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telman17
japhyr
> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class
I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.
I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
telman17
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.
xethos
Are we sure it isn't the offensively-well-funded tech industry that's being referenced here?
carabiner
Tech industry composed of many of the smartest people in the world with the most money, and the backing of the current US presidency vs. average middle America school district. Hmm.
eudamoniac
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.
Teever
How do you expect anyone to take what you just wrote seriously when there's such a blatantly obvious difference in the detectability of the use of these two different products?
iambateman
What would be better policy, in your opinion?
CJefferson
Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt.
It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.
assaddayinh
Faraday cages built into school buildings.
deaux
> 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.
Good luck!
jimt1234
Don't forget that teachers these days are also expected to be active shooter experts, ready to literally put their own lives on the line.
mschuster91
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)
[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...
honr
I went to school in a poor country, and live in the US. The education budget was very low when / where I grew up, and it is pretty hefty where my kids go to school. I occasionally visit their school and volunteer to help. That has given me a good frame for comparison.
The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I receieved.
The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum. The "modern" methods that I have seen their teachers practice (which confuse the teachers, too, by the way; the teachers all have said that), are very visibly wrong. So wrong that even I can see all sorts of flaws, despite not having any background in education science. The curriculum is predictably set for failure.
I strongly believe technology, and AI in particular, can be a major enabler in improving education. However, for early education (first 5-6 grades), I think absolute lack of technology (except maybe a big e-ink class whiteboard, or some such) would be far more beneficial. Kids can learn to type very quickly when needed (ideally 6th / 7th grade). They can't learn thinking-while-writing, as quickly. They have to slowly build up that mental muscle. Let them have a few years of building structure and core understanding, then get exposed to tools for doing things faster.
MichaelRo
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).
black_13
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thegreatpeter
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mynameisash
> 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.
glitchc
> 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.
throwaway439080
> Guess who sits on the school boards?
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.
AngryData
In my experience school boards are anything but democratic. The only people that heartfully pursue those positions are the handful of assholes that shouldn't be in those positions for any reason. And their election is just a choose your flavor of asshole that can manage a half decent public persona and is sitting on excess capital to blow on marketing. Nobody knows who these people are, even in small towns with life long residency, half the people on the board nobody knows unless they are also on the school board and met them through it. Even if people cared about their board's membership, how do you realistically vet them all without having shit tons of free time to go personally meet them or follow them around?
array_key_first
This is a new phenomena. It took over a decade for my school district to ban phones. Eventually parents relented - but for the longest time they were the single blocker. Oh, what about emergencies???
Well Nancy, it's not 1995 anymore. Phones aren't for phone calls, we all know that. The school has phones too, you know.
bandrami
> 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.
philistine
My province banned all electronic devices brought by the kids from all schools all at once. No one can complain, it's provincial law.
bryanrasmussen
>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.
bubblewand
> 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.
eudamoniac
I've never understood something about this phenomenon: why does the school care if the parent flips a shit? What power does the parent actually have in a public school? I always thought it would make more sense for the principal/teacher to give the parent the middle finger in this scenario, but is there some reason I'm unaware of for why that is not realistic?
bryanrasmussen
OK so in fact parents who want their kids to be able to communicate with them as needed, not parents who want their kids to be able to play video games when so desiring?
Of course the ability to do the first gives the ability to do the second, but I think we can agree that they don't as a general rule want their kids to play video games. Again, outliers always exist.
Now as to why parents want their kids to answer when texted that can vary, maybe a lot of reasons are stupid but I can easily construct familial situations where the kid not being able to answer a text is a major disaster and probably parents in that situation flip shit because stuff is way more difficult for them than it is for other people. Probably those parents should have notified the school though, and the school should allow exceptions, but lots of schools are not, in my experience, run by people able to see the need for exceptions.
So I sort of expect that flipping shit happens the more stress there is, some of that can be passive aggressive shit flipping to relieve stress from other places but I would expect, as it matches to my experience in the world, that when shit flipping over trivial stupid stuff happens it is probably because the relatively trivial situation that is being flipped over connects closely to some problematic situation, and thus the trivial situation for most people who flip shit over it is not as trivial as it might be for the general population.
In short I would expect that the tendency to flip shit over the kid not being able to answer calls or texts in class would be proportionate to how absolutely necessary it is for particular family to have the kid answer calls or texts.
vjvjvjvjghv
">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.
BLKNSLVR
This equates to the experience of the various teachers in my social orbit.
freeopinion
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.
lr4444lr
Stats? Who do you think is buying the kids the phones and the data plans? Who is letting them take them to school in the first place?
