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$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

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Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#171

Post by 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

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#172

Post by qsera »

bob001 wrote: post #30
qsera wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>peer reviewed study.. So you trust the peer, but not the author? How come?

The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification, and the paper provides details that can be directly looked at.

>The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification

But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author. Because both the author and the peer are not accountable to you or to mostly none.

So "peer review", without any other qualification is as good as shit.

Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#173

Post by heisenbit »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #127
jimmydddd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"--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 fou…

> ---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.

That is a meme and it does not matter whether it happened or not it would be too rare to matter.

What matters is the lack of discipline and respect for boundaries (beyond traditional teen behavior) possibly caused by social deprivation in our social app age. It is brought to the surface in the classroom where teachers have considerable less power than earlier. Physical attack once unthinkable are not rare anymore.

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#174

Post by imtringued »

mschuster91 wrote: post #122
somenameforme wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places like China and Vietnam are the ones rocking the test scores. These places operate on a tiny fraction of the $ per student of most places in the world, even PPP adjusted. And I think China's increasingly absurd achievements [1] make it clear that this goes beyond the test. I think the nurture argument can still apply there - Chinese parent is a meme all its own, and for a good reason. But this isn't something t…

> It's a combined mix of culture and parenting within that culture. The problem is, that culture (and other more or less closely related Asian cultures) also produces an awful lot of psychologically awfully damaged adults - and many Asian countries are now facing the consequences of that, with hikikomori, women not finding suitable partners, rock bottom fertility rates and collapsing demographics. And on top of that,…

China has a mathematical surplus of men. I'm not sure I can trust the rest of your comment considering that you're acting as if the one child policy didn't exist.

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#175

Post by dwedge »

revolvingthrow wrote: post #143

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 searchab…

I thought at first that you said its easier to get distract by Doom as a comment to how this problem is quite old

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#178

Post by Tanjreeve »

MichaelRo wrote: post #89
mschuster91 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 […

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 ba…

There are a few people with a powerful platform in terms of money and influence for whom it would be much simpler if the majority of people were not capable of pointing out BS or seeing how they're getting screwed. Purely coincidentally I'm sure the loudest media voices constantly declare various versions of how we should throw in the towel on educating the majority of people while also funding initiatives to enshittify public education and it would be better for most people to go into the trades and not worry their little heads about how the wider world works.

Meanwhile those people's own children are getting educated at schools with no technology allowed and are not going into trades. So it seems it's both possible to educate people given enough effort and a lot of people are capable of tertiary+ education given the right intellectual capital.

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#179

Post by dataflow »

honr wrote: post #163
mschuster91 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 […

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…

> The problem is not the budget. It is the lack of real teachers, as well as a perpetually experimental curriculum.

Taking this at face value: how are you teasing apart "lack of real teachers" from the budget? You don't think you'd get real teachers if there was a higher budget to pay them well?

> The quality of education my kids are getting is pure trash compared to what I received.

How are you doing this comparison? Have you adjusted for cost of living and the alternative opportunities available to good teachers and such? I ask because usually people compare absolute amounts of money, which distorts the picture.

Re: $30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents

#180

Post by deaux »

japhyr wrote: post #16
telman17 wrote: post #11

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…

> 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…

> 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!

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