After working on that company for a couple of years I realized using tech in education (pre university) was a mistake. One of the reasons I left.
In a decade or two the long term consequences of inundating kids with tech and then removing it will be quite obvious. This will be studied for decades to come. Reminds me of the Dutch kids that were borm during the 1944-1945 Dutch famine.
https://www.ohsu.edu/school-of-medicine/moore-institute/dutc...
I think we should use tech in education, but in a targeted way. It's important that children gain basic technical literacy, like how to touch type and use basic software. I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
The real problem is separating reading/writing skills from tech skills. We shouldn't stop teaching handwriting just because typing exists. And being able to read long books and essays teaches fundamental cognitive skills like attention, focus, and information processing.
For those, obviously you need a computer and completely agree that those are important skills to learn... But you maybe need to spend 1h/week during last 2 years of middle school on those at the computer lab (as it's been done since the 90s in many schools around the world)
But for any other course such as Math, English (or whichever primary language in your country), second languages, history, etc. : that's where using tech is a mistake
A bit of tech is ok, but it cannot be "everyone does their homework and read lesson on a iPad/Chromebook"
It makes me think back to my writing assignments in grades 6-12. I spent considerable time making sure the word processor had the exact perfect font, spacing, and formatting with cool headers, footers, and the footnotes, etc. Yet, I wouldn't even bother to proofread the final text before handing it in. What a terrible waste of a captive audience that could have helped me refine my arguments and writing style, rather than waste their time on things like careless grammatical errors.
Anyway, I do agree with the idea of incorporating Excel, and even RStudio for math and science as tools, especially if they displace Ed-tech software that adds unnecessary abstractions, or attempts to replace interaction with knowledgeable teachers. One other exception might be Anki or similar, since they might move rote memorization out of the classroom, so that more time can be spent on critical thinking.
I'm all for going back to analog where it makes sense, but it seems wrongheaded to completely remove things that are relevant skills for most 21st century careers.
I had computer lab in a catholic grade school in the mid-late 80's. Apple II's and the class was once a week and a mix of typing, logo turtle, and of course, The Oregon Trail.
What for? I've been writing computer programs and documentation since 1969 and I can't touch type. I've never felt enough pressure to do it. I can still type faster than I can think. When I'm writing most of my time is spent thinking not tapping the keys.
https://entropicthoughts.com/typing-fast-is-about-latency-no...
A few years ago I invested in a rectilinear split keyboard which has a slightly different layout, but much more ergonomic. But interestingly I can now type 120wpm+.
I think touch typing is very similar to learning penmanship (and I guess cursive to an extent). If I followed the exact rules I learned about handwriting in school, I'd have much more legible handwriting but I'd write so much more slowly. Instead I my own way, which lets me get my thoughts out quickly, albeit not as neat as "correct" penmanship. Fortunately typing is much more lenient on this front.
can even be harmful
IFF we interpret "touch typing" as the typical thought typing method and not just "typing without looking at the keyboard".
In general key arrangement traces back to physical limitations of type writers not ergonomics and layout choice isn't exactly ergonomic based either.
But even if it where, the biggest issue of touch typing is that it's often thought around the idea of your hands being somewhat orthogonal to your keyboard, _which they never should be_ (if you use a typical keyboard on a typcal desk setup) as it leads to angling you hands/wrist which is nearly guaranteed to cause you health issues long term if you are typing a lot.
The simple solution is to keep your wrist straight leading to using the keyboard in a way where you hand is at an angle to it's layout instead of orthogonal which in turn inhibits perfect touch typing. But still allows something close to it.
As keys are arranged in shifted columns this kinda works surprisingly well, an issue is the angle differs depending on left/right hand :/
Split or alice style keyboards can also help a bit, but I often feel man designs kinda miss the point. Especially many supposedly ergonomic keyboards aren't aren't really that ergonomic, especially if your hand is to large, small, or otherwise unusual...
Which brings us to the next point, human autonomy varies a lot, some people have just some very touch typing incompatible hands, like very short pinky fingers making that finger unusable for typical touch typing (even with normal hands it's a bit suboptimal which is why some keyboards shift the outer rows down by half a row).
Some of us "a bit older" seem to have gone through a golden era of tech, where we actually learned that tech en-masse. In a class of maybe 30 students, around 20, 25 of them were able to configure dial up modems, come on IRC (servers, ports, channels needed to be configured) and do a bunch of other stuff our parents mostly considered "black magic" (except for a few tech enthusiasts), and the general concensus was, that every generation will know more and be "better" than the previous generation.
A few decades have passed.. and kids can't type anymore on a keyboard, can't print, have no idea what can be changed in the settings on their smartphone, don't know how to block ads, can't cheat in games anymore (except via pay-to-win) and have no idea where to change their instagram password.
So, now you have boomers, who can't use computers and kids, who can't use computers anymore.
The latter is a fairly small demo though - supposedly around a third.
The split is more by education than by age.
Kids can use computers - phones - as app appliances, but they don't understand computers.
Peak literacy is young Gen X and older millennials.
They certainly will at home.
> I suspect there is a gap in the technical literacy of lower income students, whose parents are less likely to have a computer at home.
In which country?
I live in Mexico and even here you really need to go to the poorest families to find a home without a laptop. Even those families have multiple smartphones. Today a smartphone is not a good replacement for a laptop but maybe in a couple of years it will be.
The following article suggests that in the United States, about 59% of lower income households have a laptop or desktop computer, compared to 92% of upper income households.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/06/22/digital-d...
Is it possible that there are alternative ways than handwriting for cognitive development?
Probably in 500 BC they said you had to hack at stone with a chisel for cognitive development, and then someone invented the pen and paper.
The difference is the task had to change as well. People were able to write thousands of pages (rather than a few stone blocks) over their education, and making full use of that ability in order to "keep the brain CPU close to 100%" was a necessary concurrent change in order to preserve cognitive devolpment.
Thamus:
> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=3894
You are forgetting that in 500 BC literacy rates were well under 10%. Nobody optimized for anyone’s cognitive development.
The only cognitive development people cared about was for the rich (aristocrats, royalty, some merchants, etc). Much of that happened orally through hands-on tutoring by an army of people specifically employed to create the next generation of leaders.
Anyone would thrive with that much resources thrown at them. And I’m pretty sure many of them considered reading and writing beneath them. They got people for that.
there are countless of ways to develop fine motor skills, but handwriting replacing a chisel was not a step down because handwriting is a demanding task in contrast to the, by nature, impoverished interaction with digital rather than analog devices. I help in a maker-space and you can literally tell young people apart who only ever interacted with a phone compared to kids who play an instrument, work with tools etc.
Additionally a pen and paper come cheap compared to a tablet. It was always the perfect example of a kind of "digitalism". "oh we're so cool, we use technology, let's give everyone tablets, we're a modern country". Just expensive nonsense in the absence of educational standards and physical development.
I wonder whether it has contributed to the evolution of smaller brains: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...
Memorizing a few hundred lines of epic poetry probably is indeed unusual. But I bet most people have more than a few hundred lines of poetry in the form of song lyrics memorized (along with the tune of the song).
Update your mental model, except for the grand works, they used sticks on clay tablets similar to writing
I do think that digital technology was introduced a bad way in most schools. In my own experience it was less "digital technology education" and more "navigate Microsoft windows UI education". The teachers didn't know much about computers, of course the result was mostly a waste of time. I think the first thing kids should be taught in computer class is touch typing.
I have very bad handwriting due to dysgraphia. I suffered a lot in older years of school due to lack of ability to use Word/Latex homework to submit homework. Handwriting is not as important.
But what is exttenely important is ability to think with writing/drawing. Because at the end, paper is still the most free form of writing/drawingyou can do and actually creates and reinforces that individuals own style. Computers, however good you have them, at the end force students into one style of exposition which is the software you are using. Whether word or latex.
Paper allow you and force you to develop you own style of writing/organization information which is essentially what teaching is all about.
I think the k-shaped economy where some people are financially succeeding while the rest go through hardship is a reflection of a k-shaped education system where those who are able to ignore the distractions and succeed are doing well. The top of the k can use more edtech as they just need tools for further educational attainment. Things modern edtech can bring. The bottom of the k has different needs.
There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.
Why an "extreme" amount of freedom?
> There is no way to be done away with tech on school, but some balance and freedom must be achieved.
Yes there is. Students were educated just a couple decades ago without it. We can easily return to that style.
As dangerous as this sounds, with guidance, I think it could be done. Government and public institutions love to lock the environment into something safe but useless for further learning and adaptability
Digital tech is here to stay...
I have several friends who work in education.
At one point there were computer labs in school, there was education around computing. The pervasiveness of computing killed these programs, along with various kinds of skill based classes, like wood/auto/home economics (cooking and or sewing).
All of them tend to agree that the losses of these programs is, in hindsight, problematic. Many of them think that a return to computer education (and conveying deeper insight) would be a net positive.
> EdTech
To a person, every one I know thinks their EdTech platforms suck. One of them is in a support role as part of their job and often tells me stories of how lamentable the software and faculties interactions with it is/are.
"Progress is at fault" is a tale as old as time: https://xkcd.com/1227/
Worth noting that all of those examples are adjacent to the industrial revolution. At least personally I don't know enough to have perspective on cottage production but I imagine daily life must have been quite different 1000 years ago.
In the context of general education I can understand the strategy, it could be a useful learning environment, but certainly not if it is about digital education, tech knowledge or general engineering. Nobody becomes an engineer in a prison, you need to give your users freedom.
Ironically, Gen Z was supposed to lead the way as "digital natives", but in many ways they are (speaking broadly) much less technically adapt than, say, Gen Xers, because Gen Xers had to struggle to figure stuff out because it hadn't been all wrapped up with a bow yet, and thus we got to understand the details of how thing worked at a deeper, more fundamental level.
I recall reading some articles about how many Gen Zers new to the workplace didn't even understand how file systems or directories worked, because things like iPads largely hide those details from the end user.
And to emphasize, I'm not dumping on Gen Z - they're, like everyone, just a product of the environment they grew up in. But I strongly disagree that getting access to an iPad makes anyone more technologically adept.
For my own kid, I do limit screen time just because their eyes are still fragile before age 9, not because the above reason.
I asked an AI about the reasoning and the answer comes down to: kids need real-world interaction to support brain development. But if that's the case, aren't these two seperate issues? Using a tablet doesn't damage your brain ... it's just a low-value activity that fails to build the good skills (like video games?) that other activities do. It is not that screens make you dumber, it is that they crowd out the things that make you smarter.
Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"
No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to function without depending on it.
I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.
I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.
It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
I've used them when studying new languages (human languages not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been really useful.
Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the things they are told.
A bit like software development.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.
Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.
Are you sure it isn't both? Learning how to bypass the school's internet filtering so that I could get to flash games and reddit probably taught me more than anything in the lessons.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
I suspect the people I see saying they were able to not get distracted when using a laptop in class are either outliers or liars.
https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
Screen readers take longer.
Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source...
Another
https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut...
Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.
The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation.
I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot.
With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book.
I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.
Lots to think about there.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.
Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.
I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
An allowlist might be a good place to start.
It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.
If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!
Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)
Steve Jobs popularized among startup/HN audiences that intuitive interfaces are the best interfaces, but I have yet to see evidence for that. Are systems that work without education truly better than those where you might be a lot more effective with some amount of study? Probably there's an optimal point, like a year of full-time education to use your OS won't pay off at median longevity, but whether <5 minutes of learning is the optimum...
It's great for onboarding people to your tech product, though. Incentives may be misaligned between what's best for the users and what's best for the cashflow
What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
What does that tell us?
Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
lotta folks here with FAANG pedigrees...
There's absolutely nothing insightful about CEOs with "unprecedented insights" coming to the same conclusions as everyone else.
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
It doesn't forgive them for lobbying ferociously against any regulation of marketing to children.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to explain why this doesn't happen to men.
> Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups compared with the middle-income group (38.5%).
And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't happen to Black women.
> Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference in obesity prevalence among the income groups.
It also needs to explain why no statistically significant result happens for Asian women
> Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%) income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was only significant for white women.
Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience, Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they become richer, and White women get massively more convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but stayed the same.
That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this convenience angle.
I'm sure almost no family have an upper limit on book time.
Thus aiming for screens the replace books is a bad aim.
Why have social media when you can have Jeeves "do it" for you?
> What does that tell us?
It tells us three things:
1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature.
2. Get them to read books as an alternative.
3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educational lectures.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
Or you can watch cat videos.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
I doubt that, but the others seem reasonable
The ones a year from now from all companies will likely be better than the best today.
An offline iPad with a limited set of educational apps/books would be a good classroom aid
Of course, an iPad without those limits is bad
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
> In their book, ‘Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,’ educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: “It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”
"The Battle for Your Kids' Hearts and Minds" https://kidzu.co/parent-perspective/the-battle-for-your-kids...
Now it’s just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and boomers posting in groups.
I don’t even think it’s appropriate to call it social media anymore. It’s barely social.
Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.
Almost all my friends have stopped posted. The only social thing I see from most people is wishing people happy birthday.
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
In Zuck's case especially, in order to use what we know about childhood development and education to get kids addicted early.
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
It tells us almost nothing about the unimportant any irrelevant part - how a few individuals choose to raise their kids
This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.
Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.
That tells us more about you than about tech CEOs.
Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on the relation of people and technology. The others are just finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.
On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is only an advisor to the leader of some some small little organization called the world economic forum says you and your children should be kept “happy” with drugs and video games.
Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your children “worthless” children.
So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.
Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.
I've advised college students to leave their laptops in their dorm room. Take a spiral notebook to lecture, and a couple pens. Write down everything the professor writes on the chalkboard.
When studying, going over the notes, you'll hear the lecture again in your head.
Of course, if the professor doesn't use a chalkboard, and does a slide presentation instead, that will make studying harder for you.
The best presentation I ever gave was when the presenter didn't show up, and the conference asked for volunteers. I volunteered and gave an impromptu presentation using markers and the big whiteboard. The back-and-forth with the audience was very productive!
Most conferences have no way to do this. I tried using an overhead projector and markers, but the conference people thought I was crazy. There was just too much expectation of a packaged slide presentation.
I'm a gen Z college student (born 2005) and this is pretty much what I do all the time. I attend most of the lectures, even if they are not very good and I take notes with a pen during each of them. Some people at my school see it as being subservient to the professors and wasting time, but for me it's about rebuilding my attention span, confidence and clarity of mind (besides internalizing the material far better). It made me a different person compared to who I was in hs and freshman year. It's so simple. Most of us don't have ADHD, we're simply addicted and we can fight it.
We did almost everything on paper, even exams. I admit writing MIPS assembly on paper seemed strange to me at the time, but the effort you put in to put things black on white somehow made the knowledge stick into my mind more effectively. Some of that knowledge will stay with me forever, and I'm not sure the same could be said if I had taken "shortcuts".
That is a) a BS claim and b) wouldn't be a feature, on average, given the quality of college lectures.
It seems fairly clear that manual note taking help with learning, over using a computer, but overblown claims like this do more damage than good in convincing people to do the right thing.
It worked for me. Have you tried it?
> given the quality of college lectures
I attended a university where that wasn't a problem. Prof Daniel Goodstein, for example, turned his lectures into a video series "The Mechanical Universe". But, frankly, I liked his in-person lectures using the blackboard and chalk better.
[1] see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Btw when you damaged a book beyond repair, you needed to pay the full price. Only the exercise books needed to be bought freshly as they were "used up" fully after the year. Still, they were often seen as optional.
It's absolutely insane.
Maybe in a post-Soviet country they did. In my school they shredded them so the next class had to buy a new set.
America dropped the "phoneme, sound it out" of decades past and taught students to recognise word "shapes" and learn what they said. It was a complete, and total failure. Children did not learn to read.
What never comes up in the news is the absolutely crazy approach to rolling this out..... "Amazing new education idea is here! We're all doing it!"...... 8 years later, school graduates fail at X, Y, Z BECAUSE of that amazing idea.
There's no accountability, no recompense. Just a news article saying "5% graduate this year! Oh no! Education is terrible!".. papering over the accountability.
For some things there just is no easy way.
Basically. It wouldn't require a 20 year experiment probably. Looking at whole words vs phonics as an example, you'd get a handful of schools to participate and they'd try phonics in one class and whole word in the other. By the time the kids were in 2nd grade the fact that whole word learning wasn't working and that a higher rate of kids needed remedial lessons to catch up would have been obvious. And if it had worked really well you'd expect to see that performance improvement in reading by 2nd grade too!
So the experiment would take 3 years. Though then you'd probably want a larger scale experiment. I'd think if things were going well once kindergarten finished you could probably start involving more schools in the experimwnt the next year. So like 3-6 years altogether.
We have been successfully educating kids for a long time; if we want to mix things up with some fancy new pedagogy we should absolutely be studying if it actually works before rolling it out at scale!
That's essentially what you're arguing. Perhaps not what you intended, but it is what it becomes given the context, and more importantly, the people involved that you disregard so callously.
If it's so darned expensive to do, have you considered that you have the free will and intellectual sophistication required to just . . . not do it? If it'd be so expensive to recuperate a group of people, either your methods have too high a probability of requiring it or your method is just perhaps not ready yet if the potential end result are that disastrously bad. Either way, it points towards going back to the drawing board instead of to town.
But if it's oh so difficult to get these studies done, you know what you can do? You can do it over longer periods of time, just like you bemoan, because that larger time scale will stop you from ruining other people for your own curiosity of will x work in y. You could give people the choice to join the study, you could have smaller cohorts every time and refine the process as you go, you could keep each cohort limited to a year or two to avoid long-term damage, and you could test in different age ranges to get more data.
The list goes on and on and on. Almost like studies on people require larger caution than just testing to see what works without any precautions and going from there. When learning about the scientific method, the idea that people are, you know, people and not test subjects is pushed constantly. Because certain people sadly need that reinforced to avoid being callous researchers. It's oh so easy to forget the numbers you toy with are real lives with real value regardless of what is done with those lives.
We trade immediate results and dubiously better efficiency for larger time spans exactly so that we can ensure the people in them remain protected. Giving people choice in the matter, and letting guardians weigh the value proposition (like other studies have done successfully) by giving them the prerequisite information required to make those decisions, allows for a higher likelyhood of avoiding disasterous effects on those very same people. It's not "generational inconvenience" when lives are affected for multitudes of years; it's callous impatience. It's not "no change ever," is respect for the people involved in attempting those changes and respect for the potential ramifications of those changes. It's borderline evil to disregard people because you, and I do mean you here, don't have the patience to ensure people's safety because, oh no, it'll take a while, or cost a lot if you're held accountable.
Rather, it's okay that things take time, it's wanted that we don't make haste. Because haste makes waste. Because we don't need immediate results. Because we're not working with machines, we're working with the single most valuable thing we have on this earth; a human life. Have some compassion for those people, and you'll find that change doesn't take so long after all.
When I got to college a few years later I’d sit in the back of classrooms and see that a majority of students who’d brought a laptop (ostensibly for notes) were consistently distracted and doing something else, be it games or StumbleUpon. I can only imagine these decisions were made by groups of adults sitting around conference rooms, each staring at their own laptop and paying 20% attention to the meeting at hand.
BUT one of my kids has Asperger’s and it is extremely hard for him to muster up the energy to do something ”boring”. So gamified learning on an iPad works very well for him. Also doing math on an iPad where, instead of seeing full pages of equations to solve, he sees only one equation makes it much easier for him to get started.
With these kids you learn to not focus on parenting/teaching principles and instead focus on the goals. I’ll do whatever to get him to go to school and learn, no matter if I’ll have to drive him the 700 m to school while he is watching YouTube or having him to math on an iPad.
So as long as the push for more analogue tools is just a direction and not without individual exceptions I’m all for it.