The kids would be better off being told to read chapter 7 than play sensory overload edutainment tools that fragment their attention.
bryanrasmussen
gee, it seems like you are somehow in agreement with my point that probably laptops are worse than books, but also angry at me for some reason.
jimmydddd
"--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.
seanmcdirmid
> ---Parent of third grader informs school that her daughter should be allowed to dress and act like a lion and roam around the classroom.
This specific meme has been floating around with the MAGA crowd for at least 4-5 years now. It’s not clear if it has any basis in reality, but it is one of those “I heard it on Facebook so it must be true” kind of things.
lelanthran
> 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!
bryanrasmussen
are you agreeing with me that laptops are probably worse than the books? Because it seems like your post are is rhetorically structured as a disagreement while reifying my main point. Which is somewhat weird.
telman17
No, thus why I said it could be boiled down to.
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.
beepbooptheory
20+ years feels like a very long time for this to be the norm. Smartphone hegemony in general isn't that old.
mlrtime
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.
vjvjvjvjghv
I hear the same from teachers I know. Pay could be better, some kids suck, but the real issue is parents and administration who do nothing to support the teacher.
itishappy
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.
Why would you think laptops are different?
Noumenon72
We could reduce it to the level of distraction of a notebook and pen. Grayscale would help.
itishappy
For sure, I love my ReMarkable, but I think of it as an expensive toy. It functions slightly worse than a notebook and pen for over 100x the cost. I suppose it would enable students to save their notes digitally, but at no point have I ever felt the need to return to my earth science notes. In fact, I have fond memories of burning all my high school notebooks immediately after graduation.
jimbokun
This is an insane take.
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.
heisenbit
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.
DaveCharlieLen
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.
jacquesm
Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.
There is value in being able to automate things, but there is far more value in being able to first to learn how to do stuff yourself.
simpaticoder
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.
jacquesm
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.
beej71
> Pretty simple solution: all tech out of schools, back to paper.
That'll do something, but making maximally-capable individuals probably ain't it. There's a balance to be struck here.
renegade-otter
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.
Morromist
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.
somenameforme
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?
dyauspitr
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.
dzdt
What percent of the kind of development that standardized tests measure do you think occurs within the context of the school building?
N_Lens
I do think there are subjects where tech is integral and needed, but yes we should go back to pen and paper as much as possible.
seanmcdirmid
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.
jimbokun
The kids with the pencil and paper will outcompete the kids taught with AI.
seanmcdirmid
I don’t disagree, but I think you are confused about kids learning how to use AI vs kids being taught with AI?
Miner49er
Isn't learning to use AI just learning how to talk, read, and think coherently? Unless you mean learning to build AI or how it actually works?
gdelfino01
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.
crims0n
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.
bandrami
I do miss the days before wireless and mobile when the Internet was a place in your home or school that you sat at.
Herring
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.
bonsai_spool
> 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.
ghaff
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.
don-bright
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.
NooneAtAll3
"we evolved to talk not to write and read"
"we evolved to remember what happened to us, not to learn history of countries on the opposite side of the planet"
this argument doesn't work. if you want to claim harm - talk about the harm directly. stop hiding behind "evolution" and "biological"
csomar
So you are saying we should double down at this for the next dozen generations until our human DNA become tuned for computers/GenAI?
hedora
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?
analog31
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.
Disclosure: College math major.
seanicus
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
analog31
I think it helps to think in terms of keeping up with the demands of school without crushing their curiosity and interest. In my generation, at least where I grew up, school was less competitive and college admissions more laid back. We were at the tail end of when the people who worked on the line at Ford’s earned more than many college graduates. We had no idea what would happen next.
Today parents are freaked out because math scores are a sorting hat for college admissions and lucrative careers. Yet they don’t use math in their own careers, and many of them hate it.
My neighbor, who is a retired high school math teacher, told me that the kids who shine in advanced math are not the ones whose parents treated math as a series of competitive milestones. I started out “slow” in math, and my K-12 math grades were highly variable (to put it kindly), but eventually graduated cum laude as a math major while also becoming a fairly competent jazz musician.
My parents were both scientists, but loved the humanities. I think you can show your own interest and curiosity when talking to your kids about math, or helping them with their lessons. Rather than suggesting that you’re not “math people”, admit that it’s being taught in a new way and that you’re going to re-learn it along with them because it’s fun.
I would restructure school math if it were up to me, though I’m cautious about wholesale introduction of computers for the many reasons discussed in this thread. One idea for your kids is to explore some non-school math topics as they show an interest, such as pure logic, proofs, and computation.
tangotaylor
> 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.
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/A19DF2E8-3C69...
tzone
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.
juggerl6
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nradov
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.
npunt
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.
floren
Doing multiplication without laboriously writing one number over the other with an x next to the bottom one considered deeply suspicious...
piggerl
[dead]
PearlRiver
People are graduating from high school functionally illiterate so yeah definitely not just the US.
Budget issues exist all over the world and American culture is Western culture.
austin-cheney
Those are bad but they do not penalize the more competent half of students. Use of laptops as an educational tool penalize everyone equally.
hirvi74
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.
revolvingthrow
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.
EagnaIonat
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
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).
dwedge
I thought at first that you said its easier to get distract by Doom as a comment to how this problem is quite old
pertymcpert
Did you read the article?
spaqin
I think he might have gotten too distracted.
Yeah, in an academic setting, in higher education, it might make sense like he mentioned. Still a personal preference. for me a laptop will never beat taking notes by hand on paper.
srean
https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?si=9rJYJU2L_cNiwQrv
Veritasium's video: "Effort is the Algorithm".
The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller
auntlydiahere
I think a lot of the problem comes from the fact that the media/content is very visually biased these days, so when our children are exposed to it, they don't use the same parts of the brain that their parents used to use when reading and handwriting text. Visual content is more emotional than written content and doesn't process the same in the brain. If they would still keep laptops but bias it towards text content and still require handwriting and deliberate processes. Maybe it would help a bit. Throwing out technology is not an answer in an advancing world. Smells like "a handmaid's tale" to me.
montroser
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...
maerF0x0
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.
wasntitlower
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.
sapphicsnail
> I thought we were in the middle of a tech literacy downturn.
I've heard that anecdotally from college professors and I've seen it in my zoomer friends.
DauntingPear7
There was an article that interviewed a film prof at my current uni and he said that students nowadays can’t understand or answer very simple questions about the plot of a film, despite being film majors
npunt
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.
maerF0x0
I haven't dug into the gritty details of the article and the testing, but it's easily conceivable that "read" means Shakespeare, "Write" means fiction, and math means ... well actually pretty much all math is important :lol:
As a marginal choice I'd rather every kid know how to write a good opinion piece on current events, or a technical document closer to RFCs, than writing some fiction.
Of course, even better if we fund and train them to do both.
muyuu
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
carefree-bob
Yeah, it seems really odd to be blaming laptops.
kkfx
The issue isn't the laptops, but the proprietary software and the fact that teachers don't know how to use even a desktop on average, so they're even less capable of teaching it.
IF you teach how to use a FLOSS desktop, you're providing what's actually needed in the modern world; if you do Big Tech a favor by using their services in schools, you get a collapse in cognitive ability, which is exactly what happened. People just need to understand this and actually have the will to understand it.
spaqin
If not for my job, I would never have a need to type a single line in a Linux terminal. I don't know what does that have to do with modern world.
kkfx
That's because you haven't seen IT in action outside of your job yet, I'm talking about its true potential. It's not about the terminal or Emacs (the 2D shell), it's about the paradigm.
If you teach free software, you're teaching people how to know, not just how to follow the tracks someone else laid down. You're teaching them how to tell if a news is fake or not, how to use a feed reader to follow various sources instead of relying on whatever aggregator is popular at the moment, and how to communicate from their own home without depending on third parties, and so on. You're creating a population that understands the meaning of digital ownership/property and knows how to manage it, so they aren't slaves to the tech giants and instead have a hunger for knowledge. In other words, you're putting the gnoseological tools of the present into the hands of the masses.
With the GAFAM model, which is basically just mainframes made worse and expanded, you're creating dependency instead. You're creating slaves, not citizens; people who just comment under articles provided by some PR hack, who don't know how to start a thread on their own topic or write their own piece, people who don't have a domain name as their home address IRL, and so on. People who own nothing and, as such, not Citizens, but subjects of the few who do own everything.
dwedge
It being the first time a generation scored worse surprises me because it has been pretty obvious in the UK at least that the syllabus for children has been systematically and progressively dumbed down for at least the last 30 years.
One concrete example I remember is in sixth form in the UK when I was there, in order to address poor example results in maths, they replaced Core Maths 1-6 with Pure Maths 1-6, the 6 modules of the latter only containing the material from the first 4 modules of the former
anal_reactor
1. Parents whine and bitch every time their precious little baby is expected to do any actual work.
2. Governments dumb down education programs. Some do it to massage the statistics and make education look good, others do it because they honestly think that's how you help teachers give more attention to low-performing students.
The effect is the widening "education gap" - the difference between kids whose parents sign them up for extracurricular activities, and the ipad kids.
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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.