Archived copies of the article:
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Correlation
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Causation
Hey, Computer, what’s been happening to
- Average Class size
- Average teacher years of experience
- Average annual hours in school
Had it been?
- Up
- Down
- Down
But sure, also, they’ve replaced a stack of 5 lb textbooks nobody reads with a tablet computer nobody uses.
It reads like one of those boomer comics complaining about young people experiencing the consequences of boomer actions.
Don’t forget the negative effects of Social media on developing minds.
https://seatingchartmaker.app/articles/class-size-statistics/ USA seems stable for class size?
The typical class size in US public schools is 16-23 students. In the academic year 2020-2021, the mean class size was 18.3 students, a slight decrease from the 2017-2018 average of 19.6 students. These figures represent the mean across both primary and secondary education.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/education/class-size
In the United States, average class sizes vary widely, with national averages indicating 21.2 students in elementary schools and up to 26.8 in secondary schools.
COVID exacerbated the situation over the last five years.
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So who benefits from $30bn in spending on Laptops and Tablets? Oh Apple and Microsoft. Not students. Surprise surprise.
As with many of these articles there is a big caveat - Gen Z in the USA. It does not follow that this research applies across the world. It’d be interesting to see how other rich countries outcomes are different with their differing approaches to this. For example here in the UK I don’t believe there has been a wholesale move to laptops/tablets for every student in schools. Technology is certainly used but it’s not solely about students using laptops and tablets. Its things like smart wide boards, and the use of digital content to engage attention and so forth. Spending billions on laptops for all would be a scandal when school buildings need renewing for example.
I would hazard to suggest that the US education system is being corrupted in a similar way to other parts of the US state, with big expensive projects decided at state level by the Republicans and Democrats thanks to lobbying, benefiting big companies but not citizens. This is instead of money going to areas of proven benefit such as more teachers, school infrastructure renewal, or funding of homework clubs, after school activities, breakfast clubs or free school meals. Things proven to make a difference across the world but things that don’t benefit big US corporations.
And lets be honest, if you wanted to give every student a laptop you wouldn’t be going to Apple or Microsoft. You’d save money and go for generic hardware and a license free operating system like Linux. But that would be an anathema to both the Democrats and the Republicans, who have signed off huge spending on overpriced tech.
My kids are given Chromebooks. The schools are getting them registered with Google as early as possible.
This. And chromebooks are glorified tablets. Much less capable than a proper laptop, much less for a child to learn than a proper laptop. Google did MASSIVE pushing to get chromebooks into the classroom to get kids hooked on their platform as early as possible
So Google can begin tracking and advertising to them
I’m sure the systemic defunding and dismantling of the public education system across the United States at the hands of Republican lawmakers over the same timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Right? It always confounds and amazes me when people discount this simple fact.
Education has been fucked over so hard in this country, repeatedly. They want people dumb.
Blame it on the technology though, because admitting that Republicans plan are ALWAYS terrible for anyone below the 1%, without exception, somehow is impossible.
It’s almost like the people drawing these conclusions from incomplete data are… poorly educated?
It’s also happening in areas where education HASN’T been defended or dismantled. It’s happening in areas that aren’t Republican controlled too.
Fuck MAGA with a moldy pine tree but blaming this problem solely on them means it can’t be solved because whatever is happening isn’t being caused by them.
Which locations weren’t impacted by the first trump administration’s education department or no child left behind?
I never said it was solely on them, but saying that has no bearing on it is ridiculous as well.
We also had COVID which many/most schools had no fucking idea how to handle. There’s basically an entire year of wasted education there.
Remote learning is a completely different beast. And digital social interaction is completely different than being physically at school with friends. Social interactions are a large part of learning as well.
In this instance, I’d say it doesn’t.
The lockdown from COVID stunted a lot of development. Then the tablets and just that kids are always on a screen drive it home. That and kids and parents don’t care as much about failing grades, and the “no child left behind” has gotten about as corrupt and lazy as our government. Now it just means “your kids going to the next grade, regardless”
How does systemic defunding lead to schools buying up tablets and notebooks?
This seems more like straight up corruption to me, or dumb administrators believing the nonsense Google sells them about Chromebooks being better for learning or whatever
I completely blame ChromeOS.
Even on AD snafu’d windows, the first thing we all did was figure out how to bypass any block and do what we wanted to.
Kids are growing up not knowing there are things you can do aside from accessing the internet and loading crappy webpages.
There are even people writing ‘software’ who don’t know that.
I’m so fucking happy I’m not the only one who has noticed that.
jesus christ we’re so fucked.
I came here to say something similar. It’s not merely tech that’s to blame but the kind of tech we have today. Kids are being raised to be consumers of tech and tech services. They don’t have basic fundamentals that millenials had to learn to access porn on dialup.
Once you had the phone line to yourself it was easy, just dial out and open cracked limewire or bearshare, then simply click the first horny thing you see, like:
-br1tney_nud3s_14.4k friendly-.exe -filesize 66kb
I was the kid my friends’ dads would call to fix the PC (because SOMEHOW - “A hacker put a virus on there”), before their wives got back home. Made some nice extra cash!
lol, I mostly ditched textbooks in high school not to support technology, but because I was tired of carrying around huge books in my backpack, the bulk of which I wouldn’t even need on a daily basis. Lo and behold, even 14 years ago, I could find pdf versions of most of my textbooks, some of which were offered officially from the publisher for free via the school.
The problems are the enshittification of the internet, the attention economy and the superb lack of American educational system, not technology itself. Almost every university in the world is filled with the sounds of clacking keys from laptops, this isn’t 1984.
Technology is part of it. For example, handwriting notes is proven to be better for information retention compared to typing.
Comparing learning methods and then associating their benefits with the technology feels… fallacious.
For this reason I actually recommend a cheap Android tablet for digital note taking since it is well worth the price. I used to carry paper with me, but having the ability to quickly review notes across several classes (lectures and books) is a game changer. Need to know what was discussed last week? What you took on a topic? It’s very cumbersome with paper.
I feel like ‘technology’ is different when you actually own the tech you’re given. When you can do things with it. Not when it’s a digital casino in your pocket controlled by big corporations.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the text books that are the issue but rather the physical act of writing your own notes.
I think it’s that now people type all their notes into a laptop rather than write it down.
Did you not have a locker?
My highschool, which I graduated mid 2010s, didn’t have lockers.
We had gym lockers, which was just to put our stuff for that one gym period, it wasn’t “our own”.
So, no. Not all highschools have lockers.
My high school didn’t have lockers. I assume mine isn’t the only one.
Not OP, but when I hear this argument, a lot of schools wouldn’t let you go to your locker between all classes. That, or your classes were so far apart, you didn’t have time to go even get to your locker between them. There were some days I could only get to my locker once.
Yeah. I had a locker next to the school’s music room in the farthest corner once. Fun year.
Well that’s why I ask, we had lockers, that were easy to access between classes with minimal planning. It just blows my mind how many people didn’t have a locker… My locker at work was even easy to access. I’m sorry y’all didn’t have a locker
The text book industry inflated the cost of everything by making things huge, with mostly meaningless full color pictures everywhere. Go back 100 years and compare the size of a math book to present day. Math hasn’t changed a whole lot but the size and weight of the books certainly has.
I have a few college “textbooks” from the 1930’s. They’re small
An entry level laptop pays for itself if you use it to get textbooks for free after a certain amount of time. The question is can you do it legally? Probably not. So where is the cost savings supposed to be?
most schools offer textbooks digitally anyways. I never once was reprimanded for using pirated textbooks. If anything, teachers are just happy to know a student cares enough to learn. It’s really the crooked publishers that are far to greedy to serve any educational purpose that profit from copyright enforcement.
generation less cognitively capable than their parents
Once I have read the same complaint in a source from 120 years ago, and there they even stated that every generation has thought that about their youth since very long ago…
Every generation worries about the new one, but they haven’t actually had cause in the past.
They really need to ban phones for students in grade school.
“But, they need them for safety!”
How the hell did we ever get along without every kid having an internet connected computer in their pocket since forever before they were invented? No, they don’t need them for “safety”.
Even people who experienced that world firsthand when they were in school can’t imagine going back to that. You’ll never convince people who don’t remember those times.
In the US at least, you might not convince people. I think every parent thinking about it imagines their child calling them during a school shooting to say I love you one last time.
Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.
“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath wrote. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”
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Classroom technology usage has ballooned in recent years. A 2021 EdWeek Research Center poll of 846 teachers found 55% said they are spending one to four hours per day with educational tech. Another quarter reported using the digital tools five hours per day.
That’s what the parasite pedofile class wants they want ignorant feudal serfs
Meanwhile we’re integrating AI into classrooms. Surely nothing bad will come from that.
I’m sure the switch was a profit driven enterprise evey step of the way, so it worked perfectly, and additionally created more malleable servants.
So the plan worked
Yeah, the only thing missing from this article is that the title doesn’t end with “, as intended.”
Correlation =/= causation. Somehow other countries did it right? So maybe it’s just US thing
Why do you think other countries did it right? Does the article say that kids in other countries are smarter?
No, common sense says that.
Common sense isn’t real, it’s knowledge we take for granted … when it happens to be correct, which often enough it isn’t.
Nope this conclusion is general everywhere. Replacing textbooks and pen and paper for tablets and digital technology has damaging effects on the learning process. We as a species are not built to learn by clicking and swiping on screens. We learn by touching, feeling and writing on coarse paper. Learning is an incredibly complex process and attempting to simplify it only leads to superficial gains as opposed to real knowledge.
Now when learning 3d geometry for example, people think that buying a bunch of 3d shapes they can touch and bend and visualize easier is better. But what they don’t realize is the effort to visualize the shape with ones mind’s eye is far better for the learning process even if it takes practice and it is slower.
This race for immediate results in everything created the impression that learning a few things quickly and applying them without actually understanding their depth is better than slowing things down and building knowledge. But the curve must go up up at all costs!
What a silly naturalist falacy. Were not built by anyone and evolutionary speaking pen writing is not any more special than writing on a digital screen. All of the science here is unconvincing at best and fake bullshit at worst.
It’s entirely a skill issue.
It could be a skill issue but if that’s the case I’d argue that introducing digital learning should have been a slower process. Anyway there are countless studies showing the differences between typing and handwriting (like this one: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/) but I also have a story. Years ago I had a friend who was doing different neurological studies and she measured once the difference in the brain when writing vs typing. She said it was night and day. When writing the brain lit up almost completely, because handwriting engages so many centers for so many motions and memory recall etc. Typing she said looked almost the same as pressing a single button over and over. There wasn’t much engaging of other motions. I found it very interesting. This was years ago before social media, I don’t think smartphones were a thing yet much less tablets.
I am not saying that there is no place in learning for digital technology. It would be stupid to ignore them. But some things are better learned with pen and paper.
I feel like that’s still an implementation issue not the fact of that “digital is worse” and yeah you’re probably right - the roll out should be better. Using proprietary apple devices and shit by multi trillion budget enterprises (countries) is stupid. The government should task entire governed system with years of preparation and diligent implementation with optimized ebook software and curriculum distribution.
This is entirely a skill issue not a technology / medium issue.
Digital is clearly here to stay and superior form of information exchange - it’s literally called IT. To say that we should go back to pen, paper and text books is just pure incompetence. I speak from experience myself as I am a published author but I’m never writing an educational book again when websites exists - physical textbooks are incredibly archaic and should be abandoned entirely and I’ll die on this hill.
I am a scientist myself and I cannot see how you can solve maths and physics problems on a tablet. Maybe I am incompetent and lack the imagination but the physical limitations of these devices just make them cumbersome at best. Again I am not arguing against tablets computers etc. Just that some things are better learned with pen and paper. There are far fewer distractions and you get a much better picture when you have 3 pieces of paper in front of you with all the steps you took to get to where you are now in your solution than swiping back on the tablet. I am obviously biased but it just makes more sense to me.
Writing an article absolutely digital I would never argue against it. But actual learning is better analogue in my opinion.
And then there are the issues you mention about forcing people to use a certain brand for their education. Pen and paper is for everyone. Easily available and ready to use. I can see your argument for textbooks and here it is where a tablet could be useful (provided is distraction free). Load it up with textbooks and go. But even then my bias makes me skeptical. There are mental mechanisms to remember information from books. One can remember the placement on a page, the place in the book. In a digital version that constantly changes depending on how you read that.
I think that the belief of pen and paper being “natural”, is a weird idea. We have less than 7,000 years of history with pen and paper, closer to 50,000 if we include cave paintings. Far as evolution is concerned, that is a pretty darn short. Our understanding of writing - and computers - arises from an incidental application of our intelligence, not the other way around.
Everyone knows the real problem was moving from clay tablets to papyrus. So unnatural.
It is not the same thing and you know it but you do you!
Why is this getting down voted? This whole thread is fully of techno nerds who seem to be under 30 and grew up in the generation this article is talking about and smoking copium to make themselves feel better for being part of the less capable generation.
“But kids dumb” says the lead-brained
Norway did the same thing, and have now swapped back to books. I don’t think any other country did it right.
No it isn’t. Finland did the same thing and now our schools are fucked up.
No, what’s messed up education in Finland is that it’s much, much harder now to fail and hold back a student. The semi-equivalent of the USA’s No Child Left Behind policy.
Schools here in Finland still use plenty of books, and at least they still teach how to use computers, like typing lessons, unlike the USA.
Here in Masala they even started teaching classes about detecting AI use, it’s usage in propaganda, and privacy on the internet plus usage of AdBlockers in elementary school. My wife gave the lessons - though she changed it up on the second one after seeing that kids don’t really care about this stuff much unless framed differently, like “you can watch YouTube without ads” rather than “it’s your legal right to not have ads as children” and “Linux has many many free games” for example.
Source?
It angers me when people use the US as an example to aspire to. The US are so broken and fucked up, if they’re doing something the default reaction should be to not do it because it’s most likely some idiotic, fucked up thing. They are a negative example.