Sadly today’s Swedish government seems more focused on being seen as hard on kids, crime, immigrants etc (basically everything except environmental protections) than actually following scientific principles.
Ipads are not the solution - that gets you back to screen/computer mode in the classroom.
e-readers/ e-paper tablets might be worth a try. (Just please don't make every child have a mandatory amazon account to link with their school kindle.) It would be interesting to know whether the "books+hand notes > screens + typing" comprehension studies have something to say about e-paper (I don't think this has been done yet).
My own experience, even to this day, is that it's easier for me to learn a new language or technology from a book compared to on a screen, even if the digital version lets me work on actual code: if I can, I first read the book and take notes, then I do the online version.
I went to school a million years ago, but IIRC we kept our textbooks in the classroom until middle school (7th grade for me). Maybe one textbook might go home with math homework or an English project. For my kid, they would usually just send worksheets home; which is ok, but if you wanted to reference not on the sheet, too bad. Post-covid, there's a lot more dependence on google classroom with all that comes with it (but maybe that's also how the upper grades were working anyway)
E-readers with textbooks loaded could work, but hopefully the textbooks are tuned for the medium.
Anyway, isn't a heavy backpack a secret fitness program???
Like, maybe download wikipedia onto the device but don't give internet access. Let the device sync at school with required books and assignments.
Effectively, you could give kids a pocket library but that's the extent of what they should have.
It's essentially a notebook and a book reader.
You can take notes directly on the book if you use pdf (epubs can only have notes on the side).
I think that's the tech I want to see in school, no tablets please.
The older teachers often would rather retire than learn yet another ed tech system. They just want to teach kid not be screen dispensers.
Really feels like all the ed tech is snake oil. Education outcomes are dropping. Elite college are needing more and more remedial classes. Obviously there are multiple factors at play but we should remove complexity unless it delivers decisive results.
[1] Even investing extra time in thoughtfully crafted test papers, focusing on word problems, proofs, and complex derivations, could make a world of difference. How hard is that? China and USSR did it when they were dirt poor. France has been doing it and still produces world-class scientists and engineers. What the fuck is wrong with the American educators? Yeah, I know I know. I'm being emotional. I just don't get how dumbing down education can ever help kids.
AFAICT, meta-analyses tend to find a positive effect of tech in education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
There is no indication that the current opposite move is evidence-based either, so it's basically your typical vibe shifts. Might revert back to "digital basics" in another decade or so with identical quotes?
Then again, by comparing new techniques against old ones, presumably the old ones get studied indirectly as well. Guess the glass could be half full with this approach
If the goal is actually to do a better job teaching kids, we need to better align incentives/minimize bureaucracy/measure outcomes better/etc. My sense is that there isn't an appetite for those sorts of changes. Largely because they hold children, parents, and teachers accountable in ways that make people uncomfortable.
That said, we had some vision of learning with tailored gamified learning apps, and that has come to be in a certain cases but imho it sometimes also provided a sense of "false" accomplishments as it mostly helped with rote memorization rather than principle understanding.
The apps are in summarization often a rote thing rather than something making for deep exploration, that very forward kids might've benefited from something more "free" but a majority will end up not benefiting.
And often the practical outcome of "digital learning" in Sweden instead ended up being schools trying to save money on books by splashing random PDF's about subjects into teams folders.
Trying to help my kids on subjects often ended up being scouring those teams folders and try to reverse-engineer what the important parts and dependencies of a course has been and then go through that, with a textbook you can just flip through the relevant pages of the chapters they're working on to test my kid and go through what they were having trouble with.
Now a _very_ good teacher might build up a useful corpus (but it takes time/work) and worse teachers/schools (sadly a consequence of Swedens education privatization) often create an worse outcome than with books.
To summarize, Good real textbooks thus gives a far better chance of holding a good baseline level for education, whilst digital tools potentially could do good but in practice creates a risk for a really bad baseline without _all_ parts of the education system being good.
For the rest: yeah there's nothing more entrenched than the mindset of the people that run schools. They conceive of their school as the epicentre of all problems and solutions with respect to kids education. They cannot imagine they might be simply irrelevant on some issues.
Allegations without evidence.
The more senses you engage while learning a thing the deeper and more effective the learning is pretty accepted knowledge at this point.
This is the right decision and should be to go back to the basics, instead of full computer everywhere including iPads, phones and laptops.
Remember the big tech founders / CEOs do not give their kids access to social media, iPads, phones for a reason.
There's a major issue though, which is that course material get designed for use on computer screens first. But I have good hope that llm-based pipelines should help fix this issue.
To protect against those, you have to make kids super-early adopters like yours, make them use tech that is ahead of the curve relative to the mass market, or go the other direction entirely and have them a couple of levels behind the curve so they are not targeted.
Others have had lives disrupted by addiction.
Replacing a paper book with the same pdf on an ipad screen though, has to be one of the most stupid ideas anyone could come up with.
Not every kid can learn concepts just by having them explained verbally or with simple, inanimate diagrams. Desmos etc were incredibly valuable for unlocking certain concepts.
Also, you can't ctrl+f a textbook. Sure, you might find what you're looking for in an appendix or ToC.
The digital editions are restricted due to IP, so you can't have an infinitely copyable version for reference at home to solve the issue of children being destructive sometimes. So you end up with the worst of both worlds.
We could theoretically teach kids to convert cubits to feet and give them a translated version of the same ancient egyptian geometry textbooks used to educate the architects of the pyramids. Triangles aren't new. Why has there not been an opensource/creative commons math textbook made available to all schools with a issues board for crowd sourcing correctness?
This could be done with discrete periods of history, sciences, math, etc. We really don't need the McGraw Hill 2026 Florida Patriot's edition of the 18th century American history textbook.
The huge drop in scores during the pandemic, during which everyone switched to edTech, is pretty strong evidence that in classroom education is essential at the lower grades in particular.
But equally it's really helpful to be able to ask ChatGPT or whatever for a different explanation when you get stuck - but that is probably better done at home when studying the homework. It stops you getting frustrated and helps keep you making progress and in the 'flow state'.
I guess a big problem for schools now will be how to get them to use AI to help them learn rather than simply getting it do to their homework so they can go and play video games or whatever. I know if I'd had it as a kid I would've been tempted to do the latter.
Yeah sure, then get a (sometimes) wrong answer with high confidence and believe it?
But yeah, it's not infallible and sometimes even when it gives you a source it will incorrectly summarise it, but you can double check the information in the source itself.
It just makes it a lot easier to do quickly rather than having to go and find the right Wikipedia article or dig through lots of documentation. Just like Wikipedia and online docs made it easier than having to go to the library or leaf through a 500-page manual etc.
If you are just asking basic science questions or phone reviews then its pretty reliable.
Much of education requires making errors until you get it right a few times in a row, and paying attention of the errors. Getting an explation of your errors is only part of that process. No LLM can provide the rest of it.
At the same time, get your kids a computer early so they can learn the basics. Maybe even keep it off the internet.
Skip phones and tablets altogether for as long as possible.
The number of kids who don’t know how to operate a mouse and keyboard is wild. Things like double clicking are quite difficult for some. It’s quite interesting honestly.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.
I just don't think "instant feedback" is as important as we think in mathematics education, and might even rob us of moments to practice mathematical behaviours like justifying, communicating and accommodating. Slow feedback does have benefits.
I am a tech enthusiast to put it mildly. I also taught maths in schools from roughly 2010 to 2020 so saw the iPad/app revolution in my classrooms. Anecdotally, I think it made my lessons and my students worse. Books, paper and each other are the best tools (in my very personal opinion).
Digitalization should be able to provide you with drastically larger number of exercises to practice, and if possible should also provide you with the exercise that is at the right level for you
Where is this rush for instant feedback coming from?
Learning math isn't just about being correct. It's about doing the motions and learning how to problem solve.
Using the computer the way you suggest will make you lazy as you won't learn to do these hard things.
I always found that rumination, doubt, and consideration took time and space.
But have a look at https://dynamilis.com/ for s good app to improve hand writing.
The problem isn't that kids can't learn on tech, it's that the whole thing was done in the worst way possible.
