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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

#191

Post by mlrtime »

bandrami wrote: post #109
throwaway439080 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I see this troll response all the time stating families don't want "poors" as some kind of attempt at manipulation to feel I am a bad person.

I [given the chance] would also vote against apartments in my particular neighborhood, and it has nothing to do with being poor at all.

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

#192

Post by mlrtime »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #40
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…

>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…

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.

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

#193

Post by jacquesm »

simpaticoder wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #22

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.

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). Paren…

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.

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

#194

Post by bryanrasmussen »

lr4444lr wrote: post #76
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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.

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.

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

#195

Post by kkfx »

spaqin wrote: post #190
kkfx wrote: post #183

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. Peo…

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.

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.

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

#196

Post by bryanrasmussen »

lelanthran wrote: post #154
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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…

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.

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

#197

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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…

>I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level.

You just need to look at educational league tables between countries to see there is a spectrum of results and some places are much better than others.

Personally I think the problems are rooted in inequality. If the elite all send their children to private schools then why would they care about the poor state of public schools. The country that regularly comes out at the top of the league table for educational attainment has almost no private schools.

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

#198

Post by intended »

spwa4 wrote: post #189
intended wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools can educate well beyond that level, provided they are resourced. Bloom’s 2 sigma problem comes to mind (1). Education also ends up suffering because its seen as a support role, teachers are not valued, and “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches". Education is also political today. Science based education is an outright target. Increasing government spending to improve outcomes is also a contested issue, an…

This is true, but only in the way that no manager, private or government will ever fix. What happened to give good teachers in the 1980s (who kept working afterwards) is ... a large economic crash. Which created a relatively large supply of people from capable, respected positions, in the hard/positivist sciences who suddenly lost their job. They always had the ability to displace teachers, but never wanted to. Then,…

In the American historical example shared, education got lucky because of economic downturns.

If education is not valued by a nation, then this is not a surprising outcome. Do note, Americans as a whole tend to be extremely sensitive about critical discussions on the “way things are” in America. It’s a trait that results in a sort of “nothing can change” point of view, and hostility when it’s pointed out that other countries do better.

America has so far been able to attract that talent to their economy, but given the instability in place currently, that engine is reversing.

This means that investments in education are going to be needed. Right now teachers make their own print outs, teaching material, and the education system is generally underfunded.

Stating that it’s not a resource allocation problem, when resource allocation is what is required to attract talent, is inaccurate. Many people would prefer to work for meaning and to teach, even if they have talent and can be paid better. Given a livable wage, the super ambitious types will do the risky entrepreneurial things they should be doing. Others will be happy to teach.

Some of the smartest people I met in America chose to teach. America can change things, and it can enjoy the benefits.

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

#199

Post by japhyr »

gscott wrote: post #141
nativeit wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could pay teachers even half of the median salary for HN users, and then see if outcomes improve?

It's more about passion then money.

As someone who earned "passion" money for a long time before ever earning anything remotely close to tech-adjacent money, passion does not pay bills anywhere near as well as money does. And struggling to pay bills, such as paying someone to fix a leaking roof, is not an enjoyable life for very long.

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

#200

Post by bandrami »

mlrtime wrote: post #191
bandrami wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I see this troll response all the time stating families don't want "poors" as some kind of attempt at manipulation to feel I am a bad person. I [given the chance] would also vote against apartments in my particular neighborhood, and it has nothing to do with being poor at all.

Saying it's about poor people is the polite version, unfortunately
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