay per student you're stuck with large classrooms or crappy EdTech (or both), and if you don't spend enough 1:1 time with your kids then even a good school won't matter anyway for most students.
Mind you, of all the things we could spend our tax dollars on, I'm strongly in favor of anything which would actually improve education. I'd happily sacrifice most everything else to 10x education spend if somebody came up with a good argument for why it would help. I just don't think vouchers will do the trick, especially if we're pointing to the teachers union as the particular efficiency they're using to drive cost effectiveness.
Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-with...
Also, https://teacherquality.nctq.org/contract-database/collective...
In fact, it is probably better for them to "struggle" and figure out by themselves how to find a way to circumvent it. Make them think instead of having thoughts feed into them.
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.
My son is in the "gifted" program at his school which means they sit him down for 3 extra hours to play the Pokemon rip-off with trivia interspersed called "Prodigy". The public school system is in an unenviable state, being the fulcrum of vast societal forces and disagreements with the highest possible stakes. The districts are terrified of parents starting litigation against the school for any reason, which is why many of them have rules against ALL teacher physical contact with students, including holding the hand of pre-K, K and first graders, including stopping fights. They're supposed to tell the child no, and in the case of fights, distance themselves and call the police. In elementary school, there are no books, no teaching of handwriting, and 30 minutes of recess a day - if they're lucky. If they misbehave, taking away recess is the teacher's recourse.
Plus of course the schools are locked down like prisons, they have "code red" shooter drills once a month, every teacher has a panic button around their neck. No-one walks or rides their bike (at least not in elementary school). All of this is new, all of it is bad, and for some reason no-one seems to notice. I think it's in part that the kids don't know any different, so for them this all seems normal. Those of us having kids recently are shocked at all the changes, shocked that they've happened so quickly, and so silently.
It's maddening how all this digitization is just a way to collapse the complexity of running an education system into a black box that can not be inspected.
At least the school shooting angle isn't a real problem here.
That'll do something, but making maximally-capable individuals probably ain't it. There's a balance to be struck here.
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.
Other than that though, paper textbooks, paper notes, written on premises examinations should all be bought back.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U
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.
"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"
Are Gen-Z folks overseas as screwed as Americans, and is there a correlation between academic performance and classroom laptops?
The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.
On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.
Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.
Disclosure: College math major.
Yes, here is Dr. Horvath's (the neuroscientist mentioned in the article) written testimony which cites some studies.
The table in Section 3 is particularly damning. It shows how a classroom intervention worsened or improved outcomes relative to the baseline. Note that the worst intervention is the "1-to-1 laptops row".
Unclear if they mixed interventions, I'd have to read the mentioned studies. If the interventions were done in isolation then that's basically a longitudinal study which is a pretty clear smoking gun.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69...
People are getting too stuck on US specific issues and missing that this is a pretty global problem.
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Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.
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.
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.
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%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).
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.
Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".
The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller