Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 257 posts

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

#61

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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.

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.

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

#62

Post by jimbokun »

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…

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.

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

#63

Post by PearlRiver »

hedora wrote: post #15

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?

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.

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

#64

Post by tangotaylor »

hedora wrote: post #15

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?

> 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...

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

#65

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

Herring wrote: post #13

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U

"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"

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

#66

Post by linkregister »

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…

All it takes is one persistent parent who manages to get an administrator to reprimand a teacher for enforcing classroom rules. A teacher who deeply cares about teaching will need to support themselves at the end of the day.

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

#67

Post by jimbokun »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #61
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.

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.

The kids with the pencil and paper will outcompete the kids taught with AI.

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

#68

Post by Ifkaluva »

I lost confidence when their so-called expert cited future challenges such as “overpopulation and moral drift”. Pretty sure the leading indicators say we’re going to be facing population collapse, and he outs himself as a weirdo when he cites “moral drift”.

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

#69

Post by freeopinion »

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…

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.

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

#70

Post by jimbokun »

zekenie wrote: post #17

It’s impossible to disengage the deployment of technology with the way the technology was deployed. I’m not saying anything that I’m not saying. I believe that there could have been a world where deploying technology in all these classrooms had a positive effect

Personally I’m in favor of empiricism when it comes to deciding how to educate our young people, not some vague feeling of “belief”.
Post reply on HN