E readers work for a reason. You aren’t distracted (the slow browser in it is hardly a distraction)
Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841)
Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.
See Bloom's 2 sigma problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
unfortunately now printing is expensive
I recommend reading at least the closing line:
This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.
I dug deep into this a while ago, starting with the “how legit is the science” question because I wondered if the studies had looked at any tradeoffs (e.g. did laptop use improve programming skills in ways paper books do not?)
It’s a rabbit hole. I encourage folks to read up and form more nuanced opinions.
This being HN I need to assure you that my learned skepticism regarding harms from screens in schools does NOT mean I want to ban all books in schools, strap toddlers into VR for their entire childhood, or put Peter Thiel in charge of all curriculums. Intuitively I think paper allows greater focus. But the data is not nearly as clear as politics-driven advocates claim.
Some info:
- The move back to books was a centerpiece of election policy by the center-right government, and is at least as much about conservatism as it is about science.
- Actual studies in this area are mixed.
- A lot is made of PISA scores, which dropped from the 2010’s to early 2020’a (when this policy became popular). But: the scores started dropping before 1:1 computers were rolled out, and also correlated with teacher shortages and education policy changes, and of course COVID. I could not find any studies that controlled for these other factors, and the naive “test scores can be entirely attributed to computers” view really doesn’t hold.
- There was a major change in pedagogy in Swedish schools that predates introduction of computers and seems like a better explanation for lower scores [1]
- One meta analysis does show a very small but stat sig decrease in reading comprehension for non-fiction when read from screens rather than books [2]
- Another meta analysis found zero difference between screens and books for reading comprehension [3]
- A third meta analysis found a tiny and decreasing negative impact from screen use, and some evidence that the effect is transitional as teachers and students adapt [4]
- The vast majority of studies in this area use no children at all, only adults. There are good ethical reasons for this, but it is a mistake to assume that a 25 year old’s reading comprehension from screens in 1995 is predictive of an 8 year old’s in 2026. [5]
- One of the few studies that did look specifically at children found that paper outperformed screens… but only in traditional schools. Homeschooling and lab testing did not show any difference between mediums [6]
1. https://www.edchoice.org/is-swedish-school-choice-disastrous...
2. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/screen-reading-worse-for-c...
3. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15213269.2022.2...
4. https://oej.scholasticahq.com/article/125437-turning-the-pag...
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654321998074
The fact that studies on screens vs books cannot get a consistent answer says enough. I checked #3 of your links, and the amount of bullshit is astonishing. The cited articles offer vague, unresearched explanations for contradictory findings, or point at differences in the stimuli, something which should obviously never have happened. After some cherry picking, article #3 treats the remaining studies as equal and reliable enough to throw in a big bag, as if that solves the problem.
Think of it like this: the replication crisis in cognitive psychology was found trying to replicate some of the better studies. The average education research study is several levels below that. It'll have a replicability of 0.1 or worse.
And part of the problem is that there is a ton of money to be made in education, so there is a lot of incentive to create or cherry pick data promoting one’s preferred (most profitable) policies.
I am horrified at how bad this could be for the students. Imagine growing up without a calculator or computer. They read books, they do long division, they manually graph. They graduate and are completely unprepared for the world.
I pay well over $15,000/yr in property taxes because I wanted my kids to go to a good school. Now I'm thinking they are going to need to go to a private school or we will move from what we thought was our forever home.
AI is here, burying our heads in the sand changes nothing.
On the other hand, the stuff that AI helps with (intelligence) is not something you can skip learning and expect a good outcome.
I then moved to North America for my last year of high school, and was appalled how much behind a typical 90th percentile student was compared to me and my peers back home. I was probably about 3-4 years ahead. It also took me 30 minutes to learn how to use the TI calculator that I now needed, but I was ahead in just about every other measurable way. So I would urge you to think twice about this. AI won't help your children develop their brains, it's offloading thinking to a statistical black box.
If you desperately want mediocre chromebook instruction for your children; where your classmates turn in ChatGPT essays as original work, feel free to move to Virginia.
