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.
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)
I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.
Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).
> But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright
Nature vs nurture, the old argument...
Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).
But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.
> 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.
> I think you're actually just complaining about democracy
Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This does not require a persistent parent. Administrators whose job it is to administer consequences for misbehavior already reprimand teachers for enforcing school rules. The turnover on new teachers is crazy bad. It's kind of like what you hear about Russia "recruiting" foreigners to die in Ukraine. Our school district recruits teachers from places like the Philippines and Singapore. Even with the promise of fat American wages and a ticket to the promised land, a huge number of even those teachers don't last two years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
We 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...
Also 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.
Eh, 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.
I 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.
they failed to account for the fact that very similar effects are happening around the world in places where no investment was made to bring laptops to schools
these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
For 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.
The "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.
You didn’t ask me, but (aside from the effects of tech and social media) my #1 hypothesis is the rise in single parenthood. Parenting is so hard that I doubt pretty much everyone’s ability to do it well on their own.
Many 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.
Just 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.
Totally. 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.
the 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?
It’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
I 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”.
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.
Utter 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.
Computers 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.
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.
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.
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.
Let'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.
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.
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...
Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).
Nature vs nurture, the old argument...
Of course, you got what one might flippantly call "the inbreds from Alabama", or those whose parents suffered from substance abuse or other issues (obviously, for the mother the risk is much higher, but also the father's health has a notable impact on sperm quality). These kids, particularly those suffering from FAS (fetal alcohol abuse)? As hard as it sounds, they often enough are headed for a life behind institutional bars. FAS is no joke, and so are many genetic defects. That's nature, no doubt - but still, we as a society should do our best to help these kids to grow to the best they reasonably can (and maybe, with gene therapy, we can even "fix" them).
But IMHO, these kids where "nature" dominates are a tiny minority - and nurture is the real problem we have to tackle as societies. We are not just failing the kids themselves by letting them grow up in poverty, we are failing our society. And instead of pseudo elite tech bro children and nepo babies collecting millions of dollars for the x-th dating app, NFT or whatever scam - I'd rather prefer to see people who actually lived a life beyond getting spoiled rotten to have a chance.
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.
Local participatory democracy is in fact pretty terrible: HOAs, school boards, neighborhood impact hearings where people complain that building apartments would let the poors move in and we can't have that.
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.
The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.
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.
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.
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.
Before smartphones, texting during class was very common when I was in high school. That’s more or less how I learned that 9/11 happened.
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.
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.
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.
Parents don't know best. Parents are the problem here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
these kids have smartphones and tablets and they spend countless hours on them, it's not that hard to see the effect this has
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.
Who is going to point out the elephant in the room?
Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.
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"
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...
Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".
The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
Funny how the people that didn't listen also seemed to make a ton of money off the whole thing.
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-sa...
Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424
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.
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.
From the article:
> low quality sourcesFortune Magazine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)
> 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.
So you trust the peer, but not the author? How come?
It's just one of the many delivery mechanisms for brainrot in the 21st century